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Reviews
River of Enterprise
The Commercial Origins of Regional Identity in the Ohio Valley, 1790–1850
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By Kim M. Gruenwald
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(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 214. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.)
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An American Colony
Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture
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By Edward Watts
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(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002. Pp. xxv, 285. Map, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00.)
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| The authors of these engaging studies offer contrasting perspectives on the social, economic, and cultural development of the trans-Appalachian West in the nineteenth century. Kim Gruenwald, professor of history at Kent State University, narrates an upbeat history of how merchants—most of them emigrants from New England—constructed a web of commercial connections that transformed the western country into a thriving region of rural and urban communities, laying the foundation for what would become the American Midwest. Edward Watts, professor of English and American Studies at Michigan State University, contributes something quite different: a study of the Old Northwest as the first colonial establishment of the American federal state system. Gruenwald examines economic relations as evidenced by account books, business records, and personal papers from the period, while Watts takes a textual approach, reading and interpreting works by eastern and western writers. Ultimately, however, they both are in pursuit of that elusive object of postmodern scholarly desire—an analysis of identity, its formation and its meanings. Both authors set high goals that neither fully attains, but they have produced stimulating histories that deserve to be taken seriously. |
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At the center of Gruenwald's study is the experience of merchant Dudley Woodbridge and his son Dudley Woodbridge, Jr., who relocated from Connecticut to the Ohio Company's outpost at Marietta on the Ohio River in the late 1780s and remained in the mercantile business throughout the period under study. The Woodbridge firm kept and left voluminous records, which Gruenwald uses to reconstruct their business connections in fascinating detail. The Woodbridges imported goods from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, distributing through a network that extended to both sides of the Ohio, taking in exchange Ohio wheat, Kentucky tobacco, Tennessee cotton, and Missouri lead. Merchants such as the Woodbridges, she concludes, "established the strongest ties that helped bind the region together as one economic unit" (p. 117). |
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Though it is not clear why, Gruenwald is somewhat defensive about this conclusion. There have been a number of very good recent histories on the role of capitalists in the development of the West. "The central story of the nineteenth-century West," as William Cronon writes in his Nature's Metropolis (1991), "is that of an expanding metropolitan economy creating ever more elaborate and intimate linkages between city and country" (p. xv). Yet Gruenwald seems to think that western history is still sentimentally entangled with Jeffersonian yeomen. Not that she considers ordinary pioneers unimportant to the process of settlement. "The farmers built local community and kin networks," she concedes. But "merchants tied western communities to each other and to the outside world" (p. 156). In so doing they created the material conditions for an emergent western regional identity that encompassed communities throughout the entire Ohio Valley. By the 1810s residents of Ohio and Kentucky were referring to the region as "the Western Country," and had established a regional identity as "westerners." |
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