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

by Daniel Walker Howe

A comparative study of the economic policies of the United States and Prussia in the nineteenth century concluded that while the Prussian government contributed only 7 percent of the capital needed for that country’s early railroads, American state governments contributed 45 percent of early railroad capital.

When Henry Clay first went to Washington from Lexington, Kentucky, in 1806, his trip took three weeks; by 1846, he could do it on a train in four days.

Because of the multiple and cumulative effects of the railroads supplementing canals, the years from 1843 to the Civil War have sometimes been called America’s economic “take-off.”

The historian Ronald Formisano has aptly called these activities “a form of political revivalism.”10 In the tent, the speaker would lambaste the administration, particularly its passivity in the face of economic disaster and public hardship. When the crowd had been wound up emotionally, they would be asked to make a commitment, in this case not to Christ but to the Whig ticket. It all must have had a familiar ring, because we know that the Whig Party appealed to many members of evangelical religious bodies. (In later years, Phineas T. Barnum would adapt the same techniques to his traveling circus.) Harrison’s campaigners also exploited new technology, moving their speakers from place to place via railroads and attracting attention with a giant transparency displaying Whig emblems.

For too long historical accounts have attributed Harrison’s election to mindless hoopla. A Democratic contemporary came closer to the truth when he wrote Van Buren that “the second revulsion” (meaning the Panic of 1839 coming on top of that of 1837) “and no other cause whatever, has elected your opponent and would have elected any other man.”21 The most judicious modern scholarship concludes, however, that the voters did not just lash out at the incumbent party but rendered a judgment on which party’s policy they trusted to get the country out of hard times. The Whig campaign possessed “reason as well as rhyme,” as one historian has put it.

In a famous incident, while trying to protect the state bank, Lincoln and some other Whig legislators jumped out the window of the statehouse in a vain attempt to prevent a quorum.

In January 1842, John Quincy Adams presented a petition from forty-two residents of Haverhill, a town in his constituency, requesting the dissolution of the Union (to free the petitioners from complicity in slavery). Of course Adams disagreed thoroughly with the petition that he thought it his duty to lay before the House. But Henry Wise demanded the former president be censured. Adams turned his ensuing trial before the House into a vindication. Seventy-four years old, unintimidated by threats and hate mail or the invective of outraged southern members, he spoke brilliantly for a week in his own defense, embarrassing his prosecutors (ruining the political career of his chief prosecutor, Thomas Marshall of Kentucky) and rallying enthusiastic support among northern Whigs. The press treated it as a sensation. Rather than let this go on for another week, his adversaries threw in the towel and “tabled” the censure motion. Adams, in a gesture of triumph, laid two hundred other petitions before his stunned colleagues. Afterwards the old man toured the North, feeling somewhat awkward in his unaccustomed role of popular hero.

On July 4, 1831, the Sunday school children of Park Street Church in Boston sang a new hymn with words by twenty-three-year-old Samuel Francis Smith: “My country, ’tis of thee,/Sweet land of liberty,/Of thee I sing.” The conjunction of patriotism and religion seemed natural. Entitled simply “America,” it was sung to the tune of “God Save the King”— originally written in reaction against the Stuart uprising of 1745 and once popular in the British colonies. “America” became the unofficial national anthem, and good citizens stood up upon hearing it. (During the First World War, Americans felt the need for a national anthem with a tune different from that of the British. “The Star-Spangled Banner” then replaced “America”; Congress made this official in 1931.)

Douglass participated forcefully in the severe critique that abolitionists of all factions leveled at the churches for not dissociating themselves unequivocally from slavery. “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ,” he wrote in his autobiographical Narrative; “I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

Along with it went Calhoun’s official statement of why Texas annexation was essential: a letter from the secretary of state to Britain’s minister to the United States, Richard Pakenham, declaring that the United States acquired Texas in order to protect slavery there from British interference.

If American expansion had been truly a manifest, inevitable destiny, then it could have taken place peacefully and automatically. In practice, however, like all empires, the American one required conscious deliberation and energetic government action to bring it into being, to deal with previous occupants and competing claims to ownership. Power politics, diplomacy, and war proved as much a part of America’s “manifest destiny” as covered wagons. Jacksonian Democracy, for all its disavowals of government agency, demonstrated eagerness to exploit the authority of government in expanding the American empire.

In 1842, an apprehensive Mexican Congress forbade further acquisition of California land by foreigners, but immigrants from the United States kept arriving; speculators would still sell to them, and many simply squatted.

Careful inquiry has revealed that Joseph married between twenty-eight and thirty-three women, eleven of whom were already wives of other men. (It is not widely grasped that Joseph’s plural marriages involved polyandry as well as polygyny.)

Polk’s strategy toward Mexico was precisely the converse of his strategy toward Britain. On Oregon, he wished to appear uncompromising but achieve a compromise. Regarding the issues with Mexico, however, he wished to seem reasonable and open to discussion while pressing uncompromising demands that would probably lead to war.

President Polk was fully prepared to persuade the Mexicans to cede California by whatever means it took.

Polk pursued all the possible routes to California—purchase, revolution, and war—simultaneously.

The nineteenth-century historian and legal scholar James Schouler called Polk’s insistence on the Rio Grande as the Texan boundary “pretentious,” and it has found few defenders among historians since. Even Justin Smith, the historian whose book The War with Mexico (1919) remains the account most sympathetic to Polk, recognized that his boundary claim was “unsound.” Polk’s twentieth-century biographer Charles Sellers called his insistence on the Rio Grande boundary “indefensible”—meaning it was logically indefensible.

“We have not one particle of right to be here,” U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Ethan Hitchcock wrote in his diary. “It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses.”97 Across the Rio Grande lay the Mexican town of Matamoros. The U.S. commander built a fort and trained his guns on the town center. The Mexican commander in Matamoros, Pedro de Ampudia, demanded the American army withdraw from the disputed territory or face military action. Taylor responded by blockading the mouth of the Rio Grande on 12 April, preventing Ampudia from receiving supplies by water and legally an act of war.

In the House of Representatives, they allowed only two hours for debate, then used up all but thirty minutes of this having presidential documents read aloud.

Most of the 9,207 deserters from the U.S. armed forces did not take up arms against their former comrades but simply disappeared. The desertion rate in the war with Mexico, 8.3 percent, was the highest for any foreign war in United States history—twice as high as that in the Vietnam War. Brutal corporal punishments, doubts about the American cause, and the prejudices of nativist officers all contributed to the desertion problem. Sometimes regular soldiers deserted to join volunteer units, in search of bounties and a more lax discipline.

The conquest of Mexico by the United States turned into a longer, harder, more expensive struggle than the politicians who provoked the conflict had expected.

The letters appointed Larkin a confidential agent and told him to assure any potential rebels in California that “they would be received as brethren” should they wish to follow the Texan example and seek annexation by the United States.

“If an earnest desire to save my country from ruin and disgrace be treason, then I am a traitor.”

A Regular Army private wrote to his father, “The majority of the Volunteers sent here are a disgrace to the nation; think of one of them shooting a woman while washing on the bank of the river—merely to test his rifle; another tore forcibly from a Mexican woman the rings from her ears. Their officers take no notice of these outrages.”70 The Texans got an especially bad reputation for seeking to avenge wrongs committed during their revolution, but it was Arkansas volunteers who perpetrated a massacre of twenty to thirty Mexican civilians, in response to the killing of one of their own number.

On March 22, Morales having declined Scott’s summons to surrender, U.S. mortars commenced firing shells over the walls of Veracruz and down into the city, wreaking havoc on military targets and civilians alike. But what Scott most wanted was to pound a breach in the city’s defensive wall. The government not having provided the heavy ordnance he had requested, Scott turned to his friends in the fleet. They did not care to risk their wooden ships in a firefight with the formidable seaward fortifications of Veracruz, but the navy lent Scott both guns and crews to ferry them ashore where they could batter the landward wall, the weakest point in the city’s defenses. The bombardment continued day and night. Sixty-seven hundred projectiles landed in the city, starting fires and inflicting over a thousand casualties, two-thirds of them civilian, including about 180 deaths.

Just how little $15 million represented to pay for California and New Mexico may be judged from the fact that in the summer of 1848 the United States offered Spain $50 to $100 million for its colony Cuba—and the offer was rejected.

Excluded from all rights of citizenship or property, over the next generation they were exposed to a shocking process of expropriation, disease, subjugation, and massacre that historians today sometimes call genocide.

From their hard-won earnings, they sent back money to family members left behind, often enabling them to come and reunite their kin group on a new shore, a pattern known as “chain migration.”

So clearly was voting defined as a right for white males that during the first half of the nineteenth century the suffrage was actually taken away from those few women and some of those few black men who had once been able to exercise it.