The Age of (John Quincy) Adams

Grand narrative synthesis is a thankless task.¹ Reviewers and fellow scholars will quibble with interpretations and omissions. Because presidential administrations, wars, and treaties offer the most straightforward chronology, social and cultural historians will challenge the organizational subordination of developments that followed no similarly definable timeline—or that occurred at different moments in different places. Herein lies the paradox of Daniel Walker Howe’s undertaking. Traditional political developments drive the narrative, but the “Transformation of America” is not the political democratization that scholars from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Sean Wilentz have foregrounded.² Rather, the significant transformations in Howe’s story are the burgeoning technologies and networks of infrastructure and communication that conducted messages of religious revival, social reform, and party politics, as well as goods and people, ever more rapidly across an expanding country.

That story begins at the Battle of New Orleans, the memory and reality of which foreshadowed the great transformations and the essential political clash of the next thirty-three years. Thanks to the ancient communications system that still prevailed in 1815—“Neither Alexander the Great nor Benjamin Franklin . . . two thousand years later knew anything faster than a galloping horse” (p. 1)—Americans cheered Jackson’s victory at New Orleans (mistakenly) as the triumph that brought Great Britain to the peace table; three decades later, the telegraph would revolutionize the transmission of information. In popular lore, the Hunters of Kentucky, an individualistic band of white marksmen who also settled the West, won America’s second war for independence at New Orleans. In microcosm, as Howe explains, they also represented the nascent ideology of Jacksonian Democrats. So did Andrew Jackson’s broken promise to secure land claims for the black soldiers who aided in the victory. Conversely, he writes, the battle was in fact won by the artillery and by a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, professional soldier corps—harbingers of another American future, the Whig vision of a diversified economy, its industrial growth symbolized more aptly by large cannon than by marksmen’s rifles. To call this period the age of Jacksonian democracy, Howe suggests, is to accept the Hunters of Kentucky myth as truth.

To put it another way: What Hath God Wrought offers a Whiggish (the political party, not the historical theory) interpretation of what historians and textbook writers once reflexively called “Jacksonian America.” This view becomes evident from Howe’s dedication of the book “To the Memory of John Quincy Adams.” Jacksonians, ostensibly the nation’s political modernizers, represented merely the territorial extension of the national present, their democratic professions rooted in white supremacy. Adams’s star represented the truer beacon to American modernity in the years Andrew Jackson bestrode America’s politics. National Republicans and Whigs, moral and social reformers, evangelical leaders: “The Improvers,” as Howe calls them collectively, sought to forge a United States different from and better than its origins. Whigs, not Democrats, “facilitated the transformation of the United States from a collection of parochial agricultural communities into a cosmopolitan nation integrated by commerce, industry, information, and voluntary associations as well as by political ties” (p. 612). Echoing Major Wilson’s 1974 argument about the conflict between Democratic “expansion across space” and Whig “improvement over time,” as well as Alexander Saxton’s depiction of racial ideologies in the early republic, Howe forcefully advances an interpretation, even if he claims in the end that “This book tells a story; it does not argue a thesis” (p. 849).³

Following a first chapter that surveys the societies and peoples of North America in 1815 (and that begins ingeniously in Mexico City, where the story will return three decades later), What Hath God Wrought unfolds primarily through the political narrative of presidencies and wars, with intervening sections devoted to social, economic, and cultural developments. So, for example, the second and third chapters tell the political and diplomatic events of the Madison and early Monroe years (roughly 1812–1819), followed by a chapter...