In Memoriam
Harold M. Hyman
Harold M. Hyman was one of the most influential constitutional historians of his time, an honorary fellow of the American Society for Legal History and its president from 1993 to 1995. He was the author of the leading constitutional history of the Reconstruction era and, with William M. Wiecek, the standard account of constitutional transformation in the Civil War Era.
He had been on the faculties of UCLA and the University of Illinois, after an initial stint at Earlham College, and was the William P. Hobby Professor of History at Rice University from 1968 to 2003. He passed away on August 6, 2023 at the age of ninety-nine.
Harold was born in 1924. He lived with his family on St. Marks Square on the lower East Side of New York. He did not much like school and in 1941, at age 17, a few months short of the minimum age of 18, he enlisted in the Marines. After basic training he was sent to Hawaii, where he was when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He served in the Pacific during the war that ensued. He climbed to the rank of master sergeant, training new recruits. He enrolled in a correspondence course that enabled him to get a high school diploma. On leave in Los Angeles he met and later married Ferne Handelsman. Upon his discharge Hyman moved to Los Angeles and attended UCLA, under the G.I. Bill, earning his B.A. in 1948. He then enrolled in Columbia University, where he earned his M.A. in 1950 and Ph.D. in 1952.
Hyman studied under Henry Steele Commager, the great constitutional historian and civil libertarian. He took courses from Allan Nevins, the leading historian of the Civil War, and Richard B. Morris, the great historian of the revolutionary era, both of whom read his dissertation. Through them he met the pre-eminent constitutional historian of the Civil War James G. Randall, teaching at the University of Illinois. Among Harold’s Columbia colleagues were Hans Trefousse, Ari Hoogenboom, Herbert Gutman, and Leonard Levy, all using the G.I. Bill to earn graduate degrees. Young David Donald, returning to Columbia as an assistant professor, used to sit in a corner of the Hyman apartment grading papers when the heat went out at his own. The Columbia cohort remained friends all their lives, meeting at conferences, having dinners with each other and other Civil War specialists. Harold also cultivated friendships with legal and constitutional historians like Stanley Kutler and William Wiecek. The Columbia group (and Kutler) called Hyman “Heshie.” His students, once they completed their Ph.D. oral exams, were invited to call him “Harold.”
Working under Commager at the height of the McCarthy era, Hyman turned to the study of loyalty oaths during the Civil War. His dissertation became his first book The Era of the Oath (1954). At a period when loyalty oaths were demanded by political conservatives and denounced by political liberals, including his Columbia mentor, Hyman took a dispassionate approach. Whatever his own feelings, they did not lead him to denounce the imposition of oaths. What he did find was that loyalty oaths were ineffective. It was impossible to define loyalty and therefore they did not distinguish the loyal the disloyal. A second book, To Try Men’s Souls (1959) expanded his study to include all of American history, combining broadscale description with telling anecdotes. Hyman’s distaste for over-reaching loyalty investigations became clear as he left the Civil War era for more modern times. His skepticism about loyalty investigations was welcomed by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which awarded him the Sidney Hillman Prize, dedicated to journalism and “deep story telling” that promoted progressive public policy and social justice.
Harold wrote ten monographic books, one coauthored with his respected colleague William M. Wiecek. Another, his biography of Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, completed a project begun by the respected Civil War historian Benjamin Thomas. But Hyman reconceived it so thoroughly that Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (1962) was really his own. More than a biography, it was a study of treason and loyalty, military politics, law and military occupation, and Reconstruction politics. He wrote histories of law firms, business histories, the history of a World War One labor union uniquely sponsored by the U.S. army. He edited and coedited numerous collections of essays and documents on Civil War and constitutional history. Hyman’s most influential books were Equal Justice Under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835-1875 (1982), co-authored with Wiecek, and A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (1973). Both continue to be cited regularly by both legal scholars and historians.
Hyman specialized in the constitutional history of the Civil War era more than any other of his many interests. Over time, his perspective changed. With the stirrings of the civil rights movement he, like other historians, reconsidered the link between Republican partisanship, maintenance of the Union, and racial justice. He no longer looked askance at partisan breaches of legalisms. In 1965 he was among the contingent of eminent U.S. historians who joined the final portion of the march from Selma to Montgomery led by Martin Luther King.
Despite the growing informality on campuses, Hyman retained a master sergeant’s gruffness in dealings with students. He did make some concessions. When he introduced himself to new students in his undergraduate American history course, he informed them, “I am Professor Hyman. But there is no reason to stand on formalities. Just call me Sir.” He followed his mentor Commager’s custom of holding graduate seminars at home. At the University of Illinois, the seminars met evenings before a roaring fireplace, maintained by the most junior member. They no longer needed the fireplace at Rice, but seminars continued to meet at Harold’s home during his first fifteen years there. He and Ferne would host a gathering for students’ spouses, girlfriends, and boyfriends afterwards. His most senior students presented chapters from their dissertations. Others prepared papers on various constitutional subjects that he suggested. His comments, substantive and stylistic, filled the margins of the contributions. He was a tough questioner in seminars, encouraging other members to be the same. A few were terrified. Others thrived, among them his most prolific Ph.D. students Philip Shaw Paludan, Michael Les Benedict, Donald G. Nieman, Harold Platt, Thomas Mackey, David Courtwright, Charles Zelden, and Claudine Ferrell.
Harold remained an active scholar into his mid-seventies. When he first began to talk about retirement, colleagues and graduate students organized a conference in his honor, publishing the papers as a festschrift in 1992. But he did not retire for another ten years.
Upon his passing, many of his students and colleagues reflected that he seemed larger than life. He was among the giants who established the contours of modern legal and constitutional history.
Michael Les Benedict