| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Robert D. Sampson. John L. O'Sullivan and His Times. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 2003. Pp. xvi, 304. $38.00.
John Louis O'Sullivan is a familiar name to historians of the antebellum United States, but that familiarity tends to be based on a single piece of information: a Democratic newspaper and magazine editor, O'Sullivan coined the term "manifest destiny" in 1845 during the buildup to the U.S. conquest of Mexico. These days, O'Sullivan's name lives more or less in infamy. It has been a long time since manifest destiny called up anything other than a belligerent, racist expansionism that seems shameful to most thoughtful people today. While Robert D. Sampson's new biography hardly dispels this shadow from O'Sullivan's reputation, it will surprise many readers with its careful account of the ideological and cultural company that the author of manifest destiny kept.	1
In Sampson's account of his early life, O'Sullivan emerges as a strikingly cosmopolitan figure for someone who concocted so all-American an idea.The multilingual son of a globe-trotting, part-Swiss, Irish Catholic sea captain and an Englishwoman from Gibraltar, the future editor was educated in European schools and graduated from Columbia College before taking up the editorial pen. The vast majority of the book focuses on O'Sullivan's relatively brief period as an active writer, editor, and publisher between 1835 and 1845. His most famous and original venture, the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, was launched with typically bad economic timing amid the Panic of 1837. Jacksonian Democrats felt that most of the country's cultural and economic elites were arrayed against them, and the Democratic Review was intended as an alternative to the dominant, Whig-oriented literary publications of the day, especially the North American Review. In fact, while Sampson emphasizes politics, he observes that the majority of the magazine's content was literary, featuring essays, reviews, and fictional works from numerous prominent or soon-to-be-prominent authors who were active Democrats or sympathizers, including William Cullen Bryant, Walt Whitman, and O'Sullivan's close friends Nathaniel Hawthorne and Catherine Maria Sedgwick.	2
What made the Democratic Review famous, however, and what draws most of Sampson's attention, was its ambitious political content, especially the sweeping philosophical essays produced by O'Sullivan himself. Sampson follows many other authors in taking O'Sullivan's "Introductory Statement" as the defining manifesto for "romantic democracy," a term that looms large in the interpretation presented here without being clearly defined. "Democracy is the Cause of Humanity," O'Sullivan wrote, in a turn of phase that Sampson uses as the epigraph to chapter three. According to O'Sullivan, democracy was a cause that sought to "emancipate the minds of the mass of men from the degrading and disheartening fetters of social distinctions and advantages." It was "at war" with "fraud, violence, and oppression"; it was "a cheerful creed, a creed of high hope and universal love" (p. 32).	3
The overarching theme of the book is that this "romantic democracy" deserves to be taken seriously despite its many contradictions (especially concerning slavery) and departures from anything resembling nineteenth-century reality. Sampson correctly points out that, like his editorial role model William Leggett, O'Sullivan espoused a laissez-faire political economy that, contrary to later versions, was rooted a strong sense of "social justice and social rationality" (p. 30). As they saw it, government intervention in the economy usually served to protect or create economic privilege rather than breaking it down, which was true enough up to O'Sullivan's time. Active government also corrupted democratic politics by "mixing up pecuniary interests, as connected with bank charters, extensions of capital &c., with the contests of parties of which ought to be confined to principles" (p. 37). Treating Jacksonian attacks on banking as a serious response to the market revolution, Sampson closely follows O'Sullivan's editorial course in the ideological vanguard of the struggles for hard money and the "divorce" of banking from the state.	. . .

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