Reviewed by Kathy London

I just read on livescience “Almost two-thirds of Americans [surveyed] said the …country is moving away from traditional notions of the ideal life…” We seem to have been moving away for a long time.

Jack Larkin’s book was written about a time period I assumed was stable and uneventful: America after the Revolution and before the Civil War. But Americans at the end of that period “looked back with a sense of profound change in customs, manners and social tone…. already nostalgic for vanishing ways of …life.”

Surviving artifacts at museums and historic sites suggest Americans lived a comfortable life in the late 1700s. This is far from true. Larkin offers a compelling description of the reality, often gritty, dirty, smelly, tedious, and backbreaking; but also based on deeply intertwined economic and social relationships.

An industrial economy was replacing self-sufficient farms, rural artisans, and barter. Even farming became more business-like and less communal. Trends started in the Northern cities of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, spread to Northern rural areas, then gradually to the South and West. Attitudes changed towards drinking, childrearing, education, the role of wage labor, diet, sexual habits, and slavery. While change was unevenly distributed, many Americans reshaped much of their everyday world.

Larkin includes black Americans in every section of his book with a surprising amount of detail. Almost all were slaves and their llives were as hard as you might guess. Only a few pages are devoted to Native Americans, who had been driven out of the states.

The book covers too wide a swath of life to mention all the topics in this review but I’ll discuss a few.

Americans have always been in motion. A person would live for a while at a neighbor’s to pay barter debts or earn extra resources, or spend months living with married siblings. (“Living” and “working” were synonymous.) Hired help moved frequently. Every year, close to a quarter of all Bostonians changed their residence. In one central Massachusetts community, over a third of households counted in one census moved before the next one. In frontier towns, two-thirds might move. Itinerant peddlers, tinkers, showmen, portrait painters, and various teachers roamed the roads bringing novelty to rural communities.

Settlers on the frontier might go months without seeing anyone outside their household, but in well-established communities, men and women visited neighbors daily. There were “frolics” to husk corn or raise barns, Sunday meetings, sewing circles, nursing help, and afternoon tea. Visitors would often “tarry” overnight. Socializing moved in time with agricultural work. Visits were shorter during planting and harvesting. To bring in the Northern hay crop, other activities stopped and even shops closed as everyone went to the hay fields.

Health care was one of the most egalitarian aspects of American life. The most expensive care was as (in)effective as home remedies. “Humors” were believed to be out of balance in patients and had to be corrected by inducing bleeding, blistering, purging, or puking. No wonder homeopathy became popular – at least it didn’t hurt the patient. Despite the sorry state of medicine, there was one major success: the discovery that infecting people with the mild disease cowpox protected them from smallpox.

Casual violence was part of daily life. Social ways were painfully coarse, sometimes cruel and violent, even bizarre. Drunkenness was astonishingly common. “Blood sports” showed people’s indifference to the suffering of animals. Duels were fought between gentlemen, and fights between common men could end with an eye gouged out. White Southerners lived in fear of their slaves, but “in daily reality, slaves has far more to fear from them.” The Temperance Movement, the “Second Great Awakening” of religion, and efforts by the well-off to “advance civilization” make a lot more sense given this context.

Early American homes were dingy, unadorned, and surrounded with trash. But people must have yearned for decoration. I was struck by the image of a woman, after a long day of hard labor, taking the time to sweep a pattern into the sand floor of her kitchen before going to bed.

Larkin draws on a vast array of primary sources, including diaries and journals, letters of foreign travelers, probate inventories, federal censuses, and contemporary books. I was intrigued by the unique 1798 Direct Tax records: created to support the first Federal property tax, assessors recorded every free family’s possessions and dwelling in detail.

Larkin presents a thorough picture of life across America into the 1800s, enlivened with quotes from primary sources and full of evocative details. It provides an excellent context to any other histories you may read about this era.