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

by Daniel Walker Howe

A family farm offered the key to a life of “virtue”—a word then used to mean wholesome, productive, public-spirited independence. What made for independence in this sense was not literal economic self-sufficiency but self-employment, heading a household of one’s own, and owning real estate in fee simple, clear of mortgage indebtedness.

Like the early-modern European advocates of free enterprise, Americans of the Fullers’ generation thought of their economic careers as making a moral and political statement on behalf of freedom. Despite the continued exclusion of women from the “public sphere” of politics, wives laid (a modest) claim to the gratitude of the commonwealth, for were they not “republican mothers,” responsible for rearing future citizens?60 It is no accident that the word “liberalism” came to have both an economic and a political meaning—although our generation often finds this a confusing ambiguity. In early nineteenth-century

century America, economic development in regions such as southern New England, western New York and Pennsylvania, or Ohio was associated with the appearance of social reform

Until 1815, Americans looked principally eastward, toward the Atlantic and Europe. The Battle of New Orleans encouraged them to face westward toward the continent—but not exclusively: They still needed frequently to glance back over their shoulders, toward the ocean that continued to bring them goods, additional people, and new ideas.

Despite the mythology of “noble savages” in harmony with nature, in fact Native Americans collaborated with whites in altering their environment and depleting its

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

The apologetic attitude toward slavery, common around 1815, soon began to be challenged by a new justification for slavery: planter paternalism. In colonial times, masters had candidly and unflinchingly admitted that they owned slaves for profit and that the institution rested upon force. The notion of paternalism provided a framework for discussing slavery different from both naked self-interest and the violation of natural rights. Slaveowners, in response to moral criticism, sought to explain their relationship to “their people” as one of caring for those who could not look after themselves. Negroes as a race, they insisted, were childlike.

Americans of the twenty-first century may look back upon them as our precursors in some ways, for like them we too spend even more than our relatively high average incomes and slide more and more into debt to outside creditors (in their case, northerners and Europeans). Their strong sense of common interest enabled the slaveowning planters to become the most politically powerful social group in the United States. They dominated southern state governments. The Constitution’s three-fifths rule (counting five of their slaves as three free persons) enhanced their representation in Congress and the electoral college. In 1815, they had held the presidency for twenty-two of the past twenty-six years, and they would control it for all but eight of the next

In the years between 1815 and 1848, two rival political programs appeared, reflecting rival sets of hopes. Some Americans felt largely satisfied with their society the way it was, slavery and all, especially with the autonomy it provided to so many individual white men and their local communities. They wanted their familiar America extended across space. Other Americans, however, were beguiled by the prospect of improvement to pursue economic diversification and social reform, even at the risk of compromising some precious personal and local independence. They envisioned qualitative, not just quantitative, progress for America.

Viewing the war with hindsight after the Battle of New Orleans, Americans felt that they had won the respect of Europe in general and Britain in particular. Of much more importance, they had gained self-respect.

For their part, the Canadians too came to regard the war as a defining moment in their national history, and with even more justification. The successful repulse of the U.S. invasions fostered among the inhabitants of Upper Canada a sense of their own identity as a proud people, separate from the Americans.

The most ambitious part of Madison’s address was his plea for “establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under the national authority.

The administration sought not to absorb the Federalists but to render them irrelevant. At the national level this policy largely succeeded during Monroe’s first term. Supporters of a stronger central government, whether for internal improvements, banking, or the tariff, had no longer any need to embrace Federalist politicians.

The demise of the Federalist Party had a significant ideological effect, extinguishing in America the tradition of statist conservatism that has been so strong in

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, as the president set it forth, contained several components.60 (1) The United States proclaimed that the continents of North and South America “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power.” (2) The United States declared it would regard any European political intervention in the Western Hemisphere as “dangerous to our peace and safety.” (3) In a gesture of reciprocal isolationism, the United States resolved that it would not intervene in European wars or “internal concerns.” (4) In Adams’s version of the doctrine, the United States also forbade Spain to transfer any of its New World possessions to any other European power. This “no-transfer principle,” as it has been called, was not included in the president’s speech, but it has been treated by U.S. policymakers as being of equal importance with the other components of the

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.

The changed orientation was reflected in domestic political alignments. In the 1790s, different attitudes toward the French Revolution had been of basic importance in defining the political allegiances of Americans as either Federalists or Republicans. In the second party conflict that would emerge as Monroe’s consensus disintegrated, different attitudes toward westward expansion, Indian policy, and war against Mexico would be correspondingly fundamental. In the 1850s, a third ...

The Erie Canal represented the first step in the transportation revolution that would turn an aggregate of local economies into a nationwide market economy. Within a few years the canal was carrying $15 million worth of goods annually, twice as much as floated down the Mississippi to New

Before long, Monroe’s Era of Good Feelings would splinter, and the different kinds of nationalism that flourished together briefly in his first term would be at loggerheads. American “nationalism” developed a variety of permutations. The judicial nationalism of Marshall and Story endorsed the legislative nationalist program of banking and internal improvements. But Andrew Jackson

would encourage another kind of nationalism, based on territorial expansion, that embraced the strict constructionism of Spencer Roane. In the United States no less than in other nineteenth-century countries, nationalism turned out to be a concept that aroused strong feelings but could mean different things to different people. As communications improved in the years ahead, rival interests and rival leaders seized the opportunity to press their rival nationalisms on the public.

By giving the United States its leading export staple, the workers in the cotton fields enabled the country not only to buy manufactured goods from Europe but also to pay interest on its foreign debt and continue to import more capital to invest in transportation and industry. Much of Atlantic civilization

in the nineteenth century was built on the back of the enslaved field

John Marshall used the opportunity presented by McCulloch v. Maryland to render what may have been the most important of his many important judicial decisions. The first question he had to decide was whether Congress had been within its rights to incorporate the Bank. Endorsing the line of argument used by Alexander Hamilton to justify the first national bank, Marshall held that the power of Congress to charter corporations, while not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was implied.

The Constitution enumerates a list of powers of Congress and then authorizes it “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers.” Marshall adopted a broad construction of the phrase “necessary and proper,” defining it so as to approve not merely “indispensable” measures but whatever means seemed “appropriate,” “plainly adapted” to a constitutional objective, and “not prohibited” explicitly. Having confirmed the constitutionality of the Bank, Marshall then went on to ask whether the state had the right to tax it. The power to tax was the power to destroy, as the Bank’s lawyer Daniel Webster had argued. States must not be allowed to frustrate the legitimate authority of Congress. “The states have no power, by taxation or otherwise,” Marshall concluded, “to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control, the operations of the Federal Government, or its

The Panic of 1819 remains the only nationwide depression in American history when the voters did not turn against the

administration in Washington.

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.

Reflective southerners had long regretted the introduction of black slavery but feared that emancipation would invite race war, at least in areas with substantial black populations. To the economic fear of losing western slave markets was added the physical fear of living amidst an ever-increasing population of potential rebels—“dammed up in a land of slaves,” as Judge Spencer Roane put it.67 Southern statesmen on record as deploring slavery, such as ex-president Jefferson, now found themselves having to argue that it would be better if the institution were diffused thinly into newly settled areas rather than concentrated in the older states. “Diffusion” of slaves “over a greater surface,” as Jefferson explained it, would “facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation” by making local white populations more

willing to contemplate the possibility of freeing them and by spreading the burden of paying compensation to masters. So the extension of slavery actually would help long-term prospects for bringing an end to slavery! What makes the argument so unconvincing is that it was being used to prevent gradual emancipation in a place where blacks constituted no more than 16 percent of the population. In the last analysis, even those white southerners who regretted slavery and hoped to eliminate it would not tolerate northern participation in planning how to end it.

The Missouri Controversy also concerned political power. Northern whites were not all humanitarians concerned for the welfare of African Americans, but many of them were increasingly alarmed at the disproportionate political influence of southern slaveholders. The North had come to resent the constitutional clause by which three-fifths of the slave population counted for purposes of representation in Congress and the electoral college. The rule helped perpetuate the Virginia dynasty of presidents that reigned for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years under the Constitution; specifically, it had cost John Adams the presidency in the close election of 1800. In 1819, the three-fifths clause was boosting southern membership of the House by

slaves in Missouri, or any other state, would not reduce the state’s representation in the federal House but potentially add to it, since freedpeople would be fully counted (unless they were colonized elsewhere). But if slavery were on the road to ultimate extinction in Missouri, the state might not vote with the proslavery bloc. In such power calculations, the composition of the Senate was of even greater moment than that of the House. Despite the three-fifths rule, the northern majority in the House of Representatives increased with every census reapportionment. So the South looked to preserve sectional equality in the Senate, where each state had two members regardless of population. The recently approved admission of Alabama would balance the scales at eleven free and eleven slave states.

In general, the slave-exporting states of the Atlantic seaboard insisted more strongly on keeping the territories open to slavery than did the slave-importing states, where masters had less at stake in keeping the price of slaves high.

Like some embittered New England Federalists, the politicians of the Richmond Junto sought refuge from their declining national influence behind the barricades of state

Far from hindering religion, the American model of voluntarism hugely facilitated it, liberating powerful religious energies.

Taken together, the members of the Beecher family demonstrate how the heirs of the Puritans coped, not simply with the disestablishment of religion, but also with the demise of the Federalist Party and New England’s shrinking political influence in a growing Union. They devised new means of influencing public opinion outside of politics: education, literature, magazines, religious revivals, and organized reform. They engaged the energies of people in all walks of life, not simply a privileged elite. As a result their evangelical movement exerted a powerful social, moral, and cultural influence over the United States during the critical transition to industrialization and

Edwards had regarded religious revivals as ultimately mysterious, the action of divine grace. By contrast Finney boldly proclaimed, “A revival of religion is not a miracle” but a human work, a “result of the right use of the constituted means.” The evangelist’s job was to employ these means effectively in the effort to save souls. A good evangelist should be as self-conscious about his methods as a good farmer about scientific agriculture, Finney declared. If all the farmers waited upon the sovereignty of God “to give them a crop only when it pleases him,” the world would starve.23 By putting evangelical preaching on a scientific basis, Finney and his co-workers hoped to transcend the cycle of revivals and declensions, creating a continuous downpour where once there had been but intermittent showers of grace. In their new theology of how revivalism should be organized, the evangelists turned themselves into early psychologists of the techniques of persuasion.

Finney instructed preachers on how to market their message.24 In years to come, both political and commercial applications would be found for his principles.

American religion flourished in a society with a thinly developed institutional structure, enlisting the energies of the people themselves. The most important social consequences of the Awakening in America derived from its trust in the capacities of ordinary people. In the early American republic, the most significant challenge to the traditional assumption that the worth of human beings depended on their race, class, and gender came from the scriptural teachings that all are equal in the sight of God and all are one in Christ. Different revivals appealed to different constituencies, but taken together, the Second Great Awakening was remarkable for embracing (in the words of the Book of Common Prayer) “all sorts and conditions of men.” Including women, the poor, and African Americans among the exhorters and exhorted, the revivals expanded the number of people experiencing an autonomous sense of self. They taught self-respect and demanded that individuals function as moral agents. In this way the Awakening empowered multitudes.

The decision for Christ that the revivalists demanded had to be made voluntarily and responsibly. Having taken this decision, the believer, regardless of denomination, should accept self-discipline while also engaging in long-term moral self-improvement, sometimes called “

The new personal identity thus attained was both follower of Christ and rational, autonomous individual—paradoxical as that may

They achieved this,

however, at the cost of losing to the Irish-American community the Irish Protestant immigrants, some of whom even became nativists, a term for those who sought to limit Catholic and/or immigrant political influence.

History gets made from the bottom up as well as from the top down. Belonging to the church helped immigrants adjust to a new and unfamiliar environment while affirming the dignity of their own ancestral group and preserving an aspect of its heritage.

Jackson’s campaign marked the debut of a common and effective tactic in American politics: running against Washington, D.C. It took advantage of the unfocused resentments of people who had suffered from the hard times after

choosing between public and private interests, for in an age of many “mixed” public-private institutions, their opposition did not seem so sharp as it later appeared. Nor did the federal government’s jurisdiction over interstate commerce always preclude state legislation, as it had in the case of the steamboat monopoly. States exercised extensive “police powers” even in areas affecting interstate commerce, the Supreme Court acknowledged repeatedly.83 A litigious people even then, Americans provided their state courts with plenty to do.

Van Buren would bring to the national arena all the

skills in party organization and flexibility in economic issues that he had learned in the demanding school of New York state intrigue. His career represented not the triumph of the common man over aristocracy but the invention of machine politics.

In traditional society, the only items worth transporting long distances had been luxury goods, and information about the outside world had been one of the most precious luxuries of all. The transportation and communications revolutions made both goods and information broadly accessible. In doing so, they laid a foundation not only for widespread economic betterment and wider intellectual horizons but also for political democracy: in newspapers and magazines, in post offices, in nationwide movements to influence public opinion, and in mass political parties.

Jackson’s successful campaign owed as much to improvements in communications as to the democratization of the electorate.

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.