North Carolina Office of Archives and History

The Contrast: Manners, Morals, and Authority in the Early American Republic by Cynthia A.KiernerReview by: C. Dallett HemphillThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2007), pp. 428-429Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23522978 .

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428 Book Reviews

Moore's account of Waxhaws' economy is consistent with that provided by Robert

Mitchell in Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley

(1977) and a number of other scholars: backcountry farmers enthusiastically

participated in land speculation and commercial agriculture. But it provides little of the

detail offered by Mitchell and others. Moore makes no effort, for example, to use either

land or probate records to measure economic stratification and how it changed. Nor

does he provide significant detail about the internal operation of Waxhaws' economy. While Mitchell and others have tried to reconstruct the decentralized trading systems that operated in the southern backcountry, Moore barely acknowledges them. He does

mention "local storekeeper John Barkley" (p. 49) but offers few details about how stores

functioned in Waxhaws or who their customers were. And judging from Moore's

account, Waxhaws may have been the only community on the southern colonial

frontier in which neither peddlers nor taverns served a retail function.

Similar lacunae mark the discussion of ethnicity and religion in Waxhaws.

According to Moore, Presbyterians living in Waxhaws hated and mistrusted the

handful of Anglicans, Methodists, and Baptists living around them and had little

interaction with them. Such clannishness would not be surprising, but the only concrete measure Moore employs to demonstrate it is the paucity of marriages across

denominational boundaries. Intermarriage, however, is one of the greatest threats to

group identity. What about other, perhaps less threatening, forms of interaction?

Did Presbyterians lend money to non-Presbyterians? Did they ask non-Presbyterians to

witness their wills or serve as their executors? Did they initiate suits or other legal

proceedings against non-Presbyterians more than they did against Presbyterians? World of Toil and Strife provides a convincing account of some aspects of the social

and economic transformations that occurred in Waxhaws between 1750 and 1805, but

it will leave many readers wondering where the rest of the story is.

Virginia Tech

Daniel B. Thorp

The Contrast: Manners, M orals, and Authority in the Early American Republic. By Cynthia A.

Kierner. (New York: New York University Press, 2007. Introduction, preface, illustrations,

suggested reading, index. Pp. x, 147. $17.00, paper; $55.00, cloth.)

As the first American play to be staged professionally, Royall Tyler's The Contrast has

long held a logical place in the early American literature curriculum. It also finds a home in upper-level and graduate courses in early American cultural history. However,

Cynthia Kierner's new edition of this play should win it a much wider modern audience. Kierner highlights the many historical themes of the play with a fine introduction and facilitates deeper understanding of those issues with a wonderfully chosen set of additional primary documents. The resulting book could be used with

profit in any early American history course.

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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Book Reviews 429

While the readers might balk at it, the thirty-two-page introduction (half the length of the play itself), is what makes this book so accessible. Kierner provides a briskly paced tour through the many areas of early American society and culture that she links to the

play. Scholars will appreciate her concise accounts of current views on the social,

political, and cultural history of the new republic, especially concerning class, age, and

gender relations. Kierner points out connections between these topics that students would otherwise miss.

With Kierner's introduction, then, Tyler's play becomes an efficient vehicle for

reflection on vital issues in the wake of the American Revolution. The central plot, which follows the undoing of an unhappy engagement between the virtuous Maria and

the foppish Billy Dimple and the happy match between Maria and the equally virtuous

Colonel Manly, allowed Royall Tyler to ask an urgent question: how should Americans

behave in their new society? Should they continue in their time-honored tradition of

avid consumption of British culture, or did they need to create something new,

especially since the Revolution had called long-standing inequalities into question? To

her credit, Kierner urges the reader to recognize the complexities of these questions and

the ambiguities of Tyler's responses, whether they concern the propriety of the manners

taught in the British aristocrat's best-selling Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son or the

continued need for patriarchal family relations in the new republic. The pairs of

documents and questions for discussion that she provides explore differing contemporary views on eight of the interconnected issues raised by the play—namely, the place of the

arts and theater in America; the proper forms of manners, dress, and education; and the

impact of ideas of equality on marriage and class relations—and are well designed to

open up rather than foreclose discussion and interpretation. Kierner makes sparing but

judicious use of footnotes to translate slang and clarify literary references, yet she

provides appended, topically organized reading lists identifying ample resources for

further exploration. These features and the short length of the book make it a very

interesting new option for the classroom.

Ursinus College

C. Dallett Hemphill

"I Tremble for My Country" : Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Gentry. By Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler.

(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006. Foreword, acknowledgments, introduction,

illustrations, tables, conclusion, notes, bibliography, index. Pp. x, 206. $55.00.)

Ronald Hatzenbuehler makes two basic arguments in this graceful little monograph.

First, Thomas Jefferson is best understood as a member of the Virginia gentry, the social

class that was the main reference and chief inspiration for most of his famous writings and much of his politics. When Jefferson referred to "my country"—as he did in 1800,

"whether my country is the better for my having lived," or, in regard to slavery, "I

tremble for my country," or, in Philadelphia, "It is painful to be 300 miles from one's

country"—he did not mean the United States. He meant Virginia.

VOLUME LXXXIV • NUMBER 4 • OCTOBER 2007

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