A Small, Unquiet Place

There is a county in New York's Hudson Valley called Columbia, where the people used to squabble and sometimes take up arms against one another. My paraphrase of the opening sentence of Anthony Wallace's classic Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (1978) is deliberate. Like Rockdale, John Brooke's Columbia Rising is the product of long, close research by a mature scholar at full power, about a small place where people wrestled with very large questions. Again like Rockdale, its local story speaks not only to local issues but also to problems that reverberated through an epoch. Finally, although both books speak to one specific problem in one specific place—industrial society for Wallace and the intersection of political and civil society for Brooke—both end with their authors forced to transcend problem and place and address the great American dilemma of their subjects' day: slavery.

Brooke intervenes in a very rich historiographical landscape that stretches from fictional meditations by Washington Irving (Knickerbocker's History of New York, 1809) and James Fenimore Cooper (Satanstoe, 1845) through twentieth-century studies that range from Carl Lotus Becker (The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1809), Dixon Ryan Fox (The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York, 1919), George Dangerfield (Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, 1746-1813, 1960), Staughton Lynd (Anti-Federalism in Dutchess County, New York, 1962), Alfred F. Young (The Democratic Republicans of New York 1966), Patricia Bonomi (A Factious People, 1971), and Sung Bok Kim (Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York,1978) to the recent work of Alan Taylor (William Cooper's Town, 1995, and The Divided Ground, 2006). Brooke knows better than to argue with his predecessors or to "test" his propositions, drawn from Columbia sources, against any of theirs, many drawn from other New York State localities. This book is local history in the richest sense, intensely and specifically oriented towards its subject, eschewing attempts at generalization, declining professional argument so that it can deal with its actual subjects; yet it still develops powerful ideas.

Brooke has a superb cast of characters. Necessarily, Martin Van Buren, who was born to humble circumstances in Columbia County and who returned there after his presidency to dwell in the Victorian grandeur of his mansion Lindenwald, figures strongly. But the Little Magician does not dominate Brooke's stage. Van Buren's national career is of less import here than the way he learned to work the mechanisms of the county's messy political and civic life. Doing so, he acquired skills that served him well on several larger platforms, insights that led to his own great contribution to American public life, and attitudes that limited what he achieved.

Van Buren probably could steal any scene in which he appeared—save, perhaps, when Andrew Jackson also was in front of the footlights. But Brooke has retrieved a whole cast of powerful characters. Central among them are types familiar to any student of Hudson Valley history: Dutch Yorkers and New England Yankees, river grandees struggling to maintain their outdated way of life, tenant farmers on the landlords' great estates, and hill-country freeholders who rejected the landlords and all their works and pomps. But Brooke brings more characters to his drama, particularly women and African Americans. Thirty years ago, it was possible to write an account of New York's revolutionary-era political society that paid no attention to such people, even presuming to offer reasons for ignoring them. Brooke might have included them in a merely perfunctory way, on the principle that modern historiographical practice requires doing so. He achieves much more than that.

He does so by interweaving two separate organizing concepts; political and civil society. Both concepts are familiar, of course. Integrating them allows Brooke to deal...