Childhood, Marriage, and Reform: Henry Clarke Wright 1797-1870 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS363 Meanwhile, we have an ideal study of political power and the men who used it to consult. Allan Kulikoff Bryn Mawr College Childhood, Marriage, and Reform: Henry Chrke Wright 1797-1870. By Lewis Perry. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Pp. xiv, 359. $20.00.) This full-dress reappraisal of Henry C. Wright rescues him from undeserved neglect and uses him to make important statements about large portions of antebellum society. It is rich with subtle insights and shrewd speculations about the ways an individual accommodates a shifting culture; it also demonstrates Lewis Perry's talent for asking in the most sustained way the right questions of his subject and material. Wright was one of those nineteenth-century New England "commercial travellers" of ideas who "invent[ed] for himself the role of itinerant radical [and] spent . . . thirty-five years as a traveling expert on social evil and public improvement." Inhis samplecaseWrightcarriedmostof the antebellum reforms, but he domesticated them, or abandoned those which seemed unsusceptible of domestication, and became a specialist on the bourgeois family, especially the situations of wives and children in a turbulent, chaotic world. At the center of his ideas was a "rigorous . . . concern for self-improvement" and a "limitfless] hardening faith in the economic view ofman." In Perry's fine RadicalAbolitionism: Anarchy and the Governmentof God in Antishvery Thought (1973), Wright was a minor characterin the cast of antebellum reformers and was presented as an "extreme case," even among the more volatile reformers trying radically to remake American society. Now in Childhood, Marriage, and Reform, richer in scholarship and resourcefulness of mind, Wright is the central character , his elevation to first-lead justified on the ground that his life "is a case study [because he] typified the . . . expectations . . . among his generation," a people obliged to try to come to terms with their "fluid, anarchical age," and in so doingmanaged to convincethemselves that they "were a settled people, enjoying an easy balance of work and leisure." In short, in 1973 Wright was pretty much an off-the-wall zany; in 1980 he is "representative" of millions of Americans. (I elide Perry's careful qualifications in order to sharpen the point.) This transmogrification occurs because of the rethinking currently underway about the meaning of mid-nineteenth-century America and a redeployment of energy to search out what seems to have been important in giving fundamental shape to American society in those times. Therefore, in addition to its stated aims, the book provides, perhaps inadvertently, a comparison by which we can see clearly many of these reformulations and redeployments. The express purpose of the 364CIVIL WAR HISTORY book is to analyze Wright's "life and thought [in order to] understand dimensions of the past that would otherwise be nearly inaccessible." The intent of this analysis, given Wright's "representativeness," is explicitly to "challenge . . . the political biases of our history" by showing that "political" questions, especially those having to do with power, coercion, control and human freedom—which, Perry believes, are based in sexual and economic relations—havebeen misunderstood, and consequently mislocated, by a conventional history. The book is thus simultaneously an historiographical guidepost, a showcase of technical methods engaging a multiplicity of themes and materials, a searching inquiry into the meaning of the "changing experiences ofordinary human beings," and a provocation. Inevitably there is a price exacted from this bounty; it is paid by Wright himself who in these pages becomes less a human being than an object of dissection and commentary, and a device employed to discuss large social themes. The titleofthebook announces priorities: themanis subordinated to the themes. The reader is therefore prepared for what will come, which, despite Perry's qualifiers, oftenverges on reductionist biography. But what comes is so splendid that the price paid seems, by the end of thebook, almost inconsequential. Peter F. Walker University of North Carolina Baltimore in the Nation, 1789-1861. By Gary Lawson Browne. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Pp. xiii, 349. $20.00.) I was wondering when someone would get around to doing a history of Baltimore's rise from the Revolutionary era to the Civil War. It is a natural. Gary Browne's...