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

by Daniel Walker Howe

The Millerites, like many other American millenarians, combined their “ideological archaism” with “organizational modernity.”14

Bible-centered Protestantism, synthesized with the Enlightenment and a respect for classical learning, helped shape the culture, determine the patterns of intellectual inquiry, and define the terms of debate in the antebellum American republic. On the slavery issue, the synthesis was ambiguous; in most other ways it underwrote democratic values. It supplied a young and rapidly changing society with a sense of stability. Without resolving moral controversy, it endowed moral standards and rational discourse with each other’s authority, strengthening both.

Democrats basically approved of America the way it was. They wanted to keep it economically homogeneous in the sense that they believed agriculture should remain the predominant occupation, though their party had nothing against the expansion of commercial opportunities for planters and farmers. Democrats enjoyed their greatest party strength in the South, where agriculture predominated even more than in the North. They expressed disapproval of government favors for privileged elites, of which a national bank seemed to them the prime example. Democrats celebrated “popular sovereignty” and the equal rights of common white men. They hoped America would remain culturally (that is, morally) heterogeneous, so that a variety of religious options could be exercised and local communities of common white men could govern themselves freely. This meant deciding for themselves whether to practice slavery, whether to fund education and internal improvements, whether to tolerate Native neighbors, and, for that matter, how to deal with deviants like criminals and the insane. The Democrats’ vision of America did not require central planning, since most matters could be left either to the marketplace or to state and local decisions. Jacksonians did, however, want a government strong enough to extend their agrarian empire across the continent, expelling or conquering any who stood in their way and protecting slaveowners from interference. Whigs had a different vision. They wanted to transfo...

and cultural diversity, Whigs favored economic diversity and cultural uniformity. They wanted to impose cultural (moral) homogeneity because they strongly believed in a society that would nurture and respect conscientious individual autonomy, in contrast to the Democrats, who valued the autonomy of the small white community. Much more than Democrats, Whigs worried about lawlessness, violence, and demagogy. Duties seemed to them as important as rights, and both individuals and the nation had a responsibility to develop their potential to the fullest. Causes like temperance and public education fostered these values and also helped produce a population ready for the demands of a developed economy. Whigs had a positive conception of liberty; they treasured it as a means to the formation of individual character and a good society. Democrats, by contrast, held a negative conception of liberty; they saw it as freeing the common (white) man from the oppressive burdens of an aristocracy.

Whig ambitions to transform America were more qualitative than quantitative; sheer geographical extension of the nation’s boundaries appealed to them little unless it promised economic development. A comparison between the parties does not reveal a perfect symmetry. The Whigs possessed a more coherent program: a national bank, a protective tariff, government subsidies to transportation projects, the public lands treated as a source of revenue, and tax-supported public schools. The Democrats of course denounced the Whig plans, but beyond this, they often displayed a set of generalized attitudes rather than a specific program of their own. Jackson’s program of Indian Removal, ambitious and centrally directed, was an exception, to be sure, but often the Jacksonians led by establishing an “emotional bond” with their followers rather than by policy initiatives.40 Democratic politicians, following the example of Martin Van Buren, learned how to evoke partisan feelings in the electorate while retaining considerable flexibility with regard to policy. The variation in their tariff and banking policies—indeed, the division among them between hard and soft money—manifested this. Accordingly, the Democratic leaders relied on invoking loyalty to the party rather than to a coherent program. They largely succeeded in transferring to their party the personal loyalty Jackson had aroused and wrapped it in his mantle as defender of the people.41

One policy that the Democratic Party embraced consistently was white supremacy.

Jacksonians welcomed transporting farm products to market, so long as it could be done without the centralized planning that raised the specter of emancipation. As he did so often, the perceptive former president Adams saw to the heart of the matter. Solicitude for slavery constituted the real obstacle to federal internal improvements, he told his constituents. If the internal improvement of the country should be left to the legislative management of the national government, and the proceeds of the sales of public lands should be applied as a perpetual and self-accumulating fund for that purpose, the blessings unceasingly showered upon the people by this process would so grapple the affections of the people to the national authority that it would, in process of time, overshadow that of state governments, and settle the preponderancy of power in the free states; and then the undying worm of conscience twinges with terror for the fate of the peculiar institution. Slavery stands aghast at the prospective promotion of the general welfare.43

Nevertheless, American imperialism did not represent an American consensus; it provoked bitter dissent within the national polity. The Whig Party conceived of American development more in terms of qualitative economic improvement than quantitative expansion of territory. As Henry Clay wrote to a fellow Kentuckian, “It is much more important that we unite, harmonize, and improve what we have than attempt to acquire more.” The historian Christopher Clark has distinguished between the two partisan goals by saying the Democrats pursued America’s “extensive” development and the Whigs its “intensive” development.13 Whigs believed in America’s postmillennial role too, but interpreted it differently. They saw America’s moral mission as one of democratic example rather than one of conquest. William Ellery Channing expressed a Whig view of America’s empire in a famous open letter to Clay opposing the annexation of Texas: “The United States ought to provide its less fortunate sister republics with support, [and] assume the role of a sublime moral empire, with a mission to diffuse freedom by manifesting its fruits, not to plunder, crush, and destroy.”

On February 2, 1848, the peace commissioners signed their document “In the Name of Almighty God” at Guadalupe Hidalgo, site of Mexico’s national shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary, which Trist chose as a location to impress the Mexican public with the treaty’s authority.29 Polk’s order to General Butler to terminate the negotiations forcibly arrived too late to prevent the signing. Later the American diplomat revealed to his wife what had been his guiding principles. My object, through out was, not to obtain all I could, but on the contrary to make the treaty as little exacting as possible from Mexico, as was compatible with its being accepted at home. In this I was governed by two considerations: one was the iniquity of the war, as an abuse of power on our part; the other was that the more disadvantageous the treaty was made to Mexico, the stronger would be the ground of opposition to it in the Mexican Congress. Trist wanted a treaty that could realistically end the war, capable of ratification by both sides and avoiding such outcomes as the conquest of All Mexico, that country’s complete dismemberment, or the indefinite prolongation of anarchy and fighting. Privately, he also felt “shame” at his country’s conduct in the war. “For though it would not have done for me to say so there, that was a thing for every right-minded American to be ashamed of,” he remembered thinking.30 His recognition of a moral standard higher than the unbridled pursuit of national interest was no ...