Ebook: Our family dreams: the Fletchers' adventures in nineteenth-century America
Author: Fletcher family, Fletcher Jesse, Smith Daniel Blake
- Tags: Families, HISTORY--United States--19th Century, Pioneers, Pioneers--United States, Diaries, Personal correspondence, Biography, Nonfiction, Biographies, History, Records and correspondence, Fletcher family, Fletcher Jesse -- 1762-1831 -- Family, Fletcher family -- Correspondence, Fletcher family -- Diaries, Fletcher Jesse -- 1762-1831, Pioneers -- United States -- Biography, United States -- History -- 1783-1865 -- Biography, HISTORY -- United States -- 19th Century, United States
- Year: 2016
- Publisher: St. Martin's Press
- City: United States
- Edition: First edition
- Language: English
- epub
Beginnings -- Heading West -- Settling In -- "The Best Fortune We Can Give Our Children" -- Public Life -- Calamities -- War and Loyalty -- Legacies.;"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"--
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