In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • America 1844: Religious Fervor, Westward Expansion, and the Presidential Election that Transformed the Nation by John Bicknell
  • John C. Pinheiro
John Bicknell, America 1844: Religious Fervor, Westward Expansion, and the Presidential Election that Transformed the Nation. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015. 305 pp. $26.95.

Historians have long been attracted to the notion that particular years either are pivotal to understanding and tracing the roots of later decades or are in some way representative of their era. Some years lend toward this kind of extrapolation more than others. David McCullough’s choice of the year 1776 for his book of the same name certainly would qualify as an appropriate pivot point in American history. So, too, would the year Mexico and the United States went to war and James K. Polk settled for half of the Oregon Territory, a tale told masterfully in Bernard Devoto’s The Year of Decision, 1846. C. Edward Skeen’s 1816: America Rising is an example of an excellent book with a tough year about which to make big claims.

In keeping with this trend, it was only a matter of time before somebody took a good look at 1844, the year of James K. Polk’s election to the presidency. By the time Polk left office in 1849, the United States stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Its future as a continental and world power seemed assured, if geographical determinism was to be believed. Before long the United States was reaching out into the Pacific, a move that reached new heights with the taking of the Philippines in 1898 during the Spanish American War.

And so along comes America 1844, by John Bicknell, to tell this story. Bicknell is an expert on contemporary American politics and a journalist whose career has included editorships for Roll Call and Congressional Quarterly. As one might expect from a book written by a journalist and not a professional, academic historian, Bicknell’s writing is fluid, punchy, witty, and [End Page 162] a pleasure to read. The downside of this is that it is also very descriptive, more reporting than history qua history. Even the publicity release for America 1844 uses descriptive words like “quirky” and “wacky,” two words that are in the Oxford English Dictionary but which one rarely sees in summaries of serious historical literature. There is just not much to help the narrative hang together, even though the string of vignettes told by Bicknell are all individually engaging and entertaining.

Given the renewed interest of late by historians in religion’s role in the American past, it is unfortunate that religion appears in America 1844 not as the serious cultural force and shaper of culture that it was but rather as the pastime of fanatics. Bicknell’s book focuses on Millerites, Mormons, and the oddest preachers one can find from among the Protestant evangelists of the Second Great Awakening.

It is not that this is not entertaining. It is. But in Bicknell’s telling all decisions made by Americans seem to have been decided on sentiment, politics, or power. Nowhere is principle or religion mentioned, weighed, or reflected upon by the author. Even John C. Calhoun, who formulated and published an intricate constitutional theory, is relegated to being labeled “a radical” and a “Southern separatist” (39, 43).

The short shrift given Calhoun is not that important in a book focusing on the year 1844. Still, Bicknell could have gone deeper into the personalities, most of whom appear as bit players in what from the outset seems determined to be a comedy of mid-century oddities. Few seem human but rather more like actors in a play for which we get no background, only tension, comments, and the order of events.

The most impressive thing about America 1844, next to Bicknell’s sheer storytelling ability, is the clear message that the United States always was a tumultuous, complex place, more so the more ethnically and religiously diverse it has gotten. For this reason alone this book is valuable. This reader, however, was left wanting some of those other things that have also been constants in American history: the power of ideals and principles to...

pdf

Share