Thornton, Tamara P. Antebellum American Horticulture & T.W. Ward - Sent - Verizon Yahoo! Mail Page 1 of 1 Verizon Yahoo Mail Venzon Central Yahoo! Search: Web Search Welcome, eppster2@verizon.. Mail Home All-New Mail Tutorials Help YAHOO! [Sign Out, Member Center verizon MAIL Classic LOOK A YOUNGER Get Your FREE Triar NOW! Simulated imagery Results not typical ice Wrinkles by www.dermitage.com "S&P Apples treat Mail Contacts Calendar Notepad What's New? Mobile Mail Options Check Mail Compose Search Mail Search the Web $399 Jamaica Previous I Next I Back to Messages Mark as Unread Print ALL-INCLUSIVE! Delete Reply Forward Move. Folders [Add Edit] Antebellum American Horticulture & T.W. Ward Tuesday, January 27, 2009 2:01 PM Inbox (4) From: "ELIZABETH and RONALD EPP" Drafts (6) To: thornton@acsu.buffalo.edu Sent Spam (6) [Empty] Dear Professor Thornton: Trash [Empty] I have recently relied heavily on your Cultivating Gentlemen and "Moral Dimensions of Horticulture" in relating the mercantile success one of the first My Folders [Hide] families of Boston to their horticultural interests. DorrBiblio Ac story The Library of American Landscape Design and the University of Massachusetts Press will be publishing my biography of conservationist George Bucknam DorrBio2008 Dorr (1853-1944), the founder and first superintendent of Acadia National Park. His mother, Mary Gray Ward Dorr (1820-1901) was the daughter of Eliz messages Thomas Wren Ward (1786-1858) of #3 Park Street, Boston, the exclusive agent for the highly influential London banking firm, Barings & Sons. Horseshoe Pond I mention all of this because T. W. Ward Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society provide evidence for yet another name to add to your list (note 46 Member Informa in "Moral Dimensions") of the Boston elite who believed that horticulture could effect social reform unique to their class. Were you familiar with Ron Archives these holdings? His son, Samuel Gray Ward (1817-1907) is regarded as the first of the Lenox cottagers, forsaking mercantile opportunities at 25 years of age for the Search Shortcuts challenges of the Berkshire gentleman farmer-reformer. The Ward Papers provide abundant evidence of the preoccupation of both father and son with self- definition and the "balance" between worldly success and obligations of benevolence. In later life S.G. Ward--who stepped into his father's business shoes My Photos in 1853--would publish his own Ward Family Papers that relate to the issues I've raised here. Both father, son, and the Dorrs acquired summer property in My Attachments Canton (where the cultivation of pears was carried on extensively); the latter owned a residence on Jamaica Pond (1850-1865) directly across from the Francis Parkman estate. ADVERTISEMENT Dorr (Harvard, 1874) would partner with Harvard President Charles W. Eliot to establish on coastal Maine the Hancock Country Trustees of Public Reservations, the landscape preservation organization that assembled the tracts that led to the establishment of the Park in 1916. Earn your Master's Degree The attention you have given in your writings to Mount Auburn Cemetery (where T.W. Ward was one of the first Proprietors) is integral to the larger issues ONLINE of antebellum America. Were you aware that MAC just celebrated their 175th anniversary? I'm fortunate to count the recently retired President, William C. in 15 MONTHS Clendaniel as a friend who had helped me better understand the interplay between natural and cultural landscapes. Request Info Now I'm pleased to discover that SNUYAB is benefit ting from your experience. I was a graduate student in philosophy there back in the late Sixties before Colorado Technical University receiving my doctorate in 1971. Connect future Thank you for the thoroughness of your research and the seemingly effortless way in which you have woven themes that are too often ignored by historians. Cordially, Ronald H. Epp Ph.D. 47 Pond View Drive Merrimack, NH 03054 (603) 424-6149 eppster2@verizon.net Delete Reply Forward Move.. Previous Next I Back to Messages Select Message Encoding Full Headers Check Mail Compose Search Mail Search the Web Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved Copyright/IP Policy Terms of Service Help NOTICE We collect personal information on this site. To learn more about how we use your information, see our Privacy Policy verizon SOUTHOO http://us.mc842.mail.yahoo.com/mc/showMessage?fid=Sent&sort=date&order=down&sta. 1/27/2009 Tamara Plakins Thornton, Department of History, University at Buffalo Page 1 of 2 Department of UB University at Buffalo The State University of New York HISTORY Home PEOPLE Department Info (back to Alphabetical Faculty Index) People Graduate Tamara Plakins Thornton, Professor office: 568 Park Hall email: thornton@acsu.buffalo.edu Undergraduate phone: (716) 645-8419 Healthy Intellectual Resources Contact Information: Department of History 546 Park Hall Buffalo, NY 14260-4130 Education: A.B., Harvard, 1978; Ph.D., Yale, 1987 phone: (716) 645-2181 fax: (716) 645-5954 Courses Regularly Taught: HIS 161: U.S. to 1877 HIS 216: Crime and Punishment in America HIS 361/62: American Cultural and Intellectual History I and II HIS 429: American Landscape History HIS 537: Readings in American Cultural History HIS 551: Intellectual Life in America HIS 576: American History Core I Field(s): American Hub(s): Knowledge; Culture and Society Research Interests: American cultural and intellectual history; early republic and antebellum America; the structure of American intellectual life; American elites; history of reading and writing Current Research: I am currently working on a biography of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), prominent in scientific, business, and social circles in Salem and Boston. Selected Publications: ""A Great Machine' or a 'Beast of Prey': A Boston Corporation and Its Rural Debtors in an Age of Capitalist Transformation," Journal of the Early Republic, 27.4 (Winter 2007): 567-97. "Deviance, Dominance and the Construction of Handedness in Turn-of-the-Century Anglo-America," in Moral Problems in American Life, Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry, eds., (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1785-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) Awards: Summer 2008: Co-director (invited) of SHEAR-Mellon Summer Seminar in Early American History. The seminar, funded by the Mellon Foundation and given under the auspices of SHEAR and the University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for the Study of Early America, awards fellowships to ten undergraduates from around the country who come to Philadelphia for three weeks of directed study and research in Philadelphia http://www.history.buffalo.edu/people/thornton.shtml 1/27/2009 256 Reviews of Books landing British troops on the coast, and was tenaciously Civil War. At first, leading Bostonians embraced exper- promoted throughout the war by Brown, the gover- imental agriculture and country living ostensibly to nors of Georgia and Florida, and Lord George Ger- demonstrate their mercantile wisdom and benevolent main. Yet Brown was thwarted in carrying out the plan, concern for the common farmer. They hoped to cast not only by American rebels but also by lukewarm off "the negative connotations" of their association with British commanders, military rivals, and Indian offi- urban commerce and manufacturing and to deflect cials, such as John Stuart, who felt threatened. Cashin political challenge (p. 2). But why did the elite do SO sheds new light on many of the specific obstacles to little initially to publicize their efforts or reach practical implementation of the plan and convincingly demon- farmers? The answer, Thornton believes, is that exper- strates Brown's dominance on the southern frontier imental farming and retirement to country estates were from 1775 to 1782. Read in conjunction with the work for most "an act not of public benevolence but of of Gary Olson, Robert S. Lambert, Martha Condray private self-characterization" (p. 30). The elite sought Searcy, and J. Leitch Wright, which Cashin generously to convince themselves that they lived the plain life of acknowledges, this book will enable specialists to reach British country gentlemen ("all terms are relative, of a deeper understanding of the southern frontier dur- course!" [p. 34]) and that they represented a virtuous ing the revolution. opposition to the courtly Jeffersonian Republicans Cashin devotes too little attention, however, to the who, they believed, had betrayed the revolution and ruined the nation. larger objectives of Britain in prosecuting the war in After the War of 1812, Boston's elite aimed at "the America. And, although he does at one point concede that perhaps Brown was not actually the originator of complete reform of agriculture as a social and political the "grand plan," a wise concession since it was devel- necessity" (p. 77). The death of the Federalist party, oped and set in motion by John Connolly on the the growth of cities and factories, and the decline of Virginia frontier before British officials ever heard of New England's political power forced elite citizens to Brown, Cashin often claims too much for Brown, and embrace agricultural reform in order to stem westward such concessions are too rare. Nevertheless, these ob- migration and preserve rural values. The reform jections aside, Brown's career from Yorkshire pro- movement also helped Boston's leading mercantile and moter and Georgia planter to manager of Indians, manufacturing families find common ground and mit- loyalist claimant, confidant of colonial governors, and igate internecine antagonisms. West Indies colonizer testifies to his extraordinary Once, however, Boston's mercantile and manufac- ability to influence people and events. His is above all turing families had intermarried extensively and had closed their circle to new entrants in the 1830s, and the story of an individual's impact on history. It is therefore regrettable that Brown early became the after they had consolidated their power in the state's captive of Georgia historians seeking a symbol to dra- Whig party, their "concerns shifted subtly from politi- matize lurid tales of frontier revenge and savagery, a cal and social leadership to individual and class self- development that Cashin astutely analyzes in a final justification" (p. 141). The rise of aristocratic values excellent chapter on Brown's place in the iconography among Boston's leading citizens led to an obsession of the American revolution in the South. with the breeding of plants and animals (and with the preservation and improvement of Brahmin blood- PAUL H. SMITH Library of Congress lines). Those values also led to a new "preference for the beautiful over the practical, for ornament over utility," as the elite dedicated more of their wealth to TAMARA PLAKINS THORNTON. Cultivating Gentlemen: The hobbies, leisure, and display (p. 84). Participants in the Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1785- Massachusetts Horticultural Society, founded in 1829, 1860. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1989. Pp. xii, and in the Massachusetts Society for the Promotion of 244. $29.95. Agriculture focused single-mindedly on breeding im- ported English livestock. And they became convinced Tamara Plakins Thornton's book is an original, beau- that "they had something in common" with their fruits, tifully written study of Boston's elite. Her "history of flowers, vegetables, and horses, for "both were the the overarticulate" (p. xi) finds fresh things to say about choice products of cultivation" (p. 171). leading Bostonians of the eighteenth and nineteenth Boston's elite became increasingly "inward-looking" centuries as it explores their obsession with country 84) and "self-preoccupied" (p. 141), and it was not estates, livestock breeding, horticulture, and agricul- long before they lost interest in practical farming and tural societies. Thornton believes that the trappings of entertained thoughts of improving themselves "into a these rural pursuits-"Cabot's potatoes, Quincy's car- species" (p. 171). After the Civil War, leading citizens rots, Ingersoll's pigs, and Perkin's fruits"-shed new readily embraced the works of racist ethnologists and light on the commercial-industrial elite and on class Social Darwinists and transformed the pursuit of prize- relationships in the early republic. winning plants and animals, which at first represented Thornton finds that the meaning of the elite's pre- antidotes to materialism, into a pattern of conspicuous occupation with agriculture and rural life changed consumption. dramatically between the American revolution and the I hope Thornton will extend her work on class American Historical Review 96 (1991)- United States 257 relations and elite cultures in antebellum America and among the diverse people of Buffalo. Of special note compare her findings with those of E. Digby Baltzell on here is his insistence that the 1850s saw the ethniciza- the Philadelphia elite (Puritan Boston and Quaker Phila- tion, especially under the influence of nativism, of delphia [1979]) and Jan Lewis on the Virginia elite Protestant Americans. Having thus compounded eth- (Pursuit of Happiness [1983]). I wish she had spent as nic diversity, Gerber concludes on a note of unity by much time comparing America's regional elites as she describing the work of the Republican party in forming did comparing New England's and England's. But this a coalition of American and German ethnics that is simply a plea for more. Her book is an entertaining, overturned Democratic domination of Buffalo and thoughtful, and important work. produced a strong vote for Abraham Lincoln in 1860. RANDOLPH ROTH And so politics completed the making of an American Ohio State University, pluralism. Columbus There are some problems with this work. Among various irritants is Gerber's prose, which, although DAVID A. GERBER. The Making of an American Pluralism: generally serviceable, more than occasionally lapses into clumsy pretentiousness. A more serious fault is his Buffalo, New York, 1825-60. (Statue of Liberty-Ellis almost entire neglect of the racial dimensions of Amer- Island Centennial Series.) Urbana: University of Illi- nois Press. 1989. Pp. xvii, 531. $34.95. ican pluralism, a surprise because his first book dealt with the race situation in Ohio. In other ways, too, his tripartite model of ethnicization is nearly as simplistic In this big book, David A. Gerber uses antebellum as the pious model of "Americanization" that it is Buffalo to develop a dynamic model of interactive evidently designed to replace, most notably in its ten- social class and ethnicity at least indirectly influenced dency to play down the forces for assimilation opposed by the neo-ethnicism of the early 1970s. While ac- to the ethnicizing process. knowledging his borrowings from recent social history, This book, however, has even more noteworthy Gerber also claims that his work has some significant merits. Along with its thought-provoking thesis, it new features, most notably his rejection of the notion provides a compendium of techniques and ideas asso- that ethnic groups were preexistent in favor of the view ciated with the new social history, and it wins respect that they were formed in America under largely Amer- for its often-sensitive treatment of the interworkings of ican conditions by a process that he calls "ethniciza- ethnicity and social class. Beyond these matters, it also tion." In general, he deals with Buffalo as a public field furnishes numerous insights into the economic, cul- for the operation of distinctive but overlapping pro- tural, social, and political history of Buffalo. Students cesses of class formation and ethnicization. of urban as well as social history will find it a useful In his discussion of the first decades of Buffalo's work. growth after the opening of the Erie Canal, Gerber EDWARD K. SPANN emphasizes the emergence of a distinctively American Indiana State University class situation, where "bourgeois" businessmen and their allies exercised social and moral authority over a population of largely Protestant property owners. DOUGLAS R. EGERTON. Charles Fenton Mercer and the Trial Thus, while artisans and other occupational groups of National Conservatism, Jackson: University Press of existed, class differences were muted, and they were Mississippi. 1989. Pp. xiii, 343. $35.00. further moderated by temperance and other strivings for reform that integrated not only the classes but the More than four decades ago, Dumas Malone wrote a sexes into a common effort to create a bourgeois social lovely essay on the "great generation" of Virginians order. who helped make a revolution and build a nation. By the late 1840s, this'social order was confronted by Douglas R. Egerton's earnest attempt to rescue from a radically different social reality associated with grow- historical oblivion one of the next generation of Vir- ing numbers of Irish and then German immigrants. ginia leaders provides a sharp reminder of the steep Each of these immigrant groups, in Gerber's view, decline in the caliber of leaders that Virginia produced developed a distinctive form of ethnic solidarity de- after 1800. rived from its particular relationship with local circum- Born in 1778 to a prominent and propertied Fred- stances as well as from its cultural character. After ericksburg family, Charles Fenton Mercer had all the establishing the existence of three primary social advantages that an ambitious youth could want. At the groups (Americans, Irish, and Germans), Gerber then College of New Jersey (Princeton) in the mid-1790s, relates them first to the emergence of the modern labor Mercer absorbed the notion of responsibility for "ser- class, where ethnicity affected class consciousness, and vice" to his commonwealth and nation. then to religion, where conflict but also some accom- He did not shirk this responsibility. A committed modation between Protestants and Catholics produced conservative who never believed that common people a "new interconfessional order" (p. 280). were likely to make wise political choices, Mercer was In his last section, Gerber deals with politics as an shrewd enough to recognize that his times demanded agency of both ethnic identity and civic community public obeisance to the democratic ideal. Egerton cred- Ronald Story. Review of Cultivating gentlemen. 606 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY Vol.47. Third Series. socialist tract in America, Equality: A Political Romance (Philadelphia, (1990): 1802). Twomey's discussion of Reynolds is worth the price of the book. 606-609. He skillfully provides Reynolds's biography, gives superb context to his arrival in Philadelphia, and offers fresh analysis to his neglected vision. Twomey completes his analysis with a useful discussion of the ambigu- ities of the Jacobin legacy. Radical in their demands for greater political equality, Jacobins became spokesmen "for a new industrial morality" (p. 242). Their vehement denunciation of trade union efforts showed dismay- ing class hostilities. Their descent into reformism, concludes Twomey, stemmed from exile and their fragile ties with the American working classes. Reynolds, a true original, alone was able to break through the traditional boundaries of transatlantic radicalism. Twomey's work bears up well within the historiography of the early American working classes. Hé shows the impact of influences from abroad on political consciousness and organization in the Age of Jefferson. What he does not do is expand the analysis beyond this historiography to include women's and African-American republicanism. Twomey's study is hardly alone in this fault Comment is necessary on the production of the volume. Twomey is an active scholar. Yet the dissertation is printed without any introduction covering historiographic developments in the past sixteen years. There is an excellent bibiliography but, inexplicably, no index. The publisher should have invested more time and money in the production of this fine work. Colgate University GRAHAM HODGES Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1785-1860. By TAMARA PLAKINS THORNTON. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. Pp. xii, 244. $29.95.) Like other scholars, Tamara Plakins Thornton is struck by how exten- sively members of the industrial-commercial elite of post-Revolutionary Boston, America's "ultimate business aristocracy," concerned themselves with country estates, gentlemanly farming, agricultural experimentation, horticultural societies, and other "rural pursuits" (p. I). Why did they involve themselves in these pursuits, Thornton asks, and what does their involvement say about antebellum America? Thornton divides her study into three parts. Part One considers the immediate post-Revolutionary years, when many newly rich Bostonians established country seats with extensive fields, gardens, and greenhouses. Their motives included a desire for "rural retirement" from business and political vicissitudes (p. 49) and a longing to emulate wealthy British landowners, particularly the greater gentry and the Pittite swarm of parvenu bankers, merchants, and lawyers. But Thornton also connects the phenomenon to a well-known dilemma of republican ideology: the danger REVIEWS OF BOOKS 607 that commercial wealth would run to extravagance, vice, corruption, and ruin. This fear, she argues, led her genteel rustics into avid experimental husbandry and gentlemanly farming-elegant and rational bulwarks against debilitating luxury. There was a public dimension as well, most visible in the Massachusetts Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, founded in 1792. Mostly merchants or professional men with commercial connections, the early officers, trustees, and members of the MSPA looked chiefly to England for intelligence and guidance and expected MSPA pamphlets, gifts of new seed types, and money prizes to stimulate "practical" farmers to make improvements. Since neither agriculture nor landholding contributed significantly to members' incomes, why did they busy themselves in these ways? In order, writes Thornton, to deal with another dilemma of republican government: how to justify, in a democracy, leadership by the wealthy and prominent. Support for the MSPA demonstrated benevolent and disinterested concern for agriculture and the farmer. Full-time farmers did not belong to the MSPA because they were by definition not disinterested; merchants were. Merchants, moreover, occupied the van- guard of innovation and scientific inquiry. They could thus demonstrate not just public service, but also modern wisdom, and in this way lay claim to political as well as economic dominance. Part Two considers the period between the end of the War of 1812 and the mid-1830s, when industrialization and economic growth produced social, cultural, political, and economic fissures within the nascent Boston elite that Thornton calls "hard to underestimate" (p. 85). One response was still greater institutional bustle-as in the MSPA, which mounted a membership drive, began a regularly published journal, and organized a well-attended cattle show in Brighton, where livestock of chiefly British extraction were featured. As before, however, fewer practical than gentleman farmers paid attention to these doings, leading the gentlemen, as before, to protest their disinterested, even patriotic benevolence. Another response was not only to develop genteel rustic suburbs such as Brookline, Charlestown, and Waltham but to adduce arguments pointing to a transformed political and economic landscape. Thornton is persuasive on this point. The gentleman reformers of this era were S.G. concerned primarily with a specific goal: to shrink the acreage required for an individual farm to be financially viable in New England. Otherwise, the ward rural population would migrate to the West or to factory towns. If westward, there would be a smaller population base, hence reduced power, for the region's congressional delegations and therefore its com- mercial leadership. If to towns, there would develop the unsettling prospect of an unruly industrial proletariat. Not surprisingly, when widespread agricultural improvement proved infeasible, elite spokesmen resorted to the timeworn expedient of moral exhortation. "The society and economy of your state," Thornton paraphrases her reformers saying, "have become anglicized, SO you must anglicize your agriculture" (p. 131). 608 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY New England farmers, like the Old World's peasants, should abandon the goal of wealth and accept their austere, if virtuous, lot. In Part Three Thornton examines rustic gentility during the period of what she terms, following the interpretation of F. C. Jaher (The Urban Establishment), a "consolidated" elite, one at the pinnacle of its power but preoccupied with self-examination and self-definition, with discovering and displaying what, besides money, gave the elite legitimacy and author- ity as a privileged class. Scientific agriculture, initially an option for practical farmers hard-pressed by midwestern wheat, became largely horticulture, a vast and expensive hobby of the elite. Some estates were SO casan colossal-Horatio Hunnewell's in Wellesley spread over 500 acres; Mar- shall Pinckney Wilder's in Dorchester was even larger-that they seemed English rather than American; the owners themselves often spent many hours a day tending them. The Massachusetts Horticultural Society, founded in 1829, was modeled on the Horticultural Society of London and with an elite membership drawn from a broad range of occupations. The MHS's annual exhibition soon became a major social occasion, and while the society all but smothered the MSPA, it also initiated a national movement by helping found the country's first rural cemetery, Mt. Auburn in Cambridge. This turn to horticulture represented a break with the elite's traditional concern with utility. Horticulture became popular, argues Thornton, precisely because it was not useful. Only purportedly useless flowers gave the Bostonians what they craved-assurance, both to the public and to themselves, that they were superior to competition, avarice, and materi- alism. Horticulture enabled them to rise above the battle for money and power. Thornton notes parenthetically that the MHS did not have female members because women, being quarantined from marketplace and forum, had no need for the moral antidote of horticulture. It took a man to appreciate something without market value. Flowers, moreover, were bred, as were the racehorses that concerned a rejuvenated mid-century MSPA, and that characteristic Thornton sees as symbolic of the Bosto- nians' emerging relish for aristocratic values. Breeding, too, was symbolic of elite infatuation with the re-creation (my words, not Thornton's) of a new chain of being with demonstrable biological superiority at its apex. The propertyless base rested content with a cheaper symbol: mass- produced prints of none other than the virtuous Marshfield Farmer himself, Daniel Webster. Cultivating Gentlemen is an exquisite example of the act of reading seemingly peripheral cultural developments for their larger historical meanings. This book is likely to stand as the definitive account of the cultural development itself, the "rural pursuits" movement of elite Bos- ton, Some additional material might be here-closer tracing of the shape and proliferation of suburban country estates, more detailed study of transportation as a facilitator of estate formation, broader consideration of estate inheritance patterns-but what is here is quite good. Thornton provides us with a clear chronology and a sophisticated analysis of REVIEWS OF BOOKS 609 organizational membership and rhetoric. She is indefatigable in uncover- ing the British models Bostonians followed. The illustrations, a judicious admixture of portraits, estate renderings, and British analogues, are exquisite, as are several of the biographical sketches, most notably of Christopher Gore, Josiah Quincy, Daniel Webster, and Francis Parkman. A biographical appendix offers "rural biographies," with sources, of thirty elite Bostonians, many of them not discussed in the text. As for interpre- tation, since Thornton adheres to Jaher more closely than to Peter D. Hall (The Organization of American Culture, 1700-1900 [New York, 1984]), never mind Gabriel Kolko ("Brahmias and Business, 1870-1914," in Kurt Wolff and Barrington Moore, eds., The Critical Spirit [Boston, 1967], 343-363), there is less will to power and more langst in the book than some might expect or wish-which, in the study of a subject so lacking in the conventional surface manifestations of social utility, is as it should be. University of Massachusetts-Amberst RONALD STORY