seasonal revolutionary: the mind of charles chauncyby charles h. lippy

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Seasonal Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncy by Charles H. Lippy Review by: George Selement The American Historical Review, Vol. 88, No. 3 (Jun., 1983), pp. 749-750 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1864723 . Accessed: 28/06/2014 18:12 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 193.105.245.33 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:12:53 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Seasonal Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncyby Charles H. Lippy

Seasonal Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncy by Charles H. LippyReview by: George SelementThe American Historical Review, Vol. 88, No. 3 (Jun., 1983), pp. 749-750Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1864723 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 18:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 193.105.245.33 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:12:53 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Seasonal Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncyby Charles H. Lippy

United States 749

At one time or another during his years of public service, almost all of Arthur Lee's colleagues found him insufferable. He claimed to be more unselfishly patriotic than they were; he detected spies and traitors among pretended friends; and he lobbied aggressively against his factional opponents. Louis W. Potts's biography of Lee approaches him along several lines of inquiry, inviting the reader's sympa- thy while detailing Lee's personal and political foi- bles. We meet the revolutionary polemicist who sought a virtuous republic; the lonely, suspicious, bitter man who idealized love; and the ambitious congressman and diplomat who felt unhappy out- side of government office. Each of these Arthur Lees takes his place in a different body of scholarly literature: the studies of republican ideology, the work of psychoanalytical biographers, the analyses of congressional politics and international relations. Lee would seem to be potentially as popular among current interpreters of the American Revolution as he was unpopular with revolutionaries.

Potts's book, however, is not a pastiche of second- ary reading. He has studied his subject carefully; and he presents persuasive conclusions without re- sorting to a technical vocabulary, although he has a weakness for strained metaphors. Arthur Lee, in Potts's view, never felt assured that he existed as an autonomous personality. He remained obsessed with what other people were thinking about him. He could live only through their eyes. Constantly proclaiming his righteousness, he impugned the integrity of anyone who disagreed with him. Potts does not portray Lee as a typical revolutionary personality; nor does he make a case for a psycho- logical causation of the Revolution or its outcome. But the book does suggest that resistance to Britain subserved personal needs that antedated the imperi- al crisis. And Potts concludes that Lee was "an archetype of American radicalism" (p. 69).

Most of the book is a study of Arthur Lee's activities in public office, especially his service in France and his conflicts with the other American emissaries, Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane, as well as with their supporters in the Continental Congress. The book examines the divisions within the American mission and government, exploring the speculation, espionage, mistrust, and recrimina- tions that exacerbated those divisions. Readers who may look askance at Potts's psychological generaliza- tions will nevertheless find this facet of the biogra- phy useful.

Potts, like other recent biographers of American revolutionaries, has found in his subject a visionary idealist who experienced excitement in fighting evil but suffered disorientation when confronted with the moral ambiguity of business and government as practiced by his friends. As the years passed, Lee had fewer friends, could get no public office, and

ended his life as a bachelor gardener, specializing in ornamental fruit trees and roses.

CHARLES ROYSTER

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

CHARLES H. LIPPY. Seasonable Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncy. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. 1981. Pp. xi, 179. $18.95.

In these times, when the publication of scholarly monographs is waning due to soaring printing costs, only the best manuscripts should appear. Unfortu- nately, while Charles H. Lippy's biography of Charles Chauncy, minister of First Church at Bos- ton for nearly sixty years, is well researched in primary and secondary materials and most read- able, there is nothing special about this revised Princeton dissertation. To be sure, Lippy ably de- fends his foremost thesis that Chauncy was a con- servative leader who always sought the "protection and strengthening of the New England Way ... to preserve traditional structures, whether in religion or politics" (p. 128). Lippy carefully traces this theme through Chauncy's criticism of Jonathan Edwards in the 1740s, opposition to the placement of an Anglican episcopate in the colonies during the 1760s, support for the patriots' independence movement of the 1770s, and advocacy of Universal- ism in the 1780s. Moreover, Lippy convincingly argues throughout the text his secondary thesis that Chauncy "was guided by a desire to buttress what he saw as right and proper in a way 'seasonable' to time and circumstance without shattering the founda- tions of the established order" (p. 129; "seasonable" appears repeatedly throughout the text). But these theses are not crucial ones to early American histori- ography. Nor are they revelations to the well-in- formed, for Lippy merely documents what is known generally about the 1740-80 era with the details of Chauncy's life and thought.

Indeed, there are few historiographical surprises in this book. Lippy does amend Vernon Parrington, Perry Miller, and Alan Heimert regarding their "oversimplified liberal/conservative categorization" of Edwards and Chauncy (p. 41). Edmund S. Mor- gan is taken to task for denying that colonial think- ers made a distinction between internal and external taxation by the British (p. 68). Lippy also challenges Heimert's judgment that Chauncy was "too cautious in his Stamp Act repeal message" (p. 73). Finally, Lippy differs with the appraisal of Heimert and James W. Jones that Chauncy equated salvation with earning a Harvard degree (p. 118). More often, however, Lippy's work either summarizes or sup- ports with new data the well-known interpretations of historians specializing in eighteenth-century

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Page 3: Seasonal Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncyby Charles H. Lippy

750 Reviews of Books

America. Furthermore, these historiographical quibbles and informational elaborations should have appeared in journal articles, as some did, rather than in what is essentially a "life and times" biography.

Lippy's commonplace approach is especially dis- appointing because he could have provided with his research on Chauncy answers to more pressing questions about early America. For example, besides rehashing and refining our knowledge of the intel- lectual differences between Edwards and Chauncy, Lippy could have offered new light on why the Great Awakening occurred. And Lippy seems to support without qualification Robert E. Brown's interpretation of the American Revolution by con- cluding that Chauncy never sought to "build a new, radically different" society but supported indepen- dence to "preserve and protect the forms and institutions of liberty which had evolved in the American context" (p. 104). Content with this con- clusion about Chauncy, Lippy simply eschewed any comment on the issue of class conflict in early America. Seasonable Revolutionary, therefore, is the kind of informative but narrowly conceived mono- graph that poured off the presses in academia's affluent days before the mid-1970s, but in 1981 Nelson-Hall should have opted to publish a manu- script of greater historiographical significance.

GEORGE SELEMENT

Southwest Missouri State University

MARY BETH NORTON. Liberty's Daughters: The Revolu- tionaiy Experience of American Women, 1750-1800. Boston: Little, Brown. 1980. Pp. xvi, 384.

Whether or not the Revolution significantly altered the lives and perceptions of American women has become a hotly contested issue. Mary Beth Norton contends unequivocably that it did, but that its impact cannot be deciphered from examining legal codes and political participation. Instead, she af- firms, that impact "is more accurately revealed in an analysis of women's private writings" (p. xv). After scrutinizing 368 unpublished collections of family papers, Norton finds that white women by the 1 780s were "reading widely in political literature, publish- ing their own sentiments, engaging in heated de- bates over public policy, and avidly supporting the war effort in a variety of ways" (p. 156). Constant talk of politics at home, participation in patriotic spinning bees, home substitutions for goods previ- ously acquired from Britain, and the experience of "controlling their own affairs" during wartime caused women to abandon their" 'natural' feminine timidity," to achieve a greater "reverence of self," and to believe in their own rational capabilities. They also postponed or gave up marriage, practiced

contraception, petitioned for divorce, and attended school. Men in the young republic began to value intelligent women, praised them for their efforts, and expanded educational opportunities for them. Norton is aware that not all women and not all things changed-after the Revolution, as before, women were expected to find "happiness in their chimney corners," to assume the central roles of wife and mother, and to behave in a modest, delicate, pious manner.

Norton argues a complex and difficult-to-prove position with enthusiasm, a clear style, a fine selec- tion of spritely illustrative quotations (nieces are called "such sweet toads," women "trifling insignifi- cant Animals"), and enough evidence from widely selected sources to demonstrate that changes were occurring in private, if not public, life.

Norton's conclusions are compelling but not thor- oughly convincing. Her assertions are too inclusive at times. She provides little information to demon- strate that a decline in family size among Hingham, Massachusetts, and middle colony Quaker families represents a nationwide effort to limit births, or that an increase of divorce petitions by Connecticut and Massachusetts women suggests a wider trend. Nor do the records of a handful of plantations provide us with much information about the experiences faced by black slaves across the nation. Although Norton must be applauded for her effort to include female slaves in nearly every chapter, her total avoidance of Northern slave women severely limits her generalizations. Moreover, she does not pay attention to the tremendous diversity in America- to the fact that Scottish, Irish, German, French, Jewish, and Indian women of many tribes com- prised substantial numbers in Revolutionary Ameri- ca. Creek Indian women are mentioned briefly in two places; the other groups' separate ways of perceiving sex roles and women's progress are total- ly unexamined.

When black women are considered, there is little effort to place them in the context of Afro-Ameri- can culture. Did these women reproduce African patterns of marriage and community life in the New World? Were these patterns given greater vitality by the Revolution? What about conjure women and female preachers? Norton tells us nothing about such concerns. In fact, her view of the Southern plantation owner is essentially benign. Cruelty to black women is barely touched upon, and black women's discontent as revealed in arson attempts and sometimes murders is ignored. Their lives as runaways in backwoods maroon communities are not mentioned. Norton states that more than six- teen hundred black women ran away to the British during the Revolution, but the reader is left won- dering why. Moreover, she gives only a few lines to the rape of black women-a common eventuality

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