Research Catalog

Title

Our family dreams : the Fletchers' adventures in nineteenth-century America / Daniel Blake Smith.

Author

Smith, Daniel Blake

Publication

New York City : St. Martin's Press, 2016.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 275 pages : illustrations; 25 cm

Summary

"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"--

Subject

• Fletcher family
• Fletcher, Jesse, 1762-1831 > Family
• Fletcher family > Correspondence
• Fletcher family > Diaries
• 1783-1865
• Pioneers > United States > Biography
• HISTORY > United States > 19th Century
• United States > History > 1783-1865 > Biography

Genre/Form

• Biographies.
• Personal correspondence.
• Diaries.
• Biographies
• Diaries
• History
• Records and correspondence

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Beginnings -- Heading West -- Settling In -- "The Best Fortune We Can Give Our Children" -- Public Life -- Calamities -- War and Loyalty -- Legacies.

ISBN

• 9781137279811
• 1137279818

LCCN

^^2015028245

OCLC

• 930462935
• SCSB-11980584

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library