A Sketch of the Life of Thomas Skidmore (Young America Series No. 2) [Paperback]

Amos A. Gilbert (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Charles H Kerr Pub Co (June 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0882860615
• ISBN-13: 978-0882860619
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,494,701 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars the only complete biography of Thomas Skidmore, 1790-1832, April 28, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Oakland, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Sketch of the Life of Thomas Skidmore (Young America Series No. 2) (Hardcover)

Thomas Skidmore would have been surprised, Amos Gilbert wrote in his biographical preface, that Gilbert would turn out to be his biographer. He's have found it far less surprising that Gilbert, thirty years later, would also be a biographer of the flamboyant feminist, Fannie Wright. The paths of Skidmore and those of Wright and Gilbert passed in New York City in the late 1820's, and, Skidmore felt, to his detriment. In 1828, Thomas Skidmore was a 40-year old former child prodigy and itinerant teacher turned metalworker, author, and founder of the Working Man's Party. He'd organized a coalition of unionists against an 11-hour day sought by the City's nascent merchant class. He'd convinced his united labor front not only to seek improvements in working conditions, but redress as well in far more permanent moves to gain what he considered to be their inalienable right to property. Six months after publishing a 400-page philosophical treatise and step-by-step manual on how to secure that right for all persons and generations, Skidmore had committed his labor front to press for it by running Party candidates for the State Assembly on this unusual political platform. Just as the campaign began, Frances (Fannie) Wright arrived in the vibrant, overcrowded and seething City of a quarter-million people with the remnants of New Harmony movement. Earlier that year, Fannie had phased out her own Nashoba interracial "sweat-equity" compound in Tennessee, and joined in the move of New Harmony, led by the Scottish socialists Robert Owen, junior and senior, to New York City. There, Fannie bought an old church and converted it to a auditorium where he held forth on universal education, divorce, church oppression and free love, and the junior Owens began publishing a newspaper based on the quasi-communist ideals of the New Harmony movement. Both Owens and Wright decided to get behind the popular Working Man's Party, and to co-opt its educational platform to theirs, which called for removal of children from the corrupting influence of their parents. Skidmore disagreed with their views for both philosophical and practical reasons, but was forced to accept their alliance. The Working Man's Party captured fully 30% of the vote and elected one of its candidates in its first, hurried effort. Skidmore was convinced that the audacious remarks of Fannie Wright and the views of the Owenites had cost, rather than helped, his effort. Amos Gilbert was a devotee of Fannie Wright, but melded into the Owenites when Wright resumed her romance with the former education director at New Harmony and returned to France. He later joined with the junior Owen in forcing Skidmore out of his own party, becoming part of a strange bedfellows combination of communist and capitalist, both worried about the popularity of Skidmore's principles. After founding another party and his own newspaper, Skidmore attempted to rebuild his personal fortunes by perfecting an innovative welding technique during the summer of 1832. Unfortunately, that hot and humid summer became the last great stand of the worldwide cholera epidemic to which Skidmore and thousands of others succumbed. A year after Skidmore's death, Gilbert's long obituary traced his career and influences in some detail. While readers of today's biographies wouldn't be surprised, it is strangely out of historical context to read in Gilbert's essay about the influence of Skidmore's troubled childhood on his philosophical and political views. Gilbert ignored Thomas Skidmore's exhaustive and detailed equation of the suppressed American right to property with the other inalienable rights to life and liberty. And he further demeaned that powerful linking by ascribing it to a lingering resentment at having to support his family and alcoholic father as a teacher from the age of 13. Gilbert's treatment changes the perspective of Thomas Skidmore from that of an economic philosopher and political organizer to just another victim of a troubled childhood. But it remains the only true biographical sketch dedicated solely to Skidmore. For a more comprehensive point-of-view on the man and his times, you might read a few of the scholars who've specialized in the history of the Jacksonian Era. One of those scholars describes Skidmore in terms I find more appropriate to his life and work, that is, a man who was and may still be ahead of his time.