| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Sean Wilentz. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: W. W. Norton. 2005. p. xxiii, 1044. $35.00.
In Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (1984), Sean Wilentz discovered the heart of American democracy beating in its union halls, not its party caucuses. The theme of that book was the awakening of class consciousness among the city's skilled craftsmen, a process that Wilentz traced through their social organizations, labor presses, and fledgling trade unions. These, and not political parties, constituted "the truly democratic element in the Jacksonian city" (p. 230). When the authentic radical voice of the wage-earner did break into politics through an insurgent movement like the Working Men of 1829, it was inevitably squelched or coopted by the major parties—especially Andrew Jackson's Democrats, who sometimes talked the talk but never walked the walk.	1
That was then. In this new book, Wilentz offers a magisterial retelling of the American political saga from the Constitution to the Civil War. As Chants Democratic emulated E. P. Thompson, here Wilentz pays homage to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Wilentz's zestful, action-packed narrative expands and amends the plotline of Schlesinger's landmark The Age of Jackson (1945). Like Schlesinger, Wilentz now sees the very lifeblood of democracy, the everyday concerns of ordinary people, coursing through the cacophony of electoral politics: through the endless round of caucuses, conventions, committees, and campaigns that went into determining who governed and how. Eschewing the market revolution paradigm of the 1990s, Wilentz unabashedly accords party politics an autonomous and central role in his epic tale. The great transformation from 1789 to 1860, he argues, was political, not economic: not the commercialization of America, but its democratization.	. . .

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