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Book Review
| What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. By Daniel Walker Howe. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xx, 904 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-19-507894-7.)
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| Collecting prizes as numerous as Jupiter's moons, Daniel Walker Howe's magisterial What Hath God Wrought can hardly be described as anything other than a great book. This contribution to the Oxford History of the United States series captures the life and times of the American nation between 1815 and 1848. "Life and times" because we are treated in this hefty volume to much more than the progress of a nation-state: Howe's subject is a nation in the making that began as a chaotic plurality and emerged by 1848 as a continental Union, no longer fractured into countless interests (as in James Madison's Federalist no. 10) but forming into two rival communities, each striving (ever more dangerously) to inscribe their character on the whole of the United States. |
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Rejecting two generations of historiographical shorthand, Howe refuses to approach the era as the "age of Jackson." Instead, he sorts people, ideas, and events into two broad categories—modernizers and democratizers—that steadily gained congruence with the Whig and Democratic parties during the middle period. Before they constituted a party, modernizers comprised all who hungered for design and direction at the head of the American experiment. Included in that fellowship were economic nationalists, institution builders, Protestant perfectionists, and a generous helping of enlightened intellectuals; Howe selects as their symbolic spokesman John Quincy Adams. The democratizers (my term: Howe does not label them) drew on romantic assumptions and the libertarian strain of revolutionary republicanism to assemble a defensive alliance of all who believed that liberation itself constituted purpose and that leadership consisted of preventing the erection of barriers to private ambitions. Andrew Jackson and his colleagues rallied what they called "the people" behind a partisan commitment to little government, minimal institutions, and expanding freedom for adult white American men. |
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The contours of the story are familiar. Following the War of 1812, modernizers seized the initiative, forging a national bank, raising protective tariffs, and promoting internal improvements to facilitate travel, trade, and national integration. Fearful of consolidated power in the hands of nationalists who showed a growing antipathy to slavery, southern planters joined the "plain republicans" of the North to push back "aristocratic" capitalists, evangelical busybodies, and all who envisioned the Union as an integrated nation-state. By hook and crook Jacksonians dominated government until 1840, when lingering economic hard times and the coalescence of opponents into a coherent Whig party overthrew the Democracy. Alas, the Whigs' triumph blew up with the sudden death of William Henry Harrison and the accession of John Tyler, a Virginia planter and really no Whig at all. Tyler fixed on the annexation of Texas as the centerpiece of his ambition, setting off the cascade of misadventures that brought the Mexican-American War, the Wilmot Proviso, the sectional crisis of the 1850s, and, of course, the Civil War. |
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Howe's rendition of this story succeeds for two reasons. First, he adopts a confident, omniscient narrative voice that makes such a big book readable and makes it possible to follow a huge cast of characters. (Like Iowans at the opera, most of us need a little guidance before we can appreciate the music.) Howe knows his era as well as any historian living, and he generously instructs his readers with detailed expertise and crisp generalizations. (Without the outrageous editorial excesses, Howe establishes rapport with his readers reminiscent of Bernard DeVoto—and I mean that as a compliment.) Second, Howe treats Jackson's opponents, not as the alien aristocrats or scheming capitalists of Martin Van Buren's rhetoric, but as legitimate heirs to the American promise. As a result, the contest for the soul of the republic seems truly compelling right through the decade of Manifest Destiny. |
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