In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (review)

This ambitious and comprehensive book on letter writing in America spans the late seventeenth through eighteenth centuries. It complements nicely two other recent books, Eve Tavor Bannet’s Empire of Letters and Sarah Pearsall’s Atlantic Families,¹ and may well come to be regarded as the definitive work on the subject. It covers both the public and private dimensions of letter writing, with perhaps more attention to the former. Konstantin Dierks treats correspondence as an essential aspect of the administration of empire, the conduct of war, and long distance commerce. Letter writing was also a “system for the education of the self” (283)—a system that encouraged modern forms of subjectivity and new understandings of personal bonds.

As its subtitle suggests, the book’s scope is also broader than letter writing narrowly construed. It contains original research on the infrastructure of transport, especially the post office and the building of lines of communication during the Seven Years’ War. It also treats letter writing as part of a larger “documentary culture” (283) that required expanded literacy and schooling in the technical routines of business and legal writing. A great strength of the book is that it also covers the material culture of letter writing; it is stuffed with delightful and informative details about desks, pocketbooks, stationary, pen and ink, and more. Accordingly, the book is based on an astonishing array of sources: the personal letters of elites and the poor alike, but also letter writing and business manuals, gazetteers and school textbooks, slave runaway ads, political essays in epistolary form, portraits and furniture, and much more.

The book’s themes are as ambitious as its topical scope. Dierks takes as his starting point the observation that there was a “dramatic social expansion of letter writing” in the eighteenth century (xvii). He proposes that a large middling population exercised “agency” through letter writing (6–7). “Agency” is an overworked, often loosely used term, but Dierks gives it traction by focusing on how his subjects conceived of the cultural, political, and economic efficacy of their writing. He makes shrewd observations, for example, about commercial letter writers and how they conceptualized (or failed to conceptualize) the category of the “economic” and their own role in promoting economic development. Similarly, the familiar letter turned women and men into connoisseurs of sensibility in themselves and others.

Dierks also argues strenuously that letter writing was a way of asserting cultural authority over others. This is starkly apparent in the case of the diplomatic letters, which were part of an apparatus of domination that established British supremacy over new groups of Native Americans at the end of the Seven Years’ War. Dierks also effectively interprets the class and racial assumptions in commercial advice literature and the pedagogy of letter writing. This literature enunciated a norm of universality, but then repeatedly undermined it by taking a dim view of the capacity of those at the bottom of the social scale to participate fully in the culture of letter writing. In short, Dierks detects, as have others, a complaisant universalism in middle class culture that concealed a condescending indifference, if not explicit hostility, to the lower orders and racial outsiders. Overall, he emphasizes that the material practices and cultural assumptions associated with letter writing marginalized Native Americans, poor whites, and blacks, slave and free.

Dierks’ book makes an important contribution to the understanding of class formation and the culture of class and race. His interventions will no doubt produce debate as do all bold arguments. Dierks’ firm association of the eighteenth century culture of letter writing with the “middle class,” for example, does not in my view ring quite true. The cultural practices identified by Dierks aimed precisely to blur older distinctions among the aristocracy, gentry, professionals, and traders. The people promoting and engaging in these practices were not so much a homogeneous middle class as an amalgam of “better sorts” and middling aspirants to gentility and refinement, all of whom sought...