What Hath God Wrought Read Free Page A

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    The most common name for the years this book treats is “Jacksonian America.” I avoid the term because it suggests that Jacksonianism describes Americans as a whole, whereas in fact Andrew Jackson was a controversial figure and his political movement bitterly divided the American people. Even worse difficulties arise from the familiar expression “Jacksonian Democracy.” Our own age finds the limitations on the democracy of that period glaring: the enslavement of African Americans, the abuse of Native Americans, the exclusion of women and most nonwhites from the suffrage and equality before the law. The Jacksonian movement in politics, although it took the name of the Democratic Party, fought so hard in favor of slavery and white supremacy, and opposed the inclusion of nonwhites and women within the American civil polity so resolutely, that it makes the term “Jacksonian Democracy” all the more inappropriate as a characterization of the years between 1815 and 1848. Nor did Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaigns constitute a nationwide struggle on behalf of universal white manhood enfranchisement. In most states, white male suffrage evolved naturally and with comparatively little controversy. The consequences of white male democracy, rather than its achievement , shaped the political life of this period. 5
    Another term that has sometimes been applied to this period—more by historians than by the general public—is “the market revolution.” I avoid this expression also. Those historians who used it have argued that a drastic change occurred during these years, from farm families raising food for their own use to producing it for distant markets. However, more and more evidence has accumulated in recent years that a market economy already existed in the eighteenth-century American colonies. 6 To be sure, markets expanded vastly in the years after the end of the War of 1812, but their expansion partook more of the nature of a continuing evolution than a sudden revolution. Furthermore, their expansion did not occur in the face of resistance from any substantial group of people preferring subsistence farming to market participation. Most American family farmers welcomed the chance to buy and sell in larger markets. They did not have to be coerced into seizing the opportunities the market economy presented.
    Accordingly, I provide an alternative interpretation of the early nineteenth century as a time of a “communications revolution.” This, rather than the continued growth of the market economy, impressed contemporary Americans as a startling innovation. During the thirty-three years that began in 1815, there would be greater strides in the improvement of communication than had taken place in all previous centuries. This revolution, with its attendant political and economic consequences, would be a driving force in the history of the era.
    The America of 1848 had been transformed in many ways: by the growth of cities, by the extension of United States sovereignty across the continent, by increasing ethnic and religious diversity as a result of both immigration and conquest—as well as by expanding overseas and national markets, and by the integration of this vast and varied empire through dramatic and sudden improvements in communications. But while the citizens of the giant republic largely agreed in welcoming the growth of their economy, they were very far from uniting in a bland consensus. The nature of the expanding economy constituted one of the most frequently debated issues: Should it remain primarily agricultural, with manufactured products imported, or should economic diversification and development be encouraged along with economic growth?
    Not all Americans endorsed their country’s imperial destiny of territorial expansion. For some people, the Christian religion provided a fulcrum for criticism of American national aggrandizement rather than an endorsement of it. America’s national mission