256 Indiana Magazine of History

Samuel Vetch: Colonial Enterpriser. By G. M. Waller. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., 1960. Pp. x, 311. Endpaper map, illustrations, bibliographical note, index. $6.00.) Professor G. M. Waller, head of the Department of History and Political Science at Butler University, has subtitled his biography of Samuel Vetch “Colonial Enterpriser,” but “Promoter” might not be an inappropriate term. This colonist of Scottish origins was one of those individuals who demonstrated the fluidity and mobility of seventeenth and eighteenth-century American society by rising to great heights. Of dissenting stock in Restoration , Vetch served briefly in the military campaigns in Europe before participating in the Darien enter- prise, the ill-fated Caledonian attempt to establish a colony and trading station on the Isthmus of Panama. With the failure of the trading venture, Vetch found himself at New York in possession of some of the Company’s merchandise. By judicious, if not entirely principled, use of the Scottish Company’s goods, he promptly established himself in the provincial mercantile community. He soon became a leading, but not necessarily legal, merchant. His connections brought him entrance into the political and social world of New York and the Bay Colony and soon into marriage with Margaret Livingston, daughter of the important Livingston clan. There then followed a not too honest but evidently most profitable career as merchant, during which Vetch further built his fortune by legal and illegal trading and shipping ventures. But his well-placed political connections in Massachusetts and New York saved him eventually from any legal embarrassment and confirmed his position in the colonies and in the eyes of officials in . Professor Waller has devoted the bulk of his work to the role of Vetch in the “Glorious Enterprise,” the attempt to eliminate the French from North America. The transplanted Scot was instrumental in initiating and coordinating colonial and English efforts in the several unsuccessful campaigns against at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The ambitious scheme for the expedition against Canada in 1711-a project in which Vetch was a prime mover-failed, but Vetch reached the summit of his career with the capture of French . Until 1717 he was governor of the new British colony, . But his star faded quickly after this time. Although he claimed to have the support of many influential British politicians, he was unsuccessful in pressing his suit for the governorship of Massachusetts. He rose no further and died in 1732, a prisoner in the King’s Bench for debt. But the “enterpriser’s” career had not been in vain; he left extensive property in the colonies to his widow and offspring. Professor Waller’s chief contribution has been to illuminate the hitherto neglected career of an important colonial and imperial figure. He is particularly adept at handling the complicated political situation in New York and Massachusetts. In seeking evidence for this biography, the author has done extensive research in the repositories of North America, but for the most part he has depended upon incomplete Book Reviews transcripts in the Library of Congress and in the Canadian archives for British material. Waller’s work is more than a biography of Vetch; the career of the Scot is the focus for the wider scene of intercolonial rivalries, provincial politics, and the administration of the empire. Consequently, this history is of greater value than a more narrowly treated biography would be. There are, however, some questions which remain unanswered. Perhaps lack of material accounts for the rather skimpy account of Vetch’s later years when he apparently had many influential contacts in . Still more important, how much of Vetch’s “Great Enter- prise” was conceived because of legitimate concern for the empire? Or was he acting to promote the advancement of Samuel Vetch as he did in so many of his other activities? In consistently violating the Trade and Navigation Acts he did not appear to be overly concerned with the imperial interest. In dealing with Vetch’s “Glorious Enter- prise,” Waller appears to have overestimated the ability of England to wage war in the colonial sphere. She was not in the same pre-eminent position early in the eighteenth century as she was during the Seven Years’ War. Waller concludes that the eventual success of Vetch’s plan, the elimination of France as a colonial power in North America, freed the colonials from the threat which had tied them to the mother country, brought on the program of imperial taxation, and thus helped institute the American Revolution. This fact, he concludes, was “the imperial irony of history.” But are historical developments that in- evitable? University of Nebraska Jack M. Sosin

Alexis de Tocqueville: Journey to America. Translated by George Lawrence. Edited by J. P. Mayer. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960. Pp. 394. Appendix, index. $6.50.) Since 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville has been known chiefly for his classic study, Democracy in America, an analysis and description that remains unsurpassed in perceptivity, lucidity, and charm. For more than a century virtually nothing was known of its background, con- ception, or preparation. In 1938 George W. Pierson, having discovered some of the notebooks Tocqueville kept on his American tour, published a monumental study based on them, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America. Nineteen years later J. P. Mayer made the original texts available as part of the fifth volume of his complete works of Tocqueville. Now they are available in an English translation by George Lawrence. They comprise thirteen notebooks, some arranged topically and others chronologically, and three travel sketches covering a period of nine months from May 10, 1831, through January, 1832. The contents include notes and extracts from a variety of books, diary entries, observations and comments on American affairs, and reports of interviews, many of them given in dialogue form. The wide range of Tocqueville’s interests, his sensitivity to the people he met and to his physical surroundings, hie delight in the