Our Family Dreams
The Fletchers' Adventures in Nineteenth Century America
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In the early years after the Revolution, Americans were on the move, seeking to establish a new way of life. And, more than the church or the school or the courthouse, it was the family that nurtured the American Dream.
In this novel-like narrative, Daniel Blake Smith vividly brings to life the Fletchers, a family of loving, ambitious, at times insecure pioneers who scattered across the vast expanse of post-revolutionary America but kept in touch through letters despite their wildly different life paths. On a hard scrabble farm in Vermont, the patriarch, Jesse Fletcher, struggled with debt and depression but managed to educate his children, especially his son Elijah, a Yankee who moved to Virginia, shocked by the horrors of slavery but then seduced by the plantation lifestyle. Another son, Calvin, left at age 17 for Indianapolis to become a self-made lawyer, banker, and a prominent citizen and passionate abolitionist. The grandchildren include Indiana, a women's education activist who donated her home to create Sweet Briar College; black sheep Lucian, who went to California to join in the gold rush; and physician Billy captured as a spy during the Civil War.
Through letters and diaries, we find in Our Family Dreams that the Fletchers appear surprisingly similar to us; they dream, fret, fight, and love. Despite numerous heartaches and setbacks, their spirit of enterprise, sacrifice, mobility, and education endures as American values to this day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith (An American Betrayal), a former professor of American history at the University of Kentucky, peers into the ways settler families survived in fledgling post-revolutionary America by following the fortunes of Vermonter Jesse Fletcher and his descendants. Beginning on Fletcher's small Vermont farm, Smith traces the family's dispersion across the land. Using family letters and diaries, Smith painstakingly frames the rugged patriarch's drive and determination. These traits are also visible in the ambitions of his sons, Elijah and Calvin, who were eager to carve out their own destinies. Smith relays Elijah's conflicting views about slavery upon relocating to Virginia, marrying into a slave-owning family, and coming to defend slavery as "rather a misfortune than a crime" while becoming one of the state's largest slave owners. Calvin, one of the youngest Fletcher children, stands out as a respected lawyer and abolitionist in Indianapolis who later teamed with Elijah to pay their late father's debts. Smith is able to show that Jesse Fletcher's views of hard work, determination, and courage were passed down to his grandchildren. In following the family through two generations, Smith shows the conflicting nature of American democracy in the various paths chosen by the offspring of the Fletcher bloodline.
