Witness to the Young Republic: A Yankee's Journal, 1828-1870 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS277 the ebb and flow of nationalist commitment, are virtually ignored. Faust is surely correct when she concludes that "the creation of Confederate nationalism . . . caught the South within the paradoxes of that very change the Confederate nation had been founded to avert" (85). However, the story of how that change was experienced, how it was implemented and resisted, is beyond the scope of her study. Still, these omissions should not be overemphasized. This is primarily a work in intellectual history, and it succeeds so well on its own terms that it has clarified the questions future researchers have to ask and the approaches they will have to take. WaLiAM L. Barney University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Benjamin Brown French, Witness to the Young Republic: A Yankee's Journal, 1828-1870. Edited by Donald B. Cole and John J. McDonough. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989. Pp. 711. $45.00.) Benjamin Brown French, a New Hampshire politician who held a variety of political appointments in Washington from 1833 to 1870, left a journal of about 3,700 pages which has been available on microfilm through the Library of Congress since 1970. About one-third of these pages appear in this volume. In their selection process, the editors included all references to prominent men and women, French's character sketches of the great men of his day, most of French's remarks on politics, slavery, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War, and much of what he wrote on his economic, social, and family life. In general, the editors did a marvelous job, especially in identifying people and events in the footnotes. French, the quintessential political operative, worked in the Clerk's Office in the House of Representatives from 1833 to 1847, and then was Commissioner of Public Buildings for several stretches in the 1850s and 1860s. Since his early Washington life was dictated by the congressional calendar, he spent much of each winter and spring reading and recording bills in the House, tabulating votes, and then was off to New Hampshire during the summer and fall recess. The journal thus bounces back and forth between Washington and New Hampshire, between Washington gossip and upper-class life in New England. If French's family was even close to the norm, Yankee fathers had little control over their wives or children, and dutiful offspring were hardly the rule. French rejected his father's authority, ran away from school and joined the army, and married in secret against his parents' wishes. His bride, Elizabeth Richardson, also married without the consent of her father, the imposing and stern Chief Justice of New Hampshire's Superior Court. An outspoken, strong-willed woman, Elizabeth was 278CIVIL WAR HISTORY loving, but hardly a submissive wife. Rather than treating French like lord and master, she made fun of his letters, criticized him for drinking too much and staying out late, and generally ran his life. The Frenches had one son who was obedient and studious, graduated from Phillips Exeter and Harvard, and became a successful lawyer and banker. But they had another son, Benjamin Jr., who fought parental authority, drank too much, failed at Exeter, chased fire engines all night, refused to get up in the morning, and generally made his father's hell-raising youth seem tame by comparison. And when Benjamin Jr. got married, his estranged father chose not to attend the wedding. The strength of the journal lies in the fact that French was more than a sometimes distraught father and husband. He was also a good-natured, convivial, political insider. He liked people, liked sizing up men of power, liked gossip, and was often in the right place at the right time. An eyewitness to innumerable congressional battles, he was also on hand for Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and at Lincoln's bedside at the time of his death. But, although French rubbed shoulders with the political giants of his day, he was hardly a prophet. In 1859, for example, he had an hour-long conversation with Stephen A. Douglas, who presented views and historical data which French had "never heard." So taken was French by Douglas's...