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

by Daniel Walker Howe

As of 1815, more people had traveled to the New World from Africa via the slave trade than had come from Europe.

In terms of international power politics, the Monroe Doctrine represented the moment when the United States felt strong enough to assert a “sphere of influence” that other powers must respect. In terms of national psychology, the Monroe Doctrine marked the moment when Americans no longer faced eastward across the Atlantic and turned to face westward across the continent.

Compared with freedom, slavery proved less favorable not only to urbanization but also to the development of infrastructure like transportation and public education, all of which made real estate more valuable.

The Missouri debate revealed—to the surprise of some observers—that the South had quietly become much more committed to slavery than it had been during the Revolutionary generation. The opening of the Southwest to cotton cultivation, providing a vast new demand for slave labor, had caused the value of slave property to soar.

As Richard Allen’s account of his spiritual awakening illustrates, evangelical Christianity resonated powerfully among the slaves. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared Christianity a religion well suited to slaves because of its emphasis on humility. Nietzsche ignored the liberating strain in the Christian message, but many African Americans heard it. Allen’s religious metaphor expressed it well: “My chains flew off.” Missions to the plantations were among the many missions organized by the interdenominational evangelicals; however, Baptist and Methodist itinerants got there earlier and to greater effect. Ever since the First Awakening there had been preachers and exhorters among the slaves themselves, so the religion of the great antebellum revival did not come to them as an alien “white” intrusion. Slaves embraced evangelical Christianity as an affirmation of hope and self-respect, of moral order and justice in circumstances where these were scarce and precious.

In Leatherstocking, Cooper had created an enduring American mythic figure, the manly hero who relates to nature rather than women, who stands outside society but not outside morality, who resorts to violence to do right.

To improve the means of communication, then, is to promote a real, positive, and practical liberty; it is to extend to all the members of the human family the power of traversing and turning to account the globe, which has been given to them as their patrimony; it is to increase the rights and privileges of the greatest number, as truly and as amply as could be done by electoral laws. The effect of the most perfect system of transportation is to reduce the distance not only between different places, but between different classes.

Clay’s system was “American” in a triple sense. Obviously, it purported to promote the welfare of the nation as a whole. But it was also “American” in its assertion of national independence against the “British system” of unregulated free trade. The Kentuckian feared that a passive policy of economic laissez-faire would leave America in a neocolonial relationship to Britain, the economic giant of the day. Britain, Clay pointed out, protected her own domestic interests with tariffs like the “corn laws” while pressuring other countries to practice free trade.66 In a third sense, Clay also used the term “American System” to apply to his hemispheric trade policy. He was willing, indeed eager, to include Latin America as part of his home market. Clay wanted to synthesize the Madisonian Platform with the Monroe Doctrine. The American System was directed against European, particularly British, commercial hegemony, not against sister republics of the New World.

After 1828, the classical ideal of nonpartisan leadership, which Adams and Monroe had shared with Washington and countless political philosophers, was dead— killed in battle with Old Hickory as surely as General Pakenham.

A minority position in earlier generations, postmillennialism became the most widely held viewpoint on eschatology (the study of last things) among Protestants in antebellum America.

Without the three-fifths clause jacking up the power of the slaveholding interest, Indian Removal would not have passed.

In the last analysis, it was his personal authority, rather than that of the federal government or even the presidential office, which Jackson zealously maintained.

The outcome of the Bank War represented a symbolic victory for the president and the Democrats, but it brought little if any tangible benefit to the plain folk who constituted the party’s most faithful followers. The influence of wealth on American politics was not lessened, nor the opportunity for speculation decreased, by Jackson’s destruction of the Bank.

With such anxieties in the back of their minds, Calhoun and the Radicals with whom he now cooperated wanted to try out nullification as a means of pressuring the majority into making concessions. If they could make the procedure work in the case of the tariff, they would have the tactic to use whenever needed, and the protection of slavery would be that much more secure.

Ironically, the South Carolina low country was simultaneously the area where slaves enjoyed the greatest autonomy and the area where masters were most fanatically devoted to slavery.

To deter the nullifiers from attacking the Unionists in their midst, Jackson warned a South Carolina congressman that “if one drop of blood be shed there in defiance of the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man of them I can get my hands on to the first tree I can find.” When Robert Hayne ventured, “I don’t believe he would really hang anybody, do you?” Thomas Hart Benton replied, “Few people could have believed that he would hang Arbuthnot and shoot Ambrister . . . I tell you, Hayne, when Jackson begins to talk about hanging, they can begin to look out for ropes!”

It is conventional for historians to emphasize what a small minority abolitionism constituted. Yet its expansion actually reflected a remarkably successful effort of communication, organization, and influence on the state of opinion. By 1835, the AASS boasted 200 auxiliaries (local chapters), and by 1838, a remarkable 1,350, representing some 250,000 members. This number, the historian Kathleen McCarthy points out, is 2 percent of the U.S. population at the time—making the American Anti-Slavery Society larger, in relation to its American public, than the Boy Scouts of America or the National Wildlife Federation or the National Rifle Association in the year 2000.34

Jackson, who had stood up to South Carolina so firmly over the tariff, cooperated with the state’s defiance of federal law when the issue was race.

Rioting, rather than crime by individuals, primarily precipitated the creation of police forces as we know them.

The Reformation principle of sola scriptura, that the Bible contained all things necessary for salvation and could be properly interpreted by any conscientious believer, lived on and heavily influenced American culture. It helped promote universal literacy, democratic politics, and art that emphasized verbal expression. Respect for the Bible conditioned national identity, social criticism, natural science, the educational system, and the interpretation of authoritative texts like the Constitution.

With medical science unable to understand, prevent, or cure most of these illnesses, the health of the nation deteriorated during the first half of the nineteenth century. Between 1815 and 1845 the average height of native-born white males dropped from 173 to 171.6 centimeters; life expectancy at age 10, from 52 to 47 years. Increasing democracy and economic productivity, even rising real wages, did not offset the spread of contagious diseases, which stunted the growth of young people even if they survived. Economic development outran medical science, and those who lived through this era paid a real physical price.

The death rate in the cities was not only higher than the countryside but also higher than the urban birthrate. Only a constant influx of new arrivals kept the urban population from falling.

Railroads did indeed have political as well as economic consequences, but they turned out to be sectional rather than simply strengthening the Union. Their network reinforced east–west ties at the expense of north–south ones. Their resources, added to those of the Erie and related canals, further encouraged the Old Northwest to ship its produce eastward rather than southward along the river system to the Gulf, affecting the balance of political power both regionally and nationally. The geographical competition that the railroads stimulated for westward routes, fostered by politicians like Illinois’s Stephen Douglas, was destined to exacerbate sectional tensions in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Her burst of Romantic feeling manifested the new attitude toward music among the nineteenth-century middle class: from music as recreation to music as spiritual uplift. For devotees like Margaret Fuller, high-quality secular music was sacred music.

Remittances from Irish Americans greatly exceeded the contributions of either the British government or private charities in tangible help to the stricken Irish countryside in the years and generations following 1845.