Book Reviews

BOOK REVIEWS The Brandywine. By HENRY SEIDEL CANBY. (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1941. xiii, 285 p. $2.50.) This is a pleasant book. It was doubtless a pleasure to its author to write, with its constant reminders of his youth. It is a pleasure to read, with its frequent glimpses of the sunny meadows and peaceful stretches of the modest Pennsylvania creek that has somehow been taken into the fraternity of the great streams that make up the main company of the "Rivers of America." Mr. Canby recognizes the boldness of this claim and argues for its propriety with ingenuity and good humor. He cites the commercial and industrial significance of the two miles of its course; the European versus the local usage of the term river; the acknowledged title of his subject to social, military and even literary fame. But after all to those of us who, like Mr. Canby, love the Brandywine, it is only one, though the longest and largest, of the five beautiful streams, Darby, Crum, Ridley, Chester and Brandywine, that make their way through the wooded hills from the higher lands of eastern Pennsylvania to the Delaware, after some six or seven hundred feet of fall and forty, fifty or sixty miles of length of course. If it is a river at all, all the implications of the term are on a small scale. Even the terrain of the Battle of Brandywine, the most notable event in its history, surprises the visitor with its small propor- tions. A region that stretches only from Chadds to Jeffries Ford, from Osborn Hill to Birmingham Meeting House, a stream that can be leaped over in some places and waded across everywhere except in a few backwaters, flanked for most of its course alternately by level meadows and open woods creates amazement that such a slight physical obstacle should be the deciding factor in a crucial battle of a continental war. But this river question is all beside the mark; the title is not the most important part of a book, and there is quite enough of information and incident and interest in Mr. Canby's book to justify its production and to reward its perusal. The industries that have grown up along its course have been of great interest and importance. There was a time when more than a hundred mills—grist mills, saw mills, forges, paper mills, fulling mills, snuff mills— drew their power from its current. There was long a busy export of flour, the produce of its farms, from the port of Wilmington at its mouth and wooded ships were built there in early times as iron and steel ships are built there now. The Du Ponts have long been leaders in metal and chemical production and research. The iron and steel industry that still makes Coatesville, where the west branch of the Brandywine crosses the Chester Valley, a great if an ugly industrial community, has characterized two centuries of its history. Besides much romantic literary allusion, the Brandywine is the scene of 106 i942 BOOK REVIEWS 107 one first rate-novel, A Story of Kennett, and the native country of its author, Bayard Taylor. It was no Arno or "Bonnie Doon" but it had, nevertheless, its own inspiration for many, it must be acknowledged, second-rate novelists and poets. All of this story and description Mr. Canby gives with perpetual animation and interest and frequent eloquence. As already stated, The Brandywine is a pleasant book to read. There is little light thrown in the book on the origin of the curious name, evidently the same word as the Dutch and Swedish brandewyn, distilled wine or brandy. The author leaves little choice between the two legends, one that it was taken from a brandy laden ship sunk at its mouth, the other that it came from the name of a Swedish farmer, Brantwyn, who settled it. Media, Pennsylvania EDWARD P. CHEYNEY Anglo-American Union: Joseph Galloway's Plans to Preserve the British Empire, 1JJ4-1J88. By JULIAN P. BOYD. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1941. x, 185 p. $2.00.) Dr. Boyd's new book has been brought out and executed with the same intellectual neatness and precision that has characterized all of his past historical writing. In fact, like all good writing, the material is so well organized and the exposition of the meaning of the material so clear, that the author and the reader come out together, hand in hand. Admittedly, in this case, the task was not a supremely difficult one. Joseph Galloway—even though he has not yet been treated to a full-length biography —has been pinned down adequately enough for identification. The American Revolution is known; the theory and practice of British administration are not unknown; both the concrete and the abstract problems of managing and living in an eighteenth-century imperialism have been noticed. No wilderness had to be cleared before this book could be written. But still there was something left for the author to do. There was one of those small operations to be performed that require so much accuracy and delicacy of touch—the operation of fully revealing the meaning of what an individual who lived in the past has thought about the events in which he took part. Historical writing is rich in examples of failures at this particular operation, and only someone who has tried it can fully appreciate the hidden years of knowledge, and experience on which success depends. Dr. Boyd has excellently brought off this feat. Specifically, the book consists of two parts. The printing and editing of five plans submitted by Galloway to different people and under vastly different conditions make up the appendix. An interpretation, not so much of the plans as of the mind and circumstances that produced them, introduces the documents. The art of the editor consists in building up a picture by setting the documents against the background of a career, the career against a background of events and the events against a background of ideas. The result is extremely rich and satisfying, with its amazing interplay of relevant detail and its clear 108 BOOK REVIEWS January course of logical exposition. It is a model for the composition of limited historical analysis. As a matter of fact, it is so perfect within its limits that it is almost impossible to comment unless one goes beyond the intended scope of the book and writes about the things that come to one's mind as a result of having read it. Working in this way, one thing occurs: How justified is the tactful sug- gestion that there is a significant parallelism between Galloway's time and ours ? And, in continuation of this: What of the assumption that there is such a type of mind as the conservative mind—as if conservatism were an abstraction and not a form of behavior in relation to specific events ? Dr. Boyd, consciously one assumes, saw his work in some relation to the present discussion of Anglo-American cooperation and Union Now with the British Commonwealth. The main title implies such consciousness, Anglo- American Union. Actually, the documents scarcely support this choice of title. They are more correctly described by the subtitle, "Plans to Preserve the British Empire," and represent a negative, defensive attitude rather than a creative, imaginative effort. In the same way, the generalizations about the conservative mind are only half supported by the factual details of Galloway's history. These details reveal a man who was more intent on preserving forms than on conserving spirit. If conservatism can be generalized as the former, then it obviously is never historically adequate; and, in fact, Galloway's career shows the fundamental inadequacy of this limited conservatism. None of those to whom he addressed his "plans" were moved by them. Their failure to take root in any effective contemporary mind is evidence enough that they were not stated in terms that carried conviction to those who labored to control the patent forces of the dissolving eighteenth century. But none of this is criticism of Dr. Boyd's work. He quickly settles within proper bounds; and makes it his task to reveal the history of the documents he edits by every tool that his trained observation can bring to bear. Of these tools, that of correlative illustration is especially well handled. A good instance of this is the footnote on Burlamaqui's Principles of Natural and Politic Law, where an abstract difference in the concept of fundamental law is made to light up the movement of ideas in Galloway's mind. It is impossible to praise as it deserves the skilled touch that makes this kind of historical analysis successful. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania WILLIAM REITZEL The United States, Great Britain, and British North America from the Revolution to the Establishment of Peace After the War of 1812. By A. L. BURT. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940. xv, 448, p. $3.25.) This important volume is one of the series illustrating the relations of Canada and the United States and sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It generously accomplishes more than is to be inferred by the purpose of the series if narrowly interpreted. In fact, it is a broad and i94a BOOK REVIEWS 109 at the same time a highly discriminating review of the diplomacy that involved Anglo-American relations in North America from 1763—the year of the Peace of Paris—to and including the significant Convention of 1818. To the reviewer Professor Burt's statement that for fifty years after 1713 the peninsula of Nova Scotia under English sovereignty had been separated by "French" territory from the other English colonies on the mainland (p.

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