The Power of Sympathy

Abstract

ions (and others as well) take on new precision as Richard and Irene Brown measure their costs and consequences in the strange case of Ephraim Wheeler. Their narrative is rich in historiographical connections as well as human ones; “abstract forces” abound here. But in the end it is the “actual people” in Ephraim Wheeler who constitute the book’s greatest strength. Jill Lepore has memorably described the authors of microhistories as “historians who love too much.”6 Ephraim Wheeler’s life denies his biographers that choice. Irene Brown and Richard Brown do not love their title character, nor do they expect their readers to do so. Writing in a voice that never loses moral clarity, they leave no doubt that Wheeler committed the crime for which the state killed him. “That he was no storybook hero ennobled by a galaxy of virtues,” they note, “is all too evident” (p. 187). “Ephraim Wheeler was a vicious man,” the Browns conclude, “but still a man” (p. 290). And if they can’t admire him, they do allow us—even force us—to know him. In this the authors resemble none of their historical actors so much as Samuel Shepard, the preacher who delivered Wheeler’s execution sermon. In an affecting and honest homily, Shepard accomplished the seemingly impossible: he moved his listeners “to weep over Ephraim Wheeler, the father who had raped his daughter” reborn as “the emblem of fallen man” (p. 249). Without histrionics, without scripture, without tears, the Browns do no less. Wheeler’s singular story, precisely as they say, was no grand melodrama but “a tragedy of the lowly, a tragedy of mediocrity” (p. 188). As such it becomes an exemplary tale, one that casts light on many others in the early American republic, and in our own day as well. Jane Kamensky teaches history at Brandeis University and is completing a microhistory of failure, The Exchange Artist: A Story of Paper, Bricks, and Ash in Early National America. 1. http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2004/7/26suarez.html. 2. See for example Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774 (1970); and Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (1976). 3. Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (1989). 4. See Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (2001); Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (1999); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (1998); and Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (1991). 505 KAMENSKY / The Power of Sympathy 5. Richard D. Brown, “Microhistory and the Post-Modern Challenge,” Journal of the Early Republic 23:1 (Spring 2003): 1–20, quotations at 9, 13, 18. 6. Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88:1 (June 2001): 129–144.