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Book Review
| The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. By Sean Wilentz. (New York: Norton, 2005. xxiv, 1044 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-393-05820-4.)
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| It is impossible in a review of this length adequately to summarize, let alone properly assess (that is, dissent where dissent is warranted), Sean Wilentz's massive The Rise of American Democracy. The book has many strengths. It is based on a prodigious amount of secondary literature as well as primary sources. Its prose is clear and often eloquent. Its scope, both chronologically and topically, is strikingly ambitious. Many of its interpretations are fresh and stunningly astute. Best of all, Wilentz makes a forceful case for "the importance of political events and leaders in democracy's rise" and thus, of political history itself (p. xx). Yet it is also an uneven book. Its first two parts are far more compelling than its third. |
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"Democracy," writes Wilentz, "appears when some large number of previously excluded, ordinary persons ... secure the power not simply to select their governors but to oversee the institutions of government, as officeholders and as citizens free to assemble and criticize those in office" (p. xix). Its rise was "highly contested, not a given, and developed piecemeal, by fits and starts, at the state and local as well as the national level" (p. xxi). This political definition is clear enough, and it suggests the breadth of Wilentz's agenda. But in the meat of the book, the definition and coverage broaden even further to include any movement that challenged hierarchy of any kind. Thus, to give but a few examples, for Wilentz the Second Great Awakening, abolitionism, westward expansion, the Amistad affair, and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) all contributed to democracy's rise. |
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Wilentz's first section, "The Crisis of the New Order," covers the years from the Revolution to 1815, with Thomas Jefferson as its central actor. There, Wilentz develops one of his main themes: cross-class coalitions were required to advance democracy. More particularly, Wilentz stresses the role of what he called city and country democrats—urban artisans and yeomen farmers—in initiating the Revolution. After disagreeing about the Constitution, they recombined in the guise of Democratic-Republican Societies to launch the opposition to the Federalist administrations in the 1790s, often to the dismay of office-holding Republicans. Only after Jefferson and his southern planter allies recognized the necessity of working with these local democratic dissidents did they build the coalition that produced the Revolution of 1800. "A democratic widening of American politics ensued, ... greater than anything Jefferson, Madison, and their fellow gentry oppositionists could have imagined in 1789" (p. 42). Wilentz disdains Federalists as elitist monocrats, unable to fathom the democratic forces corralled by Jefferson, but he makes no attempt to explain why most small farmers in New England were loyal Federalists. "Here was the greatest political achievement of Jefferson's two presidencies. Against Federalism's immense condescension and determined obstructionism, Jefferson and his party vindicated the political equality of the mass of American citizens" (p. 138). |
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Section 2, "Democracy Ascendant," covers the rise of Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonians and ends with Martin Van Buren's defeat in 1840. This section is the core of the book and is superior in many ways to the equivalent account in Arthur Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson (1945), a book Wilentz reveres. Wilentz provides a much fuller analysis of the 1820s than did Schlesinger, properly citing the Panic of 1819 and the Missouri Crisis as the key events that shaped that decade. While clearly partial to the Democrats, Wilentz is also much fairer than Schlesinger to the Antimasons and Whigs. Whereas Schlesinger associated virtually every reform movement between 1820 and 1860 with Jackson, Wilentz correctly insists that humanitarian reformers often opposed Jackson. Unlike Schlesinger, he also confronts Jackson's Indian removal policies, the results of which he labels "insidious," and he devotes far more space to the sectional tensions within the Democratic party over slavery than did Schlesinger. Wilentz repeatedly denies that Jackson and his party were proslavery (just as earlier he repeatedly denies that Federalists were antislavery), but he does admit that most Jacksonians were racists who hated abolitionists, profoundly misunderstood their humanitarian motivations, and tolerated, when not directly agitating for, violations of their civil rights. |
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