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 | Jacksonian Racism

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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 26 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An excellent addition to the Family

The books in Oxford History of the United States, as a family, have identifying traits. All are detailed, informative and very readable. In addition, they stay within the modern sensibilities and views on history, for some this is a good thing and for others a problem. I have never found that this approach distracts from the good solid political and social history the series presents.
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 is an excellent addition to this series and contains all the family traits we expect. This is a big book with over 800 pages of text. The book covers the politics of the two party system, how they came into being, their appeal and platforms. The questions on what a weak Federal Government could do and what was needed are well developed. The author is able to cover these issues in a logical manner while making clear the parties platforms and the questions involved. Government policy created a chaotic economic system of boom and bust that plays on politics. Once again, the author keeps us clearly in the picture showing real skill in making the issues understandable.
The best part of the book is the social history. This was a rich and complex time or immigration, religious revival, expansion to the Mississippi River and the growth of cities. This complex society is the heart of the book. The author's straightforward reporting allows the reader to understand life as it was not as we wish to see it. The California Gold Rush, Irish and German immigration, Texas and the war with Mexico sit on a firm foundation established in early chapters. This allows us to understand how these events built the America that went into the Civil War. Every person interested in the Civil War should read this book! It greatly increased my understanding of how the war started and was fought.
I recommend all the books in this series. This is one of the best and is very close to a must read for anyone with an interest in American History.

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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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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.

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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What hath Howe wrought?

The latest volume of the Oxford History of the United States is What Hath God Wrought which covers 1815-1848. The series is overall outstanding, McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom is one of the volumes and likely the most well known. Each are great general histories which not only use primary sources but comment on the changes in the given era's interpretation by historians. The bibliographies are worth the price of book. If I were to teach U.S. history I'd use these in lieu of a traditional text book (which are generally poor).

However, this latest volume is striking in the amount of editorializing going on. Granted I'm an Andrew Jackson fan so am sensitive to criticism but here's an example:
In attempting to show that AJ's 1828 presidential victory was sectional and southern he recounts that Jackson won 178 to 83 in the Electoral college but the election would have gone to Adams had electoral votes been apportioned without use of the 3/5 rule for slaves. Fine, that is likely true. But what he fails to explain is how Jackson won the popular vote 647,286 (56%) to 508,064 (44%). 3/5 effects representation and electoral votes, not popular votes. Think about that- in essentially condemning the 3/5 rule the author has made the case for it- had it not existed Adams would have been elected despite an overwhelming popular vote against him. Does the author then take the old Federalist perspective that the people cannot be trusted and thus the EC's job to correct them? The author further fails to point out in this section (but does so later in a single sentence) that Jackson tired to abolish the EC in favor of a straight popular election for president. It would seem to me this is quite fitting for an era where differing view of nationalism had completely buried all Federalist opposition.
Also note that in 1824 AJ won the popular vote (41%) and had the most EC votes (99) but since there was no majority winner the election went to the house and to Adams. In 1832 AJ again won the popular vote w/ 56%.

Also, Howe seems to use the (to me) charged statement "white supremacy" with great frequency in regards to Indian removal. The implication of this phrase to my mind is that the motivation was based on race. In my readings I feel that this is a simple, modern and unrealistic interpretation. I believe that Jackson would have been adamant (and was) about removal of ANY threat to U.S. expansion, be it Indian, Spanish, English, free blacks or martians. The drive to expand more than racism was the primary motivation for removal. Jackson hated any who stood in the way of U.S. expansion- his earlier actions in Florida against the Spanish and English are proof of this.

Howe claims Jackosn was an Anglophoe and thus a hypocrite when he later treats with them. Again, Jackson was much more a Nationalist and would do anything to further U.S. interest as he saw it, even compromising other of his beliefs which were not as high a priority.

It seems like the author is not a fan of Jackson personally and thus is overly critical of him to the point of bias as noted by the above examples. I am surprised this made it past the series editor. In fact I found the volumes which cover the most recent U.S. eras- Grand Expectations (1945-1974) Restless Giant (1974-2000) to be very even handed in their analysis. Which actually surprised me in that more recent history tends to be more divisive to me as a reader since I lived through some of it and therefore have an ingrained point of view, have not had enough time to see its effects and thus am more skeptical and likely to disagree with any analysis.

This volume's other sections are on par with the rest of the series but Howe seems to have a personal affinity for Adams (as did George Dangerfield and historians before him), a person I suspect Howe sees as a kindred spirit and fellow intellectual. Howe seems to nurse a deep dislike for Jackson, the "man's man" as Howe puts it. Almost as if the historian sees Jackson as one of his own childhood tormentors- a tough guy with no philosophical basis for his actions. I had high hopes for this volume after reading that Howe rejected the conclusions of both Charles Sellers's The Market Revolution (which argued that market capitalism was forced on the people from the top down) and The Jacksonian Era by Schlesinger (which was a very far left leaning interpretation).

Despite that, however, Howe's main thesis of a communication & transportation revolution which facilitated ideas of nationalism was intriguing. Would be nice to see this idea explored in a smaller more focused work.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6

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