After a journey in 1764 and 1765 that took Lord Adam Gordon through British provinces from Jamaica to Quebec, the 39-year-old army officer wrote that if he ever had to live in colonial America, he would spend his days in Virginia. “[I]n point of Company and Climate,” the ancient colony on the Chesapeake “would be my choice in preference to any, I have yet seen.” Having tarried there for a month in the spring of 1765 to enjoy “an opportunity to see a good deal of the Country, and many of the first people in the Province,” Gordon was particularly impressed with the Virginians themselves. “The Women make excellent wives” and the men “far exceed in good sense, affability, and ease” any others he had encountered in his travels. Even those who had never been outside of the province were “as sensible, conver[s]able and accomplished people, as one would wish to meet with.” These “topping people” of eighteenth-century America enthralled Gordon in ways that “must deeply touch a person of any feeling.”

Two hundred years later, one can find Gordon’s kindred spirit in Emory G. Evans, whose last published work, A “Topping People”: The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Old Political Elite, 1680-1790, is an accessible, informative, and subtly provocative history of the people Gordon found so congenial and whom Evans spent a career studying. A native Virginian who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1956, Evans was a distinguished professor of colonial America whose early work on the relationship between indebtedness and the coming of the American Revolution in Virginia was followed by a generation’s worth of writing and teaching about the lives of Chesapeake elites. Evans’ intimate knowledge of those people and their world clearly shows in A “Topping People,” the first comprehensive study of Virginia’s governing political community since Charles Sydnor’s Gentleman Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia, published more than 50 years ago.

Drawing primarily on personal correspondence and public papers, Evans tells the story of a “representative elite group” of 21 families drawn from those that enjoyed “long-term membership” on the Virginia Council—a peculiar constitutional hybrid of legislative, executive, and judicial authorities that Gordon described as possessing powers “greater than those of any other Province” (1). According to Evans, the combination of “political, social, and economic power” enjoyed by the families made them “the most influential people in the colony” throughout the colonial period; they were, in effect, a super-elite, distinct even from the rest of the free, white, protestant Virginia gentry who more or less ran things in the British Chesapeake, and as such are worthy of study in their own right (3). Evans sympathetically follows them from the last years of the reign of Charles II to the first years of the American republic, tracing along the way their increasingly tenuous claim to prominence in a rapidly changing world. Their rise was built on the close ties they forged with the Chesapeake yeomanry in the early 1700s, while their fall from political, social and economic eminence was tied to rising indebtedness to British merchants. By 1776, most of Evans’ elite families were in “serious financial trouble” (114) and their power and influence faded from the public scene soon thereafter.

A “Topping People” could well be considered the definitive insider’s take on the eighteenth-century Virginia elite. In many ways, Evans’ approach mirrors that taken by Gordon in his eighteenth-century journal. Like Gordon, a Scottish aristocrat and member of parliament, Evans’ view of colonial life is decidedly, perhaps even defiantly (as the title coyly suggests), from the top down. Gordon reported that he was “well assured by Gentlemen, whose veracity I can depend on” for information about the things he did not observe firsthand. Evans similarly depends heavily on many of the same gentlemen. Scholars of the colonial Chesapeake will be already familiar with much of his source base, which is dominated by published material from such well-known planters as Robert Carter, William Byrd II, Landon Carter, and John Custis IV, as well as commentators close to their circles, like the New Jersey tutor Philip Fithian. Evans seldom employs sources from beyond that group and almost never in counterpoint to it. But just as a view from the top of a mountain can reveal much about one’s surroundings, so the book covers an impressive amount of topical ground. Again, Gordon appears to have served as something of a model for Evans, as both authors comment upon religion, architecture, horse racing, marriage, tobacco, slavery, politics, and more, all from the perspective of the male super-elites from whom they garnered almost all of their information.

Evans’ treatment of the relevant historiography is similarly focused. There is very little evidence in the book that reflects the contributions of relatively recent titles in the field, such as studies of elite women and families in the Chesapeake, or the broader influence of Atlantic history. Evans reserves his engagement of other historians for those whose work directly relates to his subject group, such as Anthony Parent and Kathleen Brown, both of whom Evans believes went beyond the available evidence in their generally critical characterizations of Virginia’s elites (238). Evans decorously relegates such differences to the endnotes or to indirect references in the text, immediately recognizable only to those familiar with the material. He disagrees with Michael Rozbicki on whether the families were full of anxiety over maintaining their social status (they weren’t, Evans claims) and he takes issue with Rhys Isaac on the extent to which gentry and commons were united as the American Revolution approached (they were but only “to a degree,” he argues) (175).

For scholars of the period, A “Topping People” is perhaps more important for the questions it leaves unanswered than for the answers it provides. Evans has deepened our understanding of Virginia’s political sociology in the eighteenth century by giving us a clearly argued and readable account of an important part of it, but the work raises a question about a core precept of much of colonial Virginia historiography: were its elites as coherent or even as comprehensively dominant a group as Evans presumes? Perhaps not. Doubts are raised when he goes outside his group for evidence, like using Roger Atkinson, a Quaker merchant unconnected to any of the families, to represent the elite point of view, or when he relies too heavily on the accounts of one observer, such as the feckless William Byrd II, to reflect elite opinion throughout the century. Moreover, the sheer size of Evans’ families by the late colonial period complicates any attempt to generalize their experience. For example, by the end of the colonial period one of those families, the descendants of William and Mary Isham Randolph, included more than 200 members who lived on both sides of the Atlantic and could be found up and down the social and economic scale of the British world, from plantation homes to alms houses. They also wound up as both loyalists and patriots when the War of Independence erupted.

To his credit, Evans suggests that his categories may be less static than they first appear: He shows how many of his elites adapted to new interests and ways of thinking that transformed the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, Virginia included. This can be seen most clearly in the distinction he draws between “old elite” and “new men” that emerged in the decades before the American Revolution; this distinction owed less to social standing or generational change than to the highly contingent tides of political economy. Evans points out that many of Virginia’s elite continued to participate in the old metropolitan tobacco trade by consigning their crops to English merchants for sale and consumption on the “home market,” which “brought a better return” (103). At the same time, Scots traders connected to European markets “began to dominate the landscape,” which thereafter developed into a new web of transatlantic commercial and intellectual influences that replaced the metropolitan trade at the center of Virginia’s economy (100). The interplay between old and new political economies also reflected shifting sets of social relationships within the province, which severed some connections between Virginians just as it created others. For example, planters whose tobacco was intended for continental consumers of snuff found common ground as opponents to mercantilist rules and imperial conflicts that inhibited direct trade with European ports, matters of little concern to the shrinking proportion of Chesapeake planters who continued to grow tobacco exclusively for English smokers. Economic allegiance helped shape political allegiance; Evans’ evidence sheds considerable light on the various paths taken by Virginia’s elites in 1776, a large number of whom—many more than Evans finds—either remained loyal to Britain or stayed out of the revolutionary conflict altogether.

Although A “Topping People” does not reflect the insights of newer work in related fields and identifies Virginia elites in ways that might be analytically problematic, it is very useful to have Evans’ mature reflections on a subject that for centuries has been shrouded in the mythology of the so-called First Families of Virginia. In giving readers what should amount to the last word on how Virginia’s elite saw themselves—providing the kind of insight that can come only from a lifetime of work—A “Topping People” has the potential to fuel a generation’s worth of scholarship on the complex political sociology of the largest, most diverse society in the British colonial world. There could be no better memorial to a scholar of Emory Evans’ considerable stature than that.

James Z. Schwartz’ Conflict on the Michigan Frontierpicks up where Richard White’s The Middle Groundleaves off: in 1815. At the close of the War of 1812, White has argued, the “middle ground” (the metaphorical and geographical site of political and cultural mediation between Indians and colonists) disintegrated. Schwartz aims to discover what happened to politics and culture in Michigan in the ensuing decades.

Schwartz’s argument is this: with the influx of unprecedented numbers of Yankees into the Great Lakes Basin after the war (especially after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825), Michigan’s long-standing “hybrid” or “borderland” traits underwent a systematic “civilizing” process (4, 92-94). East-Coast newcomers waged war on the “savageness” of Indians, the “wildness” of backcountry whites, and the “lawlessness” of the West. They were determined to eradicate “inferior” and “dangerous” cultural practices and political attitudes, and in their stead impose order, restraint, and authority. In other words, Schwartz seems to argue, the machinery that hastened the middle ground’s destruction continued to run through the mid-nineteenth century, concurrently eroding “frontier” politics and culture and inflicting and enforcing northeastern forms. But unlike White, Schwartz is less interested in how long-standing residents of Indian and French extraction responded to these erosions and coercions, and more interested in the actions and successes of the New England and New York transplants who masterminded them.

The Yankees’ war on Michigan was fought, Schwartz argues, with a two-pronged strategy: constructing both “formal” and “informal” boundaries. “Informal” boundaries were “cultural restraints” created by “families, newspapers, public opinion, and churches” to separate Yankees from everyone else (4, 143). Chapter four tells the familiar story of Yankees’ efforts to “tame” the Potawatomi and other Indian groups through mission schools, reservations, and removal to Kansas—which Schwartz tells without benefit of native perspectives (79-80). He is more persuasive and innovative in chapter five, which covers the implementation of social reform movements within white society. He reveals how Yankee evangelicals used Michigan’s new media (newspapers) and new institutions (schools and churches) to impose morality, manners, temperance, and piety on non-Yankee whites (105-106). Such aims were not meant just to fortify Michigan’s moral fiber, but also to instill social and political order (128-129).

“Formal” boundaries—those “enacted by legislatures and administered by law courts and other official institutions” (143)—are the subject of the first half of the book: the campaigns for an elected assembly and voting rights (chapter one), the establishment of Michigan’s southern boundary (chapter two), and the debates over the legitimacy of banks and land speculators (chapter three). In building these boundaries, Yankee transplants may have contained or “civilized” native Michiganians, as Schwartz argues. But their chief foes in these instances—territorial officials, speculators, and bankers—were themselves transplanted Yankees (14-15). What Schwartz actually proves in these chapters is just how complicated it is to sort and generalize about Yankee agendas, strategies, attitudes, and behaviors.

The difficulty of generalizing about Yankees in Michigan is perhaps most evident in Schwartz’s final chapter, on the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1834. The epidemics, and the panic and violence they produced, expose the “mounting discord between urban and rural settlers” (130). Yankee Detroiters contended that cholera was not a contagious but rather a social disease. Instead of establishing quarantines (the prevailing rural strategy for disease-containment), city-dwellers organized “campaigns to police and sanitize the poor” (135 and 137). For those Yankees in rural areas, cholera represented the toxicity and anarchy of the city, transmitted figuratively and literally from Detroit to outlying communities. The rural/urban divide over the epidemiology of cholera, Schwartz shows us, resulted in a heated political battle between Whigs and Democrats over “how far local officials could go in defending borders designed to protect their communities from urban contagion” (131). The value of this kind of study, Schwartz assesses, is to demonstrate just how important the tensions along geographic and social borders were (142). But it also serves to complicate the “conflict” story of the previous chapters. Yankees appear on all sides of the cholera debate, perhaps united in their “abhorrence” of Michigan’s Indian and French populations, but divided by location, disease theories, containment strategies, and opinions about appropriate government intervention (137).

The theme of government intervention is also predominant in chapter two, which traces Michigan and Ohio’s armed conflict over ownership of Toledo (1835-1836). The standoff may have had to do with a territory’s fears of a large state’s unchecked power, as Schwartz contends (32, 51). But Michiganians—Yankees and non-Yankees alike—were also still bruised from Ohio’s 1803 elevation to statehood (despite not having had the 60,000 residents requisite for consideration). Ohio’s successful, if unusual, bid prompted Congress to disband the Northwest Territory and cast Michigan into the newly formed Indiana Territory. The change stripped Michigan of the representation it had previously enjoyed and fostered resentment, both against Ohio for its favored status and against Congress for its injurious disregard. Slighted Michiganians then began a vigorous campaign for their own territory—which they were awarded in 1805. Michigan’s fears of and bitterness toward Ohio, in other words, began at least three decades before 1835.

With the exception of the Toledo War, what is largely absent from Schwartz’s book is a full sense of the “conflict” alluded to in the title. This results from Schwartz’s interest in the actions of the Yankees determined to create an “American” society in Michigan. As such, the sources upon which the argument relies (such as the anonymous letters published in various local papers in support of the boundaries) convey much more consensus and complaisance than existed. In reality, many nineteenth-century Michiganians (particularly in older settlements like Detroit and Monroe) were not Yankees lately arrived from the east. They were descendants of the earlier Indian, French, and British populations—practitioners of what Schwartz calls in his title the “borderland cultures.” These were the peoples whom the Yankees accused and attempted to cure of “wild” and “barbarous” behaviors. Certainly they were not in dazed and grateful support of these “civilizing” and “ordering” efforts. But there is no sense in Schwartz’s book of how Yankees’ actions were perceived or received. Although he submits that “ordinary settlers and Native Peoples tweaked and changed these [Yankee] rules when possible to meet their own needs,” those stories of modification and resistance are not his subject (150).

The East Coast institutions and lifeways that Yankee transplants were determined to graft onto the Michigan landscape mostly, but not entirely, took hold (143). The “legal, ethical, and social boundaries” that newcomers constructed were surprisingly faithful reproductions of East Coast originals (150). Anglo-American cultural boundaries, however, were much more difficult to enforce (149). Indeed, Detroit’s French-language newspapers—evidence of ongoing resistance to Yankee cultural boundaries—endured through the early twentieth century.

The value of Conflict on the Michigan Frontier, Schwartz observes, is its contribution to the ongoing debate about “whether pioneers created a new culture in the West or simply transplanted their traditional Eastern ways to that region.” Schwartz posits that Yankees “inadvertently created a regional culture that was predominantly Eastern, but that also contained Native and French and western elements” (150). Perhaps, and more accurately, Yankees contributed to an already “hybridized” regional culture, layering their own cultural practices over preexisting Indian, French, British, and other forms. As Michigan became increasingly “Americanized,” East Coast forms would ultimately win out. But the deliberate and uneven processes of syncretism and erasure—begun more than a century before the Yankees’ arrival—would continue long after Schwartz’s end-date of 1840.

An odd book is this. Thin and thinly documented, it does not offer anything new to Jefferson scholars or economic historians. The author, intellectual property rights (IPR) attorney Jeffrey Matsuura, wants to make U.S. patent law more “populist” and less “commercial” and finds in Thomas Jefferson a fellow traveler. Connecting one’s policy agenda to the Founding Fathers is sometimes an astute rhetorical maneuver. Leaning on Jefferson for support on economic issues, however, is a bit like Tiger Woods citing Alexander Hamilton on the sanctity of marital vows. It can be done but it isn’t going to be effective.

As Matsuura explains in dry, repetitive prose, Jefferson was a polymath who engaged in basic as well as applied (i.e., inventive) scientific activities. Although he was not a leader in any one area, Jefferson helped scientists in a variety of fields to make incremental improvements in knowledge. Jefferson’s paleontological work and his Notes on Virginia Matsuura particularly praises. The Sage of Monticello never tried to patent any of his inventions, even his “polygraph” letter copying machine, because he believed that all forms of knowledge should be shared widely for the benefit of all mankind. He did not wish to prevent inventors from making a “reasonable” profit on their improvements but sought to limit the state-sanctioned monopoly powers associated with patents.

Under the terms of the Patent Act of 1790, Secretary of State Jefferson was deeply involved in the quotidian duties of patent application screening. Due to his leadership, early U.S. patent policy hinged on the utility and (domestic) novelty of patent applications. According to Matsuura, Jefferson preferred to deny applications rather than extend them too freely. The number and complexity of applications, however, soon overwhelmed patent officials. With Jefferson’s backing, the United States in 1793 changed to a registration system whereby anyone who paid a fee and correctly completed an application received a patent defensible in the nation’s courts. According to economic historians like B. Zorina Khan (The Democratization of Invention, 2005), the new system, while not optimal, helped to drive America’s phenomenal record of economic growth in the nineteenth century. For Jefferson and Matsuura, however, the new system gave too much power to patent holders and commercialized the invention process, leading eventually to the emergence of patent trolls, entities that purchase patents to gain leverage in lucrative but largely frivolous patent infringement suits against deep pocket enterprises.

Patent trolls are of much too recent origin for Jefferson to have ever looked one in the eye, but the Virginian did take on their progenitors, entrepreneurs like Jacob Isaacks and Oliver Evans who tried to profit from their inventiveness via the patent system. (Again, Matsuura’s Jefferson did not disparage profit, just the use of state-sanctioned monopolies to acquire it.) The Evans case was particularly bizarre because Jefferson himself approved the patent for an automated milling process (which included bucket elevators, conveyor belts, and special screws) only later to infringe on it at his own mill! Jefferson infringed, Matsuura explains, because he had seen “firsthand how aggressive enforcement of broad patents can impede integration of innovations into daily personal and commercial activities.” Jefferson’s “motivation for using the proprietary materials was need, not economic gain. The Evans technology provided the most effective mill equipment, which Jefferson, and many other farmers, required” (107).

Jefferson’s argument was absurd, of course. Nobody “needed” to use Evans’s designs but they wanted to because, as Matsuura notes, they were the “most effective” then available. A miller should have been willing to pay to use the new technology at any price up to that which would make it and the old technology equally cost efficient. Diffusion was assured because it was not in Evans’s interest to charge any more than that for a use license.

As economist Ronald Coase showed long ago, assignment of property rights and freedom to trade are sufficient to ensure the most economically efficient result because each asset, regardless of its initial owner, will gravitate via trade to its most highly valued use. Jefferson missed that point (as does Matsuura) because of a mutual fixation on the initial assignment of the right rather than the economics of the subsequent technology diffusion. Demand for an invention did not drop to zero simply because it had a positive price. Moreover, the expectation of receiving payment for inventive activity increased the quantity and quality of inventions produced, a point that the Framers well understood. Some, like Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, gave away inventions, but most people did not own a sufficient number of slaves or ground rents to be able to donate their time and genius to mankind. To take the trouble to invent something—large or small—most people needed incentives. Patents provided them and were directly proportional to the invention’s value to society, rendering them more efficient than the rewards or prizes proffered by some governments and associations.

But isn’t it immoral, as Matsuura suggests, to charge poor people to use a technology that could improve their deplorable conditions? Numerous recent books, none of which Matsuura consulted, suggest not. Poor countries remain so because their highly incompetent or outright predatory governments provide people with few incentives to invest in human or physical capital, not because they suffer from a dearth of technological knowledge, which will diffuse (legally or otherwise) to wherever it can be efficiently employed (vide the early United States and more recently China). If his government is corrupt, unstable, and unable to protect his life, liberty, or property, giving a man an idea will stave off want no more effectively than giving him the proverbial fish will. Weakening intellectual property rights, therefore, will hurt rich and poor alike, not spur economic development. The current system of intellectual property rights needs reform, but not that proposed by Matsuura or his preferred Founding Father.

“I proceed, for all who are or have been young men / to tell the secret of my nights and days / To celebrate the need of comrades,” wrote Walt Whitman in the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass (1860), a statement of allegiance to love between men he ultimately expands outward into a national vision of “inseparable cities with their arms around one another’s necks.” This discourse of fraternity is generally understood to reflect Whitman’s homosexuality and its role in shaping the idiosyncratic genius of his democratic vision. While the mid-nineteenth century lies beyond the purview of Richard Godbeer’s study, after reading The Overflowing of Friendship I cannot help but entertain a new reading of such lines. I wonder whether Whitman’s expressions might not represent in part a late efflorescence of a deeply rooted and, as it turns out, mainstream historical phenomenon: a pervasive and influential culture of passionate male friendship that Godbeer convincingly establishes as common in the colonial and Revolutionary eras.

The friendships Godbeer describes here were intense sentimental bonds between two men (privileged white men, Godbeer is careful to note), not uncommonly formed in youth or in college and often sustained for many years, across temporary or prolonged separation, through marriages and many life vicissitudes. Carried out through ardent and at times highly stylized exchanges of letters as well as through personal interaction, male friendships were understood to depend on the virtues of sensibility and sympathy, which along with reason and moral instinct constituted essential parts of the era’s integrated and virtuous individual. A man’s choice of a particular friend was assumed to be based on admiration for that friend’s sensibility and character; men found in these friendships a context for being understood and encouraging their best selves. Such friendships were personal yet not private; they were typically known about and encouraged by the men’s families and society, and for most men seemed to pose little or no conflict with developing other deep emotional bonds with a wife and family when the time came. Indeed, friendship and marital relationships were often understood as parallel or overlapping; as Godbeer writes, “Just as husbands and wives became members of their spousal families, though not related by blood, so friends also became elective kin. Family incorporated not only biological kin and conjugal relatives but also friends with whom one felt a sense of kinship” (8). Evidently living within such kinship circles, in which men could be sustained by lasting attachments to both wives and friends, was not just an ideal but a lived experience for at least some men.

The model of family and of elective kinship was also central to early American understandings of society. Thus The Overflowing of Friendship moves naturally from examining the dynamics and sources of male friendships to considering the role that such friendships and the values they embodied played in the Revolution and in the development of republican ideals in post-Revolutionary society. The first chapter begins by presenting the extended account of one complex and thoroughly documented emotional association, the friendship between several elite Philadelphians in their twenties, John Mifflin and Isaac Norris, and slightly later Mifflin’s second friend, fifteen-year-old James Gibson. Even at two centuries’ distance it can be a little tiring to be subjected to a detailed account of others’ romantic ups and downs, but the chapter provides a rich entry into the range of feelings and self-understanding such relationships evoked, as well as the pronounced literary elements of their epistolary exchange. (The friends styled one another Leander, Castalio, and Lorenzo respectively, and their expressions to one another are simultaneously sincere and rhetorical, qualities not seen to be in opposition in eighteenth-century expression). The second chapter moves on to a wide range of sources to offer a more thorough overview of the structures and range of male friendships in early America, and how such friendships related to gender and social norms in the period. In the third chapter, Godbeer focuses on the relation of male love to traditions of spiritual communion, connecting the eighteenth-century phenomena he has described to earlier Puritan traditions of fraternal love as well as to the experiences of evangelicals and revivalists in the period of the Great Awakening—a fascinating discussion for anyone interested in religious studies and one that suggests male friendship is deeply woven into the origins of early America.

In the final chapters, Godbeer moves to consider the important role played by male friendship in the creation of the republic. First, he examines the role of fraternal love and the structures of elective kinship in the Continental Army, presenting views of the male attachments of such figures as Washington, Hamilton, and Lafayette. Even as the revolutionaries committed symbolic “parricide” against the British monarchy, as Godbeer explains, “they reimagined fatherhood itself in ways consistent with a more egalitarian model of society. Washington would embody that new version of fatherhood, while the “‘brother aides’ who worked under him . . . embraced the spirit of ‘mutual friendship and brotherly love’ that patriots hoped would inspire and define their Revolution” (144). In the last chapter, in many ways the capstone of the book, Godbeer explores the profound consequences of the values of sentimental friendship to the emerging vision of the new republic. Citing the influence of moral philosophy derived from members of the Scottish Enlightenment such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Frances Hutcheson, Godbeer explains how love between friends served to nurture the capacity for sympathy, and thus was hailed as an active social good; far from a merely personal form of relationship, it “would expand into a more comprehensive benevolence as personal relationships nurtured qualities that in turn enabled individuals to become better citizens” (157). Indeed, encomiums to friendship became staples of print culture during this period, and in many essays and poems the relation of marriage itself was figured as a form of friendship. In the last section of the chapter, a final piece clicks into place as Godbeer considers the notable growth of fraternal organizations in the period, most notably Masonic lodges. The freemasons saw themselves “as ‘a society of friends, linked in a strong bond of brotherly love,’ and committed to ‘the advancement of humanity and good fellowship’” (183). While at times the object of suspicion and the butt of sexual satire implying associations with sodomy and sadomasochism, by 1800, Godbeer contends, “freemasonry and its celebration of brotherly love had become the epitome of respectable American manhood,” and sought to spread across the nation “temples of brotherly love, dedicated to the promotion of moral affection, mutual benevolence, and national redemption” (185).

Throughout, The Overflowing of Friendship highlights important understandings about the complex relations in the eighteenth century between gender, emotions, and understandings of virtue. These differed significantly from most modern ones in that they assumed that male and female attributes coexisted within all individuals. As a result, men could “embrace roles and qualities identified as feminine without endangering their sense of themselves as men” (11). Thus while the culture of sensibility was associated with the feminine, cultivated men were expected to develop its virtues within themselves—and cultivating sentimental friendship was a prime means of doing so. Men evidently realized they were practicing an analogue to women’s romantic friendships, and drew inspiration for their own relationships from female friendships.

Though Godbeer does not make it an explicit part of his argument, he implicitly asks us to do some hard thinking about what has been assumed to be a distinctly female phenomenon. If publicly-accepted romantic friendship does not emerge from anything unique to the gender expression or social conditions of women, as influentially described in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s now-classic 1975 article “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” what, if anything, does? This is thus an urgent work for feminist historians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America to consider, suggesting we may need to revise some of our assumptions about women’s culture, and one that strongly, if indirectly, makes the case that we cannot begin accurately to understand the past without an integrated project of gender studies that does not split masculinity and femininity into separate areas of inquiry.

The most contentious scholarly issue the book raises is, of course, the question of sexuality. To reduce the question to its most basic and inevitable terms, were male friends lovers—often? Sometimes? Ever? The issue of physical sexual expression and the specter of homosexuality is inevitably evoked by countless expressions in the book’s sources of passionate devotion and, especially, of the intimate private times in shared beds which many male friends seem to have looked forward to and treasured in memory. Homoeroticism is precisely a specter here: it haunts our modern reading of these early modern materials, yet it can be proven neither present nor absent. And how to interpret evidence of sexual behavior or desire in the absence of proof is a subject of heated methodological debate.

In the book’s introduction, Godbeer (author of a major 2002 study, Sexual Revolution in Early America) stakes out a judiciously considered position at some length, emphasizing the very different ways early modern individuals understood sexuality and the possibilities of physical yet nonerotic love. Combined with the rarity with which any couples made reference to sexual intimacy in personal letters, the surviving evidence is simply impossible to read definitively—though occasional expressions such as Virgil Maxcy to William Blanding that “Sometimes … I think I have got hold of your doodle when in reality I have hold of the bedpost” (58) are suggestive to say the least. Godbeer’s refusal to make claims beyond what the evidence supports has infuriated one activist gay author, Larry Kramer, who excoriates him—and ultimately academic queer studies in general—for supposedly refusing to engage with sexual histories lying in as plain view as we are ever going to find them. (“Homo Sex in Colonial America.”) Yet Godbeer in fact merely refuses to sacrifice the evidentiary standards of the responsible historian to the motive of locating a queer “usable past,” and instead emphasizes a point that in its own way might be at least as challenging to the limits of our own period’s conventional norms of same-sex interaction: that “premodern American men embraced a range of possibilities for relating to other men that included intensely physical yet nonsexual relationships” (5). And whether or not sexual expression was in some cases involved, male friendship was central to normative public understandings of virtue and social cohesion in the new republic—the very opposite of a subterranean tradition of sexual relationships “hidden from history.” The new vision of the past Godbeer offers, I would suggest, queers our understanding of the past just as much—if differently—than readings that insist on genital contact.

The Overflowing of Friendship is a relatively short yet wide-ranging and deeply researched book; Godbeer draws on an impressive array of archival materials and demonstrates his mastery of the many intersecting dimensions of scholarship pertaining to his case. A number of the elements and cases the volume touches on have been studied before, but never have they been assembled into such a coherent and compelling master narrative. Godbeer’s scope as an early American historian is notable; the author of three previous books, he moves with authority between seventeenth-century Puritan contexts and the Revolutionary and early national periods. Most notably, perhaps, The Overflowing of Friendship is an extremely readable work. Godbeer has a clear and accessible style, and both within and across chapters his narrative, as befits its subject, flows pleasurably. Nor does Godbeer affect a pose of artificial neutrality. With admirable openness, he admits that he was “moved over and over again by the intensity of feelings that these men expressed and their clear sense of emotional commitment to one another” (xi), and he concludes his Epilogue with the statement that “this book is in part an elegy for a world of love, and even the possibility of love, that we have sadly lost—let us hope not forever” (197). Finishing the volume, I could not help but participate sympathetically in this elegiac response. Whatever a prospective reader’s initial stance on relations between men or on contemporary studies of gender and sexuality, it seems to me virtually impossible one could read this book and not have something of a similar reaction—and most crucially, to have one’s understanding of the emotional dynamics of the American past shifted in a subtle but unforgettable way.

With this masterful work, Daniel E. Sutherland has presented historians of the American Civil War with the most important single volume on the role of guerrilla warfare to appear in twenty years. Scholars of the conflict have long awaited the publication of Sutherland’s definitive work and the book does not disappoint. The author freely admits that he does not catalogue every attack and guerrilla action—an impossible task in any case. Nor does he try to put a precise number on how many irregulars fought during the conflict or even the number of bands because of the limitations of the source material. Though he narrates plenty of local conflicts, the focus of Sutherland’s story is broader: how guerrilla warfare disrupted the lives of civilians, wrought changes in U.S. and Confederate military policy, and decisively affected the military events of the American Civil War. He ultimately argues that far from being a “sideshow,” irregular warfare played a vital role in the outcome of America’s most divisive conflict.

For the last three decades, the highly localized nature of guerrilla warfare has led scholars of Civil War irregulars to focus high-powered lenses on communities or regions. Phillip Shaw Paludan’s classic study Victims(1981) on the Shelton Laurel massacre and Michael Fellman’s powerfully analytical Inside War (1989), which addressed Missouri’s brutal war, are two of the finest examples of this scholarship. Scholarship emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War as nineteenth-century historians began an intense search for the meaning behind war’s brutality. In particular, America’s defeat at the hands of Vietcong guerrillas pushed Civil War historians to think about why Confederates did not effectively use irregular warfare to defeat the U.S. Army during the American Civil War. More recently work by Noel C. Fisher, Robert R. Mackey, Brian McKnight, Jonathan Dean Sarris, Clay Mountcastle, and Barton A. Myers has offered nuanced analysis on a range of topics relating to irregular warfare in Civil War America, from community studies to the development of counter-irregular policy. Sutherland’s work departs from each of these earlier books in its scope by creating a lucid narrative of chaotic events across Civil War America, events which occurred from Florida and Maryland to Texas and North Carolina. Drawing on impressive archival research, Sutherland places a chronological and regional framework over his source material. The author picks up many of the threads that earlier historians have pursued and weaves it together with new, vibrant research of his own. The result is a tapestry of colorful characters and brutal events.

Sutherland addresses one of the most contentious issues of the scholarship on guerrillas—namely, how to define them. He defines three groups of Civil War irregulars: guerrillas or bands operating independently of the major armies with little or no oversight; partisan rangers or officially sanctioned guerrillas; and bushwhackers or lone gunmen, outlaws, deserters and ruffians. Sutherland believes these three typologies shared two distinct characteristics: their method or the “irregular way they attacked,” and their purpose, which he argues was local defense from internal or external enemies. Sutherland admits to the “elusive, ungainly, and untidy definition” he lays out. But he demonstrates his deep understanding of the nature of guerrilla conflict by not forcing too precise an explanatory framework onto his story, which is fraught with chaos and idiosyncrasy rooted in the diverse local experiences of the vast Civil War home front (xii). Sutherland’s refusal to accept neat categories for Civil War irregulars strengthens his book because it leads him to an important part of his argument. Most civilians and many soldiers did not employ these rigid categories as they tried to cope with the horrors of the guerrilla conflict. For many northerners, sanctioned Partisan Ranger units like the one commanded by John Singleton Mosby and regular cavalry raiders like John Hunt Morgan were no different than the self-constituted bandits organized by William Clarke Quantrill and William “Bloody Bill” Anderson.

Throughout his book Sutherland returns to a vital, central question of Civil War scholarship: What motivated Civil War irregulars? The author finds motivations nearly as numerous as the many men who took up arms in the local guerrilla wars. While some irregulars clearly fought for a Confederate nation with that clear political objective in mind, just as many were drawn into the conflict because of the threat of invasion or occupation by the U.S. Army, desire for personal gain or revenge, or because of their kinship and family ties. Sutherland’s work confirms that of many earlier community studies. Many people became involved in guerrilla conflicts to fight for their own personal cause with little thought of fighting to build a new nation. While Sutherland’s points on the background of irregulars are insightful, his deep research could have yielded more in the way of quantitative analysis by comparing a variety of regions and localities. This would have grounded his assertions still further.

By adopting a layered narrative and a region-by-region structure, Sutherland has offered several important arguments. The author boldly asserts that the guerrilla war began before the major battlefield hostilities commenced and that it continued to ebb and flow across state boundary lines until it reached its zenith in 1864, when the Confederate government lost control of its ability to manage the problem.

Clearly he is right to argue that the war was much bloodier as a result of the widespread irregular warfare. His point that irregulars shaped U.S. military policy in a fundamental way is yet another major contribution. Sutherland not only recounts the U.S. army’s efforts to codify a response to guerrillas in General Orders No. 100, but he goes into great detail about the agonizing local experiences of officers in the Trans-Mississippi theater that first forced Union officers to take notice of the problem. Sutherland believes that in the end, irregular warfare led U.S. authorities to adopt a harsher military strategy.

Sutherland asserts that the war was prolonged by at least several months by the irregular wars, sowing considerable chaos in the process. Civil War irregulars demonstrated to the Confederate populace that the Confederate government could not protect its own citizens. Indeed, Sutherland asserts that the Confederate irregulars “helped their nation lose the war” (277). Finally, Sutherland offers that guerrilla warfare damaged the Confederacy’s legacy and image, and southerners worked hard in the post-war period to forget the brutality of guerrilla warfare and rehabilitate the tarnished image of their struggle.

Perhaps the most important criticism that could be leveled at such a fine example of research and narrative scholarship is that it does not go as far as it might have with the evidence mustered. By introducing the concept of “a savage conflict,” Sutherland avoids the rigid definitions and long-standing debate over whether the Civil War was a “total war” or a “hard war.” According to historians Mark Neely and Mark Grimsley, who both firmly argue that the war was far more restrained than earlier conflicts in its application of violence toward the civilian population, “total war,” includes unrestrained violence directed at noncombatants. A “hard war,” by contrast, destroys economic resources and property, while limiting acts of violence toward civilians. It is clear that Sutherland thinks the war was brutal in its treatment of civilians, but by avoiding the terminology and definitions laid out by earlier scholars, he does not directly confront a debate where his work could have played an important and perhaps transformative role. The reader is left to wonder exactly where the violence toward civilians illustrated in his book touches one of the most important debates in Civil War history. Did the “savage conflict” make the Civil War a truly “total war”? Was the civilian body count high enough? Or, was the savagery toward civilians harsher than “hard war” but not quite “total”? An effort by the author to place Civil War guerrilla violence into the context of other American wars might have brought valuable answers to the relative place of Civil War violence directed toward civilians.

This criticism, however, should not take away from the many valuable and important arguments that Sutherland presents. With his book, Sutherland has pushed the story of Civil War irregulars into the spotlight and offered new insight into America’s uncivil war. Civil War historians should no longer ask whether guerrilla warfare was important, but when, where, and how it originated. With Sutherland’s extensive research in mind, scholars should initiate projects that bring together the diffuse source materials on guerrilla warfare that will enable the next generation of scholars to dig even deeper than Sutherland’s fine study. While it is possible to take Sutherland’s work as a bookend, Civil War historians, an indefatigable lot, should see it as just the beginning, an inspiration for even more ambitious endeavors.

As the hostilities of the American Revolution were subsiding in the winter of 1782, the Ohio frontier witnessed one of the most gruesome wartime atrocities in American history. On March 9, American patriot militiamen from nearby western Pennsylvania marched into the Moravian mission community of Gnadenhutten and condemned nearly one hundred neutral Christian Indians to death for allegedly aiding and abetting enemy Indian attacks against frontier white settlers. Unimpeded by the scant evidence to support their accusations, the frontier patriots quarantined their suspects overnight while they deliberated on the most efficient method of exacting justice. Throughout the next morning, while praying and singing hymns, the incarcerated Indians were dragged in pairs to a nearby slaughterhouse where they were bludgeoned to death. In the end, the victims consisted of twenty-eight men, twenty-nine women, and thirty-nine children, and their remains were stacked inside the building while the entire town was burned to the ground. The leader of the massacre, Colonel David Williamson, was later valorized and elected sheriff of a local county in the new United States (232).

In his most recent work, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment, Kevin Kenny sees this systematic mass execution as the nadir of a long declension in Indian-white relations. Kenny’s book traces this bloody course, and explains how the peaceful stability forged through treaties between the colony’s Quaker founder, William Penn, and Indians of the Susquehanna Valley had long since eroded under the pressures of Euro-American frontier expansion by the time of the American Revolution. Over the course of the century, moreover, various socio-political developments slowly altered white settlers’ attitudes toward their diverse native neighbors, and culminated in their association of all Indians with the tyrannical authority of a corrupt and negligent imperial government. By 1776, backcountry Indian-hating had become a patriotic virtue as quintessentially American as independence, self-sacrifice, and egalitarianism. The incident at Gnadenhutten in 1782, Kenny concludes, simply demonstrated the shocking extent to which Penn’s cross-cultural dream had been denigrated by the gradual coalescence of a nascent racism and the patriotic reform of local land laws and government structures.

Kenny’s narrative begins with the legendary negotiations with the Delaware Indians at Shackamaxon in 1682, and then with the Conestoga and Shawnee at Philadelphia in 1701. These treaties, which consummated William Penn’s vision, paid natives for land cessions and encouraged them to coexist with colonists in neighboring communities. Two pivotal occurrences, however, quickly exposed the fragility of this working arrangement. Kenny sees the mass influx in the 1710s of Scots-Irish Presbyterians from the northern Irish province of Ulster as an enormous counterweight to the principles laid forth by the earlier treaties. Unlike the area’s English Quaker and German and Swiss Mennonite colonists who exhibited pacifism, charity, and simplicity, the new arrivals “embodied a rapacious form of colonialism” centering on a militant Protestantism steeled in the bloody ethno-religious conflicts of Ireland during the previous century (21). Unscrupulous in their dealings with Pennsylvania’s Indians, and unlawful in their settlement patterns in the backcountry, the Ulster Presbyterians threatened the tenuous authority of the Penn family proprietors and the local Assembly. Out of this tension, the settlers grew increasingly suspicious of Indians’ privileged legal status, which stood in stark contrast to the evictions and arrests that they suffered at the hands of a distant and seemingly unsympathetic colonial government.

Corrosive pressure on William Penn’s settlement was also originating from within his own family. Kenny sees William’s heir, Thomas, as a profit-monger with few qualms about fleecing Indians in order to capitalize on lucrative deals with wealthy land speculators and legitimate settlers. The most famous example of this was the Walking Purchase in 1736, which used an obscure and ambiguous land transaction from 1686 to defraud the powerful Delawares out of their land possessions in eastern Pennsylvania. Thomas also negotiated with the Iroquois to the north, who in turn had long claimed Pennsylvania’s native groups as tributaries, and worked with them to oversee the dispossession of most eastern Indians from their valuable land claims. The baffled Delawares retreated west, though they would never forget the Penn family’s betrayal of their sacred trust. When imperial war with France came to Pennsylvania in 1754, the displaced Delaware and Shawnee seized the opportunity to exact retribution. Violence had finally descended on the peaceable kingdom.

Kenny’s narrative structure is at its strongest when he integrates native experiences and Pennsylvania’s broader socio-political development. Led by Teedyuscung in the east and Shingas in the backcountry, the Delawares mounted devastating raids against Euro-American settlements, killing hundreds and forcing thousands to flee their farms and retreat east. Without a legislated militia to protect them, the colony’s settlers intuitively fabricated a virulent and enduring stereotype as they “reduced the Assembly to Quakerism and Quakerism to pacifism” (80). Bureaucratic wrangling and stagnation in Philadelphia fueled backcountry beliefs in a negligent legislature conspiring against them and privileging its status among Indian neighbors. A rift was widening between the Quaker faction represented by the Assembly, and the proprietary government that aimed to curb both its growing influence in colonial politics as well as its protection of native interests. Indian and settler actions in the interior, Kenny stresses, fomented the colony’s emerging crisis of authority.

The violence saturating Pennsylvania during the Seven Years War and later in Pontiac’s War fostered the crystallization of a second, and fundamentally race-based, generalization among frontier settlers, according to Kenny. A group of vigilante settlers from Paxton town embodied this intellectual transformation, as their terrorist acts in native communities ignored the distinction between the colony’s peaceful and enemy Indians. George III’s Proclamation of 1763 barring white settlement west of the Appalachians only compounded this tension, and galvanized “the sense among frontier settlers that all forms of government were conspiring against them” (133). This powder keg exploded in December 1763, when the Paxton Boys advanced with guns and tomahawks on Conestoga Indiantown—a “friendly” native community established by William Penn’s 1701 settlement—and massacred the six Indians they found there before burning their cabins. Two weeks later, the Paxtons caught up to fourteen others who had escaped to nearby Lancaster and, in the broad daylight of the town streets, slaughtered them in front of onlookers. Acting on their belief “that all Indians were perfidious and deserving of annihilation during wartime,” the Paxtons’ indiscriminate murder spree reflected a racialized understanding of human difference that moved far beyond ethnocentrism, Kenny points out (167). William Penn’s working arrangement was being undermined not only by retributive violence, but also by a darker perception of an immutable social hierarchy fashioned in the heat of warfare.

Peaceable Kingdom Lost is intended in part as a corrective to older whiggish interpretations that represent the frontier rebels as freedom fighting proto-democrats who sought to topple an archaic form of tyrannical government. By examining their written grievances presented to colonial officials in Philadelphia, Kenny instead argues that the Paxton Boys were virtually indifferent to the issue of political representation and much more driven by local concerns over land issues and security in the backcountry. Rather than advocating provincial autonomy, moreover, the rebels and their propagandists actually identified with the British Crown and many agitated for an alliance with the proprietary family against the local Assembly in the 1760s. When the American Revolution arrived in Pennsylvania, it offered backcountry settlers yet another opportunity to air long-standing grievances over property rights and security threats posed by neighboring Indians. The Paxton Boys were thus not the harbingers of a new egalitarianism, Kenny maintains, but the defenders of a racial order who continually reiterated the “idea of killing Indians as a form of loyal opposition to bad government” (180). The grisly incident at Gnadenhutten in 1782—again extralegal and unpunished—was consummate proof that Indian-hating had become intimately bound up in the movement for socio-political reform on the frontier.

Readers acquainted with this familiar story may question the novelty of Peaceable Kingdom Lost. And their concerns are justifiable. Kenny has impeccably mastered the complexity of this narrative, and his attention to detail coupled with his ability to weave those nuances into a captivating story make his book incredibly informative as well as widely accessible. Yet he is also venturing onto well-trod ground. In the last twenty years, the eighteenth-century Pennsylvania and Ohio backcountries have served as subject matter for a plethora of scholars including Richard White, James Merrell, Eric Hinderaker, Jane Merritt, and Peter Silver, each of whom has probed Penn’s Holy Experiment for its lessons on native American history, colonialism, and the emergence of racism in early America. Out of this rich historiography has emerged a general consensus: the mid-Atlantic backcountry was an extraordinarily violent place, where a distant and faction-ridden colonial—and later, national-government fostered the growth of frontier autonomy based on the hatred and destruction of Indians. Though it is evident to readers that Kenny’s work does not challenge this orthodoxy, it is unclear if the author himself sees his narrative as substantiating or complicating its contours, or if he is contributing to another set of issues altogether. In sum, readers will have difficulty situating this work in an already exhaustive historiography.

Regardless of these questions, Peaceable Kingdom Lostcontains crucial implications for native American and early American scholars alike. As the vast majority of today’s American Indian reservations lie west of the Mississippi River, many students envision Indians in the past as inhabiting regions “out there” and beyond the pale of white civilization. Kevin Kenny reveals the intimate proximity of native and Euro-American cultures throughout the colonial period, and demonstrates how the initially benevolent nature of this closeness in Pennsylvania served as the font of later bloodshed and racism. What began as a creative expression of Penn’s Quaker piety and pragmatism, as well as native desires for diplomatic and trade alliances, would increasingly serve to legitimate violence between frontier settlers and Indians, each of whom held the other collectively accountable for periodic transgressions against the tenets of the Peaceable Kingdom. The idyllic image of Pennsylvania’s early cultural exchange, then, ironically served as the catalyst for the intensifying conflict plaguing the region’s backcountry by the late colonial period. Kenny’s work reminds us, consequently, of the ubiquity of Indian societies in much of colonial America, a posture defined frequently by natives’ physical presence and nearly always by their cognitive primacy in Euro-American minds. In the same vein, this book serves as an example of the ways in which native American and early American histories can be integrated; Indians are not relegated to the margins of America’s larger socio-political development, but instead are inextricable from and integral to our understanding of it.

Americans, J. M. Opal argues in his wonderful new book, have often been ambivalent about the concept of ambition. Typically, they believe that they have the unique “opportunity” or “right” to fulfill their dreams for advancement under the apparently liberating canopy of republican government and capitalist political economy (vii). Yet in times of crisis such as the present, Americans earnestly wonder whether ambition has gotten out of hand in the land of the free. Many ordinary citizens, facing the prospect of bankruptcy or unemployment during the current recession, have vented their outrage both at business executives who collected substantial bonuses after their speculations put the nation at risk and at politicians who voted to bail out powerful firms with stimulus funds. Few political or economic leaders, from the perspective of Main Street, seem particularly exercised about the inability of many Americans to realize the aspirations embedded in the “American Dream.” Therein lies a conundrum: Americans believe they have the right to be ambitious—theirs is a nation conceived in liberty—and yet the buoyant ambitions of the few often drown the hopes of the many. Pundits scouring the past for precedents to this economic meltdown and its consequences have rarely ventured earlier than the depression of the 1930s, so Beyond the Farm is refreshing because it shows that Americans’ ambivalence about ambition is intertwined not only in the culture of the market but in the very founding of their nation.

Opal makes significant contributions to the literature on “sensibility” during the Enlightenment and American Revolution, and connects the ideological impulses of the founding era to the development of an antebellum culture of capitalism in exciting new ways. He judiciously leavens a history of cultural keywords with compelling biographies of six ordinary New England strivers and interesting social histories of the towns in which they resided. He uses an impressive array of manuscript and published primary sources—ranging from town and school records, to newspapers and sermons, to diaries and personal memoirs—in order to support his findings.

Between the 1780s and the 1830s, Opal contends, Americans unleashed and participated in a “motivational revolution” (122) that emerged from their political revolution against Great Britain and eventually intersected with the economic revolution that shaped the ways they participated and thought about market engagement in the Early Republic. As the authors of the nation’s new constitution envisioned an “extended republic,” so too did ministers, teachers, storekeepers, and young people embark upon a “campaign” to convince rural Americans to link the concepts of “self and success, value and virtue, public need and personal worth” with the development of the new nation (ix, 49). This cosmopolitan sensibility stretched the bounded aspirations of households beyond their traditionally provincial contexts.

The resulting transformation of the meanings of ambition, coinciding with the making of the nation, elicited optimism and anxiety among individuals and families since it offered opportunities to the motivated but also unsettled the means for (and meanings of) advancement in a burgeoning market economy. Rural Americans worried about the ethical basis of this transformation, uncertain if they could reconcile this public spirit with the private goals of their households. Many of them keenly felt what this change had cost them and their families, and spurned cosmopolitan selfhood in later life. By the 1830s, though, as household ties continued to fray, Americans more confidently adopted a modern notion of the self—made through purely individualistic means in the market—and obscured its formation through familial, communal, and national ties.

In the eighteenth century, ambition—a passion widely attributed to elite men desperate to accumulate power—was a vice because it tended to attenuate and break social bonds. During the Enlightenment, however, the words “emulation” and “enterprise” began to do the cultural work necessary to refashion ambition into a moral virtue that might rival political and religious institutions in its ability to create and maintain social “harmony” (4). In the 1780s, promoters of the public spirit and the new federal constitution justified liberal and national goals by linking them with emulation and condemned local and provincial interests by connecting them with greed. Yet for rural American men who sought “independence” and “contentment” through “industry” and “competency,” liberal and national cosmopolitanism seemed superfluous to their lives, a direct affront to their power as patriarchs and a perversion of the true meanings of the Revolution (18). “Exciting emulation” among youth evoked disturbing visions of social disorder in locales where old men expected sons to “follow” in their footsteps (26). “Industry” should support households rather than worldly projects that might deplete a community’s precious resources. Personal and political independence—the guiding object of the Revolution—retained the allegiance of most country people during the nation’s “critical period.”

The impressive rate at which advocates for the liberal public spirit were able to wear away opposition to its precepts among provincial folk is striking. In the 1790s and 1800s, more and more young, white American men were beginning to think of propertied independence as “mere independence” (ix)—a disappointing status that spoke only to the goals of rural “contentment” and “competency” that had inspired their fathers during the Revolution. Some citizens, aiming outside their communities, sought commercial opportunities that would connect them with producers, consumers, and cosmopolitan sorts. Hardly serving themselves (they said), their “enterprise did not imply competition where one gained and another lost,” but rather suggested “a generous ethic of collective betterment” (53). Shareholders of corporations funded the construction of bridges and turnpike roads, facilitating commerce and redefining the meanings of the “public” and the “People” to highlight their “civic conscience” and create a more expansive notion of liberal citizenship in the new nation (54). Villages sprouted at key intersections, and on these “prosperous and promising, civil and civic” Main Streets, citizens united around extra-local commerce rather than through exchanging work and goods with each other (66).

Just as commerce propelled villagers to seek trading partners outside the community, the new liberal spirit motivated young men to redefine a number of terms in the nation’s “cultural vocabulary” (175). Young farmboys, whom disappointed fathers judged to be “lazy,” found opportunities to work hard and excel in the classrooms of private academies that embodied new definitions of the public more clearly than local district schools (103). End-of-term academy exhibitions offered public proof of students’ achievements and opportunities to cultivate a public voice. Students could marshal “industry” to achieve personal plaudits as well as household aims (124). Cosmopolitans condemned the “envy” of narrow-minded farmers who did not recognize the benefits of a wide-ranging curriculum and the steady habits that academies honed, overturning the meaning of a word previously associated with ambitious rural people taking an interest in worldly things (74). Praise in the classroom gave young men the confidence not only to seek “independence” on their own terms outside of the household, but to cast those quests as ones of their own making (90).

According to Opal, the criticism academies provoked shows that “ambition for and in the nation was not so much a controversial idea as a practical impossibility” within small farming communities (90). The public spirit remained mostly ephemeral in these places, unconnected to the reality that “the nation” these young men “sought to embody had small use for their aspirations” (127). Ambitious sorts were turning away from the disapproval of family members who would not countenance their social climbing outside their community and seeking fellowship with men whom “they did not know” (139). Cut adrift from provincial neighborhoods that would only validate local aspirations, young strivers sometimes failed to garner acclaim in a market and nation that was much less forgiving—and more ruthlessly competitive—than cosmopolitans admitted. Young men responded by finding solace in the older cultural vocabulary, reaffirming how “honest” and “industrious” they were, describing their ambitions as “duty” to their fellow man, and even hoping that they would merely earn their “independence” (136, 152, 146). These words were pale imitations of the brave new spirit invigorating the nation; the resurgence of this vocabulary’s traditional meanings suggests that many young men were in full retreat after being buffeted by the unforgiving currents of the market economy. Ambitious sorts, undeterred, tried to incorporate the liberalism of nation and market with the republicanism of patriarchal households, but an anxious few reacted to the development of a boom-and-bust economy after 1815 by overtly rejecting the optimistic cosmopolitanism of their youth.

Yet Opal sees 1815 as a “tipping point in the wider culture . . . from the goals of the household and local independence to those of individual and national distinction” (155). Many of Opal’s main characters—aspiring ministers, educators, and men of business who did not achieve fame outside of their local areas—would have been shocked to see their Victorian-era sons call themselves “self-made men” whose primary responsibility was to ensure the wellbeing of their wives and children in private, domestic havens from the market rather than to protect the public good in the community or the nation. Ambition had truly become a “national creed” that most Americans shared by the 1830s (180), but its meaning had changed once again. The concept of individualistic self-making remains a cherished, if ultimately beguiling, aspect of our national inheritance. That legacy, as Opal demonstrates, has obscured other viable meanings for and sources of ambition in the early national period. While it is still too early to tell, perhaps the recent recession will motivate Americans to modify their personal aspirations and reassess their nation’s ambivalent stance toward ambition. Opal’s superbly written and persuasively argued book might show them how.

Brian P. Luskey is assistant professor of history at West Virginia University and author of On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (2010).

In the early 1830s, Comanches and their allies went to war with their Mexican neighbors. Over the next fifteen years, southern plains Indians launched a series of organized and coordinated attacks on Mexican communities below the Rio Grande. Ranging as far south as San Luis Potosí, Indian warriors—often in parties of several hundred—killed and captured livestock, burned homes, destroyed food stores, took a few Mexicans captive, and killed thousands more. Brian DeLay argues that these actions taken by Comanches and their allies initiated a vicious cycle of Indian raids and Mexican reprisals that profoundly shaped the process, outcome, and consequences of the U.S.-Mexican War. Thus, War of a Thousand Deserts does much more than simply restore Native Americans to the historical narrative. In this provocative and ambitious book, DeLay situates southern plains peoples at the very center of the geopolitical transformation of North America in the mid-nineteenth century.

He does so by turning the common plot line of native response, resistance, and adaptation to Europeans on its head by “exploring the efforts of Mexicans and Americans to resist, cope with, and sometimes profit from the activities of Indians” (xviii). DeLay’s primary goal, however, is to explain how and why Indians pursued the course of action they did. He convincingly demonstrates that despite the assumptions of Mexican officials that their activities determined how Indians behaved, internal politics and relations with other native peoples dictated Comanche policy.

Comanches and their Kiowa and Kiowa Apache allies maintained a tenuous peace with northern Mexicans in the early nineteenth century because the residents of la comanchería faced a “defensive crisis” (79). What had made them wealthy—access to vast herds of bison and horses—also made them targets. As a result, Comanches and their allies battled constantly with Cheyennes and Arapahos in the north, and Osages and more recent arrivals like Cherokees, Shawnees, and Delawares in the east. Mexico directly benefited from this state of affairs. Besieged by Indian enemies and cut off from alternative markets, Comanches relied on northern Mexicans for reliable access to manufactured goods and stable markets for their hides and furs. More significantly, DeLay contends, endemic warfare with other native groups left Comanches and their allies with few resources and less inclination to wage war on Mexicans simultaneously.

Everything changed once Comanches secured peace with their Indian enemies. Between 1834 and 1847, southern plains Indians attacked Mexican communities with remarkable violence, destruction, and coordination. Other scholars have attributed the striking escalation of Comanche raiding during this period as a collection of discrete acts by individuals bent on acquiring wealth and status. DeLay is unconvinced.

Neither economic imperatives nor individual acquisitiveness, he persuasively argues, explain why “Comanches spent nearly as much energy punishing Mexicans as they did stealing from them” (104). In DeLay’s telling, the answer lies in an erosion of the traditional distinction between “raiding for plunder” and “waging war for revenge” (123). The two coalesced in the nineteenth century, plunging the borderlands into a reinforcing cycle of raiding and revenge. In essence, when native warriors were killed during a raid on a Mexican settlement, Comanche and Kiowa notions of honor demanded their deaths be avenged. War leaders used appeals to vengeance to galvanize communal support for another campaign and recruit additional fighting men from members of different communities, bands, and allied groups. With armies of several hundred warriors, Comanches could safely travel farther into the Mexican interior, where raiding opportunities were grander and more lucrative. There, more men were killed and the cycle continued with disastrous consequences for Mexico.

The intensification of Indian raids in the 1830s and 1840s devastated the economy in northern Mexico and depopulated the countryside. Nevertheless, Mexican officials did not envision the Indian threat in the north as a threat to the nation. Racked with political instability and fiscal crisis, they chose to devote their limited resources elsewhere. Northern Mexicans were left to fend for themselves as their pleas for help from the newly empowered central government went unfulfilled. As DeLay demonstrates, the actions of Comanches and their allies thus distanced frontier residents from their leaders in Mexico City who were unresponsive to their needs, exacerbating tensions between centralists and federalists in the first decades of Mexican independence.

The Comanche war in northern Mexico was significant for the United States as well. In the inability of the Mexican government to halt the raids and force Indians into submission, many Americans saw further proof of Mexican inferiority and yet another indication of American destiny to take Mexican territory as its own. Anglo-Americans, many believed, would triumph where Mexicans had failed, and they cast themselves as saviors of the Mexican North. But the “War of a Thousand Deserts” between Comanches and Mexicans did more than help justify the American conquest; it also helped facilitate it. The enemy U.S. soldiers encountered in northern Mexico was too demoralized, divided, and diminished in resources to launch a coherent defense against the American occupation.

Notions of their own racial superiority prevented Anglo-Americans from understanding the role Indian raids played in Mexico’s defeat. Americans were so confident in their own ability to pacify the Comanches and their allies that they pledged in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to return Mexicans held in captivity by those tribes and promised to prevent Indians from launching further raids across the border. Like their Mexican counterparts, however, U.S. officials were unable to prevent Indians from raiding Mexican settlements—above or below the new international border. An inadequate military presence and more pressing distractions far from the frontier stymied American efforts, and Indian raids intensified in the years following the war. When Mexicans demanded that the Americans live up to their treaty obligations and threatened to sue for damages, tensions between Mexico and the United States mounted. American policymakers relieved themselves of the troublesome responsibility of preventing Indian raids when they negotiated the Gadsden Purchase five years later.

DeLay begins and ends his book with a discussion of this provision in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo because it reminds us that “indigenous polities continued to shape the international contest for North America even into the mid-nineteenth century” (303). While War of a Thousand Desertsoffers important new insights into the history of native politics, the borderlands, and violence in the American West, and will likely occupy a prominent place in our discussions of the U.S.-Mexico War for years to come, DeLay’s greatest contribution may be the mounds of data published in the appendix. There he has catalogued more than 500 episodes of Comanche-Mexican violence between 1831 and 1848. Offering dates, locations, and demographic data on participants and victims that he culled from Mexican sources, it is a veritable treasure trove for future scholars.

In Passion Is the Gale (2008) Nicole Eustace traces the changing understanding of emotions in the personal and collective lives of colonial Pennsylvanians and shows that the American Revolution was truly an emotional upheaval.Common-place asked her: how can we study emotions in past societies, and what we do we learn about our affinities with and differences from eighteenth-century Americans by exploring their emotional expressions?

Many newspaper reporters admit that the requirement to ask nosey questions is one of the chief pleasures of the job. Historians, as a group, are even worse. We claim the right to snoop about in people’s most private papers—to review their wills, peruse their letters, even peep into their diaries—all as a matter of professional prerogative. Still, even unfettered access to personal records offers little guarantee that we can ever understand the interior lives of people of past times. When it comes to trying to uncover the history of emotion, scholars face a daunting task.

In one way we are fortunate: because the papers we pilfer belong to those long gone, we can usually tell how the story ends. Pondering origins and outcomes, weighing the relative influence of various causal factors and the comparative significance of different effects, we can take a more or less omniscient view of events. But our powers of observation founder when it comes to trying to discover things that went largely unremarked. How did historical actors feel about each other? Did they express their emotions to each other directly or obliquely to anyone else? If we do chance to find, say, an exchange of letters averring enmity or affection between the writers, how can we know whether to take such declarations at face value? Might societal expectations have provoked expressions of emotion that were not truly felt? Conversely, if we find no trace of recorded emotion does this mean people felt nothing? Or might it simply be a matter of scarce paper, sparse ink, and scant time?

Resistant to quantification or even to classification, emotions are a slippery topic for any scholar at any time, and particularly so for historians. While we’d love to be able to assess our historical subjects with a battery of psychological tests, we are unable to interrogate anyone directly. To write a history of emotion, then, requires that we clearly define what constitutes relevant evidence and then devise a reasonably reliable method of analyzing that data. Taking stock of the available sources of information about emotion in past times, we might come up with the following list: abstract discussions about which emotions people ought to privilege or repress (such as the directives contained in etiquette books or the reflections of philosophers and theologians); artistic representations of emotion (contained in anything from novels, to poems, to paintings); concrete depictions of the emotions observers attributed to their contemporaries (noted in everything from personal letters, to court records, to political pamphlets, to newspaper accounts); explicit records of particular emotional utterances by individuals (again, such as might be contained in court transcriptions, correspondence, or public speeches); and finally personal descriptions of emotional experiences (such as might arise in a private letter or diary). To succeed, a history of emotion must take all of these strands of evidence and attempt to braid them together.

With this in mind, I chose to undertake a history of emotion focused on a particular place and time: eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Confining myself to these chronological and geographical boundaries brought significant advantages. For starters, the period saw a huge upsurge of cultural interest in emotion, from the moral philosophers who posited that emotions provided the basis for moral decisions to the Protestant theologians who proposed that emotional awakenings were the basis of vital faith. Artists and writers of every stripe explored the role of emotion in aesthetic productions, giving rise to what would come to be known as the culture of sensibility, while the writers of conduct books laid down careful rules for the regulation of emotion. Meanwhile, colonial Pennsylvania, seat of the largest port city in British America and home to a religiously and ethnically diverse array of people, from Europeans of varied origins to free and enslaved Africans as well as members of Indian nations, offered the opportunity to scrutinize a dynamic set of competing approaches to emotion. Because I chose to restrict my efforts in terms of time and place, I had the opportunity to extend my survey to myriad historical sources and subjects.

Still, crucial decisions about how to find and select records of emotion can only advance us so far in the quest to understand emotion’s history. We still need to find the means to analyze the evidence we amass. And although we most want to know how emotions felt, we are left mostly with evidence of how they were encoded, in one way or another, through language. Since what we are really interested to recover is the substance, not just the utterance, of past emotions, we need some way to make sense of the distance between experience and expression, between the emotions people may have perceived internally and those they voiced externally.

Faced with this difficulty, I took comfort in the fact that many of my eighteenth-century subjects were also acutely aware of the problem. In colonial Pennsylvania, people not only confronted the age-old problem of how to put feelings into words but also became newly conscious of both their choice in the matter and the social implications inherent in their decisions. For example, a rising Pennsylvania merchant, John Smith, mused in his diary one day in 1747, “How painful and grievous my reflections upon this occasion were is more pungently felt than I am either able or willing to describe.” Wracked with doubts about his ability to win the hand of Hannah Logan, daughter of one of the province’s leading men, the 25-year-old Smith depicted his emotions as both “pungently felt” and as more than he was “able or willing to describe.” Emotional life posed a two-fold problem: Smith perceived both a separation between language and subjectivity and the necessity of regulating his efforts to bridge this gap. Remarkably similar concerns were cited by another man named Israel Pemberton, Jr., who after devoting more than a page of a 1749 letter to describing the “ardency of his affection” for his brother confessed to him that “such thoughts have often afforded me pleasant reflection, but this is the first time I have ever expressed them in this manner and I am now in doubt whether I shall not yet keep them to myself.” Reflections, from the painful to the pleasant, might be more easily felt than admitted, more easily experienced than explained.

I came to understand that evaluating the bare existence or final authenticity of any given emotion was more that I or anyone else could accomplish. What I could manage was to look for patterns in the expression and attribution of emotion, to note the words with which people expressed their feelings, to chart when, where, and by whom various emotions were invoked. Given the fact that emotion was a topic of enormous contemporary interest to my subjects, it seemed a fair inference that their choices about when and how to use emotion would carry with them real historic significance.

In the final analysis, the expression of emotion constitutes an exercise of power. In colonial Pennsylvania, elites generally, and men particularly, espoused the idea that genteel feelings provided the basis for civilized life, but that base passions could drive people, especially servile members of the lower orders, to despicable acts. Warnings against what one writer called devotion to the ‘‘momentary Gratification of…selfish and sordid Passions’’ were rife in colonial Pennsylvania. Exasperated masters were wont to ascribe every rebellious impulse of their servants to selfish and willful emotional excess, as in the case of the missing servant woman Elizabeth Ferrall, who was described in a runaway ad of 1762 as “red faced…very talkative, subject to Passion, and easily offended.”

Men and women alike sought to constrain their displays of angry passion and to cultivate their powers of sympathetic feeling. One Quaker leader described colonists’ emotional responsibilities in 1752 by reminding them to bear a “daily cross in opposition to sensual lust…enmity and wrath.’’ As the prominent Anglican physician Thomas Graeme counseled his daughter Elizabeth in 1762 (at a time when her emotional disturbances threatened to become physical ailments): “a cure …must be left to…the power your reason has over all your thoughts and inclinations, joined with the sympathy your friends partake with you.’’

Indians who threatened backcountry colonists were routinely castigated as furious savages driven by unbridled passions. When frontier warfare threatened in 1754, the Pennsylvania Gazette was filled with stories about extreme Indian anger. Polemicists used such descriptions to argue for military preparations in the Quaker colony, as when one writer, after laboriously recounting Indian “cruelties too shocking to be described,” asserted that the only way to “be safe from their Fury” would be to build a “Sort of Fort in every Parish.”

However, given that passions were intimately linked to the capacity for action, they could never be entirely dispensed with. As colonial British Americans endured a moment of acute imperial crisis with the coming of the Seven Years War, the motivating power of the passions to stir the will to act came to seem ever more desirable. Looking to passionate emotion as a source of strength, colonists such as 18-year-old Joseph Shippen (soon to become an officer in the Pennsylvania militia) sought justifications for their stance. “All Passions in general are planted in us for excellent Purposes in human Life,” Shippen wrote in a commonplace book in 1750. “Stoical Apathy is not a human Virtue.” Shippen then went on to quote lines from Alexander Pope: “On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail / Reason the card,[compass] but passion is the gale.”

In competition with Quakers and pietistic sects, in concert and in conflict with local Indian nations, many Pennsylvania men pivoted in their attitudes towards passionate emotions over the course of the eighteenth century. By the close of the Seven Years war in 1763, colonists could declare proudly that memory of their victory should be preserved as “a lasting monument of the Wrath of injured Britons.” Still, individual women continued to avoid direct expressions of anger as unseemly. Likewise, the emotion was seldom imputed to them. Angry emotion thus emerged as a particularly masculine source of strength, one to which Euro-American men would make increasingly exclusive claims.

Indeed, as popular embrace of angry passions evolved alongside continued communal devotion to sympathetic feelings, the polar opposite of the critiques once leveled at Indians would be aimed at enslaved Africans and their descendants. Those held in bondage were represented as naturally spiritless, so emotionally apathetic that they could never stir themselves to embrace liberty. Despite the fact that roughly one out of ten households in the province contained enslaved Africans, the master class seldom made any record of their emotions, never once depicting blacks as loving and carefully avoiding any mention of anger. If the emotions of the enslaved attracted attention at all, they were most often said to display a “down look,” a phrase suggesting that emotional dejection and legal and social subjection naturally went together.

With the onset of the American Revolution, the “spirit of liberty” would come to be claimed as the unique legacy of Euro-Americans, who attributed to themselves alone the ability to achieve an ideal balance of emotion, the better to embrace the ideals of freedom. Consisting of a heady blend that included civic love, mighty anger, and communal sympathy, the “spirit of liberty” was to mediate between the debased insensibility imputed to the enslaved and the excessive spirit ascribed to Indians while also avoiding the ineffectual effeminacy by then associated with English civility. According to the revolutionary code of feeling, love was unknown among ‘‘natural slaves,’’ mercy and sympathy were absent in ‘‘savages,’’ and anger was admirable only in men. The new emphasis on spirit at once opened a rhetorical door to equality for free white men and effectively closed it to Africans, Indians, and women.

Still, the most socially radical of the American revolutionaries, such as Thomas Paine, would ultimately move beyond this circumscribed notion. In place of praising Euro-American men’s unique “spirit,” Paine promoted the argument that all human beings share the same emotions. His famous call to action in the best-selling pamphlet Common Sense appealed to the “passions and feelings” of all “mankind.” This universalizing position posited that every person had the same capacity for feeling and passion alike. Paine’s invocation of emotion provided crucial support for emerging beliefs in the moral equality of all people and thus for the development of theories of natural rights. It promised to make the American Revolution truly “revolutionary.”

If John Smith, with his musings on “pungent feelings,” got me started in thinking about the power of emotion, Joseph Shippen gave me the lines from Pope that would ultimately sum up the significance of emotion in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. Passion was a “gale” force blowing in fierce social and political changes that would affect every element of personal and public life in revolutionary America.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/

Each year, thousands of historical documents detailing the history of the United States are added to the wealth of material already available on the Internet, offering scholars unprecedented access to resources long sequestered in distant libraries and musty archives. And yet, even as the Internet has become an indispensable tool for teachers and researchers, the democratization of knowledge it represents can be bewildering, and even intimidating, in its breadth and complexity. Some organizations, lacking money or expertise, post documents from their collections to the Web with little or no context, collections covering related topics are often not linked together, and the methods used for organizing those collections are as varied as the materials they make available to the public. Under such circumstances, the labor required to make effective use of Web-based historical resources can be daunting. Digital History, a Website created by historian Steven Mintz and sponsored by the Department of History and the College of Education at the University of Houston, seeks to ease that burden by drawing together materials from several different sites and organizing them in a variety of ways that teachers of American history should find useful.

The list of materials available either on or through the Digital History Website is impressive. The core of the Website’s collection comprises over 400 documents secured through the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. These documents cover the full range of the American past, from pre-Columbian societies to the present, and represent a wide variety of voices and experiences. Links to more than 600 images, dozens of audio files of speeches, over 150 landmark Supreme Court cases, newspaper articles from the New York Times archives, maps, and a database of annotated links to other collections on the Web are also included. All of the documents are tied together through a smoothly operating Google search engine embedded in the site. Digital History’s real strength, however, lies in the creative and varied ways in which the site’s creators have organized their materials to suit equally the varied needs of history teachers.

Digital History proceeds from the premise that the best way to spur students’ interest in the study of history is to let students actually do history. In the section of the site entitled “eXplorations, for example, the site’s creators have constructed two dozen “inquiry-based interactive modules” that link primary sources together around a set of thorny historical problems, and encourage students to work through those sources in an effort to draw their own conclusions. “John Brown: Hero or Terrorist,” for instance, links correspondence between John Brown and abolitionist luminaries, images, eyewitness accounts, newspaper articles, audio files of contemporary songs, and court testimony to immerse students in John Brown’s world. Follow-up questions help them to explore both the historical significance of Brown’s life and the meaning of his legacy. All of the documents are thoroughly contextualized both through annotation and through links to an online textbook that provides a broad background for everything on the site. Each “interactive module” also includes a tab under which teachers might find lesson plans and suggestions for varied approaches. Digital History then extends the utility and richness of these documents by taking advantage of the flexibility of the Web-based environment, recycling them in focused essays on a variety of topics related to political, legal, economic, and social history. Many of the documents that appear in “John Brown,” for instance, reappear in repackaged, cross-referenced form, linked to essays, exhibits, and lesson plans on slavery, abolition, and the Civil War. Another section of the Website allows teachers and students to use the documents and images to build Web exhibits that can then be downloaded directly or e-mailed for later use. Still another page offers broader essays, again linked to Digital History’s wealth of primary sources, on Ethnic America, Film and History, Private Life, and Science and Technology. Finally, a section entitled “History Reference Room” provides users with links to an encyclopedia of American history, a glossary of historical terms, writing guides, and historical societies.

While Digital History describes itself as a resource for teachers at all levels, the site’s principle audience will be teachers and students in more advanced U.S. history classes. The emphasis throughout the site is on general knowledge, and the materials, in terms of sources, annotations, essays, and particularly the online textbook, are clearly more suited to the issues and ideas normally presented in freshman university surveys or advanced-placement high school courses than to younger students. By the same token, the emphasis on general knowledge, and on narrative, tends to crowd out deeper discussions of historiographical controversy and recent, cutting-edge scholarship. The online exhibit entitled “America’s Reconstruction,” for instance, relies heavily on, and refers those interested in further study to, a scholarly work now more than twenty years old. More recent scholarship has substantially complicated the field in the last two decades, and while a Web-based format offers an ideal environment for incorporating recent developments, Digital History’s creators have chosen to move in a different direction. In a similar vein, the online textbook, while providing helpful background, replicates the inflexibility of the traditional textbook format both in its necessarily synthetic nature and in its inevitable obsolescence.

As with most educational Websites, Digital History is a work in progress. Some promised sections are still under construction. Others have been allowed to slip into a state of disrepair. Many links, particularly those to outside Websites, are dead or lead to sites that now require registration and administrative passwords. The site’s creator, Steven Mintz, recently left the University of Houston to join the history department at Columbia University, and his departure likely explains the site’s slip in quality. Digital History is an ambitious Website with great potential. It would be a shame if it were allowed to languish.