John Randolph Clay: America's First Career Diplomat (review)

64CIVIL WAR HISTORY Brahmin ethos in face of die realities of American democracy confronting it in mid-century. So much for summary. Aldiough Professor Tyack succeeds in analyzing the general attitudes of die conservative Brahmin caste better, I think, than anyone thus far has, he fails to justify his central character, George Ticknor , who seems too often a literary device, not a rich and convincing personality . It is rather shocking, for instance, to have been asked to follow the life of a man diroughout a book only to find him dismissed with the following sang-froid: "On the twenty-sixth of January, 1871, at the age of seventy-nine, George Ticknor died as decorously as he had lived." Ticknor seems only occasionally to command Professor Tyack's respect, never his affection. The tactical problems faced by a writer who tries to combine particularistic biography with general history in a single book are knotty, and Professor Tyack has not fully solved them. Yet as a general history the book is excellent. Part of its success stems from Professor Tyack's skill at weaving quoted material from many of Ticknor's contemporaries and near-contemporaries into his own prose, thereby capitalizing, unobtrusively, on his deep and solid research. Part stems from his wit and grace as a writer: from first to last his prose is a pleasure to read. His sense for revealing anecdote is especially good, as when he sums up die struggle between Calviniste and Unitarians after 1800: "Men began to taunt one anodier by asking, 'Are you of the Boston religion or of die Christian religion?' or by retorting, 'Are you a Christian or a Calvinist?' " And aldiough he has failed to blend biography and general history perfectly , he should be praised for having tried. The approach itself is fresh and promising._._, , ,____ r ß Richard C. Vitzthum University of Maryland John Randolph Clay: America's First Career Diplomat. By George Irvin Oeste. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966. Pp. 602. $10.00.) Anyone seeking a well-rounded knowledge of American diplomacy in the nineteendi century should pay some attention to die minor diplomats as well as to the Adamses, the Sewards, and the Fishes. In die days before cables and wireless, outlying consuls and chargés sometimes had to use dieir initiative and imagination more dian many ambassadors today, and dieir training and selection, dieir relations widi die State Department, and above all dieir handling of routine business and small crises, tell us much about die early Foreign Service. It was an often neglected branch of the government, and its members went the full range from knaves and fools to intelligent, devoted diplomats— who too often recognized sadly that diey were wasted on dieir trifling assignments . John Randolph Clay belongs to the latter group. His career was die longest in American diplomacy before the Civil War. Widi a few short breaks he served from 1830 to 1860 as secretary of legation and oc- BOOK REVIEWS65 casionally chargé d'affaires at St. Petersburg and Vienna, dien as chargé and finally minister to Peru. Making use of nearly every conceivable American source, Oeste has carefully traced Clay's slow rise and many disappointments—at the age of thirtyfive and after fifteen years of service, he returned to his original post at his original rank and salary! A letter of his in 1845 to James Buchanan, his friend and superior, (p. 254) is a telling indictment of die haphazard, politics-ridden Foreign Service of die mid-nineteenth century. During the last thirteen years of his career Clay presided over American-Peruvian relations widi a sure hand, but his experience deserved more important concerns than debts and claims, cases, guano diplomacy, and efforts to open die Amazon from die west. In 1861 Seward dismissed him into unpensioned retirement widi no recorded appreciation of his services. While Oeste might have enhanced his account of diplomacy in Lima by using Peruvian sources, he has done a diorough job, and no writer will need to reexamine Clay's career for a long time. However, die book has a few flaws which will deter some readers. It is about twice as long as necessary, for...