Forms of Uncertainty: Representation of Doubt in American Histories

Abstract

American historiography is to study how historians have treated the fact of uncertainty, by which I mean both their own doubt or unavoidable ignorance and that of their subjects. Every historian shares with his subjects at least an occasional doubt about the direction in which history moves--or at least about the significance of particular events in his own lifetime-and of course every historian perceives some limit to his ability to discover what happened in the past. Even in the seventeenth century, when a historian could call his book The Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England, or Magnalia Christi Americana, or The Triumphs of the Reformed Religion in America, the anxious serpent of doubt lay coiled in the study. Providence controlled destiny, but no one could really know which of man's accidents revealed which of God's purposes. As Hawthorne demonstrated brilliantly two centuries later in The Scarlet Letter, a seventeenth-century comet might be read as the sign of a hypocrite's secret Adultery or as the coincidental sign that Angelic Governor Winthrop was dying. And the witchcraft crisis or King Philip's War might be read either as a divine retribution for past sins or as a test of faith, for which the correct response was utter confidence that Providence would deliver a faithful nation. Perry Miller catches these extreme variations of response in his account of King Philip's War: the ineffectiveness of many Days of Humiliation and Fasting, Miller writes, led the authorities to try a Day of Thanksgiving, which was immediately rewarded by news of King Philip's death. We do not diminish Miller's achievement when we notice that Increase and Cotton