Fat Mutton and Liberty of Conscience

Carl Bridenbaugh has paused from the labor of writing his multivolumed history, The Beginnings of the People, to produce this readable essay on early Rhode Island. Perhaps too ambitiously titled, it is, in fact, a useful discussion of the agricultural-commercial development of the colony, with a few general asides about the majority of small farmers. Bridenbaugh concentrates on those individuals who became large stock raisers and graziers, exporting cattle, sheep, and horses to the rest of New England, to New York, and, farther afield, to Newfoundland and the West Indies. These stockmenmerchants, many of whom were Quaker Grandees, had by 1690 achieved success in agriculture and and surviving evidence suggests that Rhode Island enjoyed a favorable balance of trade by the same year. He therefore shows that Rhode Island's prosperity developed rather earlier than most previous accounts have suggested. There is also a discussion of the artisans-shipwrights, carpenters, and otherswho worked at trades auxiliary to farming and shipping. The essay's major weakness is that it lacks the rigorous analytical questioning of local records necessary for the reconstruction not only of farming practices but of the pattern of rural society-records that the author suggests do exist. As J. T. Lemon's work on southeastern Pennsylvania and recent writings on New England not cited by Bridenbaugh have set a high standard in this respect, readers may be confused by his accusation that American historians are all city slickers and his hope that his essay will stimulate interest in the rural life of other New England communities or the largely unstudied Middle Colonies. Similarly, his feeling that Rhode Island has been persistently denigrated by historians perhaps overlooks the interest taken in its radical sectarianism and its semirepublican politics

Conscience · Environmental ethics · Political science · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Law · Philosophy

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