Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf

Abstract

Reviewed by: Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf Cassandra Good Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis. Edited by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf. (Williamsburg, Va.: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. [viii], 422. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6563-4.) Open the acknowledgments section of nearly any book on gender and sexuality (and plenty more on politics) in the early American republic published during the past several decades, and Jan Lewis's name will appear. Lewis had an outsize influence on these fields through both her mentorship and her published writings. This volume does a great service in compiling and contextualizing thirteen of her previously published articles, many of which were scattered across different edited volumes. Reading Lewis's articles together shows both the coherence of and the evolution in her thinking over the course of nearly forty years. Lewis's work was often ahead of its time, engaging early on with the gender and cultural turns as well as with new approaches to the study of emotional history. The book begins with a short introduction by Lewis's close friends and fellow Jefferson scholars Peter S. Onuf and Annette Gordon-Reed, followed by four thematic sections. It closes with an acknowledgments section by Lewis's husband, Barry Bienstock, that sheds light on his late wife's relationships with various scholars in the field. The volume came together as a tribute to Lewis and a legacy for her granddaughters after her death in 2018, at a time when Lewis was still actively producing important scholarship. The first section, "Gender in the Early American Republic," is introduced by Carolyn Eastman and demonstrates Lewis's interest in exploring the political roles women played during this period. While Lewis's article "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic" is well known, her articles on women's pervasive political presence in early national Washington, D.C., and the brief period of women's suffrage in New Jersey between 1776 and 1807 are equally important. Her extended engagement with Jürgen Habermas is somewhat an artifact of its time, but all three articles are key parts of a conversation that more often features Linda K. Kerber, Catherine Allgor, and Rosemarie Zagarri. Nicole Eustace introduces the section on emotional history, rightly noting that Lewis's work anticipated a field that has flourished in recent years. The section's first article, "Domestic Tranquillity and the Management of Emotion among the Gentry of Pre-Revolutionary Virginia," largely echoes the first chapter of Lewis's book The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (New York, 1983). In a piece titled "Mother's Love: The Construction of an Emotion in Nineteenth-Century America," Lewis explores what she calls "emotionology of motherhood" in the antebellum era, fusing ideas about religion, gender, and emotion (p. 144). The final article, featuring Angelica Schuyler Church, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson, focuses on the intersection of politics and emotion. Lewis also brought her interest in the politics of the early republic to her work on the Constitution. As David Waldstreicher notes in the third section's introduction, Lewis convincingly demonstrated the central importance of [End Page 760] gender and slavery in Revolutionary and constitutional thought (p. 175). All three articles in this section demonstrate Lewis's rigorous attention to language and logic, clearly elucidating the ways women and enslaved people served as props in larger debates about representation, citizenship, and sectionalism. In the final section, introduced by Onuf and Gordon-Reed, Lewis applies her understanding of gender, family, politics, and slavery to Thomas Jefferson. All four of these articles come from edited volumes and may not be well known to readers, but the standout of the group, "White Jeffersons," deserves attention. First published in 1999, the essay offers an impressionistic, sometimes almost elegiac reflection on what Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings (which was, at the time, newly proved) meant for Jefferson...