A Mean-Spirited Merchant Bringing Ribbons and Rum to a Messy World

Abstract

A Mean-Spirited Merchant Bringing Ribbons and Rum to a Messy World Paul G. E. Clemens (bio) Ann Smart Martin . Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xiv + 260 pp. Figures, colored plates, tables, notes, essay on sources, index. $55.00. One way to appreciate the enormous accomplishment of Ann Smart Martin's illumination of late eighteenth-century consumerism in the Virginia backcountry is with some snapshots from this multi-dimensional book. One is of the female slave, Suckey, owned by Richard Stith, going to John Hook's New London (Bedford County) store to exchange four pounds of "cotton in the seed" for a looking glass (mirror) and a ribbon. A second is of Hook, the backcountry trader this book is built around, suing in the early 1780s to recover the value of two steers taken by an army commissary during the Revolutionary War and being humiliated in court by the defendants' famous lawyer, Patrick Henry. A third, at the end of the book, asks us to imagine Sam Walton and his Wal-Mart empire as the successful legacy of the Scottish store system in eighteenth-century Virginia. Suckey's story makes us consider the meaning of consumer goods, as it highlights two items resonant with significance to those who procured, used, or observed them. It makes us consider, as well, someone who, at first glance, is an unlikely consumer: a female slave of a local planter. Hook's clash with Patrick Henry meant one thing to Hook—another chance for his unscrupulous neighbors to parley their patriotism into a way to avoid paying their debts—while it meant another to those backcountry neighbors who saw in Hook the embodiment of every stereotype they had about Scottish merchants: "cheap, quarrelsome, and greedy" (p. 196). Thus it makes us realize that there was a politics and a culture to buying in the eighteenth century. The Wal-Mart analogy invites speculation about just how the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy, with its worldwide linkages, differed from today's globalization. Martin's point of entry to this study is her examination of the surviving store ledgers of John Hook. Hook came to Virginia in the mid–eighteenth century as an apprentice to a Glasgow tobacco firm. He stayed on as an employee, junior partner, and independent storekeeper. He died in 1809—wealthy, disliked, and [End Page 332] quickly forgotten, except for his unfortunate run-in with Patrick Henry. His store ledgers document business at one or more stores in operation immediately before the American Revolution and in the two decades following the war. Martin's aim is to triangulate the relationship between Hook, his customers, and the objects in this world; and as a specialist in material culture, she has written a different type of book about consumerism—one that pays particular attention to the objects that people needed and desired, the stores that sold these goods, and the homes in which they were used. The first chapter locates Hook economically and chronologically in the world of Atlantic trade. His was a frustrating life: he began by sweeping floors; spent too many years as a partner in a family firm that was willing to cast him aside to help out their own; and ended up, as revolution rippled through the backcountry, hauled from his house by a mob largely of his own customers, accused of treason as a Tory, and threatened with tarring and feathering. Martin believes it true that Hook was not very likeable, for his letters capture a "pessimistic man, driven to succeed, sensitive to perceived slights, and quick to complain" (p. 34). And to top it all off, when he finally got his chance, even as he toyed with the idea of returning to Scotland and formed a new partnership in 1771 with David Ross that finally gave him a degree of independence, the credit crisis of 1772 undercut the tobacco consignment trade and brought to an end more than two decades of economic prosperity in the Chesapeake. Yet he seems to have prospered, for he stayed on, even as other Scottish merchants fled back to their homeland. In the years...