The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (review)

The subject of John Fea’s new biography, Philip Vickers Fithian, is a man already well known to American historians for his insightful and detailed diary of life as a tutor on Robert Carter’s plantation in Virginia in the mid-1770s. Fea removes Fithian from the narrow Virginian pigeonhole in which historians have placed him and replants him firmly in his native social and intellectual soil. The sensitivity of his account is a fitting complement to Fithian’s unusually thoughtful and articulate diary, kept throughout his adult life.

Fea begins with Fithian’s childhood in the Cohansey region of southwestern New Jersey, where he was the oldest son of a Presbyterian yeoman farming family. He then follows Fithian through his religious conversion, his years at Princeton and at Nomini Hall, and his tours as itinerant preacher in the Appalachian backcountry. Throughout the book, Fea traces Fithian’s romance with Elizabeth Beatty, and he ends with Fithian’s growing political commitment to the Revolutionary cause and his service and death as a chaplain in the Revolutionary army. Fea’s well-structured chapters weave together the social, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional aspects of Fithian’s life in each of its discrete moments.

This biography is more than just an explication of Fithian’s remarkable diary and correspondence, however. Fea explains that his project is to use Fithian’s life to illustrate a number of themes “at the heart of the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century America” (5). For Fea, the Enlightenment is neither a grand historical abstraction nor the parlor game of a few European intellectuals; rather, it describes a particular path of self-improvement that many in eighteenth-century America tried to tread. The Enlightenment is the “way of improvement” of which his title speaks, and for Fithian and his contemporaries it consisted of a fierce commitment to the use of reason to counteract destructive individual passions and to build a “universal love of the human race” that would supersede local and parochial concerns. Importantly, Fea points out that the rational commitments of the Enlightenment always existed side by side in America with deep Christian faith. These two traditions were sometimes at odds, but were often complementary in their visions of personal and political “improvement,” especially for followers of Fithian’s moderate mid-Atlantic Presbyterianism. Fea puts Fithian’s skills as a diarist to good use in providing a clear and convincing explanation of these diverse building blocks of an early American worldview.

Fea’s biographical approach places his book at the intersection of several different historiographies. His attention to the specifics of Fithian’s experience puts his book in dialogue with other social histories of the Revolution like Alfred Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party (Boston, MA, 1999). Fithian was neither a leader nor a common soldier; rather, he was an exceptionally articulate member of the “middling sorts,” and as such, his story takes a first step toward connecting the historiography of the revolutionary experience with the historiography of the nineteenth-century middle class. Fea’s focus on Enlightenment morality and self-improvement also makes his study a useful extension to the intellectual histories of the revolutionary era exemplified by Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1993). Fea takes the grand abstractions of enlightenment, conversion, patriotism, liberty, and republicanism and shrinks them to human scale, showing how they shaped the life of an individual whose name was never in revolutionary headlines. The real success of Fea’s book is in getting these two historiographies to speak to each other, by linking Fithian’s social experience with his mental world to show how they built the texture of his daily life.

In Fea’s portrayal, Fithian’s world has a striking physical, intellectual, and spiritual coherence. Post-Great Awakening Presbyterianism, the Scottish Enlightenment, yeoman farming, life at...