cover image American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism

American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism

Harry S. Stout. Basic, $32 (432p) ISBN 978-0-465-09898-9

Using a rich trove of family letters, diaries, business records, and other writings, Stout (The New England Soul), professor of American religious history at Yale, chronicles the affairs of multiple generations of one of America’s “founding” families, the Andersons, from the mid-18th through the 19th century. Stout’s intimate work reconstructs the Andersons’ experiences and identifies them as representative of the nation’s founding elite. The clan’s patriarch was Robert Clough Anderson Sr., a Revolutionary War veteran who was awarded the post of surveyor general of a vast tract of the Western frontier. This appointment laid the basis for subsequent generations of his family to accumulate wealth and land through speculation; receive education; and embark on careers in law, politics, banking, and the military. The land itself becomes the “main protagonist” of this story and “the conduit for many (though by no means all) to realize their own economic dream” in the new American experiment of republican capitalism. Intense anxiety—over holding onto acquired land, financial panics, disease, and short life expectancies—emerges as a major theme. The foundational American crimes of slavery and the removal of indigenous peoples, which the Andersons participated in, are duly acknowledged though not a main focus. Stout turns a deep primary-source excavation into a remarkable narrative history. (Nov.)