78 Indiana Magazine of History only office of the central government continued under the same head from the Confederation into the government under the Constitution” (p. vii) , provided the basic administrative link between the old and new orders. More accurately than any other agency the War Department mirrored the dynamic transformation the Constitution wrought in the central government. This thesis places Ward in opposition to the revisionist school of historians in regard to the Confederation period. “Any idea,” he writes, “that government functioned effectively on a federal scale should be quickly dispelled” (p. 85). Shays’ Rebellion is his case in point. He believes it underscored a basic weakness of the Confederation. Congress was “unwilling to declare that the state of insurrection existed when it most clearly did, thus abrogating that power which is essential to national sovereignty” (p. 80). Congressional vacillation prevented the Secretary of War, Henry Knox, from using his authority to protect the federal arsenal at Springfield. By contrast, Knox, who continued under the federal government with little change in his military duties, later laid the groundwork for an effective military organization and saw the coercive powers of the Constitution vindicated at Fallen Timbers and in western Pennsylvania. The Department of War, 1781-1795 is something more than a dull recital of administrative routine and something less than a comprehen- sive survey of national military policy. It follows the activities of the two secretaries of war, Benjamin Lincoln (1781-1783) and Henry Knox (1785-1795), and their duties and preoccupations determine its scope. Except for the period 1789-1791, when Knox stood high in the President’s councils, neither man was greatly involved in formulating higher policy. They made their major contributions as organizers and administrators not as leaders. Lincoln’s chief concern was the admin- istration of the Continental Army-the routine matters of pay, re- cruiting, promotion, and the care of prisoners. The Indian problem, in both its diplomatic and military phases, absorbed the greater part of Knox’s energies. By carefully tracing their activities Ward has gained valuable insights into the genesis of the Union and the support- ing role played by the department which, to echo popular Army toasts of the 1780’s, helped add “Cement to the Union” and “A hoop to the barrel” (p. 41). Unfortunately numerous typographical errors, poor lithography, and the lack of a map of the Old Northwest mar this excellent monograph. University of Notre Dame Stephen T. Powers

William Plumer of New Hampshire, 1759-1850. By Lynn W. Turner. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., 1962. Pp. 366. Frontispiece, appendixes, bibliographical essay, index. $7.50.) Those interested in New England history, or that of the United States in the very early nineteenth century, owe a real debt to Dr. Turner for his biography of William Plumer. To them should be added, in truth, those who take delight in the delineation of a Yankee Book Reviews

“character,” for whatever else Plumer may have been-lawyer, politician, even statesman-he was certainly one of those decided individuals so often placed in New England by our national tradition but less often encountered. For the reviewer, who spent a summer some time ago going through the voluminous Plumer papers in Concord (alongside Dr. Turner but for a different purpose), the book is doubly welcome. William Plumer, somewhat mysteriously, has been rather ignored by historians; yet his life had great interest, and his papers throw a great deal of light on what happened politically in his active years. Possessed of an interest in writing, he put down in detail what went on around him, and then, retiring from political life in 1820, he spent another twenty-five years telling what he knew about his earlier as- sociates and their deeds. All of this vast store of manuscripts has been used, and well used, by Dr. Turner, who has also studied the fairly large amount of material by other writers that bears on Plumer’s story. Plumer himself was engaged in politics for nearly forty years. Selectman of Epping in 1783, at the age of twenty-four, he went on to the state legislature and watched with disapproval the New Hamp- shire equivalent of Shays’ Rebellion. Serving as speaker of the House and as a leader in the convention that drew up the constitution that still rules the state, he was in and out of the legislature for a decade. As a leading Federalist, he was concerned over the new banks, the troubles with France, and the rising tide of Republicanism. Elected to the United States Senate in 1802, he was a party to the New England plans for breaking the Union in 1804, and his Memorandum of Proceed- ings in the United States Senate, 1803-1807 is one of the best records of what went on there in those years. By the end of his term, rather like Senator John Quincy Adams, he had changed his party, and was henceforth to be a fervent Republican and a very successful one. Four times governor of New Hampshire, he illustrated the best of Republican liberalism. He supported the War of 1812 not for land but for reasons of national pride. He tried to remake Dartmouth College because he had real visions of the educational system needed in a democracy. He voted, as a presidential elector, against Monroe in 1820 not to preserve Washington as the only president unanimously elected, but because he distrusted Monroe’s republicanism. William Plumer, in brief, shows in his career how New Hampshire, and how many people in the country, thought about and acted on the issues of his day. Dr. Turner brings him to life, and in the process of restoring him to memory gives us a great deal of new informa- tion about Plumer’s period, illustrative even if not substantive. The author does call Plumer stodgy, but this biography is proof to the contrary even though it underplays that side of Plumer’s character that could produce such vitriolic language as once to reduce a political opponent to public tears. Turner has produced, by the excellent use of a very large amount of material, a book that adds greatly to the literature of the period. The format of the volume is unusually good, the bibliographical essay brief but excellent. The slips that a “foreigner” makes in writing local history are of no consequence. Dartmouth College Herbert W. Hill