Provincial Lives: Middle-Class Experience in the Antebellum Middle West

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Provincial Lives: Middle-Class Experience in the Antebellum Middle West. By Timothy R. Mahoney. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. 384. $54.95) In Provincial Lives, Timothy R. Mahoney offers readers a sequel to his well-received 1990 study River Towns in the Great West: The Structure of Provincial Urbanization in the American Midwest, 18201870. Once again, the author's geographic scope takes in the Upper Mississippi river valley, from St. Genevieve and St. Louis, Missouri at the south to Galena, Illinois and Prairie Du Chien, Wisconsin at the north, tracing eastward through Illinois along the Rock and Illinois Rivers, with occasional forays into the Illinois state capital at Springfield. Mahoney's earlier work explored the ways in which environment and economics conspired to create, transform and ultimately dismantle a regional urban system; here, Mahoney revisits that same ground with an eye toward the development of regional society, and, more particularly, the emergence of a distinctive regional middle class. The result is an altogether engrossing account of the changing contours of community life in the antebellum middle west. Part of Mahoney's motivation for writing the present book was a desire to paint a more intimate portrait of the people who shaped and encountered the broader changes chronicled in River Towns in the Great West, and to a large degree he succeeds, offering a thorough accounting of the means by which the fragmented, disorderly communities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century upper Mississippi Valley evolved into a stratified, hierarchical, and institutional regional society. After a stage-setting chapter surveying French, Yankee and Native American interaction along the upper Mississippi river and its tributaries, Mahoney opens his story with a captivating chronicle of one family's effort to transplant, cultivate and sustain British- and Franco-American notions of family and community life across hundreds of miles as members of the Hempstead and Gratiot clans (united in the marriage of Susan Hempstead and Henry Gratiot) migrated between the stability and sophistication of St. Louis' mercantile elite and the turbulent, provisional communities of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin's mining district. Next, we move to Keokuk, Iowa, where we observe closely (in what is an extraordinarily rich portrait of the birth of a midwestern town that will be of certain interest to local historians throughout the region) the ways in which the men who gathered together at the confluence of the Des Moines and Mississippi Rivers created - via boosterism and vigilante action, but also by way of nicknames and practical jokes, verbal jousting and other forms of collective fun - a recreational and convivial culture situated between ruffianism and that simultaneously provided an ad hoc social structure while eliding potentially-divisive differences among participants. Onto this rough-and-ready, highly masculinized, crudely egalitarian society, Mahoney argues, families from the East grafted their own values and mores, making for a uniquely Midwestern gentility. Drawing on correspondence and memoir as well as the material culture of middle class life in Galena, Illinois, Dubuque, Iowa and Quincy, Illinois, Mahoney shows how middle class men and women harnessed eastern notions of gentility in order to transfer to their new communities the values and behaviors associated with evangelical Christianity, republican law and order, and market capitalism. The final two chapters trace the ways in which these local genteel cultures were, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, transformed into a regional society, in large part by men whose careers in law and contact with the railroad brought them into communication with other elite men throughout the region. As these men formed economic, social, and political ties with others like them, the distinctive values, assumptions, practices and behaviors that had emerged in Midwestern communities were transformed into shared and singular regional middle-class culture. …