Christopher Gadsden and Henry Laurens: The Parallel Lives of Two American Patriots.

By Daniel J. McDonough. (Sellinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, c. 2000. Pp. 354. $49.50, ISBN 1-57591-039-X.)

Among South Carolina's Revolutionary-era leaders, only Henry Laurens left a substantial collection of personal papers. At least partly for that reason, for many years there were few biographies of the state's founding fathers. E. Stanly Godbold and Robert H. Woody's Christopher Gadsden and the American Revolution (Knoxville, 1982) is one of the relatively few exceptions. Laurens, despite the ongoing project devoted to his papers, has had no biographer since David Duncan Wallace's The Life of Henry Laurens (New York, 1915). Since the late 1980s a number of new biographical studies of Revolutionary-era South Carolinians have begun to fill the gap, and this book is a welcome and significant addition to that literature.

On one level, as straightforward political biography, this book contains solid, concise accounts of two important lives. While there is still room for a more detailed treatment of Laurens in a book devoted solely to him, this book features clear and often insightful coverage of both men. I was especially impressed with McDonough's argument that Gadsden--along with General Benjamin Lincoln, who succumbed to Gadsden's pressure--bears primary responsibility for the loss of the southern Continental army along with the city when Charleston surrendered to the British in 1780 (p. 244).

On another level, McDonough has introduced a comparative dimension by presenting "parallel lives" of Gadsden and Laurens. He notes that the broad social, economic, and religious generalizations that historians often use to explain political divisions cannot account for the fact that Laurens was a political moderate and a reluctant revolutionary, while Gadsden was a fiery radical who pushed at an early date for independence. The two men were born in the same year, and their parents were of the same socioeconomic status. Both Gadsden and Laurens achieved wealth as Charleston merchants. Boyhood friends, they later became political adversaries.

McDonough finds the key to their divergent paths in their personalities, temperaments, and views of the proper nature of the British Empire. He is surely right about that, and the book provides a useful reminder of the individual factor in political alignments. While the personalities of the two men are satisfactorily described, deeper insights into the characters of both still seem possible. For example, Gregory D. Massey's John Laurens and the American Revolution (Columbia, S.C., 2000)--a book that was published too late for McDonough to consult--seems to this reviewer more perceptive regarding Henry Laurens's personality. Still, McDonough's book is a solid contribution to our knowledge of two important men and the events they helped to shape.

JAMES HAW
Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne