Book Reviews
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by separate narratives of the Presbyterian, Methodist, Catholic,
Lutheran, Baptist, Jewish, Reformed, African Methodist, Swedenborgian, Disciples, and Universalist experiences. Of these, the
Presbyterians, Catholics, and Lutherans have been given the most
space, probably because their source materials are the most copious.
Frontier Faith is excellent on two counts. First, the author is
committed to fleshing out the personalities of the principal players.
Using private and ecclesiastical correspondence, newspapers, and
a variety of church records, Mather puts color on pioneer cheeks;
and he has a n eye for the vignette that amuses while it informs
about social custom. By way of example there is the worthy Friedrich Konrad Dietrich Wyneken, a strict Lutheran divine, who
grows immeasurably more amiable (and complex) as readers learn
how he scandalized local deacons by sporting yellow britches donated by a Catholic merchant. A second major contribution of
Frontier Faith is the inspiration it ought to provide for writers of
local history. Mather has proved that the sources can be rich and
varied and that considerable narratives can be drawn from key
personalities and from the social/moral concerns they espoused
and debated. The seventy-three pages of notes and sources that
Mather appends to this book suggest that research into the cultural roots of other localities might be equally rewarding.
W. WILLIAMWIMBERLY
I1 has for thirteen years been the senior minister of the
Presbyterian church of La Porte, Indiana.
General Thomas Posey: Son of the American Revolution. By John
Thornton Posey. (East Lansing: Michigan State University
Press, 1992. Pp. 325. Frontispiece, notes, appendixes, select
bibliography, index. $31.95.)
In 1871 an anonymous journalist made a sensational charge in
the Cincinnati Daily Commercial that Thomas Posey was a n illegitimate son of George Washington. Posey deserves a better billing, and this well-researched biography provides it. Although the
author relegates to a n appendix a detailed discussion of the heritage question that failed to surface until long after Posey’s death,
he nevertheless labors relationships with Washington throughout
the text. There is, of course, a lively irony in the question, was the
Father of his country sterile?
The author dramatizes Posey’s heroic and “relentless bayonet
charge” that won the day at Stoney Point (p. 581, his march with
troops “barefoot and half naked” from Virginia to the southern
front to relieve General Nathaniel Greene, and his victory over the
Creeks at Sharon, Georgia (p. 92). At Yorktown, Lieutenant Colonel Posey, “astride his horse in front of his ragged battalion,” was
“a proud eyewitness’’ a t Lord Cornwallis’s surrender (p. 82).
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Indiana Magazine of History
After the war Colonel Posey became “Thomas Posey, Gentleman,” who married “an eligible widow of means,” fathered nine
children (p. 1101, and had “no difficulty settling comfortably” at
“Greenwood,”Spotsylvania County, Virginia (p. 1131, where Posey
children had an able series of tutors, including William Wirt and
Archibald Alexander. “The Poseys,” Alexander observed, “though
somewhat decayed in wealth, maintained much of the style which
belonged to old Virginia families” (p. 117).
In 1802 the Poseys trekked to western Kentucky and resettled
at “Longview” on the colonel’s 7,000-acre military grant in Henderson County. Kentuckians sent Posey to their state Senate, and in
1808 he ran for governor. Another war hero, Charles Scott, defeated him, partly because of Posey’s federalist sympathies and his
ultra-federalist friends, one of whom, Joseph Montfort Street, married his daughter.
Frustrated by defeat, Posey went to Louisiana, and Governor
William Claiborne appointed him United States senator for a brief
term. President James Madison then appointed him territorial governor of Indiana, where Posey revitalized the militia and urged the
legislature to improve roads and schools. “Countless” militia musters in “drizzle, sleet, and snow” impaired the governor’s health
“grievously” (p. 212). With Indiana’s statehood in 1816, Posey ran
against Jonathan Jennings for governor and lost, 5,211 to 3,934.
He ended his career as Indian agent, operating from his lodging
above Hyacinth Lasselle’s inn in Vincennes. After Posey’s defeat
for Congress in 1817, the author concludes, rather wistfully, that
in Indiana “the coattails of gentry leadership had turned into an
electoral albatross” (p. 250).
ROBERTG. GUNDERSON,
emeritus professor of speech communication and of history,
Indiana University, Bloomington, is author of The Log Cabin Campaign (1975) and
The Old Gentlemen’s Convention (1961).
David Anton Randall, 1905-1975. By Dean H. Keller. (Metuchen,
N.J.: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1992. Pp. xii, 235. Illustration,
notes, index. $39.50.)
Walk across Indiana University’s Bloomington campus and
you may pass the Lilly Library, a 1960s two-story limestone block
building on the south side of the Showalter Fountain. This book is
for those who wonder about the people who built the magnificent
collections behind that facade. Although David A. Randall died in
May, 1975, some readers may well remember him as the Lilly librarian who came to the Bloomington campus in 1956 having previously served as a bookseller in the Rare Book Department of
Scribner’s Book Store. During his Lilly Library career Randall recruited such notable catalogers as Josiah &. Bennett, and he acquired collections ranging from the wondrous (for example, George