American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism by Harry S. Stout

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism by Harry S. Stout Brian Luskey American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism. Harry S. Stout. New York: Basic Books, 2017. ISBN 978-0-4650-9898-9. 432 pp., cloth, $24.92. Harry Stout's new book is a narrative history of the Anderson family, which established roots near Louisville, Kentucky, after the Revolutionary War and moved far and wide in service of personal and national ambitions in the early United States. The Andersons were representative of an apparent contradiction that Alexis de Tocqueville observed: Americans were "restless in the midst of their prosperity." Beginning with patriarch Richard Sr. and continuing into the next generation that included Robert, the US hero of Fort Sumter, the Andersons threw themselves headlong into an insatiable national quest for land and affluence. Stout introduces a promising concept, "republican capitalism," to describe the Andersons' expectations for conduct in the economic sphere (xii). Those expectations were contradictory, encouraging both ambition and virtue. These contradictions meant that anxiety would accompany prosperity. The Andersons were often "disillusioned" with the results of both democratic politics and economic competition (xiv). They continuously angled for the main chance, built an immense fortune that was never quite large enough for them, and thought others were advancing at their expense while they dutifully served the nation. Richard Anderson Sr. settled in frontier Kentucky on the Virginia land claims won from his service in the Continental Army and started a lucrative surveying business. His eldest son, Richard Jr., maintained and added to the family's wealth through land purchases in the northwest, and represented the hemispheric ambitions of the nation in his diplomatic negotiations with South American republics. Another Anderson son, Robert, fought on behalf of US territorial aggrandizement in Florida, Texas, and Mexico. The land speculations of Charles Anderson should be of particular interest to the readers of this journal, intertwined as they were with the debates about slavery and territorial expansion that produced the Civil War. His political career illuminates the contradictions of a border state conservatism that was at once antislavery and opposed to slave emancipation. Having moved from Dayton, Ohio, to settle a tract on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas, Charles ran afoul of growing secession sentiment there for his rousing speeches opposing the slave power. Driven from Texas, he received a hero's welcome in New York City in the weeks after his brother Robert received plaudits there for his defense of Fort Sumter. Returning to Ohio, Charles accepted the colonelcy of a Union regiment and was wounded at the Battle of Stones River. After he was elected lieutenant governor of Ohio during the war, he gave an address at Gettysburg on the same day that Abraham Lincoln did, but his sentiments diverged from the president's. He contended cautiously that the nation's [End Page 387] "new birth of freedom" would be worked out in God's own time. In fact, Lincoln's support of emancipation led Charles Anderson to oppose the president's reelection and postbellum efforts to give black men citizenship rights. Charles's brother William doubled down on the family's opposition to emancipation by renouncing his tepid wartime unionism and agreeing to survey land on behalf of Maximilian's Mexico in preparation for the settlement of a colony of former Confederates there. Stout's purpose is to remind readers that land speculation was at the core of capitalist transformation in the nineteenth century. Certainly, that was the case, and speculations about the republican independence that land ownership offered were central to the conflict between white northerners and southerners about the western territories in the decade prior to the Civil War. And yet, Stout does not sustain an argument about republican capitalism through the text. His approach, rather, is to take us through the correspondence between the Andersons and their wives, business partners, legislative friends and rivals, and petitioners for loans and assistance. These letters shape, pace, and structure the narrative. This organizational strategy reveals the significance of capital, credit, and economic connections in the daily lives of citizens in the early American republic. But...