What Hath God Wrought Read Free Page B

should be one of democratic example rather than conquest, they insisted. The government’s massive dispossession of eastern Indian tribes in the 1830s aroused bitter protest. Later, a strong political opposition criticized Polk’s war against Mexico. Opponents of slavery deplored territorial expansion as a plan (in the words of the poet James Russell Lowell) “to lug new slave states in.” Critics of American culture wondered whether Morse’s invention was merely an improved means to an unimproved end. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” noted Henry David Thoreau, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” 7
    In fact, the various improved means of communication carried very important messages. The early national period witnessed new and controversial ideas being formulated, publicized, and even in many cases implemented. The history of the young American republic is above all a history of battles over public opinion. The political parties debated serious issues, economic and constitutional; political divisions were sharp and party loyalties fierce. Meanwhile, innovators at least as original as Morse explored novel approaches in law, in education, in popular politics, and in corporate organization. 8 Workers tried to legitimate labor unions in the eyes of public opinion and struck in defiance of the common law. Like technology, politics, and economic development, American religion displayed remarkable originality. Millenarians warned of the imminent Second Coming of Christ. The evangelical movement prompted national soul-searching and argument over the country’s goals and the best means to achieve them. Reformers motivated by religion challenged long-held practices relating to the treatment of women, children, and convicts; utopians of every stripe founded communities dedicated to experimenting with new gender roles and family relationships. Manners and customs came under as much criticism as institutions: Cockfighting, dueling, and drinking alcohol (among other traditional pursuits) became controversial. All such reforms were created, discussed, and propagated through the enormously expanded media of print and wire. Through these debates, disparate groups competed to define America’s national mission. That America, among the nations of the world, had a mission no one doubted. Whatever America stood for, whether an empire for liberty or a light of virtue unto the nations, the Hand of God had wrought it.
    More than any other discussion, the debate over the future of human slavery in an empire dedicated to liberty threatened to tear the country apart. The communications revolution gave a new urgency to social criticism and to the slavery controversy in particular. No longer could slaveholders afford to shrug off the commentary of outsiders. Critics of slavery seized upon the new opportunities for disseminating ideas to challenge the institution in the South itself. Alarmed, the defenders of slavery erected barricades against the intrusion of unwelcome expression. Better communication did not necessarily foster harmony.
    In the King James Version of the Bible, an exclamation mark follows the words “What hath God wrought.” But when Morse transmitted the message, he left off any closing punctuation. 9 Later, when transcribing the message, Morse added a question mark, and thus it was often printed in accounts of his achievement. This misquotation had its own significance. Morse’s question mark unintentionally turned the phrase from an affirmation of the Chosen People’s destiny to a questioning of it. What God had wrought in raising up America was indeed contested, in Morse’s time no less than it is today. In the title of this book I leave the final punctuation off, as Morse originally did. This allows the title to explore both potential meanings, as the book itself seeks both to affirm and to question the value of what Americans of