How America Came of Age
In May 1844 dozens of prominent Americans crowded into the chambers of the United States Supreme Court, then in the Capitol Building in Washington, to see Samuel F. B. Morse instantaneously send a message to a colleague in Baltimore. Morse’s device, a study in cogs and wires, represented a new age, in which information and ideas could jump a whole continent in seconds rather than weeks or months. It was appropriate that the first message he sent, lifted directly from the Old Testament, was, “What hath God wrought.” For Daniel Walker Howe, author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford, 904 pages, $35), that transmission was a watershed event in the social and political development of the United States.
It capped and then accelerated a three-decade technological revolution that saw America evolve from a weak conglomerate of dispersed communities to an economic behemoth bestriding a continent. A congressional committee reported at the time of Morse’s demonstration that “doubt has been entertained by many patriotic minds how far the rapid, full, and thorough intercommunication of thought and intelligence, so necessary to the people living under a common representative republic, could be expected to take place throughout such immense bounds. That doubt can no longer exist.” To James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald, the implications were even more profound: “Steam and electricity, with the natural impulses of a free people, have made, and are making, this country the greatest, the most original, the most wonderful the sun ever shone upon.” Those who resisted its westward expansion, he added, “will be crushed into more impalpable powder than was ever attributed to the car of Juggernaut.”
Howe, the Rhodes professor of American history emeritus at Oxford University, doesn’t endorse James Gordon Bennett’s brutal vision of conquest and domination; in fact, one of his book’s greatest strengths is its attention to the racial, ethnic, and religious pluralism that U.S. expansion overwhelmed on the American continent. How the United States acquired, absorbed, and then integrated lands previously held by Indians, Spanish and French settlers, and European powers is a key theme in this sweeping tale. For readers expecting to encounter the standard story of white men, black slaves, and the occasional Indian interloper, this multiethnic narrative will surprise and inform.
The most recent addition to the Oxford History of the United States, What Hath God Wrought joins James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, David M. Kennedy’s Freedom From Fear, and James T. Patterson’s Grand Expectations in setting a standard for American history narratives. To be assigned the task of writing one of these volumes is as daunting as it is prestigious. McPherson and Kennedy each won a Pulitzer prize for their efforts; Patterson was awarded the Bancroft prize.
In the academic world, the series is regarded with such veneration that the editors have on occasion switched horses in midstream. Indeed, Howe was not the first choice to write this volume. That task originally fell to Charles Sellers, a retired history professor at Berkeley, whose contribution, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846, failed to pass muster at Oxford University Press. Widely regarded as brilliant but ideologically rigid, The Market Revolution looked at the political, religious, and social history of the period as all driven by the emergence of a market economy that forcefully reordered every aspect of daily life. The book has a lot to recommend it, and Oxford ultimately published it as a stand-alone volume. But the series editors turned to Howe for a more general synthesis of the events that spanned the decades between the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War.
Unlike Sellers, who attributed almost every change in antebellum culture and politics to the growing market economy, Howe views American history in this period as shaped by the rapid development of transportation and communications networks, which allowed for the geographic growth and social integration of the nation. Thus he begins his story with the Battle of New Orleans, which, unbeknownst to Gen. Andrew Jackson, the United States fought two weeks after a formal peace treaty had been signed with Britain. Such a mishap would have been much less likely by 1848, when thousands of miles of telegraph lines, trains, roads, bridges, and canals had turned a wide scattering of coastal communities into a unified nation. It was the transportation and communications grid that allowed for the emergence of an integrated industrial and agricultural economy, mass political parties, a national literary tradition, and a sense of shared culture.
What Hath God Wrought rounds up the period’s usual figures and stories, from James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson to the “great triumvirate” that dominated antebellum-era politics—John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. Howe moves from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the electoral crisis of 1824-25 to Jackson’s war with the Second Bank of the United States and the events preceding the Mexican-American War. Along the way, he weaves in generous helpings of social and cultural history, covering such topics as the Second Great Awakening, the growth of religious and social reform organizations, the emergence of the antislavery movement, and America’s brutal and often duplicitous treatment of Indians. Nor does he scant developments in the letters and arts, the astounding growth of America’s mercantile and manufacturing sectors, and the emergence of a popular democratic spirit suffusing both politics and culture.
The book is a sweeping and monumental achievement that no student of American history should let go unread. Attentive to historiography yet writing accessible and engaging prose, Howe has produced the perfect introduction or reintroduction to an enormously important period in American national development. If his main argument seems too present-minded given today’s constant noise about the revolutionary implications of the Internet, we need only listen to Henry Adams, who was there when it all happened. Looking back on that spring day when Morse sent his epochal message, Adams found that “the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one created.” Such is the tale that unfolds in the latest installment in the Oxford History of the United States.