Ohio History Journal

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

 

 

 

Thomas Worthington: Father of Ohio Statehood. By Alfred Byron

Sears. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press for the Ohio Histori-

cal Society, 1958. viii??260p.; end-paper illustrations, bibliography,

and index. $5.50.)

Jeffersonian republicanism (or Jeffersonian democracy, as many prefer

to call it) is one of the great inheritances of the American people, but it

is a difficult one to approach. From one direction it appears to be monu-

mental, symbolized in the eloquence of the Declaration of Independence

and the marble of a national shrine; from a second, it is as mysterious as

the power of the ballot or the charm of Monticello; from a third, as

complex and subtle as Jefferson himself. The potency of this republican-

ism was not the power and majesty of the national government, which

it sought to diminish. It existed, rather, in the men who undertook the

responsibilities of conducting an effective and acceptable government

among people who wanted as little government as possible.

It is not easy to represent those paradoxical men after a century and

a half. Professor Sears of the University of Oklahoma tries to show us

one of them. In Thomas Worthington (1773-1827), a man who was of

importance in both national political life and state and local affairs and

yet was primarily a private citizen, he brings forward a Jeffersonian

Republican who embodied their complexity.

A Virginian of Quaker background, twice United States Senator

and for two terms (1814-18) governor of Ohio, a man who is properly

called the Father of Ohio Statehood, Worthington is in many ways an

admirable subject for biographical study. He kept an elaborate diary;

records of his life and of the lives of those around him are abundant; and

many other personal, official, and business records have survived. In

other ways he is exceptionally difficult. Should he be regarded as a man

of second-rate national importance, or a man of first-rate importance in

local and state affairs? Without benefit of an established biographical

pattern or tradition to work in, or to attack (except for the author's own

earlier work almost no biographical studies exist), and against the handi-