The Human Tradition in Antebellum America

Abstract

The Human Tradition in Antebellum America. Edited by Michael A. Morrison. (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2000. Pp. xxiv, 251. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $19.95.) Convention has it that collections are so uneven in quality as to make an overall judgment very difficult. That cliches does not apply to Michael A. Morrison's The Human Tradition in Antebellum America. Cavils can be raised about a couple of weak essays and long headnotes, which tend to repeat substantive essays that follow them. But on balance collection is a genuine achievement. Morrison has compiled a series of wide-ranging contributions that give reader a sense of interplay between private lives and public affairs, enabling one to recapture contingency of past and to enter a world shifting from a traditional agrarian order to a complex protocapitalist society. The contributors to collection do not entirely move beyond great men and portray the lives of ordinary citizens, as he asserts (xiv). Rather, essayists have selected paradigmatic notables that illuminate themes and disputes of antebellum history. In doing so, they also have addressed ideological rhythms in America's social, economic, and political life, emergence of new marginal forms after older ones calcified. A quick summary cannot do justice to diverse, complex, and nuanced subject matter of these essays, but nonetheless one can extract central themes: decline of meritocratic values, corresponding democratization of politics and society, emergence of individualism and self-made man, Revolutionary War legacy of popular religion, contemporary views of minorities-women, blacks, Indians-and complexities and contradictions afflicting human condition. The very first essay establishes high scholarly character of virtually all that follow. Stephen R. Grossbart's account of Connecticut's Abraham Bishop -teacher, lawyer, orator, politician; critic of high Federalists; spokesman for republicanism; ally of Jefferson and Connecticut Wits; and opponent of ecclesiastical and civil tyranny (11)-shows a life that mirrored national politics and enlarges our knowledge of social and political landscape down to 1820s. Ruth Alden Doan's sketch of John Wesley Young further illuminates democratization of popular culture in era. Doan sets Young's conversion experience against campfire meetings that swept across North Carolina frontier, empowered ordinary people, and became part of what Nathan Hatch, in The Democratization of American Christianity (1989), termed this explosive conjunction of evangelical fervor and popular sovereignty (9). The contradictions of Young's life and behavior-he was a slaveholder who had a sense of spiritual, biracial brotherhood with blacks-are acknowledged but not explained. Two other essays also have frontier as venue. Craig Thompson Friend limns Kentucky merchants who established a commercial empire stretching from New Orleans to East Coast and became part of growing southwestern market infrastructure and mercantile sector. Andrew R. L. Cayton portrays Senator John Smith of Ohio against backdrop of a frontier society characterized by growing commercial capitalism. A man at center of America's economic development (70), Smith had army supply contracts and eventually became involved with General James Wilkinson and Aaron Burr conspiracy. Like a number of subjects of these essays, Gary J. Kornblith's subject, a self-made lumber dealer, was a deeply conflicted man. Engaged in a lifelong pursuit of material gain, Hiram Hill nonetheless was plagued by doubts, troubled by an admittedly too selfish disposition, and beset by the horrors of a guilty conscience (62). And again, his life is set in context of a shifting economy-from an older agrarian order to a factory system and an age of rampant individualism. The collection continues with sketches of three figures deeply involved in Indian removal. …