| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and the American Experience, 1769–1828. By Evan Cornog. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. x, 224 pp. $29.95, isbn 0-19-511949-5.)

Evan Cornog has written a biography of DeWitt Clinton anchoring him securely in the complex and ambiguous political era in which he lived. Clinton was in many ways a man of the eighteenth century, "a public spirited polymath," a man of learning and culture, a would-be patrician. Yet Clinton was also well ahead of his nineteenth-century time as an active and effective proponent of prison reform, public health, the almshouse, and other ameliorative efforts a generation before the antebellum ferment of reform. Clinton was to New York as Thomas Jefferson to Virginia and Horace Mann to Massachusetts, articulating a philosophy of public education and creating the Free School Society to begin to carry it out. 1

In an era when much of politics was the stuff of adolescent grudges, Clinton was particularly arrogant and inept. "A gift for conciliation," Cornog tells us, "was not among Clinton's qualities, and the conduct of his presidential campaign [in 1812] . . . managed to sow division in both Republican and Federalist parties in New York." . . .

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