In Memoriam: Robert Don Higginbotham

Universally known to his friends and colleagues as Don, Robert Don Higginbotham, who died of cancer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on June 22, 2008, made himself into one of the premier early American historians of his generation. Born in Fresno, California, on May 22, 1931, Don grew up in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where his mother taught literature in the local high school and his father was a banker. He took his B.A. and his M.A. degrees at Washington University in St. Louis, where as an undergraduate he was a member of the football team and as an advanced undergraduate and graduate student he cultivated his already deep interest in military biography under the direction of Professor Frank Vandiver. Shifting his interest from the Civil War to the American Revolution, he entered the doctoral program in history at the University of Nebraska in the fall of 1954 and came under the mentorship of John Richard Alden, at that time, and for the next two decades, one of the leading authorities on the American Revolution. Because Alden had a particular interest in the military history of the Revolution and in military biography, he and Don hit it off immediately, and when Alden left Nebraska in the spring of 1956 for a professorship at Duke University, Don accompanied him, enrolling in the doctoral program at Duke and taking his doctorate from that institution in 1958. Following closely in Alden’s footsteps, Don wrote a biography of General Daniel Morgan for his dissertation.

Like many historians of his generation, Don took a while to find a permanent position, teaching in one-year jobs at Duke University in 1957–1958, the College of William and Mary in 1958–1959, and Longwood College in 1959–1960 before taking up what is now called a tenure-track position at Louisiana State University in the fall of 1960. Promoted to associate professor in 1963, he remained at LSU for six years until he moved in the fall of 1967 to the University of North Carolina, where he spent the rest of what became an increasingly illustrious career. His national recognition contributed to his promotion to professor in 1970 and to Dowd Distinguished Professor of History and Peace, War, and Defense in 1988. Don was also twice a visiting professor at the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, during the bicentennial year of 1975–1976 and in 1998–1999.

Although Don had gone on phased retirement in the fall of 2007, he was still an active member of the teaching faculty at the time of his death, his forty-first year at the University of North Carolina. Indeed, despite the increasing malignancy of his disease, he completed his last courses just a few weeks before he died. According to his colleagues in Chapel Hill, Don was a polished and effective undergraduate teacher, a role that he greatly relished even after the earlier stages of his illness had sapped a bit of his indefatigable energy. According to his graduate students, many of whom turned out in March 2007 for The Higginbotham Affair, a symposium honoring Don’s many contributions to early American historical studies, he was also a perceptive, congenial, and helpful mentor.

Don’s devotion to teaching did not interfere with his active engagement in historical scholarship, which began early, continued until just a few days before he died, and resulted in what can only be described as a prodigious output, consisting of ten books, at least fifty-seven journal articles and chapters in books, and a substantial number of book reviews and encyclopedia articles that he did not bother to list in his c.v. But Don’s contributions to historical scholarship did not lie primarily in the quantity of his publications. Published by the Institute of Early American History and Culture in 1961, when Don was only thirty years old, Daniel Morgan: Revolutionary Rifleman, a revision of his dissertation, provided a preview of what was to come. With characteristic modesty, Don made no claim for the novelty of his approach in this laudably concise, gracefully written, and thoughtful volume, but perceptive readers immediately recognized that it was remarkable in two senses. First, it successfully aspired to rise above the details of his subject’s life and to use that life to explore the wider contexts in which Morgan operated, thereby raising biography to the level of history. Second, it was built on a thorough exploration not only of Morgan’s personal papers and those of his associates and friends but also of local records, records that allowed Don to present new information about Morgan’s life and to provide a rich depiction of the local world that shaped his values and behavior. In these ways, this work set a new standard for military biography and greatly enriched the potential of the genre.

The intersection of social and military history, which continued to be one of Don’s abiding interests, was the subject of his second and in many respects most impressive book, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policy, and Practice, 1763–1789, published by Macmillan in 1971 and fortunately still in print. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, this volume was not a traditional combat history but an analysis of the social conditions in which the war took place, conditions that fundamentally shaped the American approach to the war. After more than thirty-five years, it remains arguably the best general study of the War for Independence and should be a stock item in the library of any historian who studies the American Revolution and the birth of the American nation.

Seeking to avoid being stereotyped as a military historian and to exploit a rich collection of personal papers, Don began a biography of the North Carolina lawyer and Revolutionary leader James Iredell in the late 1960s. Although he published three interesting articles out of the materials he collected for this project and edited and published (in 1976) two out of a projected four volumes of Iredell’s papers, Don never completed this project, which, as he reported in 1988, had been frequently interrupted by requests “to contribute essays and chapters [to works] dealing with . . . the Revolution’s military dimensions.” Don collected and published the most substantial of these pieces, along with a revealing autobiographical preface, in War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider Dimensions of Conflict, a title that fully described his capacious perspective on the Revolutionary era.1

In the mid-1980s, Don began to fix his attention upon aspects of the career of George Washington. Over the next two decades, he produced three volumes on Washington and was working on a fourth at the time of his death. Published by the University of Georgia Press in 1985, his George Washington and the American Military Tradition, a revision of the Lamar Memorial Lectures in Southern History that he presented at Mercer University in 1983, was a short interpretive volume that thoughtfully and persuasively explored the relationship between Washington’s experience in commanding American troops during the War for Independence and his contributions to the emergence of a military tradition that subordinated the military to civilian authority. Don edited and wrote the introduction to a distinguished collection of thirteen essays, two of them by him, under the title George Washington Reconsidered, which was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2001. The next year, he issued a short study, George Washington: Uniting a Nation, published by Madison House, which economically analyzed Washington’s role in creating the United States and reproduced his principal state papers on that subject. For the past few years, Don had been devoting as much time as possible to a longer study of Washington’s role in the War for Independence and the creation of the American nation. Tentatively titling this work George Washington, Revolutionary, he was able to complete six of a projected twelve chapters.

Don’s other publications included two volumes issued by Rand McNally: Atlas of the American Revolution (1974), with Kenneth Nebenzahl, and Historical Guide to Virginia (1981). Among the most important of his many essays and articles are “American Historians and the Military History of the American Revolution,” American Historical Review 70, no. 1 (October 1964): 18–34 (an article initially accepted by the William and Mary Quarterly); “Military Leadership in the Eighteenth Century,” in Leadership in the American Revolution (Washington, D.C., 1974), 91–112; “The Early American Way of War: Reconnaissance and Appraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 44, no. 2 (April 1987): 230–273; “The Federalized Militia Debate: A Neglected Aspect of Second Amendment Scholarship,” ibid., 55, no. 1 (January 1998): 39–58; and “War and State Formation in Revolutionary America,” in Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. Peter S. Onuf and Eliga H. Gould (Baltimore, 2004), 54–71. His article “Was It Murder for a White Man to Kill a Slave? Chief Justice Martin Howard Condemns the Peculiar Institution in North Carolina” also appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 36, no. 4 (October 1979): 593–601.

Don’s professional achievements were not limited to the classroom and the study. He took a prominent role within the University of North Carolina. In long stints as chair of the University Scholarship Committee (1971–1981), the Department of History (1978– 1983), and the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense (1988–1992), he displayed his administrative talents, his steady leadership, and his ability to bring people of diverse opinions together, and he also served terms on many of the university’s and the department’s most important committees. Heeding the oft-given advice of John Tate Lanning, one of his doctoral professors, always to address himself to a wider audience, Don also played a prominent role in the professional societies to which he belonged, serving as president of the Southern Historical Association in 1990–1991 and of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in 1992–1993. He was a member of the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review in 1976–1979 and served one term on the Council of the Institute of Early American History and Culture in 1988–1991. A habitué of the bicentennial circuit in the mid-1970s and the late 1980s, Don lectured or participated in symposia or seminars and at more than sixty universities, historical societies, libraries, and other institutions and organizations in the United States and Canada.

In his personal life, Don was a strong family man. His first wife, Mary Stone, whom he met when she was an undergraduate student at Duke and to whom he was deeply devoted, lost her bout with cancer in 1967 just before Don and their three small boys, twins Robert and Larry and their youngest, David, moved to Chapel Hill. For the next fifteen years, Don always put the boys’ welfare first. When his retired parents moved to Chapel Hill to be closer to their only child, Don was an attentive son, faithfully visiting his mother daily after his father had died and she could no longer live on her own. For the last three decades, he considered himself undeservedly fortunate to be married to his surviving spouse, the former Kathy Jenner, who graciously tolerated his absorption with historical scholarship and his long retreats into his study. To Kathy’s children, Hilary and Christina, he was a caring stepfather. In his later years, Don delighted in the eight grandchildren produced by these sons and daughters and their respective spouses.

Don was a warm and loyal friend. My uninterrupted friendship with him dates back more than fifty years to a casual encounter in the offices of the history department at the University of Nebraska, when we learned that we were working in the same broad field with the same doctoral supervisor, John Alden. We attended our first professional meeting together in the spring of 1955, and we both moved with our supervisor to Duke a few weeks later and formed a mutual support association when we encountered widespread speculation among our fellow graduate students that these two sponsored transfers from the University of Nebraska probably could not cut it at Duke. I attended his wedding to Mary Stone, and we always got together once or twice annually at professional meetings. Especially after he moved to Chapel Hill, we frequently saw one another during my visits to my parents in Raleigh. When he went to Raleigh, he often called in on my mother and father, and when his colleagues and friends honored him at his retirement conference in 2007, my ninety-five-year-old mother expressed her delight that such a large group was gathering to pay homage to a person she still thought of as “that nice boy,” remarking that she had known him longer than anybody else then living in North Carolina. His friends will miss him deeply.

Don would no doubt pretend shock at the laudatory character of this obituary, coming from someone whose interaction with him included a fair amount of good-natured bantering. In the final analysis, however, his inability to find a way to block my jump shot, his closet rooting for the Duke Blue Devils when they met the North Carolina Tar Heels on the basketball court, or even his violent insistence that his beloved St. Louis Cardinals still played in a major league are minor flaws in an exemplary personal and scholarly life. With the support and stimulation of his family, colleagues, and students, and without ostentation, this small-town Missouri boy raised himself to the very top rung of his profession.

Jack P. Greene
East Greenwich, Rhode Island

Footnote

1. Higginbotham, War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider Dimensions of Conflict (Columbia, S.C., 1998), x (quotation).