Jonathan Slonim History of the American Family 2/14/12 The Pursuit of Happiness A Valuable and Unusual History Jan

Lewis, in The Pursuit of Happiness; Family and Values in Jeffersons Virginia, creates a fascinating vignette of the everyday life of Virginias gentry in the 18th and 19th centuries. She successfully documents a change, which is evidenced in hundreds of letters and journal entries, in the accepted modes of thought among the elite of the day. Lewis makes a convincing argument that the culture gradually grew to accept and encourage emotions in religion, death, life, and love. However, she does not always stick closely enough to her chosen argument, instead getting carried away with a desire to draw what appear to be hasty conclusions. The result is a well-documented and highly instructive monograph on the mores of the period, that occasionally feels overly emotional. Lewis begins by drawing a picture of the pre-Revolutionary gentry. These men saw themselves in many ways as analogous to the British aristocracy, and hoped to be treated as such. The primary value was independence, and many plantersshe aptly uses William Byrd II as an examplebelieved that they were self-sufficient within their plantations, without need for society at large. But, like Byrd, they all owed their luxurious lifestyle to slaves and, like Byrd, their social life consisted of a complex web of obligations between all of the neighboring plantation owners. Even more tellingly, the largest and most successful plantations were never built just on basic agriculture, but on a wide variety of entrepreneurial activity.

The real aim of the early Virginian culture was order. As Lewis writes, Happiness is freedom from the humors and vices of others. This desire for order permeated all aspects of life for the landed elites. Family ties were based on formal obligations. Friendships carried a tally sometimes literallyof who had called on whom, and that tally must balance. Emotions threatened order, and Virginians discouraged excess emotion of all kinds. Even at death, they remained startlingly stoic. The desire for order extended to religion as well. While many of the gentry were deists, they remained part of the established Anglican Church. This Anglicanism focused almost purely on praxeology and very little on doctrine. Toward the end of the 18th century, Lewis shows that a shift began to occur in this ordered way of life. The remnants of the First Great Awakening finally began to take hold among the upper classes in Virginia. Religion became more personal and thus more divisive. In 1787 the Anglican Church was disestablished after years of losing members to more evangelical denominations. Lewis calls this the growth of emotional religion, and shows how it directly affected life for Virginians. As religion changed, so did everything else. In their journals and private letters, Virginians began to freely express their feelings. Emotions and feelings were now allowed to take an important place in decision-making and in the Virginian value system. Families grew more attached to each other. No longer was the home one strand in the web of social and political obligations. Instead it was the center of life and the thing that gave meaning to existence. Death became an unbearable separation from ones loved ones, and grief was only sated by faith in a heavenly reunion. Lewiss treatment of religion is unique and profound in that it looks at the cultural rather than doctrinal changes brought about by new denominations.

This is also where Ms. Lewis seems to get a little bit too emotional in her own descriptions. She successfully deduces from the evidence that Virginians grew more comfortable with the idea of emotionsin faith, family, and loveover the course of the 18th century. However, she goes farther than that to claim that there was more suffering than there had been before. In 1800, reason could no longer subdue feeling, and the bereaved mother suffered.1 She has some evidence to support that claim (such as the story of Pettigrew on page 104), but she imputes individual emotions and failings to the whole of the gentry. The weight of evidence is firmly behind her thesis that the cultures attitude toward emotions changed, but there is no way to prove that there was on balance more emotion or that people were less happy than in the past. Lewis answers this argument to some degree in her Note on the Sources. Conscious of the potential pitfalls of such an unusual history, she is quite convincing when she stays within the boundaries she has laid out for herself. When she goes into the realm of speculation, she seems to get too wrapped up in the mood of her writing, leading her to the depressing conclusion that There is more than a little irony in the fact that the first great generation of Americans to commit themselves to the pursuit of happiness would find so much sadness instead.2 The Pursuit of Happiness is a valuable monograph that gives an excellent picture of the changes in Virginian culture at the turn of the 19th century. She deftly handles a plethora of sources to support her main conclusions. The only major weakness in the work is an occasional lack of care in defining and staying within the limits of her thesis. She may be unable to prove that people suffered more in the 1800s, but she successfully shows that Virginias gentry did indeed become more comfortable discussing and writing about their emotions around the turn of the century.

1 2

Pg. 101 Pg. 230