Our family dreams
Subtitle: the Fletchers' adventures in nineteenth-century America
By: Daniel Blake Smith
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 275
ISBN-13: 9781137279811
Subjects: Correspondence; Diaries; Family; Pioneers; Biography; History
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 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"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Beginnings; title: Heading West; title: Settling In; title: "The Best Fortune We Can Give Our Children"; title: Public Life; title: Calamities; title: War and Loyalty; title: Legacies.