Precision, Concision
COLONIAL NEW HAMPSHIRE by Professor Jere R. Daniell '55 K.T.O. Press, 1981. 279 pp. $25
When Jere Daniell attended class in Reed Hall as a Dartmouth undergraduate he found little structured opportunity to study state and local history. Professor Allen R. Foley '20 occasionally told one ot his stories about Vermont in class. Protes sor Lewis D. Stilwell had set aside his earl} interest in Vermont, published as Migrtion from Vermont (1937), for his pamphlet on the Hayes, Arthur, and Cleveland ad ministrations and his popular militar) his ton courses and legendary "BattleNights." Professor Herbert W. Hilltaught a bi-annual seminar in New England history and long served as presidentand a director of the New Hampshire HistoricalSociety. Since then, Professor Daniell has done much at the College andthroughout the state to focus attention onNew Hampshire history.
Colonial New Hampshire marks an important development in the published record of early New Hampshire, and it makes an implied statement about the new professional respectability of state and localhistory at Dartmouth College. Until recently Jeremy Belknap's three-volumeHistory of New Hampshire (1784—1792) remained the most useful account of the colonial period. In the last decade threemonographs, beginning with Daniell'sown Experiment in Republicanism, NewHampshire Politics and the American Revolution 1741-1794 (1970), began to replacethe venerated Reverend Mr. Belknap. Thisnew book may have completed the task.
Colonial New Hampshire displays Daniell's intimate acquaintance with the basic sources and published history of early New Hampshire and his capacity to organize and synthesize the evidence. He reduces to a clear outline the development of Colonial New Hampshire from the first four towns Dover, Portsmouth, Exeter, and Hampton to a thriving state of 95,000 people at the close of the Revolution. The narrative sorts out a tangled and complex history and provides a tight analysis of the factors that determined such matters as the shape and pace of early settlement, the various types of land granting, the nature of the development of the economy and of social institutions, and the forces which first allowed the Wentworth clan to establish a dynasty and then, with the coming of the Revolution, abruptly destroyed it. Daniell's discussion of the development of town government and local institutions generalizes broadly but always from a thorough reading of the wealth of published town histories. By his analytic approach and spare prose Daniel 1 may lose some of the raw passion and vivid color of life in colonial New Hampshire. He quotes only infrequently from the rich source material. But the special genius of his book is precisely its concise synthesis. A useful bibliographic essay follows the text. ColonialNew Hampshire will become the point of departure for serious students as well as other more general readers who wish to learn something of the origins of the Granite State.
"Vestiges of the colonial and revolutionary periods," as Daniell observes, "abound in present-day New Hampshire." His work describes the elements religious diversity, the impetus and pattern of settlement, the relations with England, among others which have made New Hampshire very different from other New England states, and in particular from Massachusetts with which it shared so much in the early years. Generations of students have come to Dartmouth College and learned to cherish this heritage. It is fitting that a Dartmouth graduate and faculty member has become the leading student of New Hampshire's early history and the author of the best synthesis describing it.
New Hampshire resident Muller, president ofColby-Sawyer College, edits Vermont History and writes regularly about Vermont.
