North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution by Alfred F. YoungReview by: Willis P. WhichardThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 3 (JULY 2007), pp. 335-336Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23523072 .

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Book Reviews 335

Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution. By Alfred F. Young. (New York: New

York University Press, 2006. Introduction, illustrations, notes, index. Pp. ix, 419. $22.00,

paper; $75.00, cloth.)

"Great men get great praise; little men, nothing" (p. 1). Joseph Plumb Martin, a

Connecticut farm boy who enlisted in the Continental army at sixteen and served the

length of the Revolutionary War, published these words when he was seventy. But what

could the officers do without the privates? Martin plaintively asked.

Everyone with even a modest knowledge of American history knows about the

activities of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin during the American Revolution. Even accomplished scholars of the period,

however, may know little or nothing of the contributions of Joseph Plumb Martin,

Ebenezer Mackintosh, Amos Singletary, and Isaiah Thomas. Abigail Adams and her

contributions are known; Anna Ellen Winslow and hers are not.

This book is about the less well known among those named, and others like them.

"The famous 'great men' are still very much there," states the author, "but they are no

longer the only actors on the stage, they don't have all the lines, and they interact with

players they confronted at the time" (p. 15). More accurately, perhaps, the book is about groups of lesser-known performers of the

period. Mechanics, artisans, and trade associations, for example, play significant roles

in the drama. Some of the artisans considered are justly famous. Benjamin Franklin was,

after all, a printer, and Paul Revere a silversmith, though they are better known for

other roles. Others like them, the associations they formed, and the contributions they made constitute the subject matter of these essays.

Perhaps the most interesting of the compositions seems something of a misfit.

Thomas Paine is well known even to casual students of the period. He was the author of

the three most widely read and influential pamphlets in the last quarter of the

eighteenth century: Common Sense (1776), Rights of Man (1791-1792), and Age of Reason (1795). Washington read Paine's essays to his troops. All Revolutionary leaders

at least knew of him. Congress paid him (though not what he requested) for his

expenses in the public service, and a bill to reward him with land, strongly endorsed by

George Washington, failed in the Virginia legislature by only one vote. Yet he is the

only individual to secure an entire chapter in a work ostensibly about ordinary people. The reason may be that Paine's fame had waned by the time of his death. Less than a

dozen people attended his funeral, none of them political leaders. No one, it seems,

even offered a eulogy. Paine thus had been reduced to the status of ordinariness, and

that may be the reason for his inclusion. The more likely reason, however, is that his

writings "crystallized an inchoate or unexpressed sentiment for independence" and

gave "the common people ... a sense of their own capacity to shape events" (p. 272).

The author's stated objective is "a more inclusive history" that unites perspectives

from the "bottom up" and the "middle" with those from the "top down" in order to

VOLUME LXXXIV • NUMBER 3 • JULY 2007

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336 Book Reviews

illuminate the whole (p. 12). He achieves that admirably while imparting a sense of

extraordinariness to the contributions of his "ordinary" performers.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Willis P. Whichard

Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780-1880. By Lynn A. Nelson.

(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Foreword, acknowledgments, introduction,

illustrations, epilogue, notes, bibliography, index. Pp. xviii, 295. $39.95.)

The field of environmental history has come into its own, and the long-neglected environmental history of the American South has recently received significant attention. In Pharsalia, Lynn Nelson takes an innovative approach to this topic by

closely examining the history of one farm in Virginia's Piedmont. This "environmental

biography," as Nelson terms it, examines the efforts made by several generations of the

Massie family to carve a plantation from land lying at the very foot of the Appalachian Mountains and extract from its soil and enslaved labor force enough profits to enjoy economic independence and a life-style befitting the Virginia plantation elite.

Nelson first examines the characteristics of the region's ecosystems and the

unfortunate consequences of imposing capitalist farming's intensified requirements on

them. He next explains how intertwined elements of Virginia's environment, culture, and economy contributed to the establishment of plantations like Pharsalia. The

planter elite faced a dilemma: in areas where unsustainable agricultural practices and

unchecked land speculation were rampant, it was economically more feasible to move

to new areas; yet the concept of an aristocracy emphasized permanency and generational

continuity. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, in an attempt to

confront this contradiction, the Massies, like other members of the state's planter elite,

experimented with reformed planting methods such as those advocated by their own

state's agriculturalist and periodical publisher, Edmund Ruffin. In subsequent chapters, Nelson laments that despite many desperate innovations over the rest of the nineteenth

century, the Massies failed to force the profits from Pharsalia required to maintain the

living standard to which they believed they were entitled. They tried crop rotation and fertilizers. They tried to replace tobacco with hemp and some wheat and attempted unsuccessfully to market hams and fruit brandies. Nothing improved their situation. In a last-ditch effort to finance their gentry aspirations, the Massies sold off Pharsalia piece by piece during the 1890s.

Like the Massie farm, the extensive Massie family papers have been parceled off to different owners. Despite the challenges of accessing these scattered primary sources, Nelson has effectively utilized the family papers and consulted an extensive array of

secondary sources to produce a solid study. Nelson's descriptions of the plantation's phases of development are especially rich and informative. However, the author

curiously omits a thorough economic analysis from this study. Nelson seems satisfied with the Massies' own claims that their finances were in the doldrums. But how can we

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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