The Legacy of Patriarchy

Robert E. Shalhope. A Tale of New England: The Diaries of Hiram Harwood, Vermont Farmer, 1810-1837. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. vi + 313 pp. Maps, illustrations, appendices, notes, and index. $45.00.

It is hard for the modern reader to like Hiram Harwood; it is considerably easier to pity him. It is part of the beauty of Robert Shalhope's A Tale of New England that Hiram's portrait is rendered so fully that we are unsure how to feel about him. Hiram Harwood was a New England farmer who lived in the neighborhood of Bennington, Vermont, in the early nineteenth century. His own diaries and those his father Benjamin serve as the primary sources for this recounting of a life shaped—and warped—by patriarchy. One story, told early on in the study, captures the essence of what Hiram endured. In 1806, Benjamin began dictating his diary entries to Hiram (then a teenager). Each doubt Benjamin expressed about Hiram, Hiram had to record in the diary. Like an errant schoolboy, copying over a statement of his transgressions on a blackboard, Hiram had to note every failure to prepare properly for the patriarchal role he was expected to assume, or, more mundanely, each time he was unable to match the prodigious efforts of his grandfather, Peter, in the fields. The modern reader cringes at the story, but perhaps within the tradition of New England childrearing such shaming was better than a beating. The story also serves to introduce Hiram's authorial voice. This voice, expressed in private as the diary becomes his, rather than his father's, will help him struggle to shape a new identity. That identity will be rooted in the past and in the traditions of patriarchy, family and republicanism, but will also be shaped by newer notions of respectability, sociability, and aesthetic appreciation.

Hiram Harwood was not typical. When I lecture on the antebellum social order, I introduce students to the Northeast with the story of a hypothetical Connecticut farm family— large, extended across generations, its children geographically mobile, its links to a Congregationalist past attenuated, its farming prospects bleak, but living in an economy that offered "opportunities" that ranged from cheap land in the Ohio River Valley to work on the Erie Canal to wages in the Lowell Mills to prostitution in New York. If my story, a composite of what I've learned in the last thirty years from social history, rings true, it still doesn't square with Hiram Harwood's world.¹ His was a small family, and however bad the economy, one which endured by farming. He was neither deeply religious nor an heir to the traditions of New England Federalism. It is, thus, to Shalhope, not the context but the interiority of Hiram's life that matters. If some biographers use a life to illuminate an age, and others use an age to illuminate a life, Shalhope follows the latter course, but it is a life that matters, more or less, on its own terms, as we get to know Hiram and suffer with him through what seems both a very modern and a very foreign effort to define himself. That Shalhope can create both empathy and distance is one of the great qualities of this unusual study. That we see the world so exclusively through Hiram's eyes (and briefly Benjamin's), seldom even stopping for speculation about how those around him felt, is the frustrating part of this study. The reader is left wanting to know more about the wife, the daughter, the son, the grandfather, the Federalist lawyer, and the best friend who also populate this study.

The first chapter, "A Man of Business," focuses on Hiram's father (and grandfather), and the second chapter, "A Man of Pleasure," focuses on our protagonist; these opening chapters serve as the point and counterpoint for the book as a whole. The two chapters contrast not just two distinctive temperaments...