Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier by Honor Sachs (review)

In this exciting new book Honor Sachs explores the fundamental contribution of the household to the expansion of the eighteenth-century Kentucky frontier. Written in clear and compelling prose, Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontiereffectively reframes the story of early Kentucky, which has too often been shoehorned into a strictly political narrative, to include the critical scholarly categories of gender, race, and class.

In chapter 1 Sachs traces how early settlers hoped to improve their economic and social conditions by settling in Kentucky. She looks at cases of widows and settlers’ petitions to the government in Virginia and finds that white male settlers most feared becoming “‘tennants to private gentlemen’” (p. 40). In so doing Sachs centers the relationship of landownership and conceptions of white manhood at the heart of patriarchal anxieties in the region. In chapter 2 Sachs turns to the “highly unstable society” at Bullitt’s Lick saltworks to illuminate the growing concerns of white patriarchs over questions of gender and race (p. 70). The widow and store owner Annie Christian—a pivotal figure in the book—emerged as a strikingly successful example of the threats posed by unattached women to the gendered, social, and racial order. Similarly, in chapter 3, Sachs investigates the legal response by the government toward a population that increasingly consisted of only a minority of adult white men. By looking at court cases addressing the care of orphaned children, Sachs contends that the government attempted to regulate a particular version of white patriarchy into the basic social fabric of the household.

In chapter 4 Sachs further challenges the traditional account of Kentucky’s frontier history through the category of the household. Through a focus on soldiers and their dissatisfaction with military service, she reveals how men’s commitment to defend and protect the household often superseded their attachments to the larger American nation. Subsequent divorce petitions made on the grounds of abandonment show gendered patterns of discontent that—along with the continued presence of Great Britain and Spain in the region—threatened the western experiment itself. Similarly, in chapter 5, Sachs turns to the debates over Kentucky statehood to reveal the essential role played by white manhood in creating a “‘new race of men’” (p. 143). This identity necessarily excluded others in gendered and racialized terms, a codification that the author argues operated symbolically more than practically. The author’s notion of “home rule” helps explain the contested meaning of the first territory to seek statehood under the Constitution. In a fitting conclusion, Sachs reflects on the Kentucky example, follows the rhetorical importance of the household in future years, and ends with a timely wish for a “more inclusive democracy” in our own times (p. 150).

In both the text and the endnotes Sachs adds to numerous debates in frontier and southern history. She does not ignore, but rather incorporates, the views of Frederick Jackson Turner with more modern conversations about the relationship of the periphery to the core, and to race, gender, and class. The study also expands the breadth of southern historiography by positioning frontier Kentucky alongside earlier developments across the South. Moreover, the case study of Bullitt’s Lick provides a fascinating example of an early business on the new western frontier.

A slim volume, Home Ruleis a model of how a scholarly monograph can incorporate the categories of gender, race, and class into a coherent history of the colonial frontier.