A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

    A Midwife's Tale is a really cool work of scholarship that absolutely masters what would seem like a small task: publicizing and contextualizing the diary of a midwife from 1785-1812. The author's work is so important because it reveals Maine history that was otherwise totally lost and also teaches by example that getting women's perspectives on history can completely change the modern perception of events. In countless instances, Martha Ballard's diary provides completely unique or very different interpretations of events, and sometimes records names and events unrecorded elsewhere. 

    Martha Ballard seems like an incredible woman. She delivered over 600 babies, and saved countless lives of children and mothers. She crossed frozen rivers and streams, and on one occasion, fell through the ice, and arrived soaking wet and freezing to deliver a baby in December. At the time, women practiced "social childbirth," meaning that as labor got closer to delivery, female relatives and neighbors attended births and assisted the midwives. They would often become midwives themselves after this informal apprenticeship, since it was not infrequent that a midwife would be delayed or called too late to attend the birth. Martha Ballard probably developed her career as a midwife in this way, and the author writes that it is no mistake that Ballard's midwifery picked up more when her daughters were old enough to weave, freeing up her time. Ballard was also a member of one of the last generations of women to engage in this system of social childbirth and midwifery in the United States, as doctors started to take a greater and greater role in childbirth in the 19th century, and midwife's slipped into a role as doctors' assistants.

I thought this passage was particularly good:

To celebrate such a life is to acknowledge the power--and the poverty---of written records. Outside her own diary, Martha has no history. Although she considered herself "the head of the family," a full partner in the management of a household, no independent record of her work survives. It is her husband's name, not hers, that appears in censuses, tax lists, and merchant accounts for her town. She is not listed in Hallowell's poor relief records, though we know she relieved the poor, not in the earliest records of the Augusta First Church, though she was a member. Nor does any extant court records acknowledge the testimony she took from unwed mothers in delivery. Her name appears on a list of witnesses at the North rape trial, but no one, except she, preserved a record of what was said. Henry Sewall mentioned her five times in his diary, four in relation to births and once when she died, but he never explicitly identified her as a midwife or acknowledged paying a fee.

It is incredible to think how a long life can be summed up. She delivered 600 babies, testified in a rape trial of a judge, witnessed the aftermath of a family annihilation-style mass murder, and did so much more in 77 years of life, and all that is left of her is her diary, miraculously-preserved.  

Common Sense

    Around the same time I finished A Midwife's Tale, I read "Common Sense," by Thomas Paine, which was an extremely good essay, although way more religious than I ever realized. It is totally within the tradition of the other essays I read in the Revolution, although it is really strange to read something written in January 1776, after the war began, but before the Declaration of Independence was written. Of course, this essay gives the best reasons for the necessity of declaring independence. 

    One thing that I thought was interesting was that Paine is clear on the lack of necessity of government and obviously has a more positive view of men's ability to live in a smaller-government world. He writes in one good line, "the plain truth is that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government that the crown is not as oppressive in England as it is in Turkey." He is also really strong against the English monarchy. He refers to William the Conqueror: "A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives is, in plain terms, a very paltry rascally original." The part that I knew from the essay, that it is ridiculous for a small island to govern a continent so far away, only shows up wedged in the middle of the long essay, and doesn't take up that much space. But the government Paine proposes is very similar to the government eventually adopted, although I like his idea of having the presidency rotate among the states.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• It isn't surprising that Martha Ballard spelled and punctuated words and sentences more or less randomly. What is interesting, though, is that she used different spellings for the names even of her own family members. That's a very different way of thinking about names before everyone was literate and writing.
• It was not uncommon for Ballard to receive payment for a delivery as much as four years after the fact.
• In the eighteenth century, it was believed that a woman could not lie about the father of her child while in labor, and it was sometimes considered a legal necessity for an unwed woman to declare the father of her child while in childbirth in order to establish which man was legally responsible.

The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution by Alfred F. Young

    After getting big historical and ideological context for the American Revolution, I am honing in on three books addressing three disadvantaged groups of the period: the poor, women, and slaves. This is the first, on the poor, and covers the life and popular discovery of George Twelves Hewes. Hewes was a young man who participated in the Boston Tea Party, and was rediscovered as an old man in 1834, when two books were published about him amidst a reinitiation of interest in the Boston Tea Party.

    One complaint about the book is that Hewes is not as important as the book makes him seem, and the premise that the Boston Tea Party had been forgotten and rediscovered, which was teased in the introduction, is revealed by the end to not be true. No one had forgotten the Boston Tea Party. And although the 1830s biographies of Hewes were the first works in print to name the event the "Boston Tea Party," Young's investigation reveals that the term had been used colloquially probably since the event itself, but was only formally referred to as the spilling of the tea in Boston Harbor or something to that effect.

    What is interesting is that the spilling of the tea was not commemorated as a holiday for about half a century after the revolution. Boston was dominated by the Federalists, who were more aristocratic and resented the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre as the "wrong" kind of events in the American Revolution, being led by the mob. It was not until Democrats began to dominate the city in the 1820s and 1830s that celebrations of the mass actions became more popular in Jacksonian America. July 4th had taken over all the other Boston commemorations once the war had ended, whereas during the war, Bostonians had celebrated opposition to the Stamp Act on August 14th, the resistance to the Redcoats in 1770 on March 5th, the old Pope's Day celebration of the Gunpowder Plot being foiled on November 5th, and the Tea Party on December 16th. These were all swallowed up into the 4th of July after the war. New public memory was rekindled by the War of 1812, and by Congressional acts that sought to grant pensions to surviving veterans of the Revolutionary War. One such act required veterans to write about their experiences, which created a surge of popular memory about the war. Additionally, Lafayette's visit to America in 1824 spawned more interest, as well as fiftieth anniversary celebrations in that decade. Finally, increased interest came from men like George Twelves Hewes, who were well-understood to be the last exemplars of that generation.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In the summer of 1768, there were four thousand British soldiers posted in Boston, a town of fewer than sixteen thousand inhabitants. That gives a lot of context to the Revolutionary-era fear of standing armies.

The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood

    I can tell why this book is a classic. I always wanted to read the authors name-dropped in Good Will Hunting and now I can start regurgitating Gordon Wood. Wood's primary thesis is that the American Revolution's place in history should be revised from being seen as a more conservative revolution (especially when compared with the French Revolution) to being extremely ideologically radical in its own right. The French Revolution's radicalism was obviously greater in its violence, but the American Revolution was just as much if not more ideologically radical. Above all, Wood argues that the American Revolution transformed society, not just government. While we may look back today and see an unfinished revolution for slaves and women, the equalization of all landowning men was an incredibly radical step at the time, and the Revolution really continued into the 19th century, when all white men, not just landowners, were made full citizens. Books like this are at their best when they distill the development of ideas into a path that clearly shows the contradictions and coherencies of thought at the time. You end up feeling that, because it was all explained so well, that the development of these ideas was inevitable. 

Slavery

    Indentured servitude in the New World was not a brand new concept. In England, servants usually had yearlong contracts. Indentured servitude in the colonies became especially long (five to seven years) to pay the large expenses of transporting someone across the ocean, obviously not a factor when they stayed in England. Due to the high value of these servants, the governments instituted a system of passes that was not needed in England to control their comings and goings. White servants were treated nearly as bad as black ones if not worse in the minds of some contemporary observers. Apparently they were sold like chattel as well. The big difference though, is that the white servants were on a contract that would end, while black slaves were in bondage for perpetuity. Wood uses this example to illustrate why colonial thinkers took so long to identify the abolition of slavery as a political goal. For the colonial thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, slavery was a difference in degree from indentured servitude, not in kind. Of course, there was still a different, but when society was so harshly graded into strict hierarchies as the society of 18th century America was, abolition of slavery didn't seem so high a priority. 

    What is really interesting is that the idea for the liberation of the slaves comes out of the same intellectual tradition as the liberation of Englishmen living in America. Once people started to think that they could not be taxed without representation and that colonists had been made slaves of the King and Parliament, they started to think about the freeing of actual slaves. But for all of human history until that point, very few if any had thought that slavery, in any of its many forms, should be abolished. Until the late 18th and early 19th century, slavery was just another low status in a world of low status people. That meant that once white men were transformed from subjects into citizens, the difference between black slaves and white free men (who started calling themselves gentlemen) transformed from a difference in degree into a difference in kind in the early 19th century. Only then did slavery become an aberration that required explanation. It isn't hard to see how the same thing could happen for women. In that way, liberation begets liberation.

The Transition from a Medieval World into a Capitalist World

    You could give a rough sketch of the medieval world as a world based on status and hierarchy that emphasized identity, while contrasting it with a Capitalist world that emphasized production and services. To illustrate, a medieval man worked in a trade because he was apprenticed into an appropriate trade due to his status in the community. A capitalist man worked in a trade because it could make him money. There were no businessmen in the medieval world, but in early America, Toqueville describes everyone as a businessman. A medieval nobleman owned land that was in his family for generations. Capitalist men bought and sold land to make money and speculated on its value. A medieval shopkeeper would sell to an aristocrat on credit because of his family name. A capitalist shopkeeper said "show me the money." America was a test case of early diminution of community, dominated by personal connections, in favor of society, dominated by impersonal dealings based on self-interest. Coincidentally, Adam Smith was writing in 1776 that self-interest would be the best basis for running the world. By the 19th century, that's how America was operating.

    One change in this category was about who should be serving in government. For a long time, there would hardly be an idea of "corruption" as a public vice. Public servants were not paid a full salary and were not expected to dedicate all their time to public servants. Before the American Revolution, public servants were expected to donate some of their talents to run the country for a time before returning back to their gentlemanly interests. Therefore, corruption wouldn't be looked at the same. It was common for individuals in government to face huge conflicts of interest and resolve them in their own favor. But while we would view this today as exploiting public offices for private interests, in the old world, they would have thought that the government was exploiting those private individuals for public interests, and their gains were an acceptable price to pay. Gentlemen, because of who they were, were expected to supply the officer corps and lead the government. After the American Revolution, all men were gentlemen. Indeed, even before the Revolution, rich Americans didn't have the funds necessary to fund themselves in government. So the idea transformed. Instead of being part time government leaders, America would pay it's officials, and eventually transform their posts into full-time jobs.

    Wood points out that in the Revolution, the great divide was not rich vs. poor, workers vs. employers, or democrats vs. aristocrats. Instead, it was patriots vs. courtiers. The self-made men of the colonies rebelled against the men who held positions based on their connections. It was a matter of rank/position coming from below versus above. It was only after the Revolution was complete, starting in the 1780s and becoming most obvious in the debates over ratifying the Constitution, that the key debate became democrats vs. aristocrats, with democrats represented by the Democratic-Republicans and the aristocrats represented by the Federalists.

Democrats Against Aristocrats

    With the actual war against Britain complete, the major conflict in American society centered around populism for decades thereafter. Once the courtiers were ejected by the patriots, the patriots were divided into two groups: those who thought politicians should only be wealthy, disinterested gentlemen, and those who supported the presence of "interest" in politics. The "interested" populists won, and their victory brought about a change in government. A big part of the reason that officeholders needed to be disinterested before the American Revolution was because the legislatures of the states (and Parliament) for that matter, had nearly absolute powers. Like was discussed in Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the King's absolute authority was replaced by the legislature's absolute authority. Legislatures adjudicated disputes that are now for the courts. They had unitary power over lawmaking and enforcement. The reason that it was possible to run a government with interested officeholders was thanks to checks and balances dividing government into different branches that would check each other. The genius of the system is that it would democratize government by pitting societally forces against each other through their direct representatives, rather than requiring their virtual representation by wealthy landowners who would claim to speak in society's interest.

    To illustrate the conflict, Wood hones in on the debate in the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1786 regarding the rechartering of the Bank of North America. The two protagonists of the debate were Robert Morris, the wealthiest merchant in the state, who supported rechartering the bank, and William Findley, a Scotch-Irish ex-weaver from western Pennsylvania, who supported debt-relief and paper money. This debate continues to modern day: monetary hawks versus doves. It is interesting how the same exact debate continues today, in similar form. Findley was accused of being "narrow, illiberal, and interested in the promotion of paper money and debtor-relief legislation," just like Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump. It is interesting to see how liberalism can adopt these aristocratic tendencies time and time again that results in working class debtors aligning themselves with populists. But what is interesting is how the debate between Findley and Morris foreshadowed the victory of the populists. Findley argued that, first of all, Morris was not disinterested, and was advocating for his own interest as a wealthy banker. And Findley, rather than arguing Morris' interestedness was the problem, argued that there was no issue, but that simply Findley was interested in the other direction, and thought it was hypocritical to pass off their interestedness as disinterested virtue. Wood writes that Findley suggested that interest "was quite legitimate, as long as it was open and aboveboard and not disguised by specious claims of genteel disinterestedness. The promotion of private interests was in fact what American politics ought to be about."

Cosmopolitanism

    Wood writes that "the revolutionary generation" was the most cosmopolitan of any in American history." They did not make a "national" revolution in any sense, since they considered themselves defending their rights either as Englishmen or as natural rights given by God. Many of them were deists, and thought Freemasonry could serve as a social binding that would replace religion. They were also men of science. Wood writes,

When Franklin was minister to Frace during the Revolutionary War, he issued a document to English explorer Captain Cook protecting him from American depredations at sea during his voyage of 1779. Franklin told all American shop commanders that they must regard all English scientists not as enemies but 'as common friends of Mankind.' When an American captain seized a British ship with some thirty volumes of medical lecture notes, Washington sent them back to England, saying that the United States did not make war on science.

Conclusion
    This was another excellent book that taught me about things I didn't even know I didn't know. I came away especially interested in how the Democratic-Republicans, despite essentially being made up of the losers from the fight for ratification of the Constitution, just trounced the Federalists for years and years after Adams was kicked out of the presidency. The country just became much more populist and rekindled the revolutionary spirit after Washington was gone. It was a total social transformation in which gentlemen and aristocrats were ejected from the ruling class. By the middle of the 19th century, the idle leisure that Washington and Jefferson embodied was held in contempt by a massive middle-class that valued hard work. Then, the same principles were applied to slaveholders, another aristocratic class that would lose to the value of hard work. 

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Land ownership was completely different in England and the colonies in 1776. At that time, 3/4 of English farmland was owned by noble and gentry landlords, and four hundred families owned a fifth of all land in England. Meanwhile, 2/3 of white American men owned land, while just a fifth of Englishmen owned land.
• Wood writes that young Americans at the end of the 18th century may have used pregnancy to force marriages of their choice rather than their parents'. At that time, between a quarter and a third of all brides were pregnant before their marriage.
• Members of Parliament did not receive salaries until 1911.