Book Review

Reading these two books together gives the unmistakable impression that a seismic shift took place in American perception in the five years that separated the country's "Jubilee" anniversary and what Louis P. Masur memorably calls the "year of eclipse." Historians of the early republic might attribute the change in national mood to the electoral victory of Andrew Jackson over John Quincy Adams midway through the span from 1826 to 1831, but the array of incidents that appears in these books suggests something more fundamental at work than a rotation of presidents. They reveal a veritable watershed, as an age that looked back to the revolutionary founding passed and one that would be racked by growing sectional tensions came into being.	1
Consider some of the contrasts between the two books. In 1831, we hear William Lloyd Garrison rebuke the African American colonization program that patriotic speakers had extolled, Andrew Burstein tells us, on the half-century anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We learn of an impending federal assault upon Indians far more brutal than anything suggested by James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans. Instead of the canals, cheese making, Masonry, patriotic oratory, and profile painting that Burstein depicts, Masur gives us railroads, threshing machines, working-class ferment, evangelical revivals, and the stunning illustrations of John James Audubon.	2
While there were very real changes that occurred between 1826 and 1831, these are amplified by the differing perspectives taken by two talented historians, each having a specific point of view. Burstein self-consciously looks backwards to the Revolution, a theme he makes clear not just with his title but with an opening account of the marquis de Lafayette's national tour of memory in 1825. Masur, by contrast, shares the concerns of another Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, not only tracking his travels at one point but by recalling his concern for what America was becoming, not what it had been.	. . .