BOOK REVIEWS
The Tree of Liberty. By Elizabeth Page. (Farrar & Rinehart,
Inc., 1939. 985p. $3.00.)
On the best seller list since its
publication in the spring,
this historic novel offers an unusual
combination of entertainment
and enlightenment. The story is that of
Matthew Howard and
Jane Peyton, the former a frontiersman
from the Shenandoah Valley,
the latter the daughter of a tidewater
planter. In their married life
is dramatized the bitter conflict of the
two main traditions which
underlie the American way of life:
Hamiltonian aristocracy and Jef-
fersonian democracy.
The book is large in scope and minute in
detail. The scene
is early America from the Atlantic
seaboard across the mountains
and into the wilderness beyond; the action
encompasses the half
century from Braddock's Defeat to the
Lewis and Clark Expedition;
and the book introduces almost every
important public character
of the period and many of the relatively
unimportant ones, pre-
senting them in most of the dramatic
episodes occurring in those
stirring and significant years. Its
packed pages tell of the growth
of the United States, before there were
states, through the Revo-
lution, the Articles of Confederation,
the establishment of the
Constitution, and the administrations of
Washington and John
Adams, with some years of Jefferson's
Presidency.
It is asking a good deal of any novel to
bear such a heavy
weight of history, and sometimes the
story sags beneath its burden.
On the whole, however, the family
chronicle is in itself absorbing,
and the book's characters, while
vehicles for the historical argu-
ment, do achieve individuality and
authenticity.
When Jane Peyton married Matthew Howard
she refused to
concede the soundness of his democratic
political views, and this
feud was continued by their children.
Peyton married the daughter
of a French philosopher and was closely
identified with Jefferson;
James, Hamilton's aide during the
Revolution, married into the
New York merchant aristocracy and became
one of the founders
of New England industrialism; while
Mary, whose lot was the hard
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