BOOK REVIEWS

John Eliot's Indian Dialogues'. A Study in Cultural Interaction .Edited by HENRY W. BoWDEN and JAMES P. RONDA. Contributions in American History 88 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. vii, 173 p. Notes, bibliography, index. $22.95.) The small and expensive book is a reprint of a rare missionary tract with an undocumented introductory essay. The tract is standard Eliot—a set of smarmy dialogues between converts and the unconverted in which the converts win every argument, as is to be expected. I wonder what point there is to resurrecting it. The editors claim that it tells something about how Indians were thinking, though "as much about Eliot" (p. 56). To me it seems that Eliot's Indians are straw men— "partly historical," as he put it (p. 61). Their purported language discloses that the historical part is one in a million. The editors remark that "the fact that they are not factual records does not make the dialogues valueless... [they] can be taken as a distilled paraphrase of important issues" (p. 41). About Eliot himself the tract is illuminating only to someone who can use it as a supplement to research on his conduct. Eliot is no exception to the rule that preachers are not to be understood from their sermons exclusively. In his case we do well to observe the advice of ex-Attorney General and (slightly less ex-) convict, John Mitchell: we must watch what Eliot did more than what he said. For that purpose this book's introductory essay does not help much, and Eliot's own writing is worthless. For background it is essential to know that the Indians of Eliot's praying towns were there under various kinds of compulsion rather than because of a calling of the spirit. Their lands had been seized by Massachusetts Bay. The government appointed a trainband captain who was also a magistrate "to be the ruler" over them. He is mentioned only once in the editors' essay, as a "protege" of Eliot (p. 54), leaving the impression that the Indians governed themselves. This is a hoary myth that has about as much substance as the notion that student councils run junior high schools. Eliot laid down rules, and Captain-Magistrate Gookin enforced them. Thus the praying Indians' abandonment of native custom was compelled by fines and punishments—a fact admitted in an offhand phrase about "the virtues enforced there" (p. 40), after much pious rhetoric about how the missionaries persuaded the Indians to give up their old heathen ways. Eliot and Gookin armed the praying Indians to force submission upon their Nipmuck neighbors, which process was so resented that its victims struck the first blow against Massachusetts in what is miscalled King Philip's War. The gunshot conversions to "civil government"—none of those 600 Nipmucks was baptised—had been begun in order to give Massachusetts a toehold in territory disputed with 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 215

Connecticut and Rhode Island. Such ugly data are missing from our subject essay which states rather that the missions were conducted without any regard to political or economic motivation (pp. 36, 47). Taint true. In brief, I find the discussion of Puritan motives and conduct to be deficient in fact and filiopietist in attitude. There is a glut of such stuff in our libraries already. The essay has some saving value in its discussion of Massachuset and Wampanoag cultures and the effects of missionizing upon their peoples. This is evidently Ronda's contribution. It may be accepted with more respect than the pieties about the Puritans because Ronda has previously demonstrated his sensitivity to the issues involved. See his earlier publications: '"We Are Well As We Are': An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 34:66-82; and Indian Missions: A Critical Bibliography, by James P. Ronda and James Axtell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). The theological slanting and rationalizing so suffuse the essay under review that a reader would be best advised to turn to Ronda's other work.

Newberry Library FRANCIS P. JENNINGS

The Keithian Controversy in Early Pennsylvania. Edited by J. WILLIAM FROST. (Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1980. xxii, 378 p. Bibliography. $27.50.)

Schisms fascinate historians because they define important religious issues with a clarity and force often lacking in calmer times even as they simultaneously expose some of the seamier aspects of organized religion to public view. Among Quakers the best known and best studied such schisms are the English Wilkinson-Story separation of the 1670s and the American Hicksite separation of the 1820s; that led by George Keith in Pennsylvania in the 1690s has attracted historians' attention only recently. Now, however, its central documents will be available to historians in a volume that also points up the need for editions of even more basic records of the American Friends. J. William Frost, Director of the Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore, provides an opening essay on the context of the schism, a bibliography, seven selections from manuscript sources (six printed for the first time), and twelve contemporary tracts reproduced by a photo-offset process from the original printed editions. The volume is well done within the financial constraints now imposed on all editors. Frost is careful to avoid a narrowly personal interpretation of the materials. He includes nearly all the important surviving documents on the schism, the manuscript selections are superbly transcribed and edited, and the photo-offset reproduction of the contemporary tracts gives readers access to the original sources even in their sometimes blurred printings. Only two criticisms might be offered. Frost's opening essay would have been less rushed had each source been introduced separately, a procedure that would also have encouraged fuller introductions to the documents. And additional documents from Keith's supporters, such as the proceedings of the Brandywine River Keithian congregation organized after 1694, would have broadened the scope of the collection. 216 BOOK REVIEWS April

The significance of source collections is best measured by their ability to stimulate new perspectives on their subjects. This collection does so in two ways. First, it raises important issues about the Keithian schism and the Quaker movement it disrupted. A 1691 letter from Christian Ludwig of Rhode Island, for example, again points up the heterodoxy of the early Quaker movement by distinguishing between "Foxians" who cultivated a simple inward light, and "Semi-Foxians" such as Keith, Robert Barclay, and others, who imbibed theology and philosophy, knew the Kabbala (the implications of which are described in Frances Yates's recent The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age), and were important in the movement through the 1690s but not later. The potential cleansing power of the schism is demonstrated in a 1694 Keithian anti-slavery statement that is one of the few such protests to eschew anti-African rhetoric. And the tracts by orthodox Friends, such as Caleb Pusey's 1696 defense of Keith's disownment, steadily reveal the early Quaker ability to pursue theological and philosophical argument that was largely lost after 1700. Second, the volume implicity reminds us of the pressing need for a printed edition of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting records. They remain the last major denominational records of the colonial period not yet available in some printed form. They are, of course, available on microfilm at both Haverford and Swarthmore. But in this form, without editing, they are difficult to use even for historians who live nearby. At the same time, they are especially important to the analysis of both New World Quakerism and middle colony culture because the printed sermons and doctrinal works available for other religious groups were seldom issued by Friends after 1700, and because relatively few personal documents of middle colony Friends also are easily available to historians, especially for the years before 1750. The publication of these Keithian documents suggests that an edition of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting records now might be achievable. Certainly one has long been needed.

University of Illinois at Chicago Circle JON BUTLER

The Economy of Colonial America. By EDWIN J. PERKINS. (New York: ColumbiaUni- versity Press, 1980. xii, 177 p. Bibliographical essay, appendix, index. $17.50 cloth, $6.00 paper.) Edwin Perkins has written a slender book which purports to be an historical synthesis of the economic history of colonial North America, "a summation and interpretation of recent scholarship in the field." At times the book seems to be more of an annotated bibliography, since lengthy and carefully compiled bibliographical essays accompany each of the eight chapters. Nevertheless, Perkins does draw his own interpretation of the period from the research considered. Amid both dynamic population growth and geographical expansion, the fundamental patterns of economic behavior in the American colonies remained constant throughout the 18th century. Because of a steady, gradually accelerating growth in income, colonial Americans enjoyed a high standard of living, one possibly unequalled in the European world. Along the way, Perkins refutes the theses that economic grievances were the primary 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 217 motive behind the revolutionary war, that income distribution became increasingly unequal as the 18th century drew to a close, and, somewhat obliquely, that economic and social rivalries between occupational groups contributed to the stirring up of revolutionary sentiment in major urban areas. Perkins divides The Economy of Colonial America into three parts. Chapters One and Two treat population and economic expansion, and foreign trade. The next section is devoted to an examination of occupational groups, coupled as: farmers and planters; servants and slaves; and artisans and merchants. The final section deals with money, taxes, living standards, and income growth. What draws the sections together is the author's assertion of the colonists' high standard of living and stable economy, despite geographical expansion and changes in population. Recent research by Alice Hanson Jones supports Perkins' conclusion that Americans were well off by 18th century standards. Early marriages and a low infant mortality rate led to to a high birth rate and a rapidly growing population. "The American colonies thrived within the British period," not only because of an active foreign commerce, but because of what Perkins sees as the real strength of the economy—agricultural production. Perkins' examination of the major occupational groups thus reflects an emphasis on the role of farmers to the near exclusion of artisans and merchants. From his assessment of occupations, the author moves to money, taxes, and politics. He disputes that the controversy over currency was a major grievance on the eve of independence. Perkins also argues that the degree of economic regulation and level of imperial taxation were not responsible for the American colonists' move towards revolution. Since taxes up to 1770 were rescinded and after 1770 no taxes were imposed, "the hypothesis that political separation had economic origins rests in an estimate of what Parliament was intending to do in the future"; that is, raise taxes. Some historians will question certain of Perkins' interpretations. His refutation of economic grievances as a cause of revolutionary discontent is not wholely convincing; there is at least as much evidence in recent scholarship to support the opposite conclusion. Emphasis on farmers and the rural property owners in the colonies leads Perkins to minimize the significance of merchants, artisans and urban centers where the concentration of wealth was greater. In his assertion of colonial America's high standard of living, the author chooses to neglect the existence of poverty and the beginnings of public and private assistance for the destitute. There is also the question of whether Perkins is addressing students or historians. As a text for undergraduate economic history courses, the book many confuse rather than enlighten students unfamiliar with recent, or for that matter past, scholarship on the subject. Perkins' untroubled look at the economy of colonial America takes its place, instead, as a contribution to the historiography of the period.

IN A Corporation Archives JOANNE E. FRASER

The "Centinel": Warnings of a Revolution. Edited by ELIZABETH I. NYBAKKEN. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1980. 234 p. Index. $19.50.) Dr. Nybakken, an assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University, has 2l8 BOOK REVIEWS April here compiled, introduced, and annotated twenty-five articles "planned and written by Francis Alison with the aid of John Dickinson, George Bryan, and, possibly, other aroused Pennsylvanians" (p. 16), which appeared as the "Centinel" series in William Bradford's Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser in 1768. The introduction (sixty-six pages) discusses the authors and their purpose; sets the articles in their religious, social, political, and historical context; suggests principal authorship of individual articles; analyzes the articles' significance; and speculates on the articles' presumed audience and probable effects. Alison—supervisor, coordinator, and main author of the series—was a Presbyterian minister, learned scholar, and dedicated teacher. Dickinson was the successful young lawyer, politician, and author, on whose "Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer" the series was modelled. Bryan, a merchant- judge-activist, had helped write a scurrilous defense of Benjamin Franklin in 1755. These skilled and experienced authors wanted at first "to alert Pennsylvanians of the movement to introduce an Anglican bishopric into the colonies and to warn them of the pernicious effects of such an innovation" (p. 13). Then the discussion widened beyond religion to history, politics, economics, imperial structure, law, social psychology, and natural, British, and colonial rights. In referring to an array of religious and secular sources, the authors reviewed earlier imperial and religious controversies, alluded to present dissatisfactions, and suggested future problems— bringing "themselves and their readers to the beginning of an understanding of themselves as Americans, distinct from Englishmen" (p. 13). When the series ended, it had spoken to the memory and experience of its audience; elicited agreement from non-Anglicans to the north, Anglicans to the south, and supporters in England; and fixed in the minds of Pennsylvanians a definition of colonial rights that helped unite inhabitants of the middle colonies "in preparation for the 'gathering storm' " that "became the American Revolution" (p. 17). Nybakken has therefore asserted and documented a cause of the Revolution. While recognizing changing attitudes and shifting opinions as causal forces, Nybakken considers causation beyond the abstraction that Americans' reversal in loyalties came with the Americans' attempt to define their imperial rights. In other words, Nybakken takes causation to the concretion of asking an apt question: What prompted Americans to define rights? She answers that when the King's ministers tried to flout indigenous practice and settle a British Anglican bishopric on the colonies, American dissenters sought grounds to oppose the infringement of religious liberty and concluded that religiously, economically, and politically the Americans alone had the right to determine local practice. In this signal change of mind the "Centinel's" appeal "to Pennsylvanians in their peculiar vernacular, using a knowledge of provincial issues and prejudices" phrased the arguments "in a manner most persuasive" (p. 17). By supplying the texts of the "Centinel's" attempt to change public opinion, and by introducing and annotating them with an array of factual data and a battery of authoritative viewpoints, Nybakken has shown with reasonable probability the significant revolutionary influence of the "Centinel." Her work suggests that additional studies of this nature and quality may tell even more about the causes of the American Revolution.

Temple University FREDERIC TRAUTMANN 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 219

A Wilderness of Miseries: War and Warriors in Early America. By JOHN E. FERLING. (Westport, Ct\: Greenwood Press, 1980. xiv, 227 p. Bibliography, index. $25.00.)

John Ferling's purpose is to "show how early Americans experienced war, what they thought of war, and what impact war had on the world in which they lived." He finds colonial North America to have been more warlike than contemporary Europe, and finds that "the colonists" eulogized the "warrior ethic...far more" than they "deprecated" it (173). Colonial essayists generally regarded war as inevitable and justifiable, and had little patience with pacifism. By the time of the American Revolution, Ferling maintains, a gulf existed between the more civilized European mode of warfare and the brutal, often "total" character of American wars. European armies were standing, mercenary-professional affairs; whereas "in America...the concept of the citizen-soldier remained in vogue" (78). Consequently, the British were unprepared for the passion of the American war effort. Ferling breaks some new ground and offers several interesting insights (such as the unpopularity of military forces among colonial communities due to the fear of the diseases such forces often brought with them). His chapter contrasting the unmilitary John Adams and the militaristic Joseph Warren is intriguing, though it seems somewhat out of place, perhaps extraneous. Ferling is not as impressive in handling his final task, that of assessing the effects of war on American society; this appears almost as an after-thought. And I suspect that his central thesis is exaggerated. If "the concept of the citizen-soldier remained in vogue" in America, it did so only in the context of a defensive, revolutionary struggle. Americans had, long before the Revolution, largely abandoned the militia for volunteer (mercenary) forces raised for particular campaigns or missions, and it was precisely this sort of force they would field against the British as their central military arm (the Continental Line). He may also exaggerate the differences between European and colonial warfare, if Peter Russell's article on the subject in the William and Mary Quarterly (October, 1978) is to be believed. Moreover, in repeating John Shy's claim that colonials had expressed no distress at the presence of British regulars in their midst prior to the 1760's, Ferling undervalues the impressive evidence Stephen Saunders Webb has been offering to the contrary. Part of my difficulty in accepting Ferling's judgment in place of Russells's or Webbs's or of my own synthesis of what I've seen on Ferling's subject, is due to my uneasiness with the way Ferling sometimes offers a generalization. An example: "Young boys, seeing the attention and affection lavished on [colonial] soldiers, often longed from an early age for opportunity to march off to battle" (86). How many soldiers experienced "lavish" attention? How many boys responded in this fashion, compared to boys in contemporary British society? Ferling does not adequately address the questions. Another example: "Mercy Otis Warren...in all likelihood reflected the sentiments of many women where she romanticized [war and warriors]" (164). Perhaps, but why need Ferling feel drawn to offer such an unverifiable claim? I don't want to give the impression, though, that the book contains many such 22O BOOK REVIEWS April

statements. In general, it is well organized, and its arguments carefully advanced and adequately substantiated. It would make a worthwhile addition to most libraries and special collections.

University of Pittsburgh PETER KARSTEN

The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence. Edited by JOHN C. DANN. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. xxvi, 446 p. Chronology of events, illustrations, index. $2O.OO.) This volume offers a selection of transcripts of what was, in effect, America's first large-scale oral history project. It includes the first known eyewitness accounts of such legendary events as General Israel Putnam's horseback ride down the stone steps at Greenwich, Connecticut, and the killing of Colonel William Ledyard during the massacre of the American garrison of Fort Griswold at Groton, Connecticut. Its depictions of George Washington as ordinary soldiers saw him add a new dimension to our portrait of the revolutionary Commander in Chief; Washington here is an approachable, kindly man whose character was such, says the editor, that: "Literally thousands of men...saw their services as a personal favor to their friend, General Washington" (p. 62). The eyewitness accounts in the collection derive from the comprehensive pension act of 183 2, which provided a yearly pension for every veteran of six months' or more service in the revolutionary military. Previously, except for the disabled and the poor, pensions had been restricted to officers and soldiers of the Continental Army, not the state forces, and thus the federal government could check most applications against records in its own War Department. Now that state militiamen and those with yet more informal services were eligible, many who applied had no proof of service except their memories. To qualify for a pension under the 1832 law, a veteran had to indicate the time and place of his service, the names of his units and officers, and the combats in which he had participated. He had to present and swear to this information in a court of law, and his narrative had to be supported by two or more character witnesses, including a clergyman if possible. If the soldier had no documentary evidence or testimony of contemporary witnesses, he was to submit "a very full account" (p. xvii) of his service. To meet these requirements, many claimants offered simple chronological outlines, but many others presented detailed narratives. A few wrote their recollections themselves, but more dictated them to a lawyer, a clerk, or a court reporter. Numerous pension agents went into business to collect veterans' narratives and assist in securing pensions. National Archives Microfilm Publication M805 of 898 reels contains the pension applications and supporting evidence. Until now, this material has been used principally by genealogists—one of many examples of genealogy's exploiting valuable sources that historians tend to ignore. John C. Dann, director of the Clements Library of the University of Michigan, has now read through the 898 reels, and for this volume has selected seventy-nine narratives for their historical and 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 221 literary quality and geographical balance. Notwithstanding the aim of geographical balance, readers in the Middle Atlantic states may be disappointed—though probably not suprised—to find that soldiers from their area and the South are considerably underrepresented in comparison with literate, articulate New Englanders. Because militiamen usually served near their homes, the campaigns south of New York are similarly though not so severely underrepresented. But there is a long section on campaigning in New Jersey and another on the Philadelphia campaign of 1777-177 8. And if the narratives by Middle States soldiers are relatively few, some of them are especially informative. With Michael Graham of Paxton Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, we are caught up in the effort of the Flying Camp of Pennsylvania troops to stem the rout on Long Island in 1776: "Some of them [the Americans] were mired [in a swamp] and crying to their fellows for God's sake to help them out; but every man was intent on his own safety and no assistance was rendered" (p. 50). With William Lloyd of Upper Freehold, New Jersey, we boldly approach the Commander in Chief and ask to borrow his spyglass, to watch British movements from the mountains of northern New Jersey. With William Hutchinson of Chester County, Pennsylvania, we find a survivor of the Paoli Massacre bleeding from forty-six distinct bayonet wounds. With Henry Yeager of Philadelphia, a drummer boy of fourteen, we are discharged from service, return to our mother in the city while the British army occupies it, and are arrested by British soldiers who amuse themselves by conducting a trial and announcing a death sentence—which they commute only after the hangman's rope has been put in place. This latter grisly game and the forty-six bayonet wounds are among the book's many testimonies to the acceleration of cruelty and horror with which bitterness and hatred came to invest the war. Present of course in every theater, the war's horrors reached their apex in the guerrilla campaigns of the Carolinas. Moses Hall of Rowan County, North Carolina, for example, even after considerable inurement to atrocity by witnessing such an incident as the slaughter of Tories by Light Horse Harry Lee's force at Haw River, was not prepared for the spectacle of some of his comrades' passing their leisure by cold bloodedly hacking six prisoners apart with broadswords: "At first I bore the scene without any emotion, but upon a moment's reflection, I felt such horror as I never did before nor have since, and, returning to my quarters and throwing myself upon my blanket, I contemplated the cruelties of war until overcome and unmanned by distressing gloom..." (p. 202). The cruelties were not imposed only on avowed enemies. Jehu Grant of Rhode Island, a black man, ran away from his master in part because that gentlemen was a Tory secretly provisioning the British, while Grant favored the revolutionary cause. The runaway spent ten months in the American wagon service, but when his master found him he had to return to slavery. When Grant applied for a pension in 1832, he was informed after a two-year wait that he was not eligible because his service to American Liberty had been rendered while he was a fugitive from slavery. In 1836 he appealed this decision—apparently in vain—in perhaps the most eloquent document in the book: "... when I saw liberty poles and the people all engaged for the support of freedom, I could not but like and be pleased with such thing (God forgive me if I sinned in so feeling).... Had I been taught to read or understand the precepts of the 222 BOOK REVIEWS April

Gospel, 'Servants obey your masters/ I might have done otherwise, notwithstanding the songs of liberty that saluted my ear, thrilled through my heart" (p. 28). It is not simply the current voguishness of the history of oppressed minorities that makes us respond to such a cry. Indeed, it may suggest for how little mere vogues and fashions count, that all of the chatter about the importance of the history of ordinary people currently to be heard among historians has failed to initiate any project to gather recollections from among the ordinary soldiers of the twentieth century at all comparable to the one that this book introduces.

Temple University RUSSELL F. WEIGLEY

Revolution, Reform, and the Politics of American Taxation, 1763-1783. By ROBERT A. BECKER. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. xi, 323 p. Appendix, bibliography, index. $25.00.) Even though for most persons nothing is surer than the necessity of having to pay taxes, most historians and most readers of history have managed to defer until later any obligation to consider this important topic, now stated by Robert Becker with trenchant brevity and marvellous lucidity. Arguing persuasively that "internal taxation was anything but a marginal topic for most colonists," Becker's work lays out the particulars for each colony's fiscal foibles. Colonial reliance on poll taxes and avoidance of ad valorem land taxes illustrates vividly the capacity exhibited by men of the "upper sorts" to control colonial legislation and tax policy, insuring that others would bear more of the tax burden than they themselves did. The description of pre-revolutionary tax activity incidentally provides a considered view of colonial administrative practice, replete with rapacious sheriffs, delinquent tax collectors, and colonial officials considerably in arrears with their accounts. In many of the colonies, resort to anti-Parliament rhetoric effectively kept movements espousing tax reforms divided and frustrated. The simultaneous disappearance of British government as a scapegoat coupled with the necessity of supplying all the costs of government augmented by the demands of war forced most of the new sovereign states to devise different taxation strategies. Particular responses varied considerably, depending upon such concerns as enemy occupation and previous internal civil hostilities. The duration of wartime reform measures also varied widely. Some, such as the Massachusetts poll tax reform, did not even survive until peace's declaration. The overall impression is that those persons with important stakes in society and property fully recognized their involvement, and managed in most instances to retain their control, even though somewhat modified, into the post-war period. There is no easy way to organize the separate statements of thirteen colonies' tax histories and political consequences; Becker's structure is about as simple and usable as might be imagined. The colonies are grouped into three regions and treated separately within each region for the period through Lexington and Concord. The second half of the book discusses each of the new states in similar fashion, demonstrating the consequences of independence for popular government and the creation of tax policies. It ends with an epilogue which reasonably argues for the effective impact of 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 223

the Revolution on internal tax structure and policy. Mr. Becker's language is sprightly, his argument persuasive, his evidence reliable, and his conclusions reasonable. Relying upon a substantial collection of materials from the research archives, monographic and periodical press, he has marshaled substantial support for this brief, illustrated—though not obfuscated—by quantitative evidence. This book would represent an important contribution to our understanding of the topic even if it were not one of the few available. Not every writer has the capacity to make taxation an open book, or even a readable book. In this instance the thoughtful reader will come away from Revolution, Reform, and the Politics of American Taxation not only understanding what constituted taxation policy before, during and after these critical years, but also enjoying the experience.

Rhode Island College NORMAN W. SMITH

The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America. By DREW R. MCCOY. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, ix, 259 p. Index. $21.50.) The Elusive Republic is an intellectual analysis of the historical debate over economic policy from the Revolution to the War of 1812. Building on the literature of the "republican synthesis," Drew R. McCoy agrues that the conflict over economic policy involved a fundamental disagreement between differing visions of a republic. He rejects the Progressive thesis that the conflict between Jefferson and Hamilton was over economic self interest. Nor did the founding fathers, as the consensus historians suggested, merely disagree about the proper means to the common goal of creating a national Union. Professor McCoy argues that the eighteenth century had a love-hate relationship with commercial society. Commercialization was admired as a force toward civilization, but feared as a force toward luxury, corruption and decay. How to benefit from the former but control the latter became a central paradox of revolutionary America. A basic part of the paradox was the concept of "industry," which the eighteenth century understood to mean industriousness or the opposite of idleness. "Industry" was an essential characteristic of a republican citizen. Indeed, a major contribution of this book is the hypothesis that the concept of "industry" was just as important to republicanism as the concept of "virtue." The Jeffersonian vision of a republican society sought to preserve classical values of virtue by supporting political and economic policies which would assure the expansion of an agricultural society across the continent. Just as important, however, they wanted to open world markets for agricultural exports in order to encourage industrious behavior in the republic. The Jeffersonian vision of the yeoman farmer, McCoy argues, cannot be understood separately from the Republican program of free trade. Thus, the land would make Americans independent and virtuous, and foreign trade would make them industrious. Government should encourage agricultural and commercial expansion in order to develop a republican society. While the Jeffersonian vision was the majority strain, the minority vision 224 BOOK REVIEWS April supported the development of manufacturing to assure the "industry" of the average citizen and the greatness of the new nation. This latter vision, supported by Alexander Hamilton, developed out of the economic crisis of the 1780s when the Confederation failed to secure foreign markets. Political conflict from the 1780s to the War of 1812 shaped, and was shaped by, the tensions between these two visions of a republican society. McCoy's frame of reference offers the reader important and challenging hypotheses about early American politics. According to him, the Revolution was truly revolutionary because most Americans rejected not only the politics but the economics of Europe. Benjamin Franklin envisioned a society of extended youth based upon agriculture instead of manufacturing. He believed that population increase would force all societies ultimately to develop manufacturing in order to employ their idle populations. But "expansion across space might continuously offer the proper demographic basis for a republican social order," (p. 62) preventing the development of manufacturing, which he believed caused dependence and corruption in society and politics. America could delay the development of an English social pattern of widening divisions between the very rich and the laboring poor by rejecting the political economy of mercantilism. But the Jeffersonian vision did not reject commerce. In order to build a republican social order the government had to revolutionize international trade. The Jeffersonian political economy was a paradoxical vision of a republicanism which combined the classical values of virtue with commercial values of free trade. During the 1780s the United States failed to change international patterns of trade. Consequently some Americans came to believe that the nation, because of commercial depression, needed to encourage the development of manufacturing for its growing and idle population. Those who feared the consequences of social idleness turned to constitutional reform, in part, so that the national government could foster manufacturing. James Madison, however, supported constitutional reform in order to obtain foreign markets for American agriculture. While Madison and Hamilton supported the Constitution of 1787, they held antithetical visions of America's economic and social development. These differing visions of American society shaped the political conflict of the 1790s. Hamilton's Report on Manufacturing was the keystone of his political economy and it crystallized republican political opposition. Madison's support for commercial discrimination against Great Britain was merely the beginning of the demand for free trade which under the Jeffersonians led to the War of 1812. Indeed, the war was declared not merely to defend America's commercial rights, but to sustain the expansion of a republican society which would be forced to turn to manufacturing if it did not secure markets for its agricultural surplus. If one accepts, as McCoy does, the assumption that in the eighteenth century political, social and economic thought constituted an organic system of belief, this book offers a meaningful explanation of why post-revolutionary politics evolved as it did. Both Republicans and Federalists agreed that government shaped social development, but they disagreed over the type of society they wanted or thought possible. 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 225

Professor McCoy's analysis is not without its faults. It is not clear, as the title of the book suggests, whose vision prevailed. It is not clear whether ideas about the political economy or the forces of population and the market economy were the more dynamic factors of historical development. The book is limited by the nature of its sources, which are primarily elitist. But, such criticisms only suggest areas of additional research. The book's primary contribution is its explanation of the fundamental character of early American politics and ideology. McCoy has demonstrated that the more we understand the ideological foundation of politics the more we understand the historical relationship between the present and the past without degenerating into a simplistic presentism.

Temple University HOWARD A. OHLINE

Timothy Pickering and the American Republic. By GERARD H. CLARFIELD. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980. vii, 302 p. Note on sources, index. $19.95.) In general histories and biographies dealing with the American Revolution through the years immediately following the War of 1812, the name of Timothy Pickering appears and reappears. In virtually all of these works he remains a shadowy, usually disagreeable, undistinguished public servant, more often than not depicted as "dour," "stern," "self-righteous," "inflexible," and the like. In this biography (the first to be published in well over a century) Gerard H. Clarfield compensates for other scholars' neglect of Pickering by closely examining the supporting role that he played in the history of the nation's formative years. Clarfield also discerningly analyzes the appropriateness of the pejorative terms used to buttress the stereotyped view of this embodiment of "high" Federalism. Pickering, whose life span was 1745 to 1829, was a native of Salem, Massachusetts, a graduate of Harvard, and by training a lawyer. He practiced only briefly, however, and instead devoted most of his long career to public service. During the American Revolution he ably served successively as adjutant-general of the U. S. Army, member of the Board of War, and quartermaster general. Following the war, he settled in Philadelphia where he launched a mercantile career that proved to be as unsuccessful as his forays into land speculation, that era's economic extravaganza. Once the Constitution was adopted and a new government established, Pickering promptly joined the ranks of avid office seekers. After serving on a peace mission to the Seneca Indians, he managed to win appointment as U. S. postmaster general. In 1795, he was appointed secretary of war and soon thereafter secretary of state, a post that he held for some five years. Dismissed by John Adams in May 1800, he returned to Massachusetts where he was elected to the U. S. Senate, serving from 1803-1811, and subsequently to the House of Representatives. What contributions did he make to the new nation during this extraordinarily long public career? Professor Clarfield comments, in this admirably objective study, that Pickering accomplished precious little, but rather demonstrated his unfitness for high office. The one notable exception was the New Englander's extended career (intermittently 226 BOOK REVIEWS April from 1790-1795) in Indian affairs during which he became a staunch and influential advocate of the rights of native Americans and strove energetically to improve both their plight and U.S.—Indian relations. Although Pickering did not, as he believed, bring about a "new era" in these relations, he deserves, Clarfield convincingly argues, high praise for attempting to do so. It was quite otherwise with Pickering's other official services, most particularly his tenure as secretary of state. His conduct of that important office, Clarfield asserts, merits no praise. The difficulty was not intellectual ineptitude but emotional imbalance. "Driven by ambition, frustrated by repeated disappointment, and completely lacking in self-awareness," Pickering was, in Clarfield's view, a man of "astonishing volatility and outrageous self-righteousness." Such personality defects were particularly patent during the administration of President John Adams. To begin with, Pickering stubbornly refused to heed the directions and execute the program of the president he ostensibly served, insisting instead on the rectitude of his own policies. Secondly, the secretary of state, who before the mid-nineties had taken a neutral position on the issue of Anglo-French relations, now became, in the words of British envoy Robert Liston, "one of the most violent anti-Gallicans I have met with." Finally, Pickering utterly lacked diplomatic finesse. As Clarfield writes, Pickering "frequently showed not the slightest concern for either the diplomatic repercussions or the domestic implications of his French diplomacy." More lamentably yet, this high priest of Federalism, unable to withstand personal assaults, became "emotionally unstrung." He was, Clarfield concludes, "a righteous, strident, and intolerant activist" who "used power unwisely." It is impossible within the limited scope of this review to point out the many merits of this first-rate biography. It is based on commendably thorough research, it abounds in fresh insights into the often-told history of this era, it is written with uncommon skill, and it affords a psychologically perceptive portrait of its subject. In sum, historians are indebted to Professor Clarfield for a model biography a of second-string though historically consequential Federalist leader.

Lafayette College JACOB E. COOKE

John Taylor of Caroline-. Pastoral Republican. By ROBERT E. SHALHOPE. (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1980. ix, 304 p. Bibliography, index. $I9-5O.) Extensive recent interest in the influences of republican ideology in the young nation combine with a more traditional concern about the emergence of southern sectionalism to make a new biography of John Taylor of Caroline especially welcome. Robert Shalhope's study directly addresses both these areas of historical inquiry; he portrays Taylor as a transitional figure who played a crucial role in transforming the "Virginia republicanism of the Revolution into the southern intransigence of the late antebellum period." Born in the Virginia of the 1750s, Taylor was raised by his uncle Edmund Pendleton into the lifestyle and outlook of the colonial southern gentry. After a period 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 227 at William and Mary and a stint in the Revolutionary army, Taylor returned to his home in Caroline County, where he married a wealthy cousin and settled down to manage his extensive holdings, which grew eventually to more than 3000 acres and 145 slaves. Although Taylor was politically active throughout his life, elected several times to the House of Delegates and chosen on three different occasions for service in the U.S. Senate, Shalhope emphasizes that the Virginian grew increasingly alienated from politics, which he saw undermining the ideals for which he believed the Revolution had been fought. Taylor's alarm at this devolution from true republicanism drove him to take up his pen in protest. First as an Antifederalist, then as an anti-Hamiltonian, Taylor attacked the emerging power of the " ''money impulse? " of banks, of financial aristocracy, and of the " 'paper system1 " in national life. But Taylor was almost as uncomfortable with the opposition to Federalism that began to cohere around Thomas Jefferson. Party politics were anathema to Taylor, and he could not ally himself wholeheartedly with these Republicans, nor see in their victory the solution to the nation's ills. Instead he called for basic structural change, including Constitutional revisions to provide for extension of sufferage, rotation in office and new means of abrogating laws. By the early years of the nineteenth century Taylor had begun to develop a systematic ideological critque of prevailing political thought, arguing that a separation and not a balance of powers was crucial to limiting the growing strength of a corrupting business and commercial interest that threatened to destroy the republic and rob Americans of the sources of their "virtue and happiness." In Arator, first published, Shalhope demonstrates, as a series of essays in 181O-11, Taylor articulated his notion of the "good society," a pastoral republican world to be achieved through the simultaneous reformation of politics and agriculture. Improved management, in Taylor's eyes, included not only better fertilization of the soil, the replacement of extensive with intensive cultivation, but implied a revision of attitudes towards slavery as well. The effective administration of labor was an essential part of agricultural uplift, and Taylor advocated careful discipline of slaves. Free blacks posed such difficulties that Taylor viewed colonization as the only solution to their anomalous status. Slavery and republicanism, he argued, were mutually reinforcing, and he challenged Jefferson's views about the destructive influence of power upon the master. Slavery, Taylor insisted, encouraged benevolence, not tyranny. In Arator lay the germs of the proslavery argument. By the i82O's Taylor had become actively involved not only in the defense of the peculiar institution, but in the nascent battle against the tariff system. From the time of the Revolution, he had seen " ' natural and immoveable' distinctions" between the sections, and events in the years after his death in 1824 proved his early articulation of these differences prophetic. While Shalhope succeeds admirably in his effort to portray Taylor as a man "straddling two worlds," he does not approach his other stated goals so closely. Shalhope seeks to provide an understanding of the "interrelationship between personal life, social environment, and the idea form within which" his subject worked. But the reader gets little sense of Taylor as a man. The paucity of personal material leads Shalhope to fall back too often on banalities: "He was fearless, independent in 228 BOOK REVIEWS April

thought, and would fight any man rather than compromise a principle." Such statements seem vestiges of early hagiographic biography, hardly appropriate to the innovative study Shalhope clearly intended to write. And it is in this desire for methodological innovativeness that Shalhope confronts his greatest difficulties. In his introduction the author states that he plans to offer "both more and less than a traditional biography." Citing Clifford Geertz, Kenneth Burke, Quentin Skinner and other students of the role of belief in culture, Shalhope promises a new approach to the connections "between ideas and social structure." Yet as Shalhope presents it, Taylor's relationship to his society and its beliefs remains opaque. Shalhope offers lengthy discussions of wider patterns of thought in Virginia and the nation, but these are presented largely as diversions from the chronicle of Taylor's life and not sufficiently integrated into the biographical thread of the text. Taylor's personal ties and social interactions are only sketchily portrayed, and the nature and direction of his influence remains unclear. In apparent self-contradiction, Shalhope notes that Taylor was regarded by his contemporaries as a "political crank," and then states that the Virginian's perceptions were those of an "ever-increasing number of southerners." Shalhope's treatment of republican thought is solid, but it goes little beyond an up-dating of this own "republican synthesis" published in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1972. The book is far more traditional than the citations of anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers in the Introduction would lead one to expect. But we perhaps should remember John Taylor's own message: innovation is not necessarily virtue. Even if Shalhope had not written the pathbreaking examination of belief and society towards which he seems to have aspired, he has produced a useful study of an individual whose life embodies the important continuity between the two much-studied phenomena of republicanism and southern sectionalism.

University of Pennsylvania DREW GILPIN FAUST

The Invasion of Canada, Volume One: 1812-1813. By PIERRE BERTON. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1980. xi, 363 p. Maps, bibliography, index. $17.50.) Readers of popular history are seldom presented with works generated by the War of 1812, aside from those concerned with the glamorous subject of naval warfare. Canadian author Pierre Berton has set about correcting this deficiency with a book focusing on the land engagements along the Canadian-American frontier during the first two years of the war. Some readers will have difficulty with his rather lurid style, but the book is worthy of attention because it confronts its American audience with the war as it was and is perceived from the Canadian side of the border. Berton's numerous published works range over a wide spectrum of Canadian history and contemporary society. The War of 1812 is for him but one of many interests, and he is quite content to leave weighty considerations of economic causes and diplomatic intricacies to academic historians. Although political doings in Washington, Whitehall and Qiiebec are frequently brought into the narrative, he is principally concerned with Upper and Lower Canada, and the old American 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 229

Northwest. Berton presents episodes of the war as seen through the eyes of American, British and Canadian participants, while paying particular attention to the often neglected role of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, whose alliance with the British he pronounces to have been decisive in the failure of the American invasion of 1812- 1813. Some students of the subject will question this scenario, but Berton fashions a convincing case. The author thus devotes considerable space to discussing American and British negotiations with the tribes of the Northwest from about 1807. Thomas Jefferson and particularly William Henry Harrison are subjected to stinging criticism for permiting American hunger for land to alienate the tribes who later followed the British general Isaac Brock into battle. Harrison's engagement with the Shawnees at Tippecanoe, often omitted entirely from studies of the war, is to Berton's mind key to this estrangement, which later had unfortunate repercussions for the Americans. It is no accident that the first year of this sordid conflict produced battles which are as central to Canadian national mythology as they are absent from the American tradition. Berton is not the first to observe that this war marks an exceedingly low ebb in American military proficiency. Chapters are devoted to the bloodless seizure of the strategically key Michilimackinac Island, to the near-bloodless surrender of Detroit by the befuddled General William Hull, to Brock's successful defense of Queenston Heights, to the raving incompetence of Brigadier-General Alexander Smyth on the Niagara frontier, and to the massacre on the River Raisin. Few American leaders escape censure for sloth, incompetence or some more exotic form of debility. Berton, however, is even-handed in his condemnation. British Minister to the United States Augustus John Foster is rendered as a myopic and hopelessly unfit diplomat. All of this is in support of Berton's moral message that the war was a hideous mistake wrought by a combination of greed and stupidity. Berton sets about demolishing the myth of solidarity of the Canadian settlers in the face of the invasion, and he likens the conditions in border areas to civil war. The book is not without heroes of sorts, they being Tecumseh and Isaac Brock. The latter he credits with being the architect of the successful British defense of Upper Canada. This book will not please those who prefer their history to be couched in sober prose. Berton spares his readers no detail of frontier savagery. His explanations are simplistic and his technique is episodic. Berton's mannerisms include using datelines to begin his chapters and almost exclusive use of the present tense throughout his narrative. Vignettes and the verbal portraits of his cast of characters verge on caricature. Berton succeeds, nevertheless, in exposing the nastiness and absurdity of this war that engendered such short-lived enthusiasm on both sides of the border. The Canadian viewpoint he brings to his subject, together with the attention he lavishes on the native American participants, renders the book worthy of perusal.

Ambler, Pa. JACQUELINE THIBAUT

Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership. By E. DIGBY BALTZELL. (New York: The Free Press, 1979. xii, 585 p. Bibliography, index. $19.95-) 23O BOOK REVIEWS April

E. Digby BaltzelPs latest book appears at a propitious moment. Not because Baltzell, one of our most serious conservative thinkers, is somehow in tune with the current economic conservatives in Washington, but because Baltzell, like deTocqueville and the American federalists, is a political and social rather than an economic conservative, not so much concerned with excessive government as with excessive egalitarianism and individualism. In his previous work, he has argued that our democratic society needs the social cohesion that upper class leadership can provide. The concerns expressed during the last election about America's drift and purposelessness, about our failure to produce political leaders, are the very things that Baltzell fears in a society in which the upper class cannot or will not exert its moral and social authority. Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia is part of Baltzell's lifelong study of upper class elites in this country. His first book, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (1958), examined the formation of the upper class of metropolitan Philadelphia. Baltzell, who believes passionately that "it is the proper function of an upper class in any society to wield authority not through manipulation, force, or fraud but through the respect it commands throughout society for the accomplishments and leadership qualities of its members over several generations," criticized proper Philadelphians for their singleminded concern with augmenting their wealth and social status, and their lack of intellectual and political leadership. Baltzell continued his analysis in The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (1964). There he traced the erosion of the political and intellectual authority of our national upper class in the twentieth century, due in large measure to the ethnic snobbery of the upper class itself. This was a development which Baltzell viewed with great misgiving. The seeming disintegration of American society in the late 1960s and 1970s confirmed BaltzelPs fears, and undoubtedly encouraged him to extend his study of class authority. He turned in 1968 to consider the question, what causes some members of a privileged upper class to exert intellectual and political leadership, and others to turn inward and abdicate social responsibility? In this volume, Baltzell suggests why different upper class traditions took hold in Philadelphia and Boston. Leadership and authority are difficult things to measure. Baltzell uses several yardsticks to show that Boston and its surrounding New England communities have produced a native leadership class that has dominated both local and national affairs, that Philadelphia and Pennsylvania have spawned a small and uninfluential group of leaders, and that the outstanding national leaders from Philadelphia were usually born elsewhere. (Benjamin Franklin is, of course, the outstanding example.) In trying to explain this phenomenon, Baltzell engages in a dialogue with Max Weber. Weber, in his classic study of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, argued that the religious values of the Reformation formed the basis for the acquisitive spirit which produced modern capitalism. Baltzell, whose book is subtitled Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership, argues that the Reformation produced several Protestant ethics, and that the social impact of these ethics is most clearly expressed in the political behavior they encouraged. In England, Calvinist Puritanism represented the right wing of the Reformation 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 231 and Quakerism the left wing. Puritanism, with its emphasis on Old Testament law, predestination and human sinfulness produced political values that emphasized authoritarianism, hierarchy and the responsibility of the elect for the behavior of the rest of the community. Quakerism, with its emphasis on New Testament love, personal relationship with God, and optimism about human nature, produced anti- authoritarian, anti-institutional, egalitarian and individualistic political values. When transplanted in the virgin political soil of North America, says Baltzell, Puritanism infused generations of political and intellectual leaders with a deep sense of commitment to their local communities and to the nation. The leadership values of these Brahmin families reappeared in successive generations long after the Calvinsim that spawned those values had disappeared. By contrast, Quakerism produced political chaos in early Philadelphia, deprived the city and the state for most of its history of the leadership class it needed, and led to a self-involved and individualistic upper class concerned with its own satisfactions. The bulk of the book traces the comparative history of the upper classes of Boston and Philadelphia through the early twentieth century and occasionally later. The evidence is presented in a highly interpretive way, and Baltzell's choice of topics is certainly selective. This is not a narrative history; it is more a lawyer's (or sociologist's) brief for Baltzell's thesis. But it is written in an engaging style, and the depth and strength of the author's insights are revealed in his treatment of such varied facets of the subject as the differences in national influence of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, the history of the legal and medical professions in the two cities, and the differences among Catholics who, in the twentieth century, rose into the upper classes of their respective cities. As one might expect, Baltzell suggests that Boston's upper class Catholics embraced the Brahmin values of class authority, and that their counterparts in Philadelphia did not. One objection that has been raised to Baltzell's thesis is that Massachusetts remained ethnically homogeneous in its early years, while Philadelphia was diverse almost from the beginning. Therefore, the Boston elite was able to retain its dominance much longer than that of Philadelphia. Baltzell dismisses this objection, pointing out that the ethnic differences in colonial Philadelphia and Boston stemmed from the consequences of the different religious ideologies. William Penn consciously recruited others to settle in Pennsylvania, Jonathan Winthrop and his successors tried to keep outsiders away. Furthermore, Baltzell points out that in the twentieth century, when Massachusetts was even more diverse ethnically than Pennsylvania, old stock Brahmins, who were now a minority, continued to exert strong political leadership. Complex questions of historical causation do not lend themselves to controlled data collection as do studies of identical twins. One must be resourceful in the attempt to isolate causal factors. Let me suggest another handle on the problem Baltzell raises. Philadelphia's geographical and therefore commercial advantages over Boston may explain not only the differences in ethnic composition of the two cities but also the difference between their elites. Boston, situated at the northern end of the colonies and with the western mountains limiting its hinterland was not advantageously located for trade. This geographical isolation, which resulted in Boston's decline relative to Philadelphia in the eighteenth century, may have discouraged the influx of 232 BOOK REVIEWS April newcomers, and also forced Boston elites to maintain a more active political and leadership role in the interests of bolstering a weak economy. If Baltzell were to extend his analysis to New York, Philadelphia's great trade rival in the early nineteenth century, he might help isolate the relative influence of religious ideology, ethnic diversity and location. New York, with virtually the same geographic advantages and a similar ethnic diversity as Philadelphia, was settled first by Dutch Calvinists, but not for religious reasons. If Baltzell is right about the power of religious ideology, then New York should have produced a much stronger leadership class than Philadelphia, ethnic diversity notwithstanding. And Baltzell's quantitative analysis of the geographic origins of national leaders shows New Yorkers far above Philadelphians, if well below New Englanders. Certainly, New York had superior political and economic leaders who built the Erie Canal and pursued other policies which enabled New York to far outdistance Philadelphia as the preeminent urban center of the nation. A comparison between New York and Philadelphia in light of Baltzell's thesis could be fascinating. Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia can be read on many levels. It is a treatise on the need for upper class authority in an increasingly egalitarian political system. As such, it is not likely to win wide acclaim in these anomic and anti-elitist times. But whatever one's assessment of Baltzell's normative prescriptions, it is also a superb contribution to the continuing debate since Max Weber's day on the relationship between religious ideology and social change, or more broadly, between ideas and social behavior. Finally, it presents a fascinating framework within which to view the entire history of two of our most important cities. No one who seeks to understand the distinctive qualities of these two cities will be able to ignore it.

University of the District of Columbia STEVEN J. DINER

Prophets of Prosperity: America's First Political Economists. By PAUL K. CONKIN. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. xii, 233 P- Index. $25.00.) What could be a more timely book than a well researched, well written work about the origins of the economic profession in the United States. After serving for about 20 years as the crown princes of the social sciences, economists have suddenly fallen from grace both with the public at large and with the nation's rulers. Economics is again being referred to as the dismal science, just as it was in the first half of the 19th century when it was under the influence of the English writers David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, both of whom postulated severe limits on the possibilities for economic growth. Paul K. Conkin, who is Distinguished Professor of the History at Vanderbilt University, and the author of several previous books on topics ranging from the Puritans to the New Deal, brings his considerable talent at analyzing intellectual questions to this subject. He also brings to this topic the clear understanding that although economists attempt to predict future trends, they are more successful at describing contemporary activities. Conkin also admits that although the politicians of the Jacksonian period often quoted economists, they did so to butress their own 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 233 preconceived positions and were in fact little influenced by them. Using one of the traditional approaches of intellectual historians, Conkin analyzes the nascent discipline through a series of sketches of twenty-one of its founders, whose careers stretch chronologically from John Taylor, a well known Southern congressman and political polemicist, who was born in 1753, to Henry C. Carey, a Philadelphia publisher, who died in 1879. Ideologically, they ranged from Southern agrarians as Taylor, Jacob Cardozo, and Thomas Cooper to Northern Jacksonian advocates of labor, hard money, and low tariffs such as Theodore Sedgwick and William Gouge and to Whig advocates of high tariffs, and corporations such as Carey and Calvin Colton. Despite differences in ideology economists shared one thing in common. They wrote on economics as skilled amateurs. With a few exceptions, the writers discussed by Conkin did not teach economics full time at the university, as the first department of economics was not established until after the Civil War. The other characteristics they all had in common was the influence that the classical economists Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo exercised over them. Of these economists, Ricardo had the most influence. Widely promoted throughout the United States, Ricardo argued that only labor adds value to natural resources and that the price of every product is determined by the work put into it. Believing that rents added unnaturally to the price of all goods, Ricardo warned also against overpopulation because it eventually led to such high rents that every other economic activity became unprofitable. Ricardo also postulated like Smith that the economy operated best without the strong hand of government and with free trade and the free market. Not everyone accepted the free trade ideas of Ricardo and the classical economists as a strong strain of Hamiltonism ran counter to them. Disciples of Alexander Hamilton such as Mathew Carey, the Philadelphia publisher, in the early 19th century argued that the United States needed to protect its manufacturing industries from Great Britain. Carey believed that the development of the American economy required not only protective tariffs but subsidies for industry and the construction of a national internal improvement system. In the Jacksonian era, Willard Phillips and Calvin Colton attacked Ricardo directly arguing that his economic system was applicable only to a mature economy such as England's and that it would reduce the United States to perpetual colonial status. Henry Carey, the son of Matthew Carey, moved one step beyond Phillips and Colton by building a new system of economics to replace Ricardo's plan. Carey, whom Conkin believes was the most original American economic thinker in the first half of the century, argued thatRicardo was not relevant to American conditions, but that he was actually an agent of British imperialism. By adopting his principles of free trade, Carey believed that the United States would become simply a cog in the British economy. To remove the United States from such constraints, it was necessary to erect tariff barriers and to organize the American economy from within. Carey did not fear government manipulation of the economy, and advocated a mild inflation induced by the issuance of fiat money to correct credit crunches which inevitably led to 234 BOOK REVIEWS April

depressions. He also saw no dangers in rent and felt that land was just one type of capital. To Carey, rents would be easily paid for in a strong economy by the gradual increase in the wealth of the whole country. Population growth also posed no threats as he felt technological improvements would allow the world to support billions of people. In this respect, Conkin notes that Carey reflected American optimism against the gloomy forecasts of Ricardo. Carey thus had more in common with the Progressive economists of the late 19th century, and even with John Maynard Keynes, than with many of his contemporaries. Conkin deals with a very complex subject and handles it in his usual lucid styld. But the material tends to be quite technical and at times tedious even to the 19th century specialists. Another problem with the volume is its lack of bibliography, especially since the first two chapters on the American economy and the European economists have no footnotes. For those willing to work their way through the book, there are valuable lessons for the 20th century. Conkin demonstrates that 19th century economists had just as many problems as 20th century ones in escaping the paradigms of their age. Perhaps, Conkin's volume indicates the cyclical nature of economics as the battles of the 19th century are repeated in our own era. Carey's views of an economy stimulated by the government collided with the views of free market advocates just as the views of advocates of Keynes and those supply side theorists advising President Reagan have recently clashed. Economists seem doomed to repeat themselves.

Temple University HERBERT ERSHKOWITZ

Woman and Temperance-. The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900. By RUTH BORDIN. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981. xviii, 221 p. Illustrations, appendix, index. $17.50.)

Women's central place in the post civil war temperance movement has long been recognized. There has, however, been no scholarly book on why women were attracted to temperance reform in such large numbers, on their role in shaping the character of the movement and on the relationship between participation in temperance reform and feminism. Ruth Bordin's book on the rise, maturity and decline of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) addresses these important questions. She provides a valuable new perspective on women and temperance that should lead many historians to revise their conception of the WCTU. Bordin treats the WCTU, which in the 1880s and 1890s was the largest woman's organization, with branches in every state and territory, all major cities and thousands of communities, as a mass movement. Temperance reform attracted women because it was a personal not an abstract problem. Alcohol abuse among men was widespread and women the main victims. They were, however, legally and politically powerless to protect themselves and their families from this ever present danger. The Woman's Crusade of 1873-74 and later the WCTU tapped and gave direction to inchoate desires to act and take control of their lives. The WCTU did not directly challenge broadly held beliefs about separate spheres as did suffrage organizations, but used 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 235 home protection to legitimize social and political action. Participation in an expanding range of projects provided a generation of women with skills in public speaking, lobbying, writing legislation, and managing charitable organizations which altered 6rst their behavior and then their attitude towards suffrage. Bordin's description of Francis Willard, the ideological disputes within the WCTU, and her rise to leadership differs sharply from the image created by her followers. Bordin captures well Willard's genius, her superb political skills, her capacity to evoke adulation. Willard's ideas about women's rights and about social reform were always more radical than that of the membership, but Willard's quest for public recognition and power was one they identified with. In Bordin's book the story of Willard's personal growth through social action expresses the meaning of the temperance movement for women. Bordin shows that by the 1890s temperance work represented only a small part of the WCTU's social action program; that it had come to see intemperance not simply as a moral sin, but as a disease and even a result of poverty. Yet if the WCTU had advanced ideologically as far as Bordin claims then the decline of the WCTU in relationship to the General Federation of Women's Clubs and its return to a single issue should not have occurred so swiftly after the death of Willard. We need to learn more about the membership and the activities of locals to find out whether the WCTU was a congenial environment for pursuing social reform. This story, however, requires another book.

Institute for Research in History MARLENE STEIN WORTMAN

Jesse Herman Holmes, a Quaker's Affirmation for Man. By ALBERT J. WAHL. (Richmond, Indiana: Friends United Press, 1979. xvii, 447 p. Illustrations. $10.95.) Jesse Herman Holmes (1864-1942) was an educator and reformer who worked within the framework of the social gospel and progressive movement of his time. A birthright Quaker (whose family had followed the leadings of Elias Hicks in 1827 when American Friends split into "orthodox" and "Hicksite" branches), Holmes embodied the Quaker commitment to service in the human community. All of his undertakings started from the belief that "the function of man is to improve himself and the world around him." In his student years he took degress in the sciences (B.S. at the University of Nebraska; Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University) and began his career as a preparatory school teacher of physics, chemistry, astronomy and mineralogy. However, his concern with the relationship between science and religion and a deep love for literature and philosophy led him by the turn of the century to the faculty of Swarthmore College as an instructor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy, where he would serve for thirty-seven years. The kind of teacher who left an imprint on the minds of his students, Holmes challenged his classes with the Socratic method, was instrumental in developing the honors program at Swarthmore, and promoted extracurricular lectures and projects through which students and faculty could support efforts to promote world peace, 236 BOOK REVIEWS April

improve the lot of exploited workers and fight for racial justice. Holmes' labors as a teacher did not stop at the edge of the Swarthmore campus. Drawn into the Chautauqua movement, he was "platform superintendent" and lecturer on the Pennsylvania Chautauqua circuit for fourteen summers. He was also in demand as a lecturer in other areas—within the Society of Friends, in the workers education movement, among temperance advocates and as a spokesman for Socialism. Nor did his concern with such subjects end with delivering lectures about them. He took an active part in the movement to unify Friends. Present when the American Friends Service Committee was established, Holmes worked in the AFSC relief program in Germany after World War I and was part of the struggle to prevent and then stop that war. As concern with international peace was a constant theme in his life, so was a belief in the rights of workers. He taught at the Philadelphia Labor College (later the Labor Institute School) and directed the Polity Club at Swarthmore which sponsored lectures and institutes on labor issues, involving the foremost reformers of the day. In the 1930s he became president of Philadelphia Local 129 of the American Federation of Teachers, assumed leadership responsibilities in the League for Independent Political Action and repeatedly ran for public office as a Socialist—twice for Governor of Pennsylvania, twice for Congress and once for a county post. One of the most interesting chapters in Albert WahFs biography of Holmes is that on his role as "Leader of the Progressive Friends." Serving from 1927 to 1940 as presiding clerk of Longwood Meeting near Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, Holmes helped to keep alive that vivid expression of the Quaker social conscience. By 1940, when the Longwood Meeting ceased operating, Jesse H. Holmes was three years into retirement from Swarthmore and but two years from death. The progressive causes which he had championed seemed to have peaked, and some, such as the Chautauqua movement, had completely disappeared. Dying at a moment in history when the forces of totalitarianism and violence were gaining strength throughout the world, Holmes would seem at first glance to have succeeded very little in having made lasting improvements in the world around him. But in the many lives that he had touched and through the educational and reform traditions to which he had contributed his influence lived on. The life of Holmes has been chronicled appreciatively by Albert J. Wahl, retired professor of history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Wahl's mastery of the details of Holmes' activities could have been presented to more effect, however, if his editor had been more careful about corrections and tougher about removing the minutia which too often bury major episodes and themes. Unnecessary details about Holmes' family life are offered while the portrait of his wife, Rebecca Webb Holmes, and the impact of critical events such as the death of their daughter Elizabeth at the age of sixteen remain blurred. Space devoted to inessential material might have been better used for a bibliography and an index. Despite such flaws, persons with an interest in the history of Quakerism, Swarthmore College or reform movements in modern America will find useful information in this biography.

Morgan State University Jo ANN O. ROBINSON 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 237

Fundamentalism and American Culture. By GEORGE M. MARSDEN. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. xiv, 306 p. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $19-95-) The stereotype of American Fundamentalism is of a movement largely Southern in origin, rural based, politically conservative, anti-intellectual, nativist, and atheological. Marsden argues that, before World War I, all of these image are false. He attempts to show how a congerie of beliefs held by the mainstream of evangelical Protestants in the 1870s evolved into the Fundamentalist movement. In this change individuals and institutions from the Delaware Valley took major roles: Robert Pearsall and Hannah Whitall Smith in the holiness movement, Russell Conwell and the Baptist Temple, Philadelphia Presbytery, Princeton Seminary, and, eventually, Westminster Seminary and J. Gresham Machen. What in 1870 had been respectable and influential attitudes in 1920 were not; when the rest of the culture evolved, the Fundamentalists stood still. American Protestantism created and was then shaped by revivals. The revivalists emphasized individual piety and often, as in abolition and temperance, advocated political reform. Fundamentalists continued the stress upon personal piety and a Christian social order. A second influence upon conservative evangelicals was the combination of Baconian scientific thought and Scottish Common Sense philosophy, taught at Princeton, which stressed the facticity of normal experience and the necessity of induction as a method of determining truth. Science was composed of empirical facts, not theory; Newtonian physics (which left a place for divine intervention) was science, but Darwinism was an hypothesis without clear factual support. The belief in the reasonableness of creation, a mutuality of support between biblical and all other knowledge, was combined with a frank supernaturalism. Theology was a science resting upon an inerrant Bible, true in every detail because dictated by God. The Princeton theologians had discovered true Christianity, and any deviation was not only evil but unscientific. An evangelical conservative either could subscribe to pre- or post-millenialism (whether Christ was to return before or after a perfect society was created) and could be optimistic about the possibilities for social reform, or could be pessimistic about ever creating an ideal society. In summary, Marsden shows that theological conservatives before 1900 were very much like other Americans. Fundamentalism, which came to fruition in the early twentieth century, was an intellectual and social movement designed to recapture and preserve an earlier moral Protestant civilization from new forces. Pluralism, Catholicism, secularism, historical criticism of the Bible, modernism in theology, divorce, alcohol, Christian Science, and immigrants were vaguely threatening and should be resisted. The conferences attended, tracts written, and sermons preached which defined the fundamentalist program came from Northern urbanites and were neither shrill nor pessimistic. World War I changed everything. Like other Americans, Fundamentalists learned to hate in the war, but, unlike most, continued the hysteria into the twenties. Increasingly isolated from urban America, Fundamentalists engaged in a crusade which was simplified into a battle over the teaching of evolution in schools. Unable to 238 BOOK REVIEWS April gain control of major Protestant denominations like Baptists and Presbyterians, the movement found a home in the South and rural America. After 1925, the Scopes trial, Elmer Gantry, and a host of excesses made the Fundamentalists look ridiculous. Virtually disappearing in the 1930s, a modified form of evangelical Fundamentalism appeared after World War II with Billy Graham as spokesman. Marsden is successful in integrating his own research with the work of previous scholars into an informative and provocative account of one brand of Protestantism. The book is less successful in the last chapters in analyzing the political and social implications of the phenomena. I remain uncertain whether evangelism should be characterized as an intellectual and variegated movement because the sources cited (perhaps the only ones available) are from theologians, the clergy, and the religious press. The book never discusses lay components of the movement. Marsden provides no sense of what demands and consolation the laity found in the church services. Without the laity, one does not know whether the distinction between pre-and post-war Fundamentalism is accurate. Virtually all sociological surveys of religion in America from 1920 on, in the North as well as South, stress the ignorance of church members. Were only the Fundamentalists theologically literate? The contributions of the South are also slighted. Marsden credits the war and Scopes trial with bringing decisive changes in Fundamentalism, but his proof is terribly unsystematic. The credibility of the book finally rests on whether the events highlighted are really representative. Religious history is particularly difficult to write because there is no agreed on methodology to assess the relationship of belief systems to daily life. Marsden's book is worth pondering because he makes a damaging case against conventional wisdom. And yet, the book is attempting to prove, to use a biblical metaphor, that the leopard not only can but did change its spots.

Swarthmore College J. WILLIAM FROST

A Pennsylvania Album: Picture Postcards, 1900-1930. By GEORGE MILLER. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, Keystone Books, 1979. 160 p. Illustrations, cloth $18.75, paper $10.95.) Two Russians peasants, it is told, had their fill of village life. Tempted by the prospect of looting their share of the world's riches, and travelling in the bargain, they joined the Czar's army. Years later they returned. And into the midst of resigned wives and near-starving children they hauled cases bulging with their prize. It was a magnificent collection of picture postcards. The ideological descendants of these Russians, postcard collectors, have also amassed quantities with small change. And some of these collections are now worth small fortunes. George Miller's heavily illustrated book assembled from his and other private collections of photographic postcards helps promote this ephemera as more serious documentation. Miller's knowledge of Pennsylvania during this century's first three decades as represented in such postcards is extensive. He divided the material into chapters as one might organize a collection, with headings such as 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 239

"Transportation," "Agriculture and Industry," and "Religion." Captions often restore the contexts of many images. Rare segments of eary 20th century life are pictured: a group of strikers in 1909 at the Pressed Steel Car Works in McKees Rock, Allegheny County and a funeral pocession for twenty-one miners killed in a disaster at Sykesville, Jefferson County, two years later. The photographic postcard was facilitated by the introduction of hand-held cameras and inexpensive film in the late 19th century. It took the choice of imagery out of the hands of the publishers for the first time. Postcards had been printed in quantities since the 1870s, when postal laws were revised to permit their inexpensive use. Some earlier examples, typified in the extreme by embossed Austrian postcards of birds with real, brightly-colored feathers attached, and cards with scenes that changed when they were held up to light have been recognized as objects of rarity for some time. The photographic postcard, perhaps because it is later and often of uneven quality, is coming into its own only now. It is certainly a more pure form of popular culture that came about as a result of the published card's success. And in addition to being a distinct genre, photographic postcards are welcome supplements to historical documentation, and certainly worthy of our attention, as George Miller and his peers have long known.

The Library Company of Philadelphia KENNETH FINKEL

Children of Strangers: The Stories of a Black Family. By KATHYRN L. MORGAN. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. xviii, 122 p. Illustrations. $9-95-) Joel Williamson, in his new book on the significance of miscegenation, calls mixed-race children "New People"; Kathryn Morgan has called them "children of strangers." Whatever one calls them, it is gratifying to see told some of the story of Africa-become-Afroamerica. Morgan's book, a tidy collection of her own family's stories, set in a thoughtful matrix of present-day interpretation, is not exactly history. It is not exactly anthropology. It is, in fact, a conceptually sensitive melding of the two, and a fine example of what folklore—done well—can look like. Morgan's book is divided into three parts. The first section introduces Caddy—the author's maternal great-grandmother. Caddy was "the child of a stranger," that is, the product of the union of a black woman and a lustfully exploitative white man. Caddy's subsequent weaving of an independent tapestry of dignity, economic self-sufficiency and gutsy philosophy is then recreated for the reader. Through the re-telling of Caddy's stories, we learn how, and get some glimmers of why, Caddy taught her family to stand firm for their own self-esteem in the face of American racism. We learn something of how Caddy viewed white Americans, how she viewed black Americans, and why, even though she left the South to settle in Philadelphia, she felt it important not to lose the memory of slavery. In the second section of the book, Morgan moves forward in time to her own youth, and the reader is given a glimpse of how the author's mother drew on the wisdom of Caddy to "buffer" the pressures of a life of being partly-black in Philadelphia during 240 BOOK REVIEWS April

the Great Depression. Here the stories capture a delicate balance between the values of work and humor, rigid self-discipline and measured abandon that was represented in Caddy's own balance between stauch decency and unabashed earthiness. The final section of this work opens up the little-touched area of the black community's experiences with, and responses to the "voluntary Negro"—the Afroamerican whose appearance makes it possible for him to "pass" into the white world, but who chooses not to do so. In itself, and for the job it sets out to do, the book is powerful. It is tightly organized, concise. The introduction, which gives something of the itinerary of the Caddy stories and the resultant book, is in itself an important piece. It will remind the reader of how much more sophisticated has become Morgan—and the discipline of folklore itself—in the decade since the appearance of the article which is the seed of the book. And photographs—especially the one of Professor Morgan herself on the steps of the family's North Philadelphia home—help bring characters to life. Still, both historians and anthropologists may be disappointed. They may find they want more context, more historical analysis, more connection to the mainstream of the family history literature that has become so abundant over the last ten years. Otey Scruggs' afterword is useful in pointing up how common is this little- published aspect of Afroamerican history. Scruggs weaves the outlines of his own family story through his assessment of Morgan's work. Most "black" Americans can probably identify both the "white" components of their families and their family's unique ways of "buffering" the complexity of relationships that resulted from this reality. Similarly, many "white" American familes must have closely-guarded awarenesses of the "black" members of their families. Much of the literature that recreates the story of black Americans focuses on the tensions between Afroamericans and white Americans. The beauty of Morgan's work is that it captures some of the elusive dynamics of these tensions, their compounding and their reverberation against tensions within the "black" community as it fades imperceptibly to its merger with the white world.

Temple University EMMA J. LAPSANSKY

The Peace Reform in American History. By CHARLES DEBENEDITTI. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. xvii, 245 p. Notes, bibliographical essay, index. $18.50.)

In 1936, three years before war broke out in Europe, American historian Merle Curti produced the first analytic synthesis of the history the peace movement in the United States. Peace or War. The American Struggle, 1636-1936 became a much heralded work that portrayed the fate of pacifism in the past in order to increase the understanding and possible success of peace movements in the future. However, much has happened since 1936 in terms of opposition to war and the struggle for social justice. While numerous historians have dealt with American peace reform in selected periods of our history, no one until now has attempted to plough ahead where Curti's pioneering work left off. It is refreshing to see, therefore, that a 1981 BOOK REVIEWS 241 scholar like Charles DeBenedetti has boldly decided to traverse old ground in order to bring the story up to date. The Peace Reform in American History is a general survey which is chronologically organized and evaluates peacemaking ideologies and movements from the establishment of Quaker settlements in Pennsylvania in the seventeenth century to the conclusion of the Vietnam war. There is little dramatically new in Professor DeBenedetti's interpretation, and much of it follows the same approach Curti used but with less analytical substance. Thus we are told about the actions of the American Peace Society, the American Society for the Judicial Settlement of International Disputes, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the War Resisters League, and latter- day organizations beyond the scope of Curti's work such as SANE and the United World Federalists. Incorporated into this organizational approach are brief biographical sketches of noted peace activists like Jane Addams, John Woolman, William Ladd, Elihu Burritt, Nicholas Murray Butler, James T. Shotwell, Norman Thomas, A. J. Muste, Daniel Berrigan, and a host of others. Once more we are made aware of the repeated frustrations of peace apostles to achieve the one best plan for international stability due to ideological and strategic differences. This is nonetheless a useful book. Most important is the way DeBenedetti skillfully examines and breaks down into five catagories the diverse activities of the individuals and organizations committed to peace reform: specific antiwar activities, internationalism, nonresistance and nonviolence, antimilitarism, and peace reform as part of other activities such as feminism, anarchism, or socialism. Especially rewarding, with regard to the last category, is the way he explains the integral connection between the civil rights movement, spearheaded by Dr. Martin Luther King, and opposition to the Indochina War as a means of bringing about greater awareness of the need for domestic social reform. Throughout DeBenedetti's well-organized and easily readable survey we are told that peace reformers have generally operated along two lines of action: "First they have for reasons of principle denounced war as a form of collective behavior that corrupts social order, Christian ethics, and human well-being. Second, they have worked from that principle to establish alternative means of resolving human conflicts and developing forms of group harmony so that peace might persist as a living social dynamic." Whether it be the humanitarian reformer's concern for men as Christian creatures, the Cosmopolitan reformer's interest in Anglo-Saxonism and world order, the practical reformer's faith in human reason, or the new-style twentieth century peace reformer, DeBenedetti carefully points out that all "have sought positively to make peace, and not merely to oppose war." This generalized work relies heavily on secondary sources. It does not pretend to be a definitive analysis. Rather, as DeBenedetti himself states, it is a survey that intends to place "peace reform in the context of developing American nationhood by giving new voice to those volunteer middle-class activists who have historically provided moral, intellectual, and organizing force to the nation's successive peace movements." He is strongest in his definition of terms—practical, cosmopolitan, necessary, humanitarism, subversive, and deferred—and his understanding of diplomatic history. Most importantly, he understands the complexities of power politics and the 242 BOOK REVIEWS April frustrations of peace reformers who throughout our history have been cast as misguided idealists. This is a balanced, critical, and yet sympathetic account of peace reform in America.

Teachers College, Columbia University CHARLES F. HOWLETT