| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 133.2

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 133.2 | The History Cooperative

BOOK REVIEWS

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. By Daniel Walker Howe. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xviii, 904 pp. Maps, notes, bibliographic essay, index. $35.)
A train carried John Quincy Adams's body from Washington, DC, to his home in Massachusetts in February 1848, giving the venerable ex-president the distinction of being the first politician to take that posthumous ride by railway to his final resting place. Adams had collapsed in the House chambers a couple days earlier, stricken while speaking out against a resolution thanking the generals who had brought the United States victory against Mexico in a war that he had opposed from the beginning.	1
Daniel Walker Howe punctuates his sweeping history of America between 1815 and 1848 with similar telling anecdotes, facts, and stories that will enliven many a survey lecture. But these brief paragraphs on Adams's final days also reflect Howe's broader story. The particulars of Adams's death highlight the grand political and cultural clash between a Whig Party intent on moral and economic improvements and a Democratic Party aggressively seeking territorial expansion—a transformative clash that was a harbinger of the sharper conflicts that lay ahead.	. . .

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