The Jacksonian Economy (review)

book reviews345 covenant concept in die Civil War era. The idea of America as a covenant nation under God's judgment for the sin of slavery played a prominent part in the jeremiads of New School sermons and pamphlets during the War (p. 201). Finally, political historians will want to test Marsden's assumption that there was no correlation between political loyalties and die various Presbyterian party lines (p. 50), and tiiat evangelicals in general were politically nonaligned prior to the Civil War but strongly Republican thereafter because the War "reinforced die identification of Christian reform and Republicanism" (p. 240). The political implications of pre- or post-millennial theologies also need to be explored (pp. 193, 197). In sum, this is a sympathetic, balanced analysis of the evangelical mind during the Middle Period that will long remain a standard sequel to Perry Miller's work on the Puritan mind. Hopefully, Professor Marsden will pursue further the question raised in his suggestive epilogue and a subsequent article in the Westminster Theological Journal (1970), namely, the relation between the New School—Old School denominations and twentieth century fundamentalism and liberalism in the Presbyterian Church. This is a big order, but worthy of a scholar owning both a bachelor of divinity degree and a history doctorate. Robert P. Swierenga Kent State University The Jacksonian Economy. By Peter Temin. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.Pp. 208. $1.95.) Professor Temin is an economist who has done some homework that historians should have done years ago. His book demonstrates once again the fallacy of assuming that past events necessarily occurred the way highly biased observers said diey did, by revealing the shakiness of the conventional wisdom concerning the Jackson era boom and its aftermath. Temin contends tiiat the boom of 1834-37 was not a product of Andrew Jackson's influence on banks, that neither the Specie Circular nor the Deposit Law of 1836 created sufficient pressure to trigger the Panic of 1837, and that the contraction period of the early 1840's was not as bad as it is customary to think. Disregarding the long-influential verdicts of Biddle and Gallatin, Temin has explored and combined fairly available but neglected data—for example, Treasury Department reports on the condition of state banks, 1834-41—to show instead that "The economy was not the victim of Jacksonian politics; Jackson's politics were the victims of economic fluctuations, (p. 17)." Briefly, Temin's revisionist thesis is that the boom resulted not from bank note over-issue but from the retention of silver in this country, made possible by changes in the tripartite trade in specie, opium and capital involving the United States, China and Britain. Indeed, bank 346CIVIL WAR HISTORY reserve ratios, the ratios of specie to money, remained essentially unchanged during the inflationary years, and the land boom, instead of encouraging banks to over-issue notes with each recycling of land sale proceeds, served to damp inflation by absorbing some of the increased money supply. Temin also convincingly argues that the Panic of 1837 rose not from domestic economic causes (though he admits that the Specie Circular had psychological significance) but from pressures imposed by the Bank of England and from the impact of those pressures on American cotton prices. And he points out that the hard times of 1839-43 are more accurately styled "deflation" than "depression," for unlike the period 1929-33, they witnessed actual increases in real consumption and in gross national product. It is hard to fault Temin's effort except to note that he makes the standard version of Jacksonian economics a bit too monolithic; he fails, for instance, to note the divergent and not uninfluential recent interpretation of the period by Douglass North. Otherwise he has made his case well and has stated it with great clarity. More, perhaps, than most revisions , Temin's will be inconvenient to reconcile with the accepted version, but all who deal with the Jacksonian period will now have to confront the task. Rodney O. Davis Knox College Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800-1851. By Donald B. Cole. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. Pp. xi, 283. $10.00.) In this well-researched...