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

by Daniel Walker Howe

The most common name for the years this book treats is “Jacksonian America.” I avoid the term because it suggests that Jacksonianism describes Americans as a whole, whereas in fact Andrew Jackson was a controversial figure and his political movement bitterly divided the American people. Even worse difficulties arise from the familiar expression “Jacksonian Democracy.” Our own age finds the limitations on the democracy of that period glaring: the enslavement of African Americans, the abuse of Native Americans, the exclusion of women and most nonwhites from the suffrage and equality before the law. The Jacksonian movement in politics, although it took the name of the Democratic Party, fought so hard in favor of slavery and white supremacy, and opposed the inclusion of non-whites and women within the American civil polity so resolutely, that it makes the term “Jacksonian Democracy” all the more inappropriate as a characterization of the years between 1815 and 1848. Nor did Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaigns constitute a nationwide struggle on behalf of universal white manhood enfranchisement. In most states, white male suffrage evolved naturally and with comparatively little controversy. The consequences of white male democracy, rather than its achievement, shaped the political life of this period.