Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History by C. Dallett Hemphill (review)

If the reader has sisters and brothers, C. Dallett Hemphill’s Siblings will strike a familiar chord. From the egalitarian nature of sibling relations, even between the sexes, to the lifelong salience of the sibling bond, there is apparently much continuity in sibling relations in America over the past four centuries. While tracing this continuity and the origins of today’s sibling expectations is enlightening, it is in her descriptions of the striking differences caused by generation, race, region, and class that Hemphill’s analysis really shines. It is here that she makes her strongest case for siblinghood’s function as a “shock absorber” for historical change (185). The subtitle declares this to be a history of American brothers and sisters, but the nine chapters cover only the colonial, revolutionary, and antebellum periods. The introduction, epilogue, and appendix extend the analysis to consider later nineteenth-century and twentieth-century siblings as well as a hoped-for impact of sibling studies on family history more broadly. The chapters are organized thematically, but also move chronologically through colonial and early American history as well as generationally through sibling cohorts. Despite the lack of equal evidence for all classes, races, and regions, Hemphill’s tight examination demonstrates the various forms sibling relationships took among Euro-Americans, Native Americans and African-Americans.

Hemphill has two central arguments. The first covers changes within sibling relationships from the colonial period, through the generations straddling the Revolution, and finally to the antebellum family. She highlights the differences between black, Native American, and white cultures (the former two having a higher degree of egalitarianism among siblings across the generations) and between northern and southern cultures. She sees sibling relations as a key site of social negotiation in a country experimenting with the limits of democracy and the disruptions of war, slavery, and forced migration. This leads to her second argument: that siblings help men and women maintain familial and social cohesion in times of chaos or stress and that sibling relations offer a rationale for new ways of understanding a changing world. In other words, siblings are “shock absorbers” and an “escape hatch” for everything from patriarchy to Revolution to slavery (63, 74, 108–9, 125–26, 148–52, 189, 212).

Sibling relations are accorded great familial, social, and historical power by Hemphill. For instance, she credits brothers and sisters with things as varied as the creation of sentimental family culture, the establishment of women as the key “kin-keepers,” the beginnings of fraternal workplace activism, and the development of corporate, capitalist enterprise (56, 68, 142, 152, 170–79, 181). Hemphill’s analysis is full of little nuggets that challenge current scholarship about American families and the development of American history. For example, her account of brothers’ importance to sentimentality and kin-keeping in the eighteenth century and the loss of fraternal emotional closeness in the nineteenth century are especially revealing in that they counter much of the historiography that emphasizes women’s association with sentimental families and kin-keeping. Hempill demonstrates the strength of survivorship among slave siblings and the tensions between siblings of mixed race in the antebellum South—a point rarely considered in scholarship on mixed-race couples (191, 195). Hemphill also points out the relatively recent addition of sibling rivalry to American notions of sibling relations. Until the middle of the twentieth century this aspect of sibling-hood, so prevalent today, was virtually non-existent in American history (216-19). An additional nugget is revealed when Hemphill points out the essential role brother-brother business ventures played in the development of family firms—the precursor to corporate capitalism (181, 202).

The only problem with Hemphill’s work is really a problem for family history in general. As she traces in her appendix “The Case of the Missing Siblings,” family history as a field has declined after its heady origins in the 1960s and 1970s. Co-opted by other genres of history, family history...