A REBIRTH OF FREEDOM

Govan taught American history for eight years at the University of the South, interrupted by three years as an Army historian during Word War II. In 1952 he left the University on a fellowship and never returned because the University refused to desegregate its Episcopal seminary. He left on moral grounds, relinquishing the history department chairmanship, a full professor’s salary and tenure. Two years of adjunct teaching at Tulane were followed by five years as Executive Secretary for Faculty Work of the Episcopal Church where he had a major impact on the Church’s thinking about higher education. Finally in 1962 he returned to history teaching as a full tenured professor at NYU, and in 1967, moved to the University of Oregon for his last ten years.

In 1959 he published Nicholas Biddle, Nationalist and Public Banker, 1786-1844, which completely exonerated Biddle of guilt for the failure of the Second National Bank. Govan’s conclusions have borne the test of time ever since. He also co-authored with Forrest MacDonald and Leslie E. Decker, a college American history text,The Last Best Hope, 1972. He was also a prolific essayist and reviewer.

As a historian, Govan was preoccupied with the nature of human freedom and justice and how they can be maintained with and by political order. He found the answer in the English common law tradition from which the American Constitution is descended. His primary interests were in the economics and politics of the American Revolution and the ante-bellum South, the causes and nature of the Civil War, and the conflict between the liberal and conservative traditions in United States history. He believed that the two most important issues over which Americans have argued and fought were slavery (race) and the proper relationship between the federal government and the states and individual citizens (states rights versus federal authority). These issues still remain central but unresolved in the economic and political life of our nation.

Govan’s uniqueness lay in his evolution as a historian and theologian, each informing the other. He became a theologian whose profession was to write American history. His theology transcended the distinction between “civil” versus “church” religion and “secular” versus “church” history. His purpose was to “use Biblical theology (and the Biblical view of human nature) as a clue to understanding the whole course of American history… to show that the English and American constitutions and laws are “demythologized” versions of Biblical teaching and that history [is] a name for God’s Providence.”