Forgotten Founders

America's Forgotten Founders
© 2011 ed. Gary Gregg II
185 pages

After reading several thoughtful full-length biographies in this series, I expected the same quality in miniature from this collection. That is not the case at all; after a lengthy opening essay on what constitutes a founding father, and why some are forgotten and others not, the reader is treated to ten brief articles about revolutionary-area personalities. Some of these men are unequivocally  not forgotten, like Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine. A few others are more obscure, but the information included here is so slight that one could just as well read any entry in a biographical dictionary about them. I liked the organization of each article: a biographical sketch, an outline of their chief contributions, and an excerpt of their writing. There's just not enough content here. One gentleman's writing excerpt is the Preamble of the Constitution. The full-length volumes in this series, particularly American Cicero and The Cost of Liberty are much more helpful.


The men considered:  James Wilson, George Mason, Gouverneur Morris, John Jay, Roger Sherman, John Marshall, John Dickinson, Tom Paine, Patrick Henry, and John Witherspoon. According to the introduction, many names were submitted and considered, but the editor chose the names which were suggested most often. The native American and female contributors teased at in the introduction don't actually get sketches.

The First Congress

The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government
© 2016 Fergus Bordewich
416 pages

The first attempt at creating an American confederation resulted in a chronically bankrupt and impotent organization which no one took seriously. So mightily did it flounder that a convention was called to address its structural problems, and by way of solution they created the Constitution. Thus did the American experiment begin anew,  but a superior legal start didn't guarantee steady success. Ultimately its success would depend on the men responsible for turning ink on paper into a functional government, principally the men of the first congress who had a world of policy to establish and precedents to set.   Drawing on journals and official records, Mr. Bordewich has produced here a month-by-month chronicle of the first congress’s work in and out of session, as sectional rivalries and opposing philosophies of government went head to head for dominance. Ultimately progress came through  deal-making, and some vital decisions were made not on the floor of Federal Hall, but in the dining rooms of the influential.  Bordewich succeeds in turning months of argument amid miserable weather into a fascinating narrative.

The challenges facing the first government of the United States were outstanding: the union consisted of eleven states, many with hazy western borders. Along those borders were encamped restive Indian nations, notably the Creek, and the armed forces of Britain. The states bickered with one another over water resources and were themselves awash in debt,   North Carolina and Rhode Island had yet to agree to adopt the Constitution, and the presumably-elected president George Washington was confined to bed.    Major political issues faced the nation: what to do with the debt, for instance, how to strike in practice the balance of power between the Legislature and the executive, where to established the federal capital, and what do to with the Indians. To make matters worse, the Quakers insisted on sending petitions to Congress to address slavery, even though the Constitution forbad federal action on it for twenty years after its adoption.   Each of these issues had powerful personalities eager to fight with one another.  The siting of a national capital, for instance, wasn’t merely a division between north and South.   New York and Pennsylvania were as jealous of one another as they were of the South; even John Adams loathed the thought of gracing Philadelphia or its environs with the capital.   Issues like the debt were not simply about money:  the question of whether the Federal government should take responsibility for the individual war debts of the states turned Madison from a Federalist into a Republican: he knew if the federal government took responsibility for that debt,  it would assume greater authority over the states themselves.   Slavery’s volatility needs no introduction, driving the union as it did to war.

Arguing these issues are a score of personalities, some famous but others generally overlooked. Madison is central, of course, as one of the Constitution’s key contributors and the man later tasked with presenting amendments proposed by the States to Congress. He dominates early, functioning as Washington’s prime minister in the House,  though later loses ground to Hamilton as financial matters rear their head first in the matter of the assumption of state debt, and later in the establishment of a national bank.  Other notable characters are Oliver Ellsworth, who helped establish the structure of the federal and Supreme Courts, and an antifederalist William. Maclay whose diary is a major source.   Washington and John Adams, though not congressmen,  also feature.

Bordewich's favor is with the victors,  seeing the triumph of a strong executive and Hamilton’s financial schemes over agrarian skepticism as a step forward for the United States in moving toward enlightened, modern capitalism.   His bias is not overt, though one might make a drinking game out of his referring to the Hemingses as enslaved.  In addition to the thoughtful history that makes it clear how fundamental some of the Congress’ decisions were,  Bordewich’s history also shares quite a few fascinating little tidbits. Poor Rhode Island, for instance, was bullied into joining the Union:  late into the first Congress’ term, the Rhode Island legislature failed to ratify the Constitution. Not only did Washington snub them during his tour, but the surrounding states ceased communication and transportation into the little state.   Also of interest: Thomas Jefferson learned of his appointment as Secretary of State only by reading the papers when he arrived at home!  

Bordewich’s history isn’t quite as lively as Joseph Ellis, but it is very close, a significant feat  given its greater ambition.  It makes the first Congress’ accomplishments clear, not only in establishing a new national government from the ground up –  figuring out what was needed, and how to fit it within the limits of the Constitution – but in creating union  through compromise, the most famous example  being a southern site for the capital in exchange for the wealthy cotton states agreeing to let the federal government assume the collective debt of the states.   The First Congress is superior popular history, serious, but personable still.

Related:

• Founding Brothers; The Quartet, Joseph Ellis
• James Madison and the Making of America, Kevin Gutzman
• Alexander Hamilton, Rob Chernow

Cod

Cod: A Biography of a Fish that Changed the World
© 1997 Mark Kurlansky
294 pages

In Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky detailed the surprisingly impactful career of a table condiment on human history. The importance of salted fish, both as food and as an industry, popped up again and again, not surprising given that five years earlier Kurlansky had penned an entire book on cod. For coastal peoples, fishing is more than a leisure sport done at the river; it is the sustenance of life itself, the foundation of regional economies.  North Atlantic cod have been especially important in this regard, keeping food on the table in England, Spain, Iceland, and New England.  Town seals featured the codfish prominently; in Boston, an artifical one hung from the rafters of city hall.  In the mid-20th century, several European powers engaged in "cod wars" in which their commerical and quasi-military coast guards grappled with one another, ramming their ships and cutting trawl lines.  They were fighting not just to ensure that their respective nations got a good piece of the cod pie, but that the pie would be there in the future. This history of cod has an ecological point, for man's rapacious appetitite and creative gift for fashioning technology to maximize yields has frequently driven populations into peril.    Cod demonstates the problem of the commons, in which resources held in public are abused and exhausted; not until nations began aggressively quartering off sections of the ocean and fighting off the competition were populations of the fish possible to measure and protect.  Despite moratoriums and restrictive quotas, the codfish have not rebounded as quickly as expected;  their future seems to lie in 'farms' (like catfish ponds), a somewhat depressing spectre.

Related:
Russ Roberts of EconTalk interviewed the CEO of a seafood restaurant enterprise this past Monday, discussing the problems of the fish industry today.  He followed it today with a podcast on the oyster business. (Roberts has also interviewed people about the potato chip and bottled milk businesses.)

The Whiskey Rebels

The Whiskey Rebels
© 2008 David Liss
544 pages

"You have my word as a gentleman."
"You are no gentleman!"
"Then you have my word as a scoundrel, which, I know, opens up a rather confusing paradox that I have neither the time nor inclination to disentangle."

The Whiskey Rebels is a story of love, rage, and deceit set during the frontier days of the American republic. Two people, an amiable but disgraced spy and a border widow who was an aspiring author until she had to settle for instigating another revolution,  are drawn into collusion and conflict by a sinister scheme. Although the title brings to mind the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791,  David Liss' first foray into American  historical fiction is not simultaneously his first war novel. Whiskey Rebels is instead a mystery-business thriller in the vein of The Coffee Trader and A Conspiracy of Paper: at its heart is a complicated banking scheme one must either be a financier or an author to cook up, centering on the nascent Bank of America.

Rebels is unusual in having a split narrative, as Joan Maycott and Ethan Saunders take turns in telling their own individual stories that will converge in time  amid frantic chases and gunfire. Joan is a young society woman who is too clever and audacious for her era; after she and her husband were tricked into forfeiting his backpay as a Continental soldier to take up farming on the frontier (wild west Pennsylvania),  their lives were destroyed by greedy speculators despite having turned lead into gold through the whiskey trade. Her plight, which is set several years before Saunders', works forward to intersect with his back in Philadelphia, during the nation's first financial crisis.  Saunders is introduced, tellingly, at a bar where he is about to fight over a woman. It is another woman who will get him into real trouble, though; his old fiance, who he left after he was accused of being a traitor. She's married in the years since they parted ways, and now her husband is missing and her children's lives are threatened. Would he be so kind as to help?

Saunders isn't exactly a knight in shining armor, but he is the sentimental sort. He may dote on the bottle like it was mother's milk and lie with the ease of breathing, but there is one woman he loves and one cause for which he will be utterly true: hers. Finding her wayward husband means attracting the attention of many nasty men who do not want a disgraced drunk roaming through their business, and who have a lot of money to lose if he doesn't let sleeping dogs lie. Fortunately,  there are conspiracies within conspiracies here, and some parties see some use in steering Saunders to act in their interest to undermine the others. This is not a book for shoring up one's faith in human nature, as all of the tale's characters are busy lying to one another as they manipulate the others into doing their bidding, sometimes pursuing mutual goals. It's a you-lie-to-me, I-lie-to-you game that ends up in stabbings, hangings, shootings, fires, and one grenade.  The temporal split works to the novel's advantage, as the main plot is so exhaustively entangled that it takes five hundred pages for firearms and fisticuffs to break out.  The reader is allowed to work his way into the thick of things, given rest periods to read about Joan's misfortunes in the wilderness -- fire, Indian raids, and fighting violent revenuers.  Eventually her plight will drive her back to Philadelphia for revenge, only  now she's no society woman whose idea of mischief is inviting men to take her on unsupervised walks. She's been hardened by the west, determined to destroy a cabal and its government that has become an enemy of its people.

Hell has no fury as a woman scorned, but where is the road from the frontier to Philadelphia and Alexander Hamilton's new bank?  The capital for said bank was to be raised with a heavy excise on whiskey, a tax heavy enough to drive frontier settlers who were just getting by into ruin.  That will drive Joan in part, but there are other factors and malfactors involved, and by and by wretched connections to Hamilton's treasury department are discovered.  Liss handles the intersection of our two characters exceptionally well, as Joan appears as a dinner party attendee in Ethan's story, becoming increasingly important in his own tale as well as hers.  Saunders and Joan will emerge to have a mutual enemy, but conflicting goals; while Saunder's efforts put him in tense cahoots with Hamilton, attempting to prevent the government's new financial plan from being wrecked, Joan sees Hamilton as the Archfiend himself.  The merge  makes the reader root for two people simultaneously who will act at cross purposes; here we have a novel whose most sympathetic characters are the other's antagonist. Unfortunately after they meet the thicket of lies and confabulations becomes even denser. Mercifully, the jibber-jabber about stockjobbing and buying six-percents so the four-percents will float is tempered by an amiable and hilarious lead. Sure, the noble but charming rogue is something of a trope at this point, but even when he's deep in his cups and acting heinously, the reader is beguiled into supporting him all the same.  The authorship itself is playful, the fourth wall threadbare -- at one point Saunders apologizes to the reader for introducing so many women as the most beautiful in the world, but he can't help it. He is astonished to run into so many femme fatales, himself -- it's not his fault!

Although parts of The Whiskey Rebels were strained,  it has immense appeal in having Hamilton as a side character, with Washington and Jefferson in bits parts as well. The other characters are a mix of historical and fictional, with the mutual enemy -- the author of all this misery and drama -- being a factual speculator. Rebel's' exhausting plot twists are eased with humor; it wasn't the story I expected to read, but was well-done and entertaining all the same.

Related:
Alexander Hamilton, Rob Chernow
The Coffee Trader,  A Conspiracy of Paper; David Liss. Historical business thrillers involving speculation and beautiful women.  Hmm, I sense a pattern.

The Adventures of Henry Thoreau

 The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond
© 2014 Michael Sims
384 pages

Shortly before retreating for two years to his self-built cabin at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire. A simple attempt at having fish for lunch reduced 300 acres of woodlands to charcoal, and very nearly ignited Concord.  The village pariah would eventually be pardoned, for the town had known him before his attempt at civic ignition;  they knew his reputation as the nice if odd boy from a respectable family of teachers and pencil merchants. Before Henry David Thoreau loomed large over American literary history,  eventually helping inspire the environmental and civil rights movements, Henry was that nice if odd boy. The Adventures of Henry Thoreau examines Henry's life outside of Walden,  giving a history of his life as he lived it -- as a boy, as an awkward, courting teenager, as a adventure-thirsty young man who explored the whole lengths of rivers with his brother.

Michael Sims puts a human face to the man who has cast such a long shadow over American history. Here, Henry is no icon, but a frequently distracted student who barely gets into Harvard and who itches to escape it. Throughout his life, his abiding passion is the outdoors. Raised a Unitarian, Henry was already predisposed to look askance at traditional religion. For him, spirituality was an individual journey, and he communed with God best in the outdoors, skipping church to take long walks in the wilderness. He idealized Nature, and revered the native Americans as having lived more closely connected to it. But his lust for the natural wasn't limited to getting "moony-eyed over mountains";  his mind also had a scientific cast, and those long hours of meticulous study resulted in one work of technical import.  These aren't solitary quests, either; young Henry is companionable. He takes long walks into the woods with  remarkable friends, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne;  spends weeks on a river with his brother, and even takes classes of children into the wild to teach them how to observe,  investigate, and come to understand the world around them. As the books wear on, however, these connections fall away; he leaves his work as a teacher, his brother dies, and his object of affection rejects him on the advice of her father that Henry's prospects are too dismal to make him a fit husband. Throughout, he escapes increasingly more into solitude, and though he dies at home, with family watching over him, he seems a lonely figure sometimes substituting philosophy for people. He sought an authentic life free of distractions, and produced extraordinary work as a thinker -- but in light of the ordinary happiness of his early years, one wonders if the later monkishness was truly necessary.

Related:
I to Myself: from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
"On Civil Disobedience", Henry David Thoreau

* "moony-eyed over mountains", as a skeptical professor of mine once described those who identify as spiritual, but not religious

Runaway Slaves

Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation
© 2000 John Hope Franklin, Loren Schweninger
480 pages

Easily the most horrible aspect of American history, is the institution of slavery.  Indentured servitude had been a historical norm for centuries before, of course,  usually the mark of war, but in America it was paired with racial ideology to become utter evil.  Although it eventually perished in 1865 at the hands of the 13th amendment, those whose lives it claimed were not necessarily willing to wait for freedom to be granted;  instead, they took it. In Runaway Slaves, historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger establish how chronic absenteeism and escape were throughout the slave states, revealing the institution's gross unnaturalness and complete incompatibility with the human spirit.

Precious few people in the 21st century need to be convinced that slavery was wretched, and the few who maintain that it was a necessary evil, or that its abuses were exaggerated out of proportion, would do well to confront Runaway Slaves, presenting as it does not only one human story after another about men, women, and even children resisting tyranny over their lives, and 'voting with their feet' by  escaping into the wild, but statistical evidence that reveals how persistent a problem runaways were.  Readers might expect the abused to flee, and so they did, but here too are stories of slaves who were treated 'well' -- plantation pets, like the few Jefferson kept in his mansion and doted on.  Even when provided with an allowance, comfortable quarters,  and easy work, slaves still persisted in running off from time to time ,to the utter bewilderment of owners who concluded that some Africans were simply born mad.  The runaways were not simply driven by some principled insistence that they ought to be free;  the most common motive cited here is reunification with family.  Of course, the data is incomplete; many runaways simply disappeared into history, and their motives and stories will never be told. Most did not attempt to to transverse the entire country to make into a free state, or Canada; instead, Franklin and Schweninger report, they either lingered around the edges of plantations (to be close to family, or help them escape), or migrated to a large city like Baltimore or New Orleans, where they could lose themselves in the masses that included substantial populations of free blacks. Because the data the authors work with spans most of the 19th century, readers will also appreciate slavery evolving as an institution;   legal terms of servitude that expire give way to perpetual bondage, and captured African tribesmen still bearing the tattoos and piercings of their tribe's customs become the fathers of generations born into slavery, knowing nothing else.

Runaway Slaves is a solid piece of historical writing, providing human faces to the many thousands gone,  turning a multitude once viewed as a factor of production into lives who must be reckoned.  As soul-wearying as it can be to realize how many lives were wasted away in bondage, there is also room for hope in the fact that resistance was never absent from the scene. Regardless of beatings or bread and circuses, men are, and of a right ought to be, Free.

Nullification

Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century
© 2011 Thomas E. Woods, Jr
309 pages

In a game of word association, chances are that 'nullification' would not meet with flattering replies. Nullification is a word associated with the Civil War, or the Civil Rights movement, of the southern states blocking attempts at racial equality by insisting on their own right to declare a federal law unconstitutional, and thus null and void. But nullification has a richer and nobler history than its modern critics realize; in Nullification,  Tom Woods explains the legal basis of the principle, demonstrates its use throughout early American history, and points out areas in which the states have adopted it as a tool today.

Nullification's sanction, Woods argues, rests in the little-c constitution of the United States. Though today the fifty states may seem like mere departments of the national polity, in the beginning this was not so. The united States began life not as a nation, but an agreement between thirteen, and with specific purposes. Treaties from the period enumerate the individual states, demonstrating their primacy. If not the States, who may declare a given law unconstitutional? The Supreme Court has assumed that role ('judicial review'), but as part of the government, how can it be expected to police itself?  The individual States, however, have existence without the national government, and it exists, or was supposed to have existed, as their handmaiden -- not the other way around. Theirs is the right to declare the actions of Congress, the President, and the Court unconstitutional -- but theirs is likewise the responsibility to create measures for frustrating the government's knavish tricks.

This they have done, from as early as the Adams presidency til today. Nullification first came onto the scene after the Federalist congress put into effect the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made defaming the government and its officials a crime. (Defaming the government was, until the rise of baseball, the national sport, and especially loved by Jefferson, Hamilton, and their respective parties.) Straightaway governors began throwing up barriers to federal agents attempting to arrest mouthy citizens. They did the same when, during the Napoleonic Wars, President Jefferson imposed an embargo on Europe -- an embargo that might have driven American trade to its knees. The reality and the threat of nullification continued to force the hands of overambitious executives. Today, legislative sabotage continues as states decriminalize marijuana use even as the federal  government continues to insist it's a no-no.   Given that the US attorney general is now retreating from parts of the War on Drugs (starting with that odd habit of theirs of seizing  property that has been declared guilty of participating in a crime), the principle seems just as potent.

Nullification is a small book (~165 pages, not counting the documents appended to it), but is a very worthy introduction to compact theory, in which the States are legally superior and not subordinate to the national state. It's also a respectable attempt to rescue nullification from its historical taint, but loses some points given that Woods never squarely addresses the threatened use of it during the 1960s, maintaining only that nullification is a weapon that can be used unjustly as easily as it can be for justice.  I was also hoping for other kinds of nullification to be covered (like jury nullification), but Woods focused only on formal measures by the States themselves.  Altogether it's a solid intro to the subject, and I am all for throwing wrenches into the machinery.


Related:
The Liberty Amendments, Mark Levin,  all of which aim to restore to the fifty states their original power over the central government.

The Men Who United the States

 The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
© 2013 Simon Winchester
496 pages

The Men who United the States is a storied account of how the American people came to realize their ‘manifest destiny’, from the explorers who plied rivers and mapped the vast expanses to the technological tools that knit the continent together. It is organized thematically, utilizing the five elements of Chinese mythology: wood,  earth, water, fire, and metal.  Although most sections cover the full expanse of American history, the focus of each moves forward; ‘metal’ largely concerns revolutions in communications technology,  culminating in the Internet  while ‘fire’ covers the effects of the steam and combustion engines. Politics and war are downplayed: this is the tale of explorers and inventors whose dangerous  and enterprising deeds made political dreams a factual reality.  Winchester is a personable author, often inserting his attempts to retrace the tracks of some intrepid but doomed explorer along mountain passes or through river rapids. It's an odd element in a work of history, but works well enough despite sometimes bordering on off-topic.  Winchester makes for a winsome host through the annals of American explorers, and his work of adventure, history, and technological progress are sure to find a warm reception among readers.

Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton
© 2005 Rob Chernow
832 pages

Who is  Alexander Hamilton? The greatest founder save George Washington, or the Antichrist?  The latter is the view of Hamilton one may derive from the accounts of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, whereas Rob Chernow’s biography views him in a far more sympathetic light. Though not quite a hagiography, it rings a tribute to a man whose accomplishments are impressive, even to his critics. Hamilton’s life is the story of a boy twice orphaned (losing not only his parents, but two sets of guardians), who emigrated to the American colonies and became not only a leading member of the Revolution, but an architect of its destiny, whose power and influence rivaled and even surpassed that of some of the early presidents. His opinions and policies were at the heart of the controversies and feuds of the early Republic, and though shot down in a duel, his legacy is all but dead, and this grand treatment of his life is a powerful aid to understanding the first decades of the United States' life.

 Unlike most of the founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton was not born in the American colonies, at least not the 'proper' thirteen. He hailed instead from the isle of Nevis, in the West Indies, growing up amid scenes of the sugar trade, of ships from various nations plying the Caribbean routes, hauling trade goods and slaves hither and yon, between islands baked by the sun and hit alternatively with bouts of hurricanes and disease. Orphaned early on, Hamilton found employment as a clerk in a trading firm, and his success there led him to New York, working first on the firm's behalf and then on his own, as he became involved in the colonies' struggle for independence. After completing his education there, Hamilton put his mind to work outside the exchequer's office, engaged as a lawyer and putting his pen to work arguing for independence. During the Revolutionary War, he served first as a captain of artillery, and then as George Washington's attache, a position which forged his destiny. By war's end, he had become Washington's de facto chief of staff, and when 'his excellency' became president,  their long relationship and the strength of Hamilton's writings on politics and economics (including most of The Federalist Papers) earned him a seat in the first cabinet, as Secretary of the Treasury.  There, he helped to create a nation, pushing forward a much-hated plan for the new union to absorb the debts of the old, a move that established the young country's credit and strengthened the position of the federal government over the states.  Hamilton's belief in a strong, efficient central government made him the foe of states-rights proponents like Jefferson, who saw in him the antithesis the revolution. Hamilton and they engaged in ferocious battles of words, railing against one another  in the press. When Washington retired and John Adams became president, it was Hamilton, and not Adams, who led the Federalist party against the attacks of Jefferson and the anti-federalist Republicans. (Such a fact was very much not appreciated by John Adams, whose cabinetmen stayed in constant correspondence with Hamilton and forwarded his advice as their own)  Although Hamilton accomplished his dream of a strong union backed by a strong currency (backed by a strong, national bank), his reputation fell into disrepute through his constant bickering with others, especially after he engaged in a no-holds barred assault on then-president John Adams, splintering the federalists and allowing for decades of Republican domination. His highly colorful career -- festooned with accomplishments and embarrassment -- came to an end in 1804, when he engaged Vice President Aaron Burr in a duel and was shot down, dying in the same fashion as his son a year prior.

 So, the story of Alexander Hamilton is something kin to a rags-to-riches tale, or it would if he actually died rich.  His ascent is stupefying, and Chernow's admiration is hard for a reader not to share. Although I'd expected the book to sing Hamilton's praises, Chernow chronicles the man's persistent faults faithfully. He does couch the criticism in such a way as to soften the blows, frequently mourning over dear Hamilton's all-too frequent lapses in judgment the way readers might tut-tut over their grandparents' foibles.  Chief among them was Hamilton's ability to hold a grudge, and the power grudges held over his opinion, moving him to rail against  opponents so scathingly that even John Adams was taken aback.  Chernow doesn't fault Hamilton's basic approach to governance, which tended toward the cautious: Hamilton was the anti-Jefferson, and promoted more a strong, centralzied government run by 'cool, cool, considerate men', rather than a republic of states run by the mob, which is what he imagined democracy to be.  Although Jefferson & company's skepticism of Hamilton's strongman approach is warranted (as is skepticism of Jefferson's own approach),  his fiscal accomplishments seem to validate them. Chernow goes to bat for his chosen subject, engaging in little arguments to defend claims that Hamilton was corrupt or intending to replace the government with the rule of some Hannoverian scion. Of course, considering he once entertained ideas for conquering South America in the event of a French victory during the Napoleonic wars, maybe his enemies' paranoia was justified. The degree to which Jefferson and others engaged in conspiracy theories with Hamilton at the center is baffling , but Jefferson is as much the villain of the piece as Hamilton is the hero. If Chernow is fair with Hamiliton, being honest with his faults, he is less so with the man's foes.  John Adams receives the kindest treatment,  notable given how hostile he became toward 'that Creole bastard' during his adminstration.

Alexander Hamilton is quite the biography. Not only was his a life fascinating to behold -- an orphaned turned national puppetmaster -- but through it, readers get a glimpse at how debates over the fate of the nation were enacted. Hamilton's personal life is included, but shoved to the side: this is a work about the relationships between Hamilton and other founders, especially George Washington and their relation to the first decade of American politics: it emphasizes policy more than cozy scenes of family life.  Chernow is an able storyteller, and proved to be more fair than I gave him credit for.  This is a massive piece, but I found it very much worth my while, given how anti-Hamiltonian my previous Revolutionary War reads have been. I think next year I shall have to read a biography of Jefferson, since he's much abused in both treatments of John Adams' and Alexander Hamilton's lives.

           

The Artificial River

The Artificial River: the Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1867
© 1997 Carol Sheriff
272 pages

At the dawn of a new century, the two-decade old American republic stood hemmed in between storm-tossed Atlantic ocean and the towering Appalachian mountains. Beyond them lay the west, sparsely settled but full of potential, stifled only by the dangers and isolation of the wilderness. But then the state of New York summoned the will and resources to create a river where there had been none before, to turn the woods and rolling hills to an avenue for expansion. The Erie Canal opened the west to development and changed the nation’s history, but how did it effect the lives of the people who used it and lived along its course? Such is the question Carol Sheriff attempts to answer in The Artificial River: the Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress.

The Erie Canal was the first major infrastructure project in the early Republic, and changed the relationship between the state government and the people in a variety of ways. First, Sheriff demonstrates, it led to a stronger governmental hand in economic affairs, but the Canal Board allowed people a more direct voice in government than the House of Representatives. “The people” included farmers who were annoyed that access to their land had been limited or the land itself diminished by flooding and the actions of laborers, but the phrase also covered businessmen who were beginning to link their own prosperity with ‘the nation’s” and eager to enlist government financial support in matters that would – quite coincidentally, of course! – improve their own business prospect while furthering the nation's interests. It didn’t include so much the laborers who made the canal possible – the men who dug the ‘ditch’ by hand an in era without mechanized tools, and the boys who helped run the boats up and down the canal, seven days a week, finding their pleasures in the taverns and brothels when they could, and constantly under attack by the wealthy as the scourge of society or viewed as a band of sinners who needed to be saved from themselves by the burgeoning Temperance movement.

Aside from the government becoming more involved in the affairs of life, the canal's presence in people's lives drove home the idea of what was possible. The 19th century would be one dominated by the ever-forward March of Technology. A century earlier, a given technological triumph might be enjoyed only by a particularly wealthy lord or merchant, but in the 19th century progress became a democratic institution. The Erie Canal's swiftness was not limited to the the wealthy: the locks opened and the river flowed for all, and it became an active link to "civilization" for the initial settlers even as it served as the agent of the west's own civilization. Indeed, so quickly did the area along the canal become civilized that it was soon taken for granted and its annual winter closings were greeted not with stoic understanding, but annoyance -- like that which cell phone users experience when experiencing choppiness. The fact that they have their personal phone which is operating by sending signals into space is utterly lost on them in comparison to the impression that they have been inconvenienced. So when the railroads followed the canal down the paths it blazed through wilderness and rendered the marvelous waterway obsolete within only a few decades, no one thought it strange When Thomas Jefferson first heard the proposal to build the canal, he snorted that it would make a fine project in a century. He could have never imagined how much change would be wrought before then.

The Artificial River differs from most Erie histories in that its focus is not on the politics and history of the canal's construction and operation  but on the people whose lives it touched. There it demonstrates what a transitional period the United States was in, shifting from an agrarian republic run by a relative elite to a bustling, noisy commercial democracy where property qualifications were increasingly passe, and the future of the country was in the now very noticeable working class. It's very fine history as far as its focus goes, but for a fuller appreciation of the canal I would probably read it along with other books.

Related:
Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and American Empire, Gerared Koeppel