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establish the founders' collective moral vision: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison,
Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, John Adams,
John Witherspoon, John Jay, and George Washington.
He acknowledges that religious heterodoxy and classical political theory shaped the civic morality of this
elite corps, but only to underscore their decidedly less
sanguine hopes that such intellectual resources could
adequately nourish political morality among ordinary
folks. This dilemma produced what West calls the
"theological-political" problem in the early republic
(p. 3). How could the new nation separate church and
state, protect freedom of conscience, and still tap the
politically salutary moral resources of religion?
The solution derived from a cultural consensus that
reason and revelation yielded enough common moral
interests to sustain a principled civic life. Moreover, it
required that sacred and secular communities exercise
restraint and moderation. Religious groups were welcomed as legitimate political players, provided that
they embraced public causes and arguments comprehensible to natural reason and morality. In return,
political leaders steered clear of matters doctrinal and
spiritual.
Subsequent chapters test evangelicals' practical allegiance to this framework. West includes Presbyterians and Episcopalians, as well as Methodists and
Baptists, arguing that adherence to historic Protestant
theology rather than worship style guided contemporary use of the term. At least until 1835, he contends,
evangelicals generally respected the founders' limits
while publicly declaiming against dueling, Sabbathbreaking, Sunday mails, and Cherokee removal.
West finds the Cherokee case most illustrative of
evangelicals' capacity for limited but principled political activism. With raw economic interests and political
expedience spurring removal advocates, only the moral
intransigence of ministers and missionaries generated
collective resistance on a national scale. Evangelical
luminary Jeremiah Evarts gave the struggle particular
respectability in the secular community with his widely
published "William Penn" essays, a closely reasoned
indictment of government duplicity. Evangelicals ultimately yielded to Andrew Jackson and covetous Georgians but not out of deference to ethnocultural loyalties as William G. McLoughlin contended in Cherokee
Renasance in the New Republic (1986). Instead, religious protestors retreated to avoid an unreasonable
and impossible confrontation with public opinion overwhelmingly committed to removal. Nevertheless, West
concludes that "religious idealism alone had shown
itself firm enough to defend the Cherokees' rights,
which suggested that the founders had been correct in
claiming that religion would be the guarantor of
morality in America" (p. 205).
West's treatment is balanced. He acknowledges that
antimasonry and especially anti-Catholicism marred
the evangelical record. The slavery issue produced
bitter internecine conflict, not unity. Likewise, evangelical campaigns often attracted zealots, easy targets
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for political leaders seeking to discredit religious activism. West embarks on a salvage mission here. For
example, Lyman Beecher, chief architect of early
reform efforts, ranted about Catholic hordes on the
frontier in Plea for the West, but he also prescribed
education and missionary outreach, not political restrictions or social intimidation. That qualifier hardly
excuses his lurid portrait of Catholic schemes, but
West mounts convincing evidence that Beecher and
other leaders regularly counseled moderation and that
they distinguished between the mandates of Christian
piety and republican morality.
West's use of the founders' solution to explain
evangelical advocacy and restraint, however, occasionally detracts from the spiritual and theological sources
of their limited earthly expectations. Evangelicals'
focus on the "new birth" was a more serious impediment to their confidence in moral suasion than West
allows. Political activism coexisted uneasily with their
conviction that natural moral understanding could not
yield consistent moral practice. Reason and self-interest, in their view, were poor substitutes for the incentives that revealed truth afforded only to believers. If
the founders' solution prescribed moderation, this
theologically based skepticism provided a rationale to
use force. Most evangelicals rejected this extreme, but,
as West admits, nativism, struggles to sustain Protestant theology in the schools, and even efforts to force
constitutional recognition of Christ's authority demonstrated future crusaders' willingness to ignore earlier
restraints.
Over three decades of scholarship has emphasized
that millennialism and a desire for Christian America
combined to make extremism and a penchant for
confusing religion and republicanism the hallmarks of
evangelical motivation. West's study, part of a growing
body of revisionist scholarship, argues convincingly
that many first-generation evangelicals separated piety
and politics in the service of limited earthly expectations.
MARK
Y. HANLEY
Truman State University
CAROL SHERIFF. The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and
the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862. New York: Hill
and Wang. 1996. Pp. xvii, 251. $21.00.
The Erie Canal is renowned as the first major transportation route connecting the Atlantic seaboard with
the trans-Appalachian West. Following a topographically blessed route (the highest point was less than 600
feet above sea level), the original Erie Canal incorporated eighty-three locks between Albany and Buffalo
to create a continuous "artificial river" 360 miles long.
Construction began in 1817, the complete canal
opened in 1825, and in 1835 the State of New York
authorized a major enlargement; by the early 1840s,
the waterway supported 3,400 boats and depended on
the labor of 30,000 men, women, and children to
remain operational.
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Reviews of Books
Carol Sheriff does not attempt a comprehensive
treatment of the canal's construction and operation.
Rather, she sets more modest goals by focusing on the
social and economic culture that both spawned the
system and was transformed by its success. For example, using evocative primary sources, she illustrates
how the canal encouraged long-distance travel not
merely for commercial trade but for tourism that was
unanticipated by early proponents of the system. "The
Canal made distances seem short not so much with
speed as with efficiency ... Canal boats could move
day and night, and they ran at much more frequent
intervals than stages" (p. 54). In particular, the opening of the canal sparked intense interest among easterners in visiting Niagara Falls (an event sardonically
celebrated in an 1828 play entitled "A Trip to Niagara").
In Sheriff's view, "the Canal's proponents believed
that the social decay associated with rapid market
growth (unemployment, poverty, crime, anonymity)
could be avoided altogether in America's interior" (p.
26) but, in truth, the canal created a very different
social reality. The "paradox of progress" highlighted in
the book's title aptly reflects a central theme of her
analysis: the "republican" vision of an expanding
America which the canal was to promote quickly faded
in the face of class and social divisions reflective of
American industrial society as a whole. This first
surfaced in the disdain shown toward the (often immigrant) laborers who actually dug the canal; it later
became manifest in the American Bethel Society's
evangelical concern for the "spiritual welfare" of the
boatmen (and the many boys drawn into the canal's
labor pool) who worked in a rootless environment
isolated from the surrounding culture.
Sheriff's analysis depends on extensive use of petitions submitted to the Canal Board (the state agency
established to administer the waterway) by New Yorkers seeking financial compensation or commercial
advantage. Filed by the thousands, these petitions
requested such things as monetary awards for property
damage sustained during construction or funding for
bridges to connect land holdings divided by the canal.
Municipal business interests also "expended a great
deal of energy attempting to persuade state officials
that the Canal [including regional feeder canals]
should run through their town, [or] that the toll
collector's office should be located in the building next
to their tavern" (p. 110). In analyzing the efforts of the
citizenry to demonstrate why their personal financial
interests coincided with a larger public good, Sheriff
convincingly illustrates how the interrelationship of
"public works" with "private interests" represents a
longstanding (if not necessarily honorable) tradition
within the political economy of the United States.
Sheriff's success in bringing her perspective on the
canal to life reflects a remarkable ability to filter out
financial, political, and technological aspects of the
waterway's history that are covered in other sources
and seemingly are not germane to her concerns. Of
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course, readers with specific interest in the canal may
not always be impressed with how their favorite subjects are covered. For example, the coming of the
railroad in the 1840s and 1850s as a competitor to the
canal and the myriad changes this wrought receive
little attention. Although the book's title implies coverage from 1817 through 1862, its analysis is heavily
weighted toward the period prior to 1845.
Sheriff avoids obscure academic jargon and her
work will prove accessible to a broad range of historians (including students and non-professionals). This
well-crafted book, which includes ten graphically compelling illustrations taken from nineteenth-century
sources, offers important and original insight into the
culture of antebellum America. It deserves a wide
audience.
DONALD C. JACKSON
Lafayette College
HARVEY H. JACKSON III. Rivers of History: Life on the
Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama. Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press. 1995. Pp. xiii, 300.
$29.95.
In his introduction to this study, Harvey H. Jackson III
notes that he has written "an older book," one in which
the style "is mostly narrative, analysis is treated as part
of the story, and the focus is on the people rather than
on the institutions" (p. xii). The result is the first
comprehensive history of the Alabama River system,
beginning with descriptions of the natural environment
and ending with an assessment of the role of the
Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama rivers in
modern day Alabama. In between, Jackson explores
the culture of indigenous people; early European
exploration; American settlement and the Creek War;
cotton agriculture and African-American slavery; the
steamboat age; Civil War; the rise of the railroad and
a modern industrial economy; hydroelectric dams (especially the Alabama Power Company); the Great
Depression; the Army Corps of Engineers; civil rights;
and the lives and work of modern black and white
Alabamians inhabiting these storied river valleys.
Jackson has combed a variety of secondary works
and primary material to paint his canvas. He has
examined all of the primary accounts published in
books or scholarly journals, including explorers' and
travelers' reports, military records, pioneer and slave
narratives (some from the Works Progress Administration transcriptions), county and community histories, and the published work of amateur historians and
local storytellers. Oral histories figure importantly, as
Jackson supplements newspaper interviews with locals
with his own interviews. By focusing on informants
from the Alabama River community of Gee's Bend, he
draws a lively social history. His archival research
ranges from the Alabama Power Company corporate
archives to the Selma Public Library and Birmingham
Museum of Art. All of this work is based on a thorough
review of contemporary scholarly secondary literature,
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