Reviews of Books

The Life and Times of Martha Laurens Ramsay, 1759–1811. By JOANNA BOWEN GILLESPIE. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001 . Pp. xxx, 315 . $ 34.95 .)

South Carolina's political elite in the eighteenth century resembled an extended family whose lives were closely intertwined in public and private. Christopher Gadsden and Henry Laurens, boyhood friends who became political rivals on the road to revolution, played prominent parts on the local and national stage, which are amply documented in the historical record (particularly in Laurens's voluminous papers). So, too, did Henry's son John, the young Continental officer who proposed that slaves be armed and freed in return for military service. Not so John's sister Martha, who was obliged to cultivate an expansive intellect and questing spirit in the domestic sphere. A valuable aide to her diplomat father in France and intellectual partner of her physician husband, David Ramsay, for twenty-four years she kept a remarkable secret diary of her interior life, the existence of which she disclosed only on her deathbed in 1811, with the request that it be preserved as a "common book of the family" (Gillespie, p. 3). Ramsay went beyond that wish; he edited and published the diary (the original of which disappeared long ago), along with some surviving letters, as Memoirs of the Life of Martha Laurens Ramsay in 1811. By that tribute, Ramsay, the Charleston man of letters best known for his History of the American Revolution (1789), secured from oblivion the "literary remains" (ibid.) of an elite woman whose intense involvement in her tumultuous era merits equal place along with the deeds of her male kin.

1

Christopher Gadsden and Henry Laurens offers a dual biography of the "parallel lives of two American patriots." Through this pairing, Daniel J. McDonough strives "to explain the motivation" and "to illuminate the lives and careers of two important, yet relatively neglected, figures" (p. 13). In this account, Gadsden and Laurens are public men, engaged in politics and commerce, whose families get only occasional mention. By contrast, Joanna Bowen Gillespie's The Life and Times of Martha Laurens Ramsay places her subject "firmly within family narratives" as Henry Laurens's eldest daughter, David Ramsay's wife, and the mother of eleven children. Yet her aim is to present Martha Laurens Ramsay in her own right and not merely as an "auxiliary" to her father and husband and to let her, "as much as is historically possible," speak "for herself" (pp. 17–18). Not surprisingly, then, McDonough and Gillespie produce quite different books. What is surprising is that their books work better when considered together rather than separately.

. . .