What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

Canadian Journal of History, Autumn, 2008 by Klaus J. Hansen

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe. The Oxford History of the United States series. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007. xviii, 904 pp. $35.00 US (cloth).

Thomas Carlyle's notion that it is great men that make history has not had much traction lately. Yet, there are exceptions. Andrew Jackson, who has had his ups and downs in American historiography, enjoyed a spectacular revival with the publication of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson (1945). Even as, in the ensuing years, the scholarly interventions of race, class, and gender have diminished the notion of the great man in history, the Old Hero has continued as a saleable commodity in a kind of neo-Schlesinger tradition, the latest being Sean Wilentz's massive history and analysis, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005), as well as a few years earlier Charles Sellers's The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1991). Originally commissioned by Oxford University Press for its History of the United States, Sellers's work was rejected as unsuitable by quondam general editor C. Vann Woodward, supposedly because of its overemphasis on economics. This proved a fortuitous opportunity for Daniel Walker Howe, who as author of path-breaking works in antebellum American religion, politics, and culture, is eminently prepared to cast a wide net, introducing a broader audience to cutting-edge scholarship, and shaping the whole into something much larger than the individual parts, providing a cohesive, panoramic narrative, deftly blending politics with social and cultural history.

Though of course acknowledging Andrew Jackson as a main actor in the historical drama of this period (the chapter on him alone is worth the price of the book), Howe argues that the concept of "Jacksonian America" suggests too inclusive an interpretation, because the movement was highly partisan and divisive, excluding large segments of American society. On the other hand, Howe is also critical of Sellers's concept of the "market revolution" as the ideological centre of the period, finding it too constricting for a general history, as well as too deterministic--of market forces displacing human rights with property rights, resisted by an heroic, forward-looking Andrew Jackson leading the "people" in their struggle against the "interests," the latter determined on preserving a stagnant status quo, represented by all those who coalesced around the Whig Party.

Though Howe, like Sellers and Wilentz, centres his political story on the two rival movements and parties, reflecting rival sets of hopes, he virtually reverses their perspectives. In Howe's view, it was the Democrats who were the more backward-looking, more intent on quantitative change, while many Americans "envisioned qualitative, not just quantitative, progress" for their country: "In the long run, the choice was more than an economic decision; it was a moral one" (p. 62). Howe argues that this was a perspective more in harmony with the Whigs

Although Howe's interpretation is, no doubt, a major departure from that of his influential predecessors, he seems reluctant to be seen as pushing a thesis. If others may view his work as revisionist, perhaps cutting Jackson down to size, Howe is more inclined to let his sources tell the story as he sees it, calling it narrative history. Rather than reducing Jackson, Howe has shifted the balance by remixing the evidence. The cumulative effect is a fresh interpretation of the transformation of America between 1815 and 1848, based on a reading and rereading of a huge number of sources and interpretations (around 3,000 cited in the notes and the bibliography). A massive magnum opus covering a mere thirty-three years in some 900 pages, some wit might reject such voluminosity by quoting architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's quip that "less is more." As I see it, an appropriate rejoinder, qua What Hath God Wrought, would be another Miesian aphorism, "God is in the details." Fitting these into a magnificent, vibrant mosaic has been Daniel Walker Howe's great achievement.

In Howe's view, it was not Jackson but John Quincy Adams, a man perhaps close to the Whigs by temperament and persuasion, yet not a rigid party man, but one whose vision for his country went beyond party, who stood for qualitative progress and moral choice, perhaps the "representative man" of his age. Nevertheless, Howe refrains from calling his book "The Age of John Quincy Adams," understanding his protagonist as an anti-hero, harnessing forces greater than himself--above all science and technology, elevated and sanctified beyond mere materialistic goals by a "superintending providence" propelling the American nation and humankind to the realization of a messianic age of advancing civilization--grand goals and aspirations beyond any "great man." Howe has instead dedicated his book "To the Memory of John Quincy Adams."