Ohio History Journal

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BOOK REVIEWS

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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