The Middle Ground

Richard White. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

This book is the history of a time and place that, while bounded geographically and temporally as indicated in the subtitle, was also defined by a complex web of social, cultural, political, and economic relationships between Indian and European societies which met in this "middle ground".

The author refers to it as a "circular story" (ix) in which Indians and whites began the period regarding each other as strange, alien "others" to be regarded from a distance; in the end, the triumphant Americans would re-impose this perception on the former middle ground, but in the intervening decades, there had been a complex world of ever-shifting negotiation and compromise. The Middle Ground could be--and often was--a dangerous and violent place, but it was also a place in which accommodation and compromise were possible.

White often refers to the region by the name given by early French explorers and colonists: the pays d'en haut. This is appropriate, as the relationship between French and Algonquian established much of the initial template for the middle ground; later generations of Indians would often look back to the era in which the "French Fathers" had been the primary Euro-American power with nostalgia and longing. The initial alliance that French and Indian individuals and groups painstakingly negotiated had a lasting effect on the history of subsequent Spanish, British, and American involvement in the region.

This book covers a long time period across a wide area, and while White's analysis pays a great deal of attention to the ambiguity and shifting realities of the topic, the book itself is largely structured in a straightforwardly chronological framework. This is welcome, as a more thematic approach would have lost any narrative connection, as White deliberately leaves the center of most commonly-studied events of the period (particularly the wars: French-Indian; American Revolution; and the War of 1812) off-stage. He locates the center of his story firmly within the pays d'en haut. 

This book is a valuable study of Indian'white relations and Indian history, but it also adds a new dimension to the study of colonial and Early American history. This is a view from what most standard American histories of the era consider the hinterlands or the "back country." As White explains, most students of American history know how this story ends--with the new nation committed to rigid racial hierarchies, and a complete dispossession of the western Indians. But that history was not inevitable, nor was it the logical consequence of what preceded it. White restores the history of a world that was lost when America "conquered" the West.

Slave Country

Adam Rothman. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

After achieving independence, the United States acquired sovereignty over a vast area west of the Appalachians and the original colonies-turned-States. The spread of chattel slavery to the southern half of this domain--and beyond, after the acquisition of the Louisiana territory--was anything but preordained; the story of how this happened, specifically in the Deep South (defined here as the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) between the 1780's and 1820 is covered ably in this book.

As Rothman points out in the Introduction, the institution of slavery came with the new nation as a heritage of the colonial period, but that does not explain why it survived and in fact expanded in the first several decades of independence. The United States was a Republic, born of a revolution formerly committed to ideals of liberty and equality. The tension between the rhetoric of the Revolution on the one hand, and the reality of race-based slavery on the other, had troubled many Americans, and had led to the gradual decline of the institution in the North. Yet, within a few decades, the newly established states of the Deep South were firmly committed to plantation slavery as the foundation of their economies, and the source of much of their political and social elite.

None of this, again, was inevitable; in the Preface Rothman states "Slavery's expansion in the Deep South emerged from contingent global forces, concrete policies pursued by governments, and countless small choices made by thousands of individuals in diverse stations of life."(xi)

The original vision for how the lands of the West should be settled was articulated by Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned a peaceful, agrarian settling of the vast American interior by good Republican--white--farm families. He also believed, or at least hoped, that somehow the spread of Americans westward across the North American continent would somehow diffuse slavery to the point where it would disappear as an institution and a moral problem. There were two problems with this vision; to begin with, it ignored powerful economic incentives which would encourage the continuation and expansion of slavery, and it failed to account for what would happen to slaves themselves once the institution somehow organically died off. Jefferson's vision had no place for black people. This fact would heavily mitigate any meaningful move toward widespread emancipation in the spreading "slave country".

Furthermore, the spread of settlement into these new lands created conflicts with neighboring colonial powers as well as Indian nations and existing inhabitants. The incorporation of Louisiana into the American polity was problematic, as the city of New Orleans in particular was both very cosmopolitan and had a very different social and racial caste system than the roughly binary white-vs.-black racial hierarchy that was forming in the increasingly democratic (white) Republic of Jeffersonian America. Conflict was inevitable; the Jeffersonian vision could not last contact with the complex realities on the ground.

What followed was a period marked by both demographic growth and economic expansion on one hand, and violence and discord on the other. Cotton and sugar boomed as commodities, and a flood of voracious new settlers--particularly the well-off who could use money and connections to acquire the best land, first--moved in to turn more and more of the region into productive plantation land, worked by an ever-increasing population of enslaved people. At the same time, Indian wars, slave resistance (including the largest single slave revolt in US history, in 1811), and the War of 1812 all contributed to the process of destabilizing the old order and violently clearing the way for the growth and spread of a new slave-based social and economic order.

By the end of the period, the Deep South had emerged as the heart of what was becoming the "Slave Power". There would be further conflict and war ahead, but when the book concludes, the creators of the Deep South could convince themselves that they were the bulwark of a new order which would, in fact, hold it's own for several decades.

Encountering Revolution

Ashli White. Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Ashli White extends the notion of Atlantic History to the Haitian Revolution--but while that perspective (rightly) puts that event into the larger context of the French and American Revolutions, White has a narrower focus--the effect that refugees from the ongoing Haitian conflict had on the new American republic.

The United States received thousands of refugees from Haiti during a period extending, intermittently, over nearly two decades. They consisted of three main groups: whites, free men of color, and enslaved blacks. Although Haiti was a plantation economy, the slaves who came were overwhelmingly the personal servants of the white refugees, or were skilled tradesmen. The exiles collectively challenged Americans nascent sense of nationhood--as a Republic (the exiles were often refugees from the pro-Republican island regime earlier in the conflict), and as a slave-holding Republic.

White traces this rather tightly-circumscribed story well. The presence of Haitian exiles posed an existential challenge to Americans' understanding of themselves--for white Americans, the plight of the white exiles created a tension between the American commitment to trans-national Republicanism, and a race-based slavery system. For black Americans, the Haitian Revolution provided a tangible example of how the language of liberty and revolution was universal.

Ultimately, white America chose race over universal Republicanism. The experience of accepting and assimilating the Haitian refugees resonated for decades, and profoundly influenced the development of early American nationalism.

The Freedoms We Lost

Barbara Clark Smith. The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America.
New York: The New Press, 2010.

In the Preface, Barbara Clark Smith establishes that in many important ways, Americans today enjoy many more--and in many ways, greater--freedoms than colonial and Revolutionary-era Americans did; she assures the reader that "Early America was no golden age." (xi)  Her goal here is not to claim that early Americans were better off or "more free" than today, but rather that they enjoyed and believed in different freedoms. Those freedoms were vested in a radically different conception of the relationship between the individual, and both society and government. That understanding provided a context in which a more consensual notion of "governing", based on a sense that a unified "people" provided consent not only to how law was made but also how--and even if--it was implemented.

The world in which these earlier freedoms existed was one in which "the people" were subjects, rather than citizens, a distinction which on first glance would seem to offer little room for any meaningful freedom as modern-day Americans understand them.  (3)  But while ultimate sovereignty was not vested in the people as a whole, and neither suffrage nor representation were as universal or equitable as contemporary ideals would hold, colonial Americans conceptualized their freedoms in different ways. While their ability to control the reins of government and direct the creation of laws and legal institutions, both common law and custom vested them with an ability to modulate, regulate, and even negate the implementation of law. Through collective public actions, and juries, "the people" participated in the political culture of their society by, in theory at least, embodying and clarifying a unitary sentiment. "The people" did not have direct say in the laws and dictates their government imposed, but they did have the right--even the obligation--to give, or withhold, their consent.

This conception of a collective consensus extended to realms which later Americans would regard as being "economics" rather than "politics." There was a moral dimension to what we call "market relations", in that no transaction was purely a matter between buyer and seller. The community itself had a claim on the terms in which goods and services were produced, distributed, and sold. This consensus, however, would begin to break down during the later years of the Revolution. The sacrifices the Patriot movement required become more and more questionable to many as the war dragged on and the initial enthusiasm for war and revolution abated.

Whether or not this older conception would have survived had the war been shorter is an open question; there were other stresses on the old order. Most importantly, the development of the ideal of popular sovereignty, along with total representation, eliminated much of the rationale for the old ways. The idea that crowds could and should negotiate the terms of compliance with constitutional government became more and more problematic as former Patriots such as Samuel Adams accommodated themselves to the idea that elections were the proper--perhaps the only--arena for political action by "the People." Americans had gained many new freedoms, but they lost others.

Sealed with Blood

Sarah J. Purcell. Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002

This books takes a subject which on first glance may seem limited--the ways in which public remembrance of Revolutionary War heroes changed in the first half-century of American history. However, Purcell explains in the Introduction that "To understand how the Revolutionary War contributed to the earliest formation of national identity is to understand something crucial and long lasting about American political culture." (10) The subsequent chapters support that statement. By tracing how American chose to remember and honor those who had suffered--and especially, particularly in earlier years, those who had died--in the Revolutionary War, Purcell is able to illustrate how early American nationalism was increasingly contested between elite-oriented Republican ideals and emerging democratic norms.

The book is divided into five chapters, covering the era in chronological order. According to Purcell, remembrance went through discrete stages during different periods; first, during the war itself; then, during the Articles of Confederation era; changed again during the Federalist era; evolved towards more democratic norms from 1801 to 1819; and then what was left of the unitary nature of Revolutionary commemoration fractured from 1800 to 1825, on the verge of the Jacksonian period.

In general, the movement was towards greater democratization--in the early chapters, Purcell argues that it was widely accepted by most Americans that it was fitting that elite officers who died in battle should be commemorated in the interests of the greater Republican good. The idea of honoring ordinary soldiers never came up, and would have been regarded as counter-productive; deference was still an important social value during the Revolutionary period. (22)

But while ordinary Americans were not at first fit subjects for commemoration, they had an important role to play in these rituals--the widespread participation of Americans of different strata of society, including women, was both expected and indeed necessary in order for society to be united and proper national feeling derived from such ceremonies, writings, and memorials.

Later, however, events would force the sacrifices and experiences of ordinary Americans to the forefront, and increasingly both the memoirs of middling and working-class participants in the Revolutions, as well as memorials dedicated to the collective sacrifice of ordinary soldiers, would be seen as proper and even necessary functions of national collective remembrance. As a second war with Britain loomed on the horizon in the early 19th century, there was also a new focus on the naval experience in the Revolution. This ultimately led to a recognition of the suffering of American prisoners on British prison ships--a powerful parallel to what impressed sailors were going through as the War of 1812 drew near.

Finally, the return of the Marquis de Lafayette to America allowed for surviving veterans to take a place in the very public, and very national, spectacle of Lafayette's return. The elderly French hero was very welcoming to all former veterans--even, on some very notable occasions, to African-American veterans who otherwise had been written out of the evolving orthodox narrative.

By this point, not only had the deference to great leaders as emblematic of the entire national experience passed, but also the notion that there was one, unified national memory that all Americans could agree on and rally around was little more than a comforting illusion. Americans North and South would continue to insist that the Revolution held a special meaning, but they would disagree more and more strongly about what that meaning was.

Tom Paine's America

Seth Cotlar. Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Radicalism in the Early Republic.
Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011.

Cotlar’s provocatively titled book begins with a moving, and slightly pathetic, account of Tom Paine’s less-than-triumphant return to the United States, in 1802. The former bard of Democracy and Revolution was reduced to hoofing it from tavern to tavern in Baltimore looking for one which would provide lodging to a man now widely reviled as an atheist and a “Jacobin.” The contrast between this ignominious episode, and the reference to “Tom Paine’s America” in the title is striking. Thomas Paine found Americans in the early 1800s to be largely either hostile or indifferent to his return and his person, a situation which—as the Epilogue makes clear—would largely continue to this death, and beyond. So what, exactly, was the “America” which Cotlar claims was his, and what happened to it?

The intervening five chapters illuminate the rise and fall of that now largely forgotten America; one which embraced a trans-Atlantic, radical democracy as its ultimate goal. The ‘Paineites’ in Cotlar’s narrative held a view of democracy which was more expansive, all-encompassing, and radical than the purely suffrage-based model we are more familiar with. They considered themselves part of a larger democratic movement, one which took inspiration from other countries as well as crediting Americans for doing the same; devotees of Paine’s teachings saw democratic revolution as a truly universal phenomenon, one which was defined neither by American exceptionalism, nor by a limitation to what is now considered the “political” sphere.

Indeed, the very notion of what was “political” was contested in the early years of the republic, just as what “democracy” meant was. In both cases, the Paineites advocated a broader conception of those concepts; in both cases, their interpretations—which were influential and important during the Revolutionary era—would eventually be discredited by a new, more moderate consensus.

But Paineites did not give up without a fight; for some time after Tom Paine himself left America for France, his followers continued to advocate his ideals; one of Cotlar’s arguments is that Paineites existed in a much more intense and active dialogue with—and understanding of—liberal democratic activism in Europe. It was easy for them to tie their own cause, whether it took shape in nascent working-class activism or in the many Democratic-Republican Societies, to the fate of similar groups espousing similar goals in Great Britain and France. And for a while, this position was both popular and broadly acceptable to many Americans. So while there was always a conservative opposition to Paineite ideology, conservatives such as John Adams felt obligated either to criticize radical democrats obliquely, or in private.

That would change, however; the rise of Jacobin violence in France, and the supposed influence of the Democratic-Republican Societies on the Whiskey Rebellion, began to put Paineites on the defensive. More and more, they were forced to explain their support for movements which seemed to threaten good government, the new Constitution, and social harmony.

The Painites would continue to have a place in the anti-Federalist opposition for some time, but ironically it was the victory of Jefferson and the Republicans in 1800 which sounded the death knell for Paine’s followers as a vital and formidable political force. Jefferson and his followers quickly disassociated themselves from the radical democrats—now routinely disparaged by “respectable” Republicans as well as Federalists as ‘Jacobins’—who had helped them gain power; the Federalist establishment returned the favor by acknowledging that Jefferson and his Republican coalition were much more respectable than the Jacobin rabble. Property was safe, as was respectable political leadership by sober, respectable men. Questions about leveling, ending slavery, and so forth could be safely forgotten. In the end, America was able to avoid the trauma of the French Revolution by taming and restricting the scope of what “democracy” meant and how far it should go.

Paine himself died a nearly forgotten man, spending his days with a tiny, dwindling band of like-minded artisan deists and radicals, all of whom would strive to keep the flame of radical democracy flickering for future generations to rediscover.

The Other Founders

Saul Cornell. The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism & the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Cornell argues that while "the structure of American was crafted by the Federalists, the spirit of American politics has more often been inspired by the Anti-Federalists." (1) This is a sweeping claim, which he repeats at the end of the book (where he credits Martin Van Buren for this formulation). As the subtitle implies, Anti-Federalism as a movement was an active, and self-consciously oppositional, factor in American politics for several decades after the ratification of the Constitution. During that time period, a varied group of writers and politicians created a vibrant and varied body of writing based on a broadly-shared commitment to resisting a highly-centralized ("consolidated") national government.

Anti-Federalism during the ratification process included three distinct groups: elite, middling, and plebian. A shared commitment to resisting ratification, and an ability to read different things into similar language (a commitment to "liberty" could mean very different things to a wealthy, slave-owning plantation owner than to journeyman tanner in western Pennsylvania) allowed these three groups to work together to a degree. The same ambiguity in meaning also meant that texts could be used and read by others in a manner neither intended nor understood by the author.

Cornell argues that this diversity has confused historians and scholars, and was part of the reason why the Anti-Federalists were relatively marginalized in American history for so long. But he argues that "Weighting texts according to their influence in their time, however, reveals a clear, consistent Anti-Federalist critique." (10) Such a reading reveals a much more cohesive vision; one which quite consistently claimed to be a genuinely 'federal' ideology committed to a balance of power between more democratic state governments and a strictly and explicitly limited national government. This vision was made of "three components: federalism, constitutional textualism, and support for a vigorous public sphere of political debate." (11)

The book is divided in three parts. Part I considers the original ratification debate. Cornell considers the importance of rhetoric as well as how texts were read and shared, and by whom. He also contrasts the stances of elite Anti-Federalists with those of the middling and plebian sorts. The latter two groups had much common ground, but plebian support for the Carlisle riot (in which Anti-Federalist mobs threatened and harassed local Federalists, destroying property in the process) led to a split which created the possibility of an alliance between middling and elite Federalists--an alliance which in some ways anticipates Van Buren's Republican coalition. Resorts to mob violence, as well as radically democratic rhetoric, would continue to hamper plebian success and mitigate against an alliance with middling Anti-Federalists.

Part II details how the language, rhetoric, and arguments of Anti-Federalism influenced and shaped Jeffersonian Republican politics as the Republican coalition worked out the process of functioning as a loyal opposition. As Madison joined their ranks, he helped craft a "Madisonian" variant of the Anti-Federalism argument. His arguments were less radical and anti-statist than much of Anti-Federalist thought, eventually becoming something of an orthodoxy for the rising Republican Party.

In Part III, the coalition behind Anti-Federalism began to fracture in the wake of Jefferson's electoral success; the challenge of having to govern put new strains on the fractures which had been latent during years of being the party in opposition. Ultimately, some Republicans would move beyond Madison's consensus, while John C. Calhoun would ignore Anti-Federalism entirely, and craft the novel doctrine of nullification from an esoteric reading of Federalist arguments.

Anti-Federalism was finished as a coherent, self-conscious political faction, but it left a body of work which addressed many core facets of American politics and political theory; one which Americans across the entire political spectrum continue to draw on.

A Revolution in Favor of Government

Max M. Edling. A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of he U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Max Edling examines the ratification debate over the Constitution through the lens of a broader consideration of Federalist literature than most previous studies and scholars had offered. The result isn't just a more complete understanding of Federalist arguments for ratification, but a reconsideration of the larger program and ideology Federalists, in general, advocated for.

Edling argues that orthodox studies of the Federalist position on ratification and the Constitution have been skewed by too heavy an emphasis on the Federalist Papers in general, and the writings of James Madison especially. The Madisonian interpretation is important in American political history, and has been very influential, but "[t]hanks to the publication of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, it is now possible to investigate the Federalist side of the debate more inclusively than has previously been the case." (7) In doing so, Edling concludes that the Madisonian argument, rather than either summarizing the main thrust of Federalist thought, or standing in the ideological center of it, was actually in many ways out of sync. While Madison was concerned primarily with structure--such matters as separation of powers, the roles of different branches, etc.--Edling argues that Federalists in general put much more emphasis not on the limits placed on government, but the powers given to it.

Those powers were not general or unspecified--they were the power to tax, and to wage war. The Federalists products of the late eighteenth-century world; a time which saw the rise of the "fiscal-military state" in Europe; according the Edling, the Federalists believed that the only way the new nation could guarantee its safety, prosperity, and continued sovereignty was to adopt the same tools which European powers relied on to create military, diplomatic, and economic power. And they had to do so within the context of a country with a deeply-rooted anti-statist tradition, as well as immature or unformed institutions.

One advantage of looking at Federalism through this interpretive lens is that the broader trends of Anti-Federalist thought actually appears more coherent and consistent than many standard interpretations allow. Edling makes a strong case that both sides were not arguing over "democracy" versus "aristocracy" or other abstract political dichotomies, but rather over the very concrete issues of whether or not the new government under the Constitution would have ultimate power over its citizens through the power to extract resources and commit men to armed conflict.

The bulk of the book considers those two issues--taxation, and a standing army--from both sides of the debate. A debate, Edling argues, which the Federalists wanted to be extensive and deliberate, in contrast to at least some interpretations which picture a well-organized Federalist minority pushing through a little-understand invention before the inchoate opposition could craft a systematic alternative.

Essays on the Making of the Constitution

Leonard W. Levy, Editor. Essays on the Making of the Constitution, Second Edition. 
New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

This Second edition of a book originally published in 1969 still serves a useful purpose. A lengthy introduction by the editor establishes the context--the nationalist "Spirit of '76" which failed to take institutional or political form in the early months of the Revolution immediately following the Declaration of Independence would ultimately be revived and codified in the Constitution. Levy, in other words, does not play the impartial curator of historiography; he has his own point of view. In fact, he not only writes an introduction to each reading, he also gets the "last word" in with his own essay on the Bill of Rights at the end of the volume.

Naturally,the book begins with a selection of passages from "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution" by Charles Beard, and not surprisingly much of the selections which follow are direct responses to Beard's essential argument. Levy's brief introductions establish the context for each selection, and the selections in general--including Merrill Jensen, Jackson T. Main, and John P. Roche--cover many of the seminal works on post-Beard Constitutional scholarship.

This short volume is an excellent "crash-course" in the subject, and a handy resource for students and scholars alike.

Slave Counterpoint

Philip D. Morgan. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry. Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 1998.

Morgan's epic work of scholarship won a raft of major awards upon publication in 1998, and it has endured as a modern classic ever since. Long, but neither dense nor burdened with theory, his study of the subject is possibly as "exhaustive" as it is possible to be given the paucity of primary sources. Morgan, like other historians of early America, have followed Rhys Isaac's lead, finding new ways to "read" information which previous generations might have regarded as mere decorative detail, if they even noticed them at all.

What that means in practice is that Morgan casts a wide net; he uses material culture and archaeology, as well as applying a probing, critical eye to first-person accounts by both white observers as well as slaves and former slaves. He analyzes oral histories, accounts of clothing, gesture, dialect, etc. One reason this book is so long is because Morgan was seemingly tireless in finding any possible facet of black culture during this period.

Although the subtitle might seem to indicate that this is a comparative history, that is not entirely the case; Morgan is interested in comparing these two regions--which collectively were the home of the vast majority of Eighteenth-century British North American slaves--but also in noting their similarities. While he is interested in the differences, ultimately this book is about the larger fact of American slavery, and the leading role that these two regions played in shaping the institution and its further development in the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries.

This is, he notes, a "structural history" (page xix), divided into three parts. Part I examines the landscape, and the agricultural reality, in each of the two sections--place is very important in understand Chesapeake and Lowcountry slavery, as are the differences between the primary cash crops (tobacco in the former, rice in the latter) and secondary cash crops (wheat, and indigo, respectively) in terms of the work required to produce them and the infrastructure required. In the Chesapeake, generally, tobacco and wheat favored smaller production units, lower capital costs, and a less relentless work regimen than rice and indigo called for in the Lowcountry. At the same time, the relatively unhealthy climate in the Lowcountry dictated that it would take longer to develop a self-sustaining (i.e., demographically self-replacing) slave population than in the Chesapeake. Therefore, large-scale importation of new slaves from Africa lasted longer there, giving Lowcountry slavery a more explicitly African tinge.

Part II explores interactions between Blacks and Whites in the two regions; this section therefore delves into issues of patriarchy, paternalism, interracial antagonism and cooperation, intimacy of all kinds as well as hostility.

Part III finally considers the Black American culture that began to take shape over the course of the century in these two regions. This is a detailed examination of everything from dance, to conversational sarcasm, dialect, funerals, African influences on religion and the assimilation of Christianity, and more.

The book is heavy with detail and anecdote, but never gets bogged down. Morgan has done a masterful job of teasing out numberless strands of meaning from a diverse range of sources and scholarly realms.

The Transformation of Virginia

Rhyss Isaac. The Transformation of Virginia: 1740-1790. 
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.

Isaac's book is a classic of cultural history; one which not only forced a reconsideration of the Revolutionary era, but also pointed the way towards a new methodology. Over three decades since it won the Pulitzer Prize for History, its status as a modern classic of Early American historiography seems secure.

He tells his story in a decidedly non-linear style, eschewing narrative and and an extended, explicit argument for the cumulative power of vignettes and descriptive sketches. Isaac confronts the challenge that faced any historian of colonial Virginia who wishes to match the depth of intellectual insight and cultural meaning scholars of colonial New England have been able to achieve--namely, the extreme paucity of written sources produced by Virginians relative to the wealth produced by the much more literate and bookish New Englanders. Isaac--as he explains in the Appendix, "Discourse on Method"--turned to alternate sources and alternate modes of "reading" them. Therefore, Part I consists of a large number of brief sketches of material and physical culture, broadly defined--houses and landscapes, yes, as well as clothing and furniture, but also dancing, horse-racing, seating arrangements at public events such as church and "court days" at the County courthouse. Gestures and public speaking are all "texts" that Isaac reads in order to recreate the world of colonial Virginia as it existed in 1740.

In Part II, he goes on to show that the colonial social order which seemingly was becoming more settled and secure by 1740 would soon be challenged and ultimately undermined by changes coming from within; changes rooted in the Great Awakening and the evangelical movement which continued to flourish and grow in its wake. Evangelicalism challenged the static and hierarchical nature of colonial society and encouraged the growth of individualism, which was incompatible with the corporate social idea which the traditional gentry both believed in and relied on to preserve their power and status. For the gentry, traditional Virginia religion--vested in the Anglican Church--was a bulwark against anarchy and change. For evangelicals, the Anglican establishment was corrupt and insufficient for the spiritual needs of Virginia's people. In the end, he traces the final throes of this struggle within the legislative battles which led to the passing of one of Thomas Jefferson's proudest accomplishments--the Act for Establishing Freedom of Religion. The temporary political alliance between mostly back-country Baptists and the liberal gentry of the Tidewater and Piedmont was, according to Isaac, a sign of the degree to which individualism was now regarded as the basis of society.

Part III briefly details how this new individualism took shape, in matters of changing political behaviors, new architectural norms, and a decline of the conviviality which the pre-war gentry had been famous (and prided itself) for. Virginia was still a largely rural, agrarian society--and it was still a slave society--but in many ways it entered the nineteenth century as a much different place than it had been a few decades earlier.

Defiance of the Patriots

Benjamin L. Carp. Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & The Making of America.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Despite being a famous event that almost every American is familiar with, the Boston Tea Party has not generated a great volume of scholarly literature. Carp notes in the “Further Reading” section of the bibliography that his book is the first academic work on the matter since The Boston Tea Party by Benjamin Woods Larabee, published in 1966. Despite Carp’s claims to the events larger significance (much of which is certainly justified) of the incident, the fact remains that the Boston Tea Party itself was a brief incident in a larger story. The story Carp tells is interesting and even illuminating, but it doesn’t challenge any general historiographical consensus on the Revolutionary period.

This is not a criticism—Carp makes no claims that a clearer picture of the Tea Party will force a rethinking of any accepted interpretations of the Revolution or American history in general. Instead, he is mainly interested—beyond the telling of the story itself—in a warts-and-all account which can complicate subsequent references to the event by those who would use the Tea Party as a symbol of protest for a wide spectrum of national, political, social, and ideological causes.

He points out that Americans struggled with the memory of the event from the beginning—was it a righteous outburst of patriotic resistance, or an extra-legal resort to property destruction, vandalism, and terrorism? Carp leaves that to the reader—that ambiguity is the real legacy of the Tea Party, perhaps, although he also refers to the democratic aspects of a mass effort carried out by men from a wide spectrum of colonial society, with broad support (both tacit and otherwise) from society at large.

In the end, knowing the story of the Tea Party helps illuminate the story of the outbreak of the American Revolution; this is a fairly modest and un-revolutionary goal, but this well-written and readable book does add some nuance and color to a crucial turning point in the imperial crisis of the early 1770s, as well as giving contemporaries who harken back to the original event a fuller and more richly nuanced version of those events than sloganeering activists generally grant it.

The King's Three Faces

Brendan McConville. The King's Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press (for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA), 2006.

This book is a cultural history of a colonial America which has been completely forgotten, and which most Americans have no idea ever existed. The “Royal America” that the subtitle refers to was a colonial society which defined its relationship to the British Empire (the first British Empire, as McConville repeatedly stresses) through a primarily emotional attachment to the monarchy. This royal attachment grew stronger in America even as society in England itself was developing a greater attachment to Parliament as the locus of British sovereignty and the defender of British liberties. It did not break until the very eve of the American Revolution.

This view of colonists as arch-monarchists in an Empire formally committed to legislative supremacy contrasted sharply with the generally accepted view of an eighteenth-century proto-America drifting away from the British system and developing its own republican traditions and values. Because this is a history of a mentalitie McConville focuses on a cultural history of what colonial Americans were reading, hearing, and seeing—in an attempt to recreate what they were feeling. Their tie to the King was primarily an emotional one; it had to be, as their understanding was at odds with British constitutional theory and practice as it was developing in the mother country.

This came to be because the empire early on relied on such emotional bonds, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, to hold the disparate and multi-cultural empire together in the absence of a robust administrative infrastructure. Emotional bonds replaced institutional ones. This system might have worked in the long run, but in the American colonies demographic realities mitigated against that possibility—the population grew much too fast for the halting growth of the imperial administration to provide opportunities for ambitious young colonials. As a result, the colonies developed a sizeable “ruling class” which wasn’t allowed to rule—a colonial elite which was increasingly shut out of the sort of offices which provided precious social status.

The break between colonists and the distant King whom they mistakenly identified as the protector of their liberties and their ally against what they perceived as Parliamentary tyranny was much-delayed, and all the more anguished and violent when it came. The destruction of royal iconography destroyed much of the material culture which might otherwise have survived to remind us of this history, but depth of that emotional purging can still be seen in the angry and defiant wording of the Declaration of Independence

The Minutemen and their World

Robert A. Gross. The Minutemen and their World. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976, 2001.

This "25th anniversary" reprint of a classic of social history adds a forward by Alan Taylor and a new afterword by the author; both of which put the book into the context of the time (as a then-novel melding of the quantitative methodologies of the "new social history" with more a narrative-based approach than most other practitioners were considering) as well as giving Gross an opportunity to tell the story of how the book came to be.

The book itself is short, readable, and relatively straightforward. In brief, Gross portrays Concord as a place which was deeply local in outlook until very close to the outbreak of the war; the locals were little involved or interested in the world beyond their borders (although in the Afterword, Gross concedes that subsequently he has learned that he probably exaggerated the level of isolation in the community), and deeply committed to traditional, hierarchical social norms. In fact, he argues that their involvement in the Revolution--once the movement for liberty came to Concord--was motivated by an effort to defend tradition as they understood it.

However, there were two reasons why that didn't work. First-the world as they knew it was already changing, and in fact he does a great job illustrating the demographic and economic pressures which were behind the deep anxiety the community was marked by at the time. Secondly, the logic of the Revolution itself created new dynamics which would allow--or even force--many locals to look forward to new opportunities rather than backward to an idealized past.

The republican unity which Concord sought to defend was an organic whole in which the 'individual' was expected to defer his or her own interests and even opinions to local society as a whole. And it was a unity which was proudly local in outlook. Yet the Revolution produced a world in which the individual would increasingly reign supreme, and the community would be more deeply engaged in--and its interests dictated by--the outside world than ever before.

The triumph of this book is that Gross rescued the Minutemen from the gauzy haze of patriotic myth. He restores them to their own complex world and their own complicated lives.

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Bernard Bailyn. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. [Enlarged Edition] 
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967, 1992.

Bailyn's book, which is now an acknowledged classic, still stands the test of time as a useful intellectual history of the Revolutionary period, in spite of its tendency towards a "Whiggish" if not teleological viewpoint. Originating as an introduction to a multi-volume publication reprinting an enormous collection of pamphlets from the Revolutionary era, Bailyn argued that this literature presented a broader view of the intellectual climate of the era, as well as new insights into the well-known literature scholars were already familiar with.

Bailyn makes his viewpoint clear in the first chapter; on page 19 he states that

"What was essentially involved in the American Revolution was not the disruption of society, with all the fear, despair, and hatred that that entails, but the realization, the comprehension and fulfillment, of the inheritance of liberty and of what was taken to be America's destiny in the context of world history."

This is problematic, not just because Bailyn is staking out a position very different than that argued later by his own protege Gordon Wood--let along later scholars who would argue that even Wood is essentially Whiggish although he did regard the Revolution as truly "revolutionary" rather than merely the culmination of a logical intellectual process, but also because it is clear that while Bailyn's study pays a great deal of attention to what a wide swath of the literate colonial population was writing and publishing, he spends a great deal less trying to unravel who was reading these pamphlets, as well as how they were reading them.

That said, his argument still merits attention even a full half-century after its initial publication. Given that it is such a widely read classic, it probably isn't necessary to recount the outlines of his major points. I will, however, note a couple of core strengths the book still possesses.

First, the emphasis on both the Enlightenment as experienced in the provincial world, as well as the legacy of the first Great Awakening would have been interesting at that; the way in which Bailyn argues that these two seemingly incompatible ideologies actually shared many common assumptions and often reinforced each other in the ways they played out socially and culturally is a fascinating insight--a reminder that ideologies often "work" in ways that don't necessarily fit preconceived notions of how they "should."

Secondly, the ways in which the colonials understand English common law in their own context is fascinating.

And finally, of course, there is his argument that the legacy of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 largely framed and informed the intellectual climate the colonists worked in--and the ways in which they understand their place in the British Empire. This might be the most important legacy of Bailyn's book, and while I take issue with many aspects of his conceptual approach, this book still merits a great deal of respect for having opened this avenue of interpretation.

From Colonials to Provincials

Ned C. Landsman. From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680-1760. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000, 1997.

Landsman's book is a brief intellectual history of a period which he acknowledges has been described as a "Death Valley" in terms of interest. On the surface, this is an understandable bias--the era was not marked by the tumult, change, and conflict of the early decades in American colonial history; and of course it is followed by the much more dynamic and dramatic years leading up to the American Revolution. 

However, he argues that while the era might have been devoid of obvious drama and clear narrative interest, there was a great deal "going on" in the intellectual life of the colonies. When the era began, the colonists were isolated, both geographically and culturally, from the center of English culture. When it concludes, they are British subjects, intimately connected to--and involved in--the cultural and intellectual life of the Empire. This was a complex process that occurred on many different levels; Landsman is concerned with the intellectual changes which fed, directed, and helped create this conceptual shift.

Central to his argument is the meaning of the term "provincial", which here has a less negative or condescending meaning than it largely does in a contemporary context. Landsman is speaking of the "provinces" which developed in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union which, among other things, served to create a 'British' context in which subjects outside of the "metropolitan" (London, of course, but also the main centers of English culture and commerce) lived, and from which they conceptualized their place in this new political, social, and cultural sphere. It wasn't merely the North American (and Caribbean) colonists who were "provincials"--the title also applied to the Scots, Protestants in Ulster, and even some more remote parts of England proper.

The Scots are particularly important here, as the links between the Scottish and American colonial intelligentsia were frequent and robust--writers, theologians, officials, philosophers, etc. from both sides were in frequent contact with each other, through letter writing, literature, business, and personal relationships. Scotland was a poor country with a sizable educated professional class in need of opportunity; after the 1707 Union many of them increasingly sought those opportunities in the New World. 

Even as "provincials" were struggling--and often succeeding--to create enhanced roles for themselves in the newly-created "British" polity, other intellectual trends were in the works which would determine much of the climate in which they worked. Contrary to earlier beliefs that the Enlightenment was a narrowly elite intellectual event, confined to the Continent and largely to France, Landsman points out that historians today have a broader idea of what the Enlightenment was, where it happened, and who participated in it. In a chapter on the "republic of letters", he illustrates how a broad sector the literate public (and while literacy for this period is hard to measure, it was certainly relatively widespread) participated in the Enlightenment by engaging in "conversations" on a wide variety of questions moral, scientific, and so on. By focusing not just on what people were writing but also on what they were reading--and what their reactions to what they read were, when possible--Landsman is able to illustrate that there was indeed an American Enlightenment.

Aside from written culture--philosophy, science, history, even the relatively-new genre of the novel--the other arena in which provincial culture was worked out was in religion. Landsman goes over seemingly well-trod ground--the Great Awakening, the schisms in Puritan culture, the debate between Jonathan Edwards and Charles Chauncey, etc.--but puts this religious and theological history in a broader context. Parallel with the growth of Enlightenment thinking, the religious changes and controversies of this period helped develop a new culture in which a more self-consciously individualistic mode of thought developed. Provincials began to see themselves in new ways, and become more aware of their status as British subjects and their place within the larger imperial order.

This book has a lot to say about how colonial Americans learned to think about "liberty" in ways which would, ultimately, lead to revolution and independence.

Facing East from Indian Country

Daniel K. Richter. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Any attempt, no matter how well-meaning, to "write Indians into" a standard narrative history of early British North America must confront the asymmetrical availability of sources.  The Indians did not produce their own written sources, and the early English colonists never betrayed much interest in understanding native peoples. Advances in archaeology and other fields have given once-silenced Indian peoples a voice, but in the standard teleological narrative that voice struggles to be heard above the much more robust and explicit record that English colonists left behind.

Richter has found a novel way to address that imbalance--by reversing the point of view. The "facing east" of the title is literal; this is a (sometimes speculative) re-imagining of the story from the perspective of Indians witnessing and coping with the arrival of Europeans. By reversing the point of view, the relative paucity of written sources no longer tilts the playing ground in favor of the literate Euro-Americans.

Another advantage of Richter's approach is that it emphasizes the historical nature of the Indian side of the story. Native peoples were part of history, not the victims of history as so many well-meaning histories have portrayed them. Their removal was neither the inevitable workings of demographic inevitability nor a morality tale for future generations.

By framing the traditional colonial story in a way in which the "west" is the center rather than the dimly-known frontier, Richter not only offers an Indian-centric version of early American history, he also sheds new light on well-known dynamics of colonial land acquisition, resource use, and more. T

Creatures of Empire

Virginia DeJohn Anderson. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Anderson’s work is an important contribution to the field of environmental history, one which builds on previous studies by focusing on domestic animals as active agents and direct causes of ecological change. Earlier environmental histories examined how the introduction of European domestic animals into the Americas inflicted a wide variety of changes to the ecosystem. Domestic animals competed with native fauna for food, introduced new pathogens and microorganisms, and hastened the transformation of the land in general. But Anderson moves beyond those indirect changes. Her book is a study of how domestic animals directly affected the lives and actions of both colonists and Indians in colonial British North America. She reframes the story of colonial America by presenting livestock as actors alongside the other two groups.

The role that livestock played was hardly peripheral, either—in the Prologue, she states that:

            “To a remarkable extent, the reactions of Indians and colonists to problems created by livestock became a reliable indicator of the tenor of their relations with each other.”

The key phrase in that quote is “problems created by”. In Anderson’s account, the domestic animals which English colonialists introduced to North America were never completely under the control of the English settlers, nor were Indians ever able to contain the actions of animals within their own sphere of activity.

The reason for this—and probably the key point for Anderson’s entire argument—was that the conditions of settlement in British North America precluded the sort of complete and comprehensive control over domestic animals which English famers were accustomed to and routinely practiced in the mother country. English husbandry was a well-developed practice with a substantive body of tradition and literature, which was tailored to the well-developed, heavily populated, and thoroughly demarcated English landscape. Colonialists brought their assumptions about husbandry to the New World along with their animals, but the reality of establishing new English-style settlements stymied attempts to recreate old ways. There was simply too much work to be done—fields to be cleared, buildings to be erected, market infrastructure to be developed—and too little labor to be devoted to other, less essential tasks. Therefore, the careful practices of ideal husbandry, which necessitated a great deal of personal oversight and management—as well as sizeable fenced fields and barns—failed to take root.

Instead, English settlers soon took to allowing their livestock to take care of themselves—which, in practice, meant allowing them to room in the woods and fields beyond the “improved” lands on their farms.

This brought the animals directly into competition—and conflict—with the Indians who relied on the woods for hunting and fishing. Nor did rooting, loose swine respect the integrity of Indian fields, which—unlike English fields—were unfenced. English assumptions about “improvement” and the proper mode of agriculture simply could not credit Indian land use as legitimate. While Indians practiced a mode of living which was fluid and mobile, English agriculture was based on an ideal of fixed settlement—proper agriculture, in the English mind, was marked by permanent structures such as houses, barns, and outbuildings, as well as fences. Indian fields, which were farmed by women rather than by men, and without the use of beasts of burden, seemed wild, messy, and uncivilized to English observers. And while colonists were willing to concede the legitimacy of Indian agriculture—however second-rate it seemed to be—they did not recognize the use of forest land as legitimate in the slightest. Hunting and fishing were not efficient uses of “unimproved” land so Indian complaints regarding the invasion of those spaces by free-range livestock gained no traction in colonial courts, or elsewhere in the British American imagination.

The other key axis on which conflicting Indian and colonial reactions to livestock hinged on was differing conceptions of “property.” Indian notions of property were temporally limited and contingent—more specifically, Indians understood property in terms of use. Resources were only “owned” when they were used and/or needed. For example, no individual, town or tribe “owned” wild deer; but when a hunter or a group of hunters killed a deer, then they owned that deer. English notions of property, of course, were much different—based on absolute and exclusive notions of ownership which were static and non-negotiable. These conflicting conceptions would create endless conflict as Indian hunters struggled to understand, for example, why it was OK to kill a deer but not a hog which had just rooted up an entire field of maize, beans, and squash.

The English plan to set a “civilizing” example to the Indians by their own allegedly superior modes of agricultural production would founder at least partly due to their failure to control their own domestic animals. Yet eventually, they would learn that those same animals were quite effective as weapons of imperialism, as they could undermine and help destroy the capacity of Indians in their vicinity to successfully maintain their food supply. The English finally understood that while they hadn’t managed to fully control their animals, they could still use them towards the desired end—the removal and dispossession of the indigenous people. 

Changes in the Land

William Cronon. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983, 2003.

Cronon's first book--published when he was 28 years old--has become a modern classic as well as a seminal text in what has become known as environmental history.

It is a brief book, one which still is impressive and eye-opening over three decades later, although the fact that environmental history is now far more prevalent means that the book isn't quite the shock now it must have been when first published. Still, it is easy to see why it won the 1984 Francis Parkman Prize. This is an elegantly written monograph which calmly and deliberately makes its point: "the shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes--well known to historians--in the ways these peoples organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations--less well known to historians--in the region's plant and animal communities." (From the Preface).

In other words, there was an ecological change as well as economic, political, social, and demographic changes, in the wake of contact between Indians and Europeans, and subsequent settlement by the latter.

The book is marked by the obvious contrast between Indian use of the land versus that pursued by the colonists, but Cronon takes great care to avoid falling in to a lazy dichotomy--as he notes at the beginning of Chapter 7, "A World of Fields and Fences":

"One must not exaggerate the differences between English and Indian agriculture. The two in many ways resembled each other in the annual cycles by which they tracked the seasons of the year."

He also cautions against the tendency to interpret the vast changes wrought by the introduction of European trade goods into Indian societies to the technologies themselves--rather, it was the new mode of economic logic and the new agents tied to larger markets, not the trade goods themselves, which were often used by Indians in ways very different than intended--often as markers of status rather than as utilitarian goods. Also, Indians tended to incorporate these goods into existing patterns of economic use, so assumptions that "improved" European goods necessarily altered economic practices don't add up.

Other contrasts--the distinction between "sovereignty" and "ownership" in regards to land ownership (and differing Indian and English concepts of both)--inform this richly detailed look at the environmental history of the region which was--to paraphrase his comments about history in his afterword to this 20th anniversary edition--going on all around the people in the past although the didn't realize it was happening.

American Colonies

Alan Taylor. American Colonies: The Settling of North America. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

Alan Taylor's book was to be the projected first volume of a series, "The Penguin History of the United States." Given this start, and the fact that it was to be edited by Eric Foner, it's a shame that the series seems to have been shelved. We can be grateful that we got this volume, though--Taylor has written an excellent synthesis history of "colonial America" re-imagined in ways which that venerable descriptor fails to signify in the popular imagination.

The first hint to where Taylor takes the reader is in the title--this is a history of multiple colonies, rather than the singular tale of the British North Ameican colonies spreading westward across an empty, formless continent. Taylor tells a more nuanced story--one which is aimed at the general reader, the college undergraduate, and ultimately anyone interested in rethinking old assumptions about the colonial period.

The story begins with the American Indians of North America, and then moves across the Atlantic to consider Western Europe on the verge of the colonial era. In this second chapter, we meet many "colonizers" including of course Christopher Columbus--but from there rather than move quickly to the British story, first the reader gets a chapter each on New Spain and New France.

The point here is to look at the colonies as they were, not as precursors to what the reader knows is coming. The second section of the book is a detailed look at the British colonies in North America, including the West Indies. A consistent theme of this section is the dynamic nature of Indian societies during this period--American Indian societies were constantly adjusting to, and affecting, the rise of Euro-American settlement. This section also gives consideration to the colonies of New Netherlands and even New Sweden.

The final section, "Empires", traces the story of how these different colonial empires collided and contested the North American continent between them--while never losing sight of the Indians who were caught in the crossfire, or the African-American slaves who were compelled to play a role in this story. The book ends far away from the Atlantic seaboard, on the islands of Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest. Taylor spreads a wide net, and the result is a very readable reconsideration of the story of "colonial America."

Protestant Empire

Carla Gardina Pestana. Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Pestina's book is an interesting take on Atlantic history, one which--as the title indicates--focuses on religion. Her research and range is impressive, and for Americanists it is very instructive to see events such as First and Second Great Awakenings placed in a larger, Atlantic context. More broadly, she traces how the religious pluralism that the United States boasted from its inception was not only a product of trans-Atlantic transportation and New World experimentation--a common trope of American history--but also was part of a larger, dynamic process of "circulation", "transplantation", and "negotiation" throughout the growing British Atlantic world. British efforts to mimic Spanish success in using the national church as a tool for colony building and enforcing national unity largely failed, although in the end this failure led to a relatively more ecumenical pan-Protestant British nationalism. This would have important consequences throughout the British Atlantic as well as in the mother country. In the United States, it facilitated the rise of a degree of religious heterogeneity that virtually dictated the creation of the American concept of "separation of church and state", simply because the leaders of the Revolution and then the new republic recognized that there was no way to enforce conformity across such a diverse spectrum of denominations.

Pestana does a very deft job of balancing the various theaters across two full centuries. She explains how the religious and denominational situation was different in England (and Wales, which largely followed the English lead with some exceptions), Scotland, and Ireland. The attempts of the Anglican Church to impose its will throughout England was never completely successful, which partly explains the failure of English authorities to put sufficient effort and resources into their plans to use the church as an institution of state control throughout their colonial possessions. In Scotland, the strength and independence of the Presbyterian kirk not only affected Scottish history, but also provided a base from which that denomination was able to exert influence throughout the empire. And in Ireland, the persistence of Catholicism among the majority was one factor feeding the anti-Catholicism of English nationalism; ultimately, though, this persistence would also support the eventual relaxation of suppression of the church in the UK.

Chapter One, “Religion before English Expansion”, is a look at the religious worlds of the three main regions of what would become the British Atlantic World circa 1500—eastern North America, western Europe, and West Africa. This is not an exercise in comparative history, however, but instead a look at three distinct religious worlds which will be drawn into contact and conflict during the following three centuries. She outlines some differences between the three different religious norms, perhaps most notably the Western Christian beliefs regarding conversion (17). According to Pestana, European Christians tended to regard conversion as a convulsive and decisive decision, rather than a conditional or gradual process. This conceptualization would prove problematic when Euro-American colonists were later faced with native “converts” who approached the decision to embrace Christianity on their own terms—conditionally, and often in negotiation with traditional Native beliefs.

Along with the differences, Pestana also emphasizes underlying similarities—which were generally ignored by most Europeans at the time but which allowed for a more complex process of acculturation and adaptation by American Indians and transplanted African slaves. Despite outward differences between European Christianity, West African traditional religions, and American Indian animism, was a common belief in “densely occupied spiritual landscape”. (18) The three worlds had different rituals and different seasonal calendars, but they all had them. There were several other shared general traits as well. While the differences would largely prove relevant because English colonists would rely on them to justify unilaterally establishing dominance and pushing for “spiritual hegemony”, the similarities would prove important because they explained how Indians and Africans negotiated the belief system of the dominant Euro-American culture often by finding parallels and commonalities which were compatible with their own belief systems.

These three worlds would soon come into intimate contact, but the first convulsion to this order occurred within Western Europe—the Reformation. The rise of Protestantism forced a cleavage in the formally unified Western Christian world. The divisions were often along national lines, as with the establishment of the Church of England. In other places, the division shook the unity of nascent nation-states, driving rulers to at least attempt to impose homogeneity. Religion became tied to nationality and state-building in the wake of the Reformation. In the British world, this tendency was complicated by a number of factors, including the failure of Anglicanism to completely dominate England; the rise of Presbyterianism as the main religion in Scotland; the persistence of a Catholic minority in Great Britain; and the attempt to conquer, subdue, and incorporate Catholic Ireland into the polity.

Rather than resolves these tensions, the English crown ended up exporting them, as different faiths and religious institutions were able to establish themselves in different colonies. And in turn, these colonial settlements provided “laboratories” in which religious institutions could experiment and develop—and then transmit newly strengthened religious identities back to the home country. The colonies also provided a base for Protestant sects such as the Puritans and the Quakers to develop their own orthodoxies and institutions. These would play a role in politics back in England.

In the end, the British polity would create a new pan-Atlantic ‘Britishness’ based on a broad commitment to Protestantism, rather than a narrower conception of Anglicanism as the basis of citizenship and patriotism. The British turned the heterogeneous nature of British religious life into an asset, as they united disparate denominations into a relatively unified anti-Catholicism.

Pestana has created a fresh vantage point from which to view American religious history as well as Atlantic history. My only complaint with this book is a minor one. She has a tendency to overly elaborate at times--some points are repeated for no apparent reason. And frequently she will repeat an explanation in one chapter of a point that was already elaborated in a previous chapter. The latter might very well be a result of a long process of writing and development. The former, however, sometimes seems a matter of occasional clumsiness. This, however, is a very minor problem, and Petana might very well counter that she would rather make her point too well than not well enough.

The Web of Empire

Alison Games. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolians in an Age of Expansion 1560-1660. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008

Games has written a provocative history of the English traders, ministers, ambassadors, adventurers, merchants, and colonists of a period spanning the rise of the English state as a rival--at first an underdog, but then increasingly a formidable foe--to the other centralized European trading and colonizing powers during the century indicated in the title. In doing so, she has implicitly taken American colonial history beyond Atlantic history into a more global arena. She also refutes the conventional wisdom regarding the centrality of the Irish experience to the colonial enterprise in North America. This study forces Americanists to reconsider the early colonial experience within a broader framework than most histories have conceptualized.

Her argument covers a lot of ground both spatially and temporally, but the central theme is this--during the rise of English expansionism, the English state was weak relative to other Western European powers, meaning that the English lacked the robust military and naval resources to confront imperial rivals directly or to impose their wishes on various foreign peoples and entities. The English were late to the game in establishing trading connections in the Mediterranean, in Africa, the Indian Ocean, East Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. Time and time again, the English found themselves operating from a position of weakness--forced to rely on the expertise of other Europeans, and to accommodate to local conditions and mores to a degree which was quite troubling at a time when concerns over English sovereignty and threats to Protestant sanctity made the very act of travelling suspect. Let alone a willingness to engage foreigners and non-Protestants on their own terms. The cosmopolitanism of these Englishmen was hard-won and fraught with dangers both foreign and domestic.

This era ends with the rise of a more centralized state which was far more willing and able to expend resources on the tools of imposing its will on other peoples as well as its own subjects--particularly a larger standing army and a state-controlled navy. This process was started by Cromwell, and ironically continued by Charles II. The reliance on private militias and armed merchant ships would be a thing of the past, as would (eventually) the cosmopolitanism of the time. The English would eventually come to rely on coercion and force to impose their will as the growing power of their state allowed them to develop new tools of empire.

However, the transition did not happen immediately, meaning that the British North American colonies were largely founded by men working in the early dynamic that Games articulates. The fact that the later, more centralized mode of British imperialism post-dated the establishment of the thirteen mainland colonies surely influenced the American colonists expectations over their relationship to the mother country. That is another story, but while Games does not look ahead to the eventual break, the implication is there in the final pages. While this book is immediately a study of an important stage in the growth of the British state and its global role, American historians will benefit from this opportunity to see the British founding of the colonies in a new context. 

The Birth of America

William R. Polk. The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.

Polk--a descendant of the American president with the same surname--has spent most of his long career as a diplomat and political scholar, but with this book he chose to, as he states in the introduction, offer a "different angle of vision" on the history of the colonial era of American history. The introduction presents a brief synopsis of American historiography, reinforcing his point that the story of America's founding still needs to be revisited and retold in the light of new sources, new points of view, and new interpretations. So, as a non-American historian but an experienced scholar, he offers his own version.

How does he do? To begin with, credit must be given--he has done his research. For a non-specialist, he has an impressive command of a wide range of sources. Polk is writing for a general audience, and his writing style is well-suited to finding a broader audience than many academics. He has a good eye for telling anecdotes and examples, and he utilizes them frequently to bring this far-reaching narrative to life. 

The story he tells is hardly comprehensive--Polk is very good at giving the Indian story its due, and he places slavery at the very center of the colonial saga, but he has little if anything to say about gender or family, nor does he trouble himself too much with culture or intellectual history. But these are observations, not criticisms. This is a "big picture" story which is deeply rooted in an Atlantic history perspective. Part I, "Europe and Africa Come to America" takes up the first 100 pages of a 309-page text, so that the book devotes fully a third of its length to the various actors who would collide, collude, and intermingle in what became British North America.

Even a specialist night enjoy his take. His eye for detail, noted above, keeps the story fresh even when the general outline is already known. True to his explanation at the very beginning that history is not fixed and is always affected by what is important in the present, some of the details he chooses to highlight are very pointed rejoinders to contemporary (mis-)readings. His assertion that most colonial Americans neither owned guns nor knew how to use them would be quite a surprise in many circles where references to the Founders are routine.

All in all, this is a lively and well-crafted book; Polk fulfills his promise to the reader to take a "fresh look" at a story all too many Americans think they know better than they actually do. 

The Jacksonian Economy

Peter Temin. The Jacksonian Economy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1967

Peter Temin is an economist and economic historian who has written several books on 19th century American economics. This is one of his first books, and it has been a fairly influential one. Published in the late 1960s as a corrective to then-prevalent existing orthodoxy, which held that Andrew Jackson was primarily responsible for the Panic of 1837 due to his Bank War and Specie Circular. In the intervening decades, Temin's thesis seems to have won out and his argument accepted.

It is an economic argument, and for readers not used to the field might find the argument a little hard to keep track of. Temin's prose is straight-forward if more than a little dry, and even a novice such as myself can understand what he is saying even if much of the content is abstract and somewhat bloodless.

Temin's argument, in a nutshell, is that nothing Jackson did brought on the Panic, and that while some of his actions probably retarded the recovery, even those negative effects were limited. The real culprit was a combination of events in Britain and China. Improved wheat harvests in Britain produced a surplus of capital which was funneled to investment opportunities in the United States. At the same time, Chinese opium users were increasing their purchases from Britain, therefore diverting the flow of Mexican silver from China to the United States because it was quicker and cheaper to use American credit for purchase. Therefore, the United States saw an increase in specie, which increased the money supply, which in turn led to inflation.

A later cut in British credit was followed by a decline in the price of cotton, which brought the American economy to a halt. The chain of events continued through the 1840s, resulting in a long period of deflation and an end to the economic boom times of the 1830s. Land sales slowed, and the value of American money depreciated.

It is, admittedly, a difficult argument to keep straight if one is not used to speaking and thinking in pure economics. Still, the argument seems sound and the book is useful to have on hand when reading about the economic aspects of Jacksonian America.

The Jacksonian Promise

Daniel Feller. The Jacksonian Promise: America, 1815-1840. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Originally published 20 years ago, Feller's book on the Jacksonian period seeks to address what he saw as a too pessimistic or gloomy interpretation of the period. The emphasis on the market revolution and the corresponding anxieties, Feller argues, ignores the tone of public and private statements of the people who lived through the era. Jacksonian America was remarkable not for its fears and uncertainties, but for its optimism and its certainties about the "promise" of the future. Jacksonian Americans were excited about the possibilities that change promised rather than primarily discomforted by it. Furthermore, this optimism was a common thread that united disparate elements in society.

The narrative begins with the "Year of Jubilee" 1826, which was prefaced by the triumphant return of the Marquis de Lafayette in 1824. Lafayette was treated to an endless parade of well-wishers and adulation, but he was also witness to a nation experiencing incredibly dynamic growth in geographic, demographic, and economic terms, as well as seeing a huge surge in infrastructure development. The America that Lafayette visited was proud of its past, but even more excited about its future.

Feller does a passable job making his case, although sometimes he seems to make it by re-framing intense disagreements as two sides of the same coin; arguing that both the American System of Henry Clay and the small-government nationalism of Andrew Jackson were really nothing more than different manifestations of the same optimistic faith in American progress. This is not an unconvincing argument in and of itself, but when Feller continues to present other disagreements (such as over the proper role of women in society, the role of benevolent institutions in social uplift, etc.) in the same interpretive framework--particularly in a text that is just over 200 pages--he invites speculation that he over-simplifies.

If his argument that the optimism of Jacksonian America was universally shared risks being a little strained, he does a very convincing job of arguing that the era was indeed marked by a wide-open atmosphere of restlessness and openness to experimentation. It should also be noted that he ties a lot of different threads together rather deftly. By bookmarking the era with the aftermath of the Panic of 1837 and the rise of the Second Party System through the election of William Henry Harrison in 1840, he effectively closes his narrative with a deft rhetorical touch. Whatever one thinks of his argument, he certainly makes it well.

This book also serves as a fairly brisk and readable introduction to the larger social, cultural, and political themes of the period. Aside from Feller's interpretation, he has written a reasonably far-ranging survey.

Moralists and Modernizers

Steven Mintz. Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Published twenty years ago, this brief volume is still an excellent introduction to the topic of pre-Civil War reform both religious and secular. Chapter 1, "The Specter of Social Breakdown", briefly sketches the context of economic, social, and political insecurity and turmoil within which these different, often overlapping, reform impulses and movements arose. From there, Mintz devotes four chapters to generally thematic considerations of the topic. In general, Chapters 2 and 3 consider religion and religious movements such as Millenialism and the centrality of liberal Protestantism and evangelicalism to many reform efforts, while Chapters 4 and 5 look at secular movements such as poorhouses, asylums for the mentally ill, penitentiaries, and common schools.

Mintz places his interpretation midway between two poles--early interpretators of Antebellum reformers who praised them for their humanity and credited them with many lasting improvements in American society, versus later revisionists who focused on the middle-class biases and coercive aspects of the era. Mintz argues that both schools of thought have merit but that neither can be considered definitive. More concretely, he argues that the legacy of those reformers needs to be redeemed from the generally condemnation that revisionist historians applied to them. Their motives were more complex and varied--and often more sincerely altruistic--than the revisionists were generally willing to allow.

All of the discussions are necessarily brief, and are intended for the general reader and the student. It is an excellent introduction to the topic, which closes with an Epilogue tying Antebellum reform to the larger American liberal tradition.

Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars

Robert V. Remini. Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

Remini, a preeminent Jackson scholar, chose to devote his final book on Andrew Jackson to the most contentious aspect of his entire public career--his important role in the removal of Indian nations from the United States east of the Mississippi River.

Remini recounted the story with narrative flair and an impressive command of the facts, but what is most striking about this book is the rather startling argument at its core--as summarized in the closing sentence, Remini claims that for all his racism, and for all his responsibility for the great suffering and mortality inflicting on Indians in the process of removal, the end result was that "[h]e saved the Five Civilized Nations from probable extinction."

Remini wass neither ignorant nor dismissive of contemporary attitudes towards Jackson and his role in the dispossession of the southern and (old) western Indian nations. Nor does he deny that Jackson held values and viewpoints which are heinous by contemporary standards, However, he argues that Jackson's racism was hardly unique to him (an inarguable claim, really) and that his oft-stated concern for his "red children", while condescending, was genuine. He really believed--with good reason--that white incursions into Indian land would doom the nations of the old Southwest, and that their removal to "vacant" (of whites) land further west as their only chance of survival.

Remini also established that while land hunger drove white settlement, it was not Jackson's primary concern. Rather, he was obsessed with national security. His original interest in removal stemmed from a belief that Indian occupation of the American frontier was a fatal weakness in American defense and sovereignty. Given the role that British and Spanish authorities played in encouraging and supplying Indian military ventures and raids against American settlers, this was hardly an unrealistic viewpoint.

Remini did not flinch from illustrating the horrors of Jackson's policies as they were carried out (he had a blind spot as to the consequences of policies he sincerely believed in), nor did he try and absolve either Jackson or the American people of their guilt. But he does ask the reader to set aside contemporary mores and retrospective judgment. Look at the situation as it was at the time. Jackson was not a monster. He was merely a human being, and like all of us he was a prisoner of the circumstances and mentalities of his age. In the end, this book demands a little humility from the reader.

The American Revolution

Edward Countryman. The American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.

This short, readable volume is in some way a synthesis of scholarship on the Revolution. However, Countryman brings a narrative control and point of view so that the text never devolves into a mere recounting of historiography.

The central question Countryman addresses is simple: What was the American Revolution? The answer turns out to be that the Revolution was a complex phenomena which was experienced differently by different people at different times; but also that it was a dynamic process that exacerbated old stresses and reconfigured old institutions and practices. The Revolution began in 1763 with the Stamp Act, and ended in 1788 with the ratification of the Constitution; during this period, Americans of different classes and different regions found themselves negotiating between old structures and the fluidity of the era. And the reactions varied from colony to colony, state to state.

In more concrete terms, this is a book about how urban artisans and merchants were in the vanguard of a resistance movement to British rule. Those both above and below then had to react to the increased tensions of the era. Among the ruling elite, there were hard decisions to be made, as some in the upper class felt that the Empire no longer served their needs, while others chose loyalty. Ultimately, the Constitution (and many state constitutions) would be crafted by members of this elite who recognized that it was better to acquiesce to some popular discontent in order to help shape the new order once that change became inevitable.

In the back country, many small farmers felt little affinity for the Patriot movement, and many held pre-existing resentments against the political elites of their colonies; resentments which did not dissipate once independence beckoned. This was where the fighting of the Revolution was at its bloodiest. It was also where opposition to the Constitution would be the strongest.

This is a very good synthesis of scholarship, as well as a fine consideration of the how the Revolution can be understood by examining how differently various groups in colonial society experienced it.

The Kingdom of Matthias

Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz. The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

This short volume rescues a near-forgotten episode from the religious enthusiasms of the 1830s--the short-lived nascent cult of Robert Matthews, alias Matthias, who presented himself to his followers (and anybody else within earshot) that he was the living incarnation of the patriarchal God of the Hebrews. Matthias never attracted more than a handful of followers to his authoritarian cult, and the death of his first follower as well as the fallout of his imposed "spirit matches" which ignored existing legal marriages by his command led to the collapse of the tiny "Kingdom" he tried to establish in Sing Sing, New York and a handful of locations in Manhattan.

The authors begin with a brief account of a meeting between Matthias after his fall, fleeing the notoriety of his trial for theft, murder, and finally assault, and none other than Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon faith. Smith and Matthias, we will learn, shared much in common; however, Smith was far more successful than Matthias. Ultimately, Smith banishes Matthias; at the end of the book we learn that this is very nearly the last historical trace of this strange, failed prophet.

What makes this story more than a mere footnote to history is the authors' examination of how issues of gender and class were central to this story--Matthews was a failed man of the working class in early Jacksonian America; the sort of man who was losing in the new market economy. The winners, very often, were middle class types who embraced the new, Charles Finney-inspired evangelical faith with it's emphasis on the increased role of women in the church and in the home. For a man who came of age in a stable Scots-Irish backwoods settlement where a stern patriarchy ruled over a rough, modest social and economic equality, this was galling. Like Smith and others, Matthews sought to reject the individualistic market economy and restore an idealized patriarchy through a re-imagining of existing scriptures and dogmas.

The story the authors tell is recreated from a handful of sources--for the most part, this story disappeared from public memory after the trial at the end, as the penny press moved on to the next sensational case. And for the most part, the participants also vanish from the historical memory. Except one--the authors save their big reveal for the very last sentence, when they reveal that Isabella, the former slave-turned-servant who was Matthias' most devoted and dogged believer, would reinvent herself as none other than Sojourner Truth.

It's somewhat surprising that the involvement of such a legendary personage wasn't sufficient enough to make this story more well-known, but it suggests yet another enticing thread to be unraveled. Johnson and Wilentz do a great job of tracing possible connections and resonant echoes throughout this sordid little story.