| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Edward L. Widmer. Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City. New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. viii, 290. $29.95.

Some decades ago, antebellum intellectual history was often dominated by an enthusiasm for the expansionist rhetoric of "Manifest Destiny" to the dissatisfaction of historians like myself, who believed the subject was more foam than substance. Now, Edward L. Widmer returns to that enthusiasm in an even broader form. Widmer, identified as presently being a White House speech writer, asserts that "Young America" (Manifest Destiny extended into the 1850s) was the principal vehicle for the development of American culture in the two decades before the Civil War. 1

The heart and mind of his subject is the Democratic Review and its editor, John L. O'Sullivan, the author of the term "Manifest Destiny." Widmer provides an unusually comprehensive view of O'Sullivan's life and thought, using numerous manuscript collections including the especially interesting Civil War correspondence between O'Sullivan and Samuel J. Tilden possessed by the New York Public Library. This correspondence reveals the supposed philosopher of American nationalism as a Confederate sympathizer who had no idea of how America's liberal ideology was saved by the triumph of the Union. Widmer concentrates on the earlier advocate of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s, presenting Sullivan as an editor who also supported basic reforms in American society and fostered the development of an original American literature. . . .

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