Hopewell Village: A Social and Economic History of an Iron-Making Community by Joseph E.WalkerReview by: Robert V. BruceThe American Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Oct., 1966), pp. 289-290Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1848358 .

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Americas 289

There is a vast amount to be learned, also, about the social and economic life of New England from these volumes, particularly in those sections dealing with con- tracts, admiralty, and criminal cases. We are given new understanding of the events that brought Adams to the defense of Captain Preston and his men as well as to anger and chagrin over the treatment accorded unpopular, suspect Tories by ardent Sons of Liberty who took it upon themselves to attack, ransack, and burn. From scores of eyewitness accounts we may learn why it was that Preston was acquitted and the guilt of his men almost impossible for a jury to ascertain. We learn, in effect, that the story of the Boston Massacre has never before been fully treated. For lawyer Adams we learn to have heightened respect as a practi- tioner of his art.

Most scholars and students will find the introduction an invaluable guide to the history of the early American bar and to the intricacies of the late colonial court system; they will find at the end of the third volume an excellent bibliog- raphy of sources for the study of American legal history; and they will find the massacre trials testimony fascinating in itself and rich in sources for a more ade- quate account than has yet been written of an event that displayed both English justice and John Adams at their resplendent best. This is a scholarly work of such merit as to demand the highest praise. Wabash College STEPHEN G. KURTZ

HOPEWELL VILLAGE: A SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY OF AN IRON-MAKING COMMUNITY. By Joseph E. Walker. (Philadelphia: Uni- versity of Pennsylvania Press. i966. Pp. 526. $io.oo.)

FOUNDED in I771, Hopewell Furnace suffered improvident management, postwar slumps, and land title suits until about I820 when, under abler and more attentive owner-managers, it began two decades of high prosperity through stove casting. Then depression and the rise of hot-blast coke furnaces started it on a long de- cline, temporarily reversed by Civil War and railroad demand, to its final blast in 1883. It was not the first, last, biggest, nor oldest of several hundred Pennsyl- vania charcoal iron furnaces. Its distinction came through restoration as the Hope- well Village National Historical Site and the amassing of its manuscript records. From this comes Professor Walker's long-matured book, thorough and meticulous in the mining, smelting, and casting of its abundant materials. Though clear and direct in style, it is often lumpy with trivia. But for the casual or hurried reader there is a skillful summary of conclusions, a bibliographic essay on what others have said about such communities, a full index, and many photographs of the restoration.

The patient reader sees a charcoal iron community in detail comparable only to that of E. N. Hartley's Ironworks on the Satugus for another time and place. Subject and sources make Walker's book less sophisticated in style and grand in theme but fuller as to social and cultural life. Hopewell's piping times are its chief concern; unfortunately dates are not always specified. After a historical sketch the book turns to topics of community life, fully describing furnace tech-

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290 Reviews of Books nology but adding nothing new. It examines homes, furnishings, crops, buildings, and equipment; managerial and clerical work; transportation and marketing (without advertising); labor conditions; and village trade (not a company mo- nopoly). Its analysis of village society includes community relations, the substan- tial Negro element (relatively unsegregated), women and children (many being wage earners), education, health, religion, recreation, and outside contacts (more extensive than usually assumed). Forty-four pages of tables analyze representative incomes, expenditures, articles of consumption, jobs, and working hours.

Walker has, as he says, not tried to compare Hopewell Village with other places. But if his field of vision is narrow, his definition is sharp. Those who seek to know the shape of American life in almost any respect during the first half of the nineteenth century should in the course of their search put an eye to this peephole. Boston University ROBERT V. BRUCE

GENERAL DE KALB, LAFAYETTE'S MENTOR. By A. E. Zucker. [Univer- sity of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, Number 53.1 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. [I966.] Pp. ix, 25I. $7.00.)

UNTIL the appearance of this book, the only serious work on De Kalb was done by Friedrich Kapp over a hundred years ago. Its German and English versions have long been out of print, and the research carried on in the intervening time on eighteenth-century European and American history has been considerable.

Professor Zucker has succeeded in finding some previously unused material in American and French repositories and has rediscovered in France a large number of letters written by De Kalb to his wife during his service in the American Con- tinental Army. Copies of these letters had been used by Kapp, but had since dis- appeared. The list of "Principal Authorities" attests to Zucker's comprehensive use of pertinent printed and manuscript material.

Still, in the large outline, Kapp's painstaking search for the sources of his hero's life had produced the historically essential facts: De Kalb's humble German peasant origin, the noble status conferred upon De Kalb by himself to facilitate his career in the French Army, his military apprenticeship under Maurice de Saxe and Lowendal, his noteworthy diplomatic enterprise in the American colonies in 1768 for which he had been commissioned by Choiseul, his introduction of La Fayette to Silas Deane and his intervention which secured for the young French nobleman a major-generalship in the American Army, his own service to Ameri- can independence, and his heroic death on the battlefield of Camden, South Caro- lina, in 1780.

Zucker has added details here and there; particularly, in the first part of his book, he has taken leisurely excursions into eighteenth-century history to fill the chapters on the youth and early manhood of De Kalb about which a number of things are not known and, in all probability, never will be known. He has written discursively and not without repetitions. The reader will find a carefully docu-

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