Reviewed by Johann N. Neem | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 599 words from this article are provided below; about 591 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by Johann N. Neem | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Johann N. Neem, Western Washington University

1816: America Rising. By C. Edward Skeen. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. 320 pages. $35.00 (cloth).
Three books have been published since 2000 that focus on single years of the early nineteenth century; C. Edward Skeen's 1816 is the most recent (the others are Andrew Burstein's on 1826 and Louis P. Masur's on 1831).¹ Though the notion of trying to show how a single moment illuminates everything from politics to social structure to economics has some flaws, Skeen has done a remarkable job of using 1816 to exhibit an America in transition "between adolescence and maturity" (xi). His book makes a strong case that the period following the War of 1812 was an important moment in American politics and society.	1
There has been much debunking of nationalism among historians and social scientists who, following Benedict Anderson, emphasize the invented or imagined quality of nations.² To some academics, nations no longer exist, or at least no longer deserve to. Skeen disagrees. Skeen's normative claims about the meaning of American nationhood, in particular, challenge the interpretations of such scholarship. Much of 1816 is old-fashioned, top-down political narrative. He celebrates the processes that, he argues, brought Americans together as one people. During and after the War of 1812, Skeen writes, "the people of the United States began to conceive of themselves as something more than a collection of individuals in states joined by a central government" (xii). And, for a brief moment in 1816, this unity gave the national government an opportunity to act on behalf of the common good rather than for specific, narrow interests.	2
Skeen reminds readers that 1816 is usually remembered for being the year without a summer. Cold spells affected crop yields, pushing many poor farmers westward. Yet Skeen wants us to consider 1816 in a different light, as a period of nonpartisan political cooperation. Following the war, Skeen argues, Americans yearned to overcome the divisive politics of the first party system. Thus, to Skeen, "the legacies of the War of 1812 were mostly positive. The asperity of the political dialogue prior to and during the war was clearly being replaced by a decline of partisan rancor and a growing sense of nationhood and pride in being an American" (33).	3
The story begins with the meeting of the Fourteenth Congress in a makeshift building in burned-out Washington. President James Madison laid out his agenda to Congress. He celebrated the "successful termination" (38) of the Algiers conflict; called for various improvements to the nation's military; supported a higher tariff on imports; and urged Congress to build new national roads and canals and to consider a national bank and a national university. Though the university never materialized, to a remarkable degree the other policy initiatives came to pass, Skeen argues, because politicians were willing to set aside their partisan agendas and to promote bills that were broadly conceived to serve the public interest. Republicans embraced Federalist policies as Federalists, shamed by the Hartford Convention and worried about becoming a regional party, joined (and were welcomed into) Republican ranks. Borrowing from both parties, the emerging National Republican coalition, Skeen suggests, overcame the false dichotomy between individual freedom and big government. Such national unity could not last and Americans soon fell back into "the usual struggle between the multiplicity of interests that have marked the course of this nation ever since" (xvi). He could have said more about why national republicanism was untenable for Americans in the long run.	. . .

There are about 591 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.