Everything Worthy of Observation: The 1826 New York State Travel Journal of Alexander Stewart Scott ed. by Paul G. Schneider Jr. (review)

Everything Worthy of Observation: The 1826 New York State Travel Journal of Alexander Stewart Scott Edited by Paul G. Schneider Jr. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019. Excelsior Editions. 246 pages, 31 halftones, 13 maps, 6" x 9". $95.00 cloth, $31.95 paper, $31.95 ebook.

In August 1826, twenty-one-year-old Alexander Stewart Scott left his home in Quebec City for a three-month journey through lower Canada and upstate New York. A student of law and the son of a British customs collector, Scott set out with intellectual curiosity, the means to travel comfortably, and introductions to well-placed citizens in the towns he visited. Throughout his voyage, he recorded his daily encounters and observations, intending to share them only with family and close friends. Now, nearly two hundred years later, Scott's journal can receive a broader audience, thanks to a carefully edited and annotated edition by Paul G. Schneider Jr.

In Everything Worthy of Observation, Scott brings a middle-class sensibility to the region's natural and artificial topography as well as to its human inhabitants. A native of Scotland who emigrated to Canada with his family in the 1810s, Scott begins his journey with an assumption of American inferiority; in some ways his travels reaffirmed his presuppositions, and in other ways they stoked admiration. Although he finds some places to be unclean or otherwise uninviting (Schenectady is "straggling"), he is taken by the "sublimity" of Niagara Falls, the abundance of churches, and the "handsome" nature of some buildings and towns, declaring Albany to be "beautiful" (49, 69, 77, 87). The Erie Canal's low bridges, towropes, and sleeping accommodations create hazards, some life-threatening, but overall the brand-new waterway reflects admirable workmanship, provides smooth and rapid travel (without the dust and mud that bedevils roads), and offers welcome amenities, such as libraries, on its packets. American law students are ignorant and uncouth, with one showing his "free republican spirit" by "clapping his feet upon the Table" as he sat for his exam, perhaps in part because they lacked poor role models: New York's practicing lawyers were "very poor speakers," while its chief justice was ill-clad and chewed tobacco (50, 91). Nor did Scott have kind words for American literati, critiquing James Fenimore Cooper's "slavish imitation" of Sir Walter Scott (101). But based on his personal interactions with "gentlemen" and their families—and their hospitality toward him—he ends his journey with a favorable impression of Americans, despite "a few peculiarities in their manners" (97).

Scott is able to experience such hospitality in part because two of his sisters lived in New York, and they and their husbands opened doors for Scott that would have been closed for most people passing through the region. In that important respect, his journal differs from those kept by other international travelers along the so-called Northern tour. Although Scott remains a tourist and a visitor, he accompanies his brother-in-law, a merchant, on his business travels, giving us a sense of how the Erie Canal unleashed local as well as long-distance geographic mobility. While visiting his sisters and traveling with his brother-in-law, he interacts with other well-placed individuals, offering glimpses of middleclass leisure activities, such as the theater, dinners, card parties, dances, swimming au naturel, and drinking the waters at mineral spas. And if we need additional evidence supporting the notion of the "alcoholic republic" to which W. J. Rorabaugh introduced us more than forty years ago, Scott's account provides it. "Yet," as Schneider notes, "gregarious as he appears, Scott rarely mentions or apparently even 'sees,' let alone associates with, people who are laborers, poor immigrants, servants...