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

by Daniel Walker Howe

Americans’ aggressive imperialism manifested their preoccupation with the future rather than the present. New homes, either in the growing cities or on the frontier, constituted part of the innovative quest in which so many participated. No significant group of Americans wished to shun what all agreed was the nation’s destiny to greatness. Even the critics of territorial expansion endorsed the growth of American population, productivity, and power; but they preferred to improve the quality of national life through education, economic development, and moral reform both individual and collective, rather than just expand geographically the kind of America that already existed, encumbered with the institution of slavery. The National Republicans and afterwards the Whigs, led by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, proposed an alternative vision to that of the Jacksonian Democrats. Their vision of government-sponsored modernization offered America a different future. Eventually, the Whig vision prevailed, but only after Abraham Lincoln had vindicated it in the bloodiest of American wars.