Reviewed by William Pencak | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3

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Reviewed by William Pencak | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

William Pencak, Pennsylvania State University

The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America. By Richard R. Beeman. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 376 pages. $31.96 (cloth).
When it comes to historians of early American politics, the fable of the blind men studying the elephant comes to mind. Colonial politics has been variously viewed as democratic or deferential, unstable or harmonious. There is perpetual discordance with England or salutary neglect. The pot melts or diverse ethnic and religious groups are at loggerheads. Some accounts focus on factionalism within the colonial legislatures (which could be very unstable in a stable society) or conflict among religions or regions (which could occur as an established legislature continued to dominate). All these descriptions capture some aspects of the subject at certain times and places. Only by avoiding the contest for a definitive picture of colonial politics can scholars see that the elephant is not just trunk, tusk, and tail: it is all these elements and yet more than the sum of its parts.	1
The great virtue of Richard R. Beeman's book is his comfort with a colonial political universe—much like the academic one he must have encountered when he served as a dean at the University of Pennsylvania—in which different units have entirely different histories and cultures that only occasionally coincide. Beeman is quick to point out the many ironies he encountered in the course of his research. Virginia's House of Burgesses was filled with gentlemen who proclaimed their devotion to the public good and prided themselves on their intelligent management of social conflict (unlike in the Carolinas, the backcountry did not explode; unlike in Massachusetts, the Baptists were accommodated). But Speaker John Robinson was caught with his hand in the till for what was perhaps the greatest abuse of public funds in prerevolutionary British America. Democratic and puritanical Massachusetts produced a native-born elite of Hutchinsons and Olivers, who from 1740 to 1765 were at the forefront of Anglo-American cooperation yet dominated the backcountry majority in the legislature when it counted.	. . .

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