What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United...

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States) | Daniel Walker Howe | A tremendous undertaking and done very well

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What Hath God Wrou...

	What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States) Daniel Walker Howe Oxford University Press, USA, 2007 - 928 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Jacksonian Racism

Can you imagine a U.S. president who forces the country into an unpopular war, and when some members of Congress express doubt, he calls them unpatriotic? Hard to believe, right? Okay, maybe not.
How about a president who never doubts he is right and never apologizes when he is wrong? Who ignores the Constitution and the Supreme Court? Impossible, right? Okay, okay, so it isn't.
I'm not referring to our current president, but to two who served long ago. They are James K. Polk and Andrew Jackson, and the two are central figures in Daniel Walker Howe's WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT. It is a magnificent book--magnificent in its detailed research, magnificent in its lively prose, and magnificent in its wide scope. It covers the period from the Battle of New Orleans in January of 1815 to the presidential election of 1848, and everything in between. Jackson, Polk, and Martin Van Buren are the villains of the book. As Howe convincingly shows, their primary agenda was to spread slavery and white supremacy across the continent.
Jackson ignored the Supreme Court's decision which said that the Cherokee had title to their land. He ignored the Constitution, which said that a president could not remove funds from the National Bank. He owned slaves and supported the spread of slavery west. He showed himself to be a stubborn, narrow-minded man. Why is he considered a great president? Why does his image remain on the twenty dollar bill? Howe points out the irony of this, as Jackson was against the use of paper money, and he personally destroyed the Second U.S. Bank, which sent the country into a lengthy depression.
Polk forced a war on Mexico, then tried to blame it on them. The war was fought solely to gain land, and many Americans were embarrassed at our imperialism and our racism. Many still are.
There are those who come off very well in the book-- Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay, and Brigham Young among them. John Quincy Adams seems especially worthy of the greatness stamp. He fought for women's rights and for the rights of Native Americans to keep their traditional lands. He was a ferocious opponent of slavery, and opposed the Mexican War. Adams, it seems, was way ahead of his time. It would be much more just if he were on the twenty dollar bill, rather than Jackson.
But for true justice, we should replace Jackson with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That would show we've come full circle. I think Quincy Adams would approve.

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A tremendous undertaking and done very well

This addition to the Oxford History of the United States is truly a masterpiece covering the era of the new republic. The book begins in the aftermath of the War of 1812 and tracks the political, social, economic and cultural development of the United States through the Seneca Falls Convention and beginning of the Gold Rush. The book explores the rise of evangelicalism in the United States through the great awakening and looks at the rise of the city which organized many natavist movements. The role of slavery and the treatment of Indians is also explored in a responsible way. Although some reviewers have complained that it is revisionist there is quite a bit of truth to Howe's writing. The organizers at the time wrote about "the extermination of the Indians" and we cannot change out countries past. We can only study it and interpret what it means for our future. The United States came into its own during this time laying the seeds to become an economic powerhouse. The rise of the telegraph, railroads, canals and industry across the country shaped the United States for its rise in the 1880's.
The book is divided up amongst the major events during the time period and covers them thoroughly. The two major focus points of the book are the Jacksonian era and the age of expansion under Polk. Jackson is painted in a darker light than in many books have written about him. The author justifies his points well and his criticisms of Jackson are on target. The destruction of the bank and the spread of populism and patronage changed the United States. The Age of Expansion was another defining moment as the United State added Texas, Oregon and the southwest to its borders. Although Polk wanted to go even further he was sabotaged by his own representatives into drawing a reasonable peace with Mexico. Overall a well done book and truly a great addition to this already wonderful series.

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Read Like a Novel

I enjoyed this book immensely, reading it cover-to-cover like a novel. For those who tend to think that America went from Revolution to Civil War without much happening in between, it's a real eye-opener. I already shared Howe's respect for Henry Clay and John Q. Adams, and his seeming dislike of Andrew Jackson, based on the little I knew of them. After reading "WHGW", I respect my instincts, and understand them much better.

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States)

And they say that knowledge is an easy burden... Beautifully written, educational, but not quite bedside literature.

An articulate, scholarly, well-rounded period US history work highly readable for the lay person and with relevance for today

Being retired and with a particular interest in this period of US history (for reasons disclosed below), I possessed both adequate time and motivation to undertake the reading of this voluminous work, hoping that it wouldn't bog down into a pedantic recitation by page 200. Far beyond my most optimistic expectations, it turned out to be a real "page turner", not like one of those Grisham novels, but rather a work that kept opening my eyes to what the reality of this country was back then, and how that past still bears witness to what we are experiencing today. It is nothing less than astonishing for the author to attempt and succeed in combining so many disciplines of knowledge into such a lucid, comprehensive portrayal of what our forefathers did, recorded, and left as a legacy for us today.

As a lay reader with great interest in, but only a relatively superficial understanding of what went on during the 1815-1848 period, the book offeres innumerous facts and subsequent interpretations by the author, as footnoted and sourced from hundreds of secondary, scholarly works. This academic format, however, never slowed down my understanding of and appreciation for what was going on. If one has some interest in our Presidents of that period (i.e. Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler and Polk) the narrative covers most of them in detail and offers many startling (at least to this lay person) revelations which, in hindsight, has me scratching my head as to why certain of these gentlemen have such a high positive profile today. Mr. Howe definitely has his biases in appreciation of these men, but supports his interpretations with scholarly attention to factual details about their personalities, politics, and policies.

Andrew Jackson, the well-coiffured fellow we see on the face of the $20 bill at every ATM visit, and who we know as the military hero of the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, comes off as a protector of the union, but otherwise a rather bullying, temper prone imperialist, and with few exceptions, having little concern or care for the well being of any but the caucasian male race. As Mr. Howe points out, the supreme irony of his continued appearance on the $20 dollar bill, despite being both against an independent national bank (i.e. akin to today's federal reserve bank) and the use of paper money, is something one can only sit back and be befuddled by (the reasoning for this decision made by our government back in 1928 is not available for public scrutiny).

The view towards John Quincy Adams - the curmudgeonly old man portrayed so well by Anthony Hopkins in Steven Spielberg's Amistad movie - is much more positive and forgiving, as Howe details his rather enlightened approach (for that day) to social classes other than the white male, economic development using federal funds, and foreign policy. Finally, the portrayal of James K. Polk as the scheming, secretive President who plotted and waged an aggressive war on Mexico during 1846-48 while all the time keeping Congress off stride with his manipulations, surely brings to mind both the thinking behind and execution of today's war in Iraq by Messrs. Bush and Cheney. Substitute "soil" for "oil" and you pretty much understand what was going on then and now.

Knowing that the inspiration for the book's title and its central figure representative of the themed importance of communications and transportation in the progress of our nation at that time was Samuel F.B. Morse (also a noted historical artist and leader of the arts community of that period), I was hoping that the contribution of visual arts to this period would be recognized, at least in some ancillary way. However, despite including a well chosen series of reproduced portraits and genre paintings, prints and sculpture representative of personalities and events of this period, the text itself completely ignores the topic. While some attention is paid to music, the theatre, and literature of the time, in particular in relation to ties to slavery and its themes, apparently the visual arts represented too "highbrow" of a topic for inclusion.

As I see it though, there could have been - especially as part of the chapters on the "New Economy" and/or "American Renaissance" - an effort to tie in the seemingly disparate, but actually connected topics of the deity/millenialism, nature, transcendentalism, urbanism, book and serial illustrations, the first original american school of landscape painting (later dubbed the Hudson River School), and the beginnings of travel and tourism by the emerging middle class of the period. As there were many strong ties between writers and artists during this time, this would not have been a difficult thing to do, and because of its absence, I can only give a four star rating to the book. Notwithstanding, if you have a few weeks of leisure time to devote to understanding in detail how we evolved into what we have become as a nation, I can't think of a more productive use of ones time. Thanks Dr. Howe for your wonderful contribution.

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reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5

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