The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (review)

BOOK REVIEWS255 Louisiana State University Press could have done a much betterjob weeding the text. One stumbles over such infelicities as "Rio Grande River," "headed up," "divisional" (meaning division), and "infantries" (meaning two or more infantry units). There are also many outright errors—"states' rights," healthy (for healthful), and former (for the first of three). An occasional sentence is awkward in the extreme: "Originally favoring a peaceful settlement of sectional issues, Lincoln's call for troops to suppress the rebellion drove [Gaspard] Tochman to join the southern cause" (41, 89, 97, 136, 215, 222, 238). The addition of an index would have been very helpful. The names of many men and information on important topics pop up throughout the book. More Generals in Gray is a fine work. Anyone with a serious interest in the mid-nineteenth-century South in general and the Confederacy in particular will find it a valuable reference source. Richard M. McMurry Americus, Georgia The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association. By Christopher Clark. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv, 269. $27.50.) The elimination of economic and social injustice from the world seemed possible to the hardy souls, most of them Garrisonian nonresistants, who gathered in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1842 to form the Northampton Association ofEducation and Industry. Taking over a recently failed silk factory and the lands surrounding it, they settled in to experiment with wages, hours, communal ownership, object education, racial and gender equality, social activism , and religious freedom. By the time the association disbanded four and a half years later, however, the optimism of most had waned. It is the reasons for (and significance of) this fleeting moment of hope and its passing that has intrigued Christopher Clark. Making use ofthe recently rediscovered (although still incomplete) account books, membership register, minutes, and outgoing correspondence of the group, Clark has brought to this study the same penetrating analysis of daily records of ordinary people and the same theoretical perspective that sees the increasing nonownership of the means of production as the principal sourceofsocial tension in this era, which characterizedhis earlier prize-winning book, The Roots ofRural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860. Like the best recent studies of communitarians in America, Clark's analyzes its subjects in the context of the culture of the time and evaluates their influence , not by their agreement eventually to disband but by the criticisms they leveled at contemporary society, the responses they elicited from those contemporaries , and the community members' own modified social understandings. Clark's sensitivity to cultural context enables him to argue that experiments in 256CIVIL WAR HISTORY communal living were no more unusual at the time than experiments with popular democracy, public education, or the factory system. With as many as 1 20 members in residence at one time, the Northampton Association was larger than most antebellum organizations, too. To label "come-outers" as failures, he insists, is to ignore the need of the larger society to respond to their radical challenge and reexamine its own premises. Indeed, radical beliefs did not destabilize the community. Dissenters were typically replaced with new recruits , and reformist zeal made the economic problems suffered by the silk industry easier to tolerate. Only when disunion became a goal for Garrisonians did enthusiasm flag, because such a political objective could not be achieved through social reorganization. After ending the association, members followed different paths in their continuing quest for social change, but their subsequent choices were invariably influenced by what they had concluded from their experiment in association. Clark's definitive study comments on numerous issues raised in other studies of communities. He sees women responding to community according to their own ideologies rather than gender alone. Social networks of families, neighbors , and ideological soulmates supplied the community recruits. Rather than being dominated by charismatic leaders, members were more radical than the community's founders. Although a total of only 240 people ever lived in the commune, Clark has managed to glean from their experiences with everything from silk making to hydropathy a compelling view of New England (and radicalism) in transition. Phyllis F. Field Ohio University The First Woman ofthe Republic: A Cultural Biography ofLydia Maria...