Daughters of Canaan: A Saga of Southern Women by Margaret Ripley Wolfe (review)

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 to which Bentley devoted far less attention. Foster's assumption seems to have been that Bentley's description ot her work, the core of her existence as a woman, unlike, sas the abolitionist movement in Ohio,is selfexplanatory for modern readers. And although the differences between Bentley's world and ours, beginning with the lack of birth control in hers,appear obvious,at the same time her letters speak to the eternal facts of women' s workcooking ,cleaning,and childcare. This paradoxshe is not like us, she is just like usposes a dilemma for any scholar concerned with early American women's writings. How much do readers need to know about Bentley' s world to understand her letters? Is the nature of mutual support among women in the Quaker community to which Bentley regularly refers selfevident ? What was the relationship, in historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich' s formulation,between Bentley' s private and community lives? These are difficult questions, and Foster' s decision not to pursue them does not detract from her otherwise solid editorial work. Still, in the end, American Grit eft this reader wishing for just a bit more. Even the title, which evokes the national cando spirit,does not do Bentley justice. She was not an archetype of a pioneer woman; her life was more than steely determination in the face of adversity . The heart of these letters is the '*' tr,» 82 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY for undergraduate classes in American history and women' s studies. Amy Thompson McCa, idless College of Charleston Allan Peskin. Winfield Scott and tbe Profession of Arms. Kent, Oh.:Kent State University Press, 2003. 328 pp. ISBN: 0873387740 ( cloth), $ 49. 00. n his latest work,Allan Peskin has taken on the formidable task of writing a biography of Winfield Scott, a man whose career in the American military,political culture, and diplomatic affairs spanned over a half century. A selfabsorbed man,whose pompous personal characteristics no doubt taxed Peskin, Winfield Scott's importance in his time cannot be denied. Still, since the publication of Charles Winslow Elliott's Winfield Scott:Tbe Soldier and tbe Man that appeared in 1937, few biographies of Scott had been published until the 1990s. In that decade, two scholars took on Scott ( John Eisenhower's Agent of Destiny and Timothy Johnson' s Tbe Quest for Military Glory), and now with the addition of this new work Scott certainly has received the attention he deserves. Born in 1786 and raised on a farm near Petersburg ,Virginia,Winfield Scott attended the College of William and Mary where he studied law,but in 1807, when tension erupted between the British and the Americans, Scott took tremendous pride in joining a company of volunteers to fight in what became the War of 1812. In part impressed with how he looked in uniform,he made the military his life's profession. After he received a commission as a captain in the artillery in 1808, he soon became known as " Old Fuss and Feathers"for his devotion to niilitary regulatioiis and to his soldiers. As tensions continued and the military expanded to meet the demands of the approaching war,however, Scott came into conflict with superiors, and that led to his suspension tor a year just prior to 1812. Still, he went on to fight in that war,was wounded and captured,and eventually he emerged from the fighting with distinction. In the years following the War of 1812, Scott traveled around Europe as a...