William Henry Seward (review)

BOOK REVIEWS57 lectual debt was greater to the French romantic philosopher Cousin than to the German thinkers. As much an individualist in his own way as men like Thoreau, Alcott or Theodore Parker, Ripley was able to challenge the impersonality of Emerson 's views on God and his indifference to social reform without jeopardizing his own high standing among other transcendentalist leaders. "Had the conversation of this evening been written out by Plato," Parker wrote once after Ripley had been holding forth, "it would equal any of his beautiful dialogues." Like Emerson, Ripley found that Transcendentalism was incompatible with a Unitarian pulpit. Unlike Emerson he found himself driven to show that the kind of self-realization all transcendantalists aspired to could only be secured through community organization. This was the genesis of Brook Farm, and Mr. Crowe is careful to point out the philosophical connection between this famous Utopian experiment and the "submerged vein of collectivism rising from Emerson's exaltation of intuition as a faculty which belonged at least potentially to all men." The chapters on Brook Farm are the best in the book. This is a subject too often passed off in textbooks and in the class room as a quaint adventure contrived and indulged in by harmless New England eccentrics unable to come to grips with the real problems of American life. Mr. Crowe treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves and shows how Ripley conceived the experiment as an attempt to resolve one of the central dilemmas in the American experience—how to reconcile the values of individualism with the human need for community. All utopias fail and Brook Farm was no exception. For Ripley it was a personal crisis brought on partly by natural calamity (the main building burned down), and partly by his attempt to make the experiment conform rigidly to the doctrinaire specifications of Fourierism. Finally Ripley moved to New York and turned to journalism . Discouraged and temporarily embittered by poverty and the endless bickering of other reformers, he began to exploit the commercial possibilities of his pen, and beat "a steady retreat from the values" by which he had earlier lived. As one of the stars on Horace Greeley's staff, he became affluent and famous, and when he died in 1878 he was apparently as serene as he had been during the balmiest days at Brook Farm when some of his friends had felt they were "going to heaven in a swing." This book is based almost entirely on primary sources and is written with a grace and vigor that goes far beyond that of most scholarly monographs. The style is detached and analytical, and those aspects of Ripley's personal life (his marriage to the brooding Sophia who ultimately became a Catholic convert) most closely related to his career are treated with a sensitivity and caution that does justice both to the subject and the sources. Despite Mr. Crowe's modest disclaimer that "the essential and consistent Ripley ultimately eludes us," we finish this biography with the feeling that he has drawn a convincing portrait of an important American thinker and writer who, like most of the ante-bellum reformers, found the mainstream of American life too strong to buck forever, and who, unlike many others, managed to turn with the current without compromising his intelligence or his dignity . Irving H. Bartlett Carnegie-Mellon University William Henry Seward. By Glyndon G. Van Deusen. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Pp. xi, 666. $12.00. ) Despite the significance of William Seward's career his reputation has faded badly since his day. Seward was too important to be forgotten, but he is usually recalled simply in terms of his most famous phrases, "higher law" and "irrepressible conflict," or as the Civil War era Secretary of State who purchased Alaska. Seward's "fall," which stemmed partly from the domination of Lincoln over his epoch, in both folk 58CIVIL WAR HISTORY culture and historiography, meant that while some figures bask in multiple biographies , Seward's life lacked a modem study. This deficiency has now been remedied by Professor Emeritus Van Deusen of the University of Rochester, who was instrumental in bringing the rich...