Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Wayne Bodle, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Cadwallader Colden was an Edinburgh-trained physician, a politician who scaled the ladder of imperial power in an American colony, a published inquirer into medical, scientific, and philosophical questions, and the author of a still useful work on Indian ethnography. He was New York's answer to Benjamin Franklin, but incredibly—while a huge trove of his personal papers was in print as early as the mid-1930s—no standard biography of Colden has ever been published. Perhaps it did not help that a critic of the only previous such work—that of Alice Mapelsden Keys—called her book a "classic example of how not to write a biography."1 A handful of doctoral dissertations have plumbed the man as politician or scientist, but these studies have yielded no books and few articles.	1
Alfred Hoermann's Cadwallader Colden does not claim to be a biography, although it begins and ends with rather traditional biographical accounts that treat the early and late public Colden. The first chapter carries him from Edinburgh to London to Philadelphia to New York in search of work and stature, surveys his political apprenticeship and early acquaintance with American men of ideas, and charts his retirement in 1728 to a country seat at "Coldengham" in Ulster County, New York. The epilogue narrates the already well-known story of Colden the older imperial ideologue, going angrily into the night in 1776 against mounting gales of revolution.	2
These accounts bookend four difficult chapters in which Hoermann treats Colden as a scientist/philosophe engaging with contemporary ideas in medicine and botany, Newtonian physics, and materialist philosophy. The effect of this organizing scheme is a bit unsettling. It will be hard for most William and Mary Quarterly readers to imagine Colden the thinker as divorced from Colden the political intriguer, Colden the family manager, Colden the gentleman farmer, or Colden the provincial surveyor, but one can plow through vast intellectual terrain in the core chapters engaged with little more than "Colden" the brand name: a disembodied signatory of various texts whose contents receive energetic exegesis, presented in a rather old-fashioned style of intellectual history. Hoermann is no postmodernist, and we see in his analysis no autonomous ideas floating around in discursive space, but the practical effect of this detachment between a protoplasmic actor and his intellectual expression is almost the same.	. . .