Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/679

 Htint: U^asJdngton Society 669 ter of interior and foreign affairs, 1837-1839; suppressed the insurrec- tion of Pasto, 1840; was president of New Granada, 1841-1845; was three times minister to the United States, 1847-1849, 1855-1859, and 1861 ; and was on various occasions commander-in-chief, senator, and deputy. His career thus extended through all five stages of Colombian history, from the war of independence to the organization of the United States of Colombia in 1863. The present biography, constructed from the sources, gives a clear account of his life and of the principal events in which he figured, and is notably free from exaggerations and decla- mation. Nearly one-half the volume is devoted to pieces justificatives. The fourth volume deals with the revolt of the Comuneros in 1781, which together with the insurrection of Tupac Amaru in Peru in the same year, marks the first assertion on the part of the Creoles of their political rights, and, was the forerunner of the revolution for indepen- dence. The first half of the volume consists of an inedited narrative of rare interest written in the year 1783 by the capuchin Joaquin de Finestrad; the second piece is an account, with documents, of the career of Jose Antonio Galan (1749-1782), one of the leaders of the revolt, by the late Colombian historian, Seiior Angel M. Galan; the third is a history of the events in the commune of Zipaquira based on original materials; the rest of the volume (pp. 363-/^49) contains a number of original documents. The introduction to the volume is excellent. The contents of the four volumes which have been briefly recited attest the exceptional interest of the series as a whole, and Senores Posada and Ibafiez have proved themselves not only judicious editors but compe- tent historians as well. Luis M. Perez. The First Forty Years of Washington Society. Edited by Gaillard Hunt. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. igo6. Pp. xii, 424.) Mr. Hunt has made an interesting selection from the correspondence of Margaret Bayard Smith, the wife of Samuel Harrison Smith of Philadelphia, who came to Washington, D. C, in 1800 and established the National Intelligencer. Mr. Smith was appointed by Madison in 1813 the first Commissioner of the Treasury Department and was from 1809 to 1819 President of the Bank of Washington and later President of the Branch Bank of the United States. The letters in this volume, with a few exceptions, were written by Mrs. Smith to members of her family, and cover the period from shortly after her arrival in Washing- ton, in the latter part of 1800, to within a few years of her death, which occurred in January, 1844. Mrs. Smith wrote freely of persons and 'events, and during her more than forty years of residence in Washing- ton she had unusual opportunities of becoming intimately acquainted with many of those most prominent in social life. These letters illustrate forcibly that for the first thirty years there was but one social circle in Washington, and that dominated by those in political life. The Capitol was the meeting-place for society people.