From Captives to Consuls: Three Sailors in Barbary and Their Self-Making across the Early American Republic, 1770–1840 by Brett Goodin

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Captives to Consuls: Three Sailors in Barbary and Their Self-Making across the Early American Republic, 1770–1840 by Brett Goodin Konstantin Dierks From Captives to Consuls: Three Sailors in Barbary and Their Self-Making across the Early American Republic, 1770–1840. By Brett Goodin. Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. 224 pages. Cloth, ebook. Brett Goodin’s From Captives to Consuls presents a prehistory of the “self-made man” (1) in the era of the early American republic, before the symbol came to loom large in the nation’s cultural imagination. Though he credits Henry Clay with coining the phrase on the U.S. Senate floor in 1832, Goodin insists that “generations of American men had been inventing and reinventing themselves alongside the colonies’ own reinvention into a united nation” (1).1 Drawing inspiration from Linda Colley’s 2007 The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, Goodin deploys a microhistorical approach “to chart an emergent United States in three lives and three lives in an emergent United States” (5).2 How, he asks, did individuals contribute their mite to the larger cultural project of American nation building? Goodin’s answer is that the pursuit of “self-making” (2) by nonelite white men was a crucial component in furthering American expansionary ambition in the first decades of the early republic. Goodin’s book weaves together three biographical studies of figures closely associated with geopolitical tensions between the United States and the Barbary States from 1784 to 1815: Richard O’Brien, James Cathcart, and James Riley. Each experienced captivity at the hands of the Barbary States, and the first two subsequently served as U.S. consuls in North Africa. Though they were united by this Barbary connection, their complete life histories were also remarkably similar: O’Brien, Cathcart, and Riley all worked as sailors in the 1770s before they became captives of the Barbary States, and in the 1830s, after their experiences in North Africa, all became involved in settlement of the “Old Northwest”—O’Brien in western Pennsylvania, Cathcart in Indiana, and Riley in Ohio. Though conceding that their experiences as captives and consuls were exceptional, Goodin maintains the full arcs of their lives were more typical of Americans during these formative years for the nation. [End Page 145] O’Brien, Cathcart, and Riley, Goodin argues, were confronted throughout their working lives by the same “forces of global conflict, commerce, and cultural exchange” faced by “many (if not most) Americans within the former colonies” (6). Indeed, Goodin sees the historical forces of the period spanning the “revolutionary era” and the “Jacksonian era” as converging especially “markedly” (6) in the cases of these three. Because of their roles, moreover, they produced a “trove of source material,” enabling Goodin to argue for the underappreciated contributions of these “non-elite” (6) historical figures to the national development of the young United States. Goodin recognizes from the long-standing lessons of social history that the three “(admittedly, white) American men” (6) cannot be treated as fully representative given the social diversity within the nation. But he views them as “exemplars of the era” (6) because of their circumstances—“volatility and insecurity in employment, finances, personal relationships, and safety”—and how they responded; they were “forced to cultivate a talent for adaptability and reinvention that was the hallmark of the self-made man” (1). This pattern of self-invention began for these men in the 1770s, Goodin maintains, when “early lessons in self-interested self-making at sea taught them to adapt to circumstances and routinely tack their identities and allegiances toward profit and security” (6). Building upon these experiences, he argues, they continued to find some measure of personal success “through their ability to adapt to circumstances beyond their control and to change and exploit identities and patrons while navigating a dizzying array of professions” (2). In their unexpected interactions with and then employment within the U.S. government, these nonelite men contributed to the international reach and western expansion of the United States. Moreover, in their claims to expertise about North Africa and then about the Old...