A History of Missouri: Volume II, 1820 to 1860 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS49 of eighteenth-century circumstances and ideas than the generalized "liberty and natural rights" that the nineteenth century remembered. Colonial society had not been literally as harmonious as it appeared in retrospect, but those who qualified for a part in the provincial polity —especially the yeomen and gentry who together figured as the virtuous , independent citizenry upon which the political ideology of the English "Country" party and the American Revolution was basedhad constituted a more coherently structured society than that of the next century. As the emphasis of the doctrine of the new nation rapidly shifted toward economic liberty and social equality, it not only eroded the hierarchical values of the old society but ultimately made it impossible to check the structural disintegration of the oncoming industrial society, since the successful businessman was generally admired as an exceptionally virtuous citizen of the most exemplary independence. In a short concluding passage on liberalism Persons observes that the entrepreneur embodied the "economic side" and the gentleman the "ethical aspect" of the once common ideology. But he does not pursue that insight much farther than the gentry did, nor examine why they were the only Americans greatly troubled by the divergence. Mass society, which likewise troubled conservative gentlemen from James Fenimore Cooper to Irving Babbitt, had its roots in the same colonial society of independent citizen-freeholders, large and small, and in the Old Whig ideology that they had adopted for their Revolution . While Persons notes that the colonial middle class was already an "emergent mass" that would one day destroy gentility, he ascribes to more immediate, nineteenth-century causes the "diffusion of gentility throughout the population" that paradoxically accompanied the decline of the gentry. This "dispersion of civility" had not been unknown, however, among the mass of colonial freeholders, as the republican (and potentially egalitarian) ideology of the Revolution attested. Indeed , "a good yeoman," as Barrett Wendell remarked, had been called "a gentleman in the ore" as early as seventeenth-century England— the society to which, in effect, the successive waves of republican nostalgia atavistically harked back. Here again the current reinterpretation of Revolutionary socio-political ideas could considerably enhance the understanding of nineteenth-century thought that Persons derives from the gentlemen-intellectuals of the latter time. Rowland Berthoff Washington University A History of Missouri: Volume II, 1820 to 1860. By Perry McCandless. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972. Pp. x, 325. $9.50.) This book is the second volume in the Missouri Sesquicentennial Series designed, according to the series editor, "to detail the state's development and the role it has played both regionally and nationally." If detailing the state's development means narrating many things that 50CIVIL WAR HISTORY happened in Missouri, then the book accomplishes that objective. Such a listing, however, does not result in elucidation of the role Missouri played regionally and nationally; and that objective remains unfulfilled . In short, though the author presents competent accounts of various individual episodes, his book has no thesis. The forty years encompassed in the title just rolled along, oddly enough in chronological order. For instance, in a chapter entitled "The Years of Jacksonian Supremacy" McCandless goes directly from Missouri's rejection of nullification in 1833 to passage of legislation making county officials elective rather than appointive to Andrew Jackson's appointment of the governor as surveyor general of Missouri, Illinois, and Arkansas; all without transition of any kind (pp. 98-99). Apparently the only connection between the three events was their occurrence during the administration of Governor Daniel Dunklin. Similarly, in the section treating Governor Lilburn Bogg's administration , readers are expected to shift unaided by the author from Missouri 's successful bid to incorporate the fertile Platte region into her western boundary to Boggs's decision to build a new capítol building to President Van Buren's request in 1837 for volunteers for the Seminole War (pp. 117-118). Chapters entitled "The Search for Social Improvement " and "Literature, the Fine Arts, and Recreation" fail to relieve the tedium, consisting as they do so largely of annotated lists of reformers, educators, authors, and artists. In his preface McCandless states that he has tried to write "in a manner of...