American Grit: A Woman’s Letters from the Ohio Frontier ed. by Emily Foster (review)

BOOK REVIEWS sure, slow at times to deal with issues, even when they have been evident for decades. One thinks,for example of the two decades or more of talk by Hoosier politicians about the need to better diversify the state's economic base, while at the same time courting heavy industry for the jobs it brings to the state, a policy that has made the recent recession particularly hard on the state' s finances. Perhaps the biggest change the state has faced since Peckham wrote this book has been the shift to multiclass basketball, which many believe has destroyed the sacred nature of the high school tournament. But in the other areas that Peelham outlined, from religion and education, to the cherishing of small town values, to a love for politics, to a continued growth in the arts,Indiana remains much the same. Readers are not likely to find anything in this book that other,more recent historians,have not written about extensively. But in many ways, their works are variations on Peckham' s theme, and his book should find its place along side theirs on the bookshelves of anyone interested in Indiana' s place in the world. Jason S. Lantzer Franklin College Emily Foster, editor. American G rit:A Woman' s Letters from tbe Obio Frontier. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. 344 pp. ISBN: 0813122651 ( cloth), 45.00. n 1826,Anna Briggs Bentley and her family left Maryland for a frontier farm in Columbiana County,Ohio. Anna and her husband,Joseph,were by then parents of five living children,a sixth having died before the move. Between 1826 and 1842, the time during which Anna wrote most of the letters t t.3 - " . St= 31* fom# 4* Letters 1* 2«, 0»»ffbnter -"' f#' f G C, Exttly FofTER « 4 . collected in A111 er i can Grit, she bore six more children, losing two in infancy and one as a small child. The rest of the letters , some written by adult children, depict the comitig of age, marriage, and establishment in independent households of the next generation of Bentleys. Anna Briggs Bentley wrote her last known surviving letter in 1881. When she died nine years later at the age of ninetyfour ,she had outlived her husband and eight children. Anna Briggs Bentley was born into a prosperous , socially prominent Quaker family that in her generation fell on hard times. As a part of their financial retrenchment, the Betltleys relocated to Ohio, but the move exacted a heavy physical and psychological toll on the genteel Anna accustomed as she was to having servants around the house and leisure enough for selfcultivation . The move also wrenched her from the bosom of her family. Bentley coped with her deprivations by writing letters on precious scraps of paper that she covered with lines written one way and then overwritten at right angles. She stole tillie for writing from her sleep, groggily describing her previous day in the wee hours of the next. Always, she tried to show her correspondents, usually her mother or sister,how she and her family lived. In return, she begged them for " all the news"and, occasionally, for material supportmoney and fabric for clothing . The letters also speak to the twin challenges of the Society of Friends in the early nineteenth centurythe Hicksite schism and abolition, both of which clainied the synipathies of Bentley and her family. In sum, Anna Briggs Bentley' s letters 80 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY comprise a vivid social history of family and community life in early Ohio. Editor Emily Foster has paved the way for readers to enter Bentley's world. Foster's transcription of the letters is clear,and she has skillfully untangled family genealogies knotted by generations of interi »narriage. Her textual annotations, although tending toward the minimal, are helpful. Foster's introductions to the chronologically arranged chapters ,and occasional commentaries between letters, help to link the Bentley family's activities to larger political, religious,and economic developments. She could, however,have done more to provide a historical context for Bentley's writings. Foster makes much less effort to elucidate the domestic circumstances that dominate the letterS than she does public matters...