Voices of the New Republic: Connecticut Towns, 1800-1832 (review)

The turn of the nineteenth century was a promising time in the new American republic, poised between enduring traditions and great social and economic changes. In 1800 the socially elite members of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences sent out a circular letter to all 107 towns of the Constitution State, inquiring about each community's history, people, geology, economy, and natural environment. In all, more than a hundred questions were posed in thirty-two categories. The academy intended to publish the answers as a "statistical history" of the state—the word "statistical" then emphasizing factual statements rather than merely numerical data. More than half the towns never replied, however, and others took decades to do so. Many replies were incomplete. All this delayed the project for more than two hundred years. Now, the first volume of Voices of the New Republic finally reassembles and presents the answers the academy received, and a companion volume includes two dozen interpretive or supplemental essays. It was worth the wait.

An interpretive essay by historian Christopher P. Bickford in volume 1 introduces the original project and summarizes its two-century history. Then the original questions are followed by annotated transcriptions of the answers, town by town, county by county. These replies trickled in to the academy over a period of more than three decades. Some were systematic and complete, but the citizens who answered on behalf of other towns ignored most of the topics of inquiry. All replies, the succinct and the verbose, are in the rather excursive but still readily comprehensible prose of the nineteenth century. A few respondents even included simple tabulations of data. The editors have added context by providing annotations and brief biographical sketches of the original authors, and they have enhanced utility by including an index.

As fascinating and illuminating as all this information is, a modern reader does encounter disappointments. Those chargeable to the editors or publishers are minor (the awkward relegation of annotations to endnotes, for example, and the use of a rather small typeface). Most frustrations owe to the nature of the questions posed, the incomplete replies, and the timing of the original project. More than half of the towns are absent, including Hartford and most of Fairfield County. The coming industrial revolution could of course only be hinted at. Some "statistics" are merely lurid or sensational anecdotes. Yet in fairness we cannot fault the original respondents; they deserve no blame for a lack of historical perspective, or for being too busy living their lives to devote considerable time and effort to replying to what we today might consider a junk mail survey.

The prejudices, preconceptions, motivations, superstitions, and subjective and moral judgments of both the academy and the respondents are often as illustrative as the "facts" they sought to relay. There are many details pertinent to methods of farming, but information on craft technologies is virtually nonexistent. While many questions went unanswered, some answers went well beyond what was asked. For example, Lewis M. Norton, writing about Goshen in 1812, railed against the growing scourge of intemperance and provided statistics about alcohol consumption. Such unexpected gems—others include mortality tables for Litchfield County and a report of a piped public water supply in Washington, Connecticut, in 1815—make for illuminating reading.

The interpretive essays in the second volume are thoughtfully arranged and lucidly written by first-rate scholars of early New England history, ecology, and technology. They range from disease and medicine to the fishing industry, from religion to farming, from politics to wildlife. Any one would be strong enough to stand alone; together, they add up to a coherent collection that often cleverly segues from one topic to the next. While the authors are obviously very familiar with the current scholarship, none of the essays burdens the reader with exhaustive historiographic preambles. Most are more comprehensive than the topics addressed by...