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Bennington and the Green Mountain Boys: The Emergence of Liberal Democracy in Vermont, 1750-1850. By Robert E. Shalhope. Series on Reconfiguring American Political History. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1996. Pp. xiii, 412. $49.95.)
Robert Shalhope's study of Bennington addresses one of the most compelling questions raised in early American history: how did eighteenth-century people become nineteenth-century people? More specifically, how did the children of the community-minded egalitarians who founded Vermont come to embrace the competition and individualism that characterized nineteenth-century liberal capitalism? Shalhope addresses that question with a meticulously constructed case study of the town of Bennington, Vermont, over a period of one hundred years. He argues that Benningtonians became self-seeking individualists not so much as a result of their intentions as in spite of them. Not only did they not intend to change, they were not aware of changing, and their lack of awareness was made possible by their adherence to a continuing rhetorical tradition that hid the fundamental changes they embraced.
As Shalhope describes it, the first settlers of Bennington responded to the New York-New Hampshire struggle over land tenure by forging a somewhat unlikely alliance. The mostly young men who made up the Green Mountain Boys were individualistic, irreligious, and anti-authoritarian. The leading men of Bennington were intensely religious and socially conservative, but both groups shared a commitment to egalitarian and communitarian values. Almost as soon as this alliance had secured a de facto right to its land, however, a third type of...