A Mountaineer in Motion: The Memoir of Dr. Abraham Jobe, 1817–1906 (review)

In reading Dr. Abraham Jobe’s memoirs, one gets the impression of a moralistic, strong-willed Victorian businessman of the highest respectability. That is certainly the image he wanted to portray. Writing in the latter years of his life, in the 1890s and early 1900s, Jobe presented himself as a man whose upstanding ethic and sober habits protected him against the vicissitudes of commerce and the machinations of competitors who did not share his sense of fair play. Jobe aimed his didactic writing (if one accepts his statements as genuine) at a limited audience, insisting in several places that “I write not for publication.” Instead, Jobe wrote “for my children and grandchildren and intimate friends, who have often requested for me to leave for them some sketch of my travels” (39). The University of Tennessee Press, however, has chosen to violate Dr. Jobe’s wishes and send his memoirs out to the world. Appalachian scholars will be glad that the press did so, because Jobe’s story, traversing the entire swath of the nineteenth century, underscores the complexity of the Appalachian social and economic experience.

Jobe was a businessman as well as a physician, and both professions carried him far from his home base in the Great Valley of Tennessee. In each step of his travels, Jobe encountered honorable and dishonorable men, upstanding citizens and violent drunks. Jobe details several stories of being cheated in business, including a memorable episode from his youth, in which both he and his business-partner brother were simultaneously fleeced. After the Civil War, Jobe invested in various New South mining, railroad, and manufacturing schemes, all of which saw threats from unscrupulous men and overextended credit. While Jobe earned considerable wealth from those investments, he still calculated that, in his retirement, he held over ten thousand dollars in defaulted debts. Looking back on events such as these from old age, Jobe concludes that he “‘had entirely too much confidence in mankind’” (32). Historians, meanwhile, gain new appreciation of the centrality of revolving credit and multiple forms of currency in the functioning of the nineteenth-century commercial economy.

Jobe’s experiences often carried him far from the realm of business. Several sections of the memoir detail his encounters with Native Americans, including his service in the Georgia militia during the Creek wars of the 1830s, and, in the 1860s, his travels to the Ojibwa peoples in Minnesota, as something of a governmental missionary for civilization. Both sections provide intriguing descriptions of relations between Indians and whites, and both show clearly Jobe’s sharp distinction between “savage” and “civilized” Indians (usually “half-breeds”), with only the latter having the potential for assimilation. Jobe devotes less attention to his medical work than to his businesses, but he still presents a deliciously gruesome description of external tumors and their excision, nicely illustrated by editor Hsiung with contemporary depictions of various medical devices and tools. Along the way, Jobe mentions in passing his wife and family, but he says very little about them and very little about any personal relationships at all until the last chapter.

David Hsiung’s editing of the memoirs succeeds in transforming a handwritten, disorganized manuscript into a coherent volume. Hsuing has divided Jobe’s writing into chapters, each with a brief introduction that sets the material into wider historical context. I quibble with Hsiung’s presentation of the “market revolution” in chapter two, which strikes me as rooted in an outmoded 1980s historiography, but in general the settings work well. Jobe’s marginal comments and insertions find their place in the endnotes, along with the multitude of obscure references in the text that Hsiung has tracked down. As a result, the endnotes are as much a joy to read as the main body of the book. Abraham Jobe has perhaps found an audience for his writing that he did not want, but we hope he will appreciate the high...