NEXT MONDAY: Michael Morrison on Political History in _What Hath God
Wrought_

TODAY: James Huston on Economic History in _What Hath God Wrought_

In Daniel Walker Howe’s _What Hath God Wrought_, there is, by my
reckoning, one and only one preposterous statement. He writes, “This
book tells a story; it does not argue a thesis” (p. 849). The thesis
is written in every line of this work that is not a direct quotation
of some contemporary, and the thesis is pointed out, in a footnote, in
one of the great understatements in modern historical treatments: “I
am taking issue here, as elsewhere, with the argument of Charles
Sellers, _The Market Revolution_ (New York, 1991)” (p. 850). This book
entirely repudiates the “market revolution” interpretation that for
twenty-five years has permeated scholarship on the early American
republic. A more honest title of Howe’s magnum opus would have been,
_What Hath God Wrought: The Whig Empire Strikes Back_! Howe takes out
his light sabre and incinerates the interpretations of the Jedi
Knights of the Age of Jackson: Charles Sellers, Harry Watson, John
Ashworth, and Sean Wilentz. This overarching design--the rejection of
all interpretations based on an idea of a market revolution--has to be
kept in mind when dealing with Howe’s treatment of American economic
development in the years 1815 to 1848.

For the American economy, Howe makes the argument that the nation had
less of a “Market Revolution” or an “Industrial Revolution” than it
had a “Communications Revolution.” The real development of note was
neither increased business activity nor the use of machines in
production but rather the amazing ability of Americans to communicate
with each other extensively and rapidly. Instead of the steam engine,
the locomotive, the power loom, or the factory being the symbol of
change in the United States, Howe argues for the printing press, the
telegraph, the U.S. Postal Service. Beyond this finesse of what
economic change in the country really mattered, Howe also stresses
that the nation remained overwhelmingly an agricultural nation and
that rural rhythms dominated the quality of life. While urban America
started expanding and industrialization did take root, both processes
were minor compared to the supremacy of agriculture. Here, Howe makes
his pitch for the salubrious qualities of transportation improvements
(steamboats, canals, and railroads) and the American citizen’s
accessibility to markets. In 1815, the glorious independent yeoman
lived a hard-scrabble life--better than his/her European counterpart
but still pathetically poor and squalid. Indeed, given the fact that
most Americans bathed only once a year, the Republic of Virtue could
have been called the Republic of Human Stench. Most Americans in 1815
wanted market connections but did not have them. The Communications
Revolution gave Americans what they wanted and needed, access to
markets. The result was a vast improvement in the life of most
Americans.

In general, Howe’s treatment of the economics of the early republic is
a sound synthesis of existing literature and posits several
interesting interpretations; but overall it is bland. The
transportation developments are dutifully retold, the story of the
Boston Associates repeated, technological developments restated, and
the rise of the cotton kingdom reiterated. Specific topics seem
abbreviated. The economics of slavery are condensed. Treatment of
manufacturing besides textiles seems truncated--there is little on
shoemaking, iron-making, milling, merchandising, and construction.
Yet, one hesitates to argue that a narrative already 855 pages in
length should be longer. Howe has a number of good maps but only two
tables, and those tables deal with the ratio of women to men (p. 134).
Given the nature of American economic change 1815 to 1848, some
tabular summaries would have made some developments more explicit and
comprehensible.  For the purposes of synthesis, Howe’s treatment of
the American economy is adequate. Researchers wanting more elaboration
will have to go elsewhere.[1]

One senses that Howe’s heart does not beat rapidly when he comes to
the subject of economic history; politics and religion have stolen his
affections. Even the overarching generalizations he offers require
modification. On page 849, he lists the transformations he sees in
American life: first, the growth of market economy; second, the rise
of religious fervor; third, the emergence of mass political parties.
Actually, he sees one transition and three transformations: the
transition was from a semi-subsistence economy to a market economy,
and the transformations were those in communications, religious life,
and mass democratic parties. The three transformations fed off each
other, as the development of means of communication and mass
production of literature enabled the religious message to be spread
abroad and allowed the parties to extend their influence over the
masses. But in terms of the average economic life of an American, the
alterations in business conditions represented a small change, an
improvement, but not a new way of life.

Treating the rise of a market economy as a transition but not a
transformation sets the stage for the battle between the Market
Revolution crowd and Howe, which is the real theme of the work. For
the Market Revolution scholars, the demise of the egalitarian
subsistence economy was an agony; division of labor ran rampant over
old craftsmen styles, avaricious capitalists gloried in the misery
they imposed upon the sweaty multitude, and industrialism--the horror
of all horrors-- swallowed up the good people of New England,
threatened the South and its paternalistic if violent folkways, and
loomed ominously over the yeomen farmers of the Great Lakes. And to
prove that the glorious agrarian paradise that was pre-1815 America
was descending into the hell of capitalism, Market Revolution scholars
pointed to the most unholy development of all--banking! And fighting
that monster was what made Andrew Jackson and the locofocos and
working-class agitators the heroes they were: they tried to retard or
even reverse the tide of capitalism that was about to engulf the
republic and drown out “virtue.” At the heart of the interpretation of
the Market Revolution is the idea that it introduced capitalism to the
country and massively and violently changed the nation’s social
structure, resulting in the privileged few aggrandizing the resources
and happiness of the country by impoverishing the hard-working many.

Howe will have none of it; he totally reverses the story.
Industrialization was not a major story between 1815 and 1848,
relegated as it was to a few small areas along the East Coast. The
nation remained a farming nation and farmers experienced a better life
because of improvements in the market infrastructure. He sees no
upheaval in social structure, save that which came from religious
revival. Indeed, Howe’s story virtually excludes the notion of class;
class only intrudes two or three times in his narrative. The labor
agitations of the 1820s and 1830s are given short-shrift in Howe’s
presentation, although he does note the awful conditions prevalent in
early American factories. One need only compare this book to Harry
Watson, _Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America_ (1990)
or Sellers’ _The Market Revolution_ (1991), to see what Howe has done:
he has minimized economic change and by so doing called into dispute
the extent of social structure change; and by doing that, he has
gutted the essentials of the Market Revolution interpretation.

Howe perhaps underestimates the impact of the Market Revolution--such
as the reshuffling of economic activity in the regions and some of the
adjustments people had to make to an economic competition that they
had never confronted before--but in other ways his argument has merit.
The stress he lays on the limitations of life in the semi-subsistence
economy is more right than wrong, and he correctly emphasizes the
agrarian nature of American life. His point about the optimism that
the rise of market relations caused actually deserves more treatment
and discussion than he gives it. Market Revolution scholars constantly
confuse commercialization (extension of market activity) with
industrialization (the machine’s displacement of skilled labor in
production); they are separate processes. When the improvements in
transportation began integrating economic activities across geography,
many of the alterations lifted incomes and, more significantly,
widened the field of occupations. One need only look at the list of
occupations in the Censuses of 1840, 1850, 1860, and 1870 to see what
was happening. This may be a bit of heresy (although given the urban
lifestyle of many of the Market Revolution crowd it should not be),
but not everyone wants to commune with Mother Nature on a farm. The
Transportation Revolution gave Americans new occupational options; and
that meant opportunity. It was this aspect of the Transportation
Revolution that gave this period its optimism; it was the economic
backbone of faith in democracy and in reform. The idea that the
“common man” could engage life intelligently, make beneficial choices,
and wisely determine his (then her) own path in life had a direct
connection with hundreds of thousands of people entering new
occupations--and doing well at them.

This optimism came from commercialization, at least in its initial and
middle stages. Commercialization had a leveling quality to it and did
not require hierarchy. This was very much unlike the old medieval
structures of feudalism, or the American one of the plantation, or of
Industrialization, which gathered numerous people together and put
superiors over them. And one of the ways the broadening, democratic
impulse of commercialization can be seen is to extend the time period
under consideration to 1880. Living in the midst of the
commercialization of American life between 1815 and 1880, white
Americans found it possible to take a huge bottom layer of society,
roughly twelve percent of the population, release it from slavery, and
then move that totally impoverished lower class to citizenship, giving
its members political power. In almost every decade of its existence,
save probably the 1930s, American leaders have feared the lower class
and sought to restrict and control it. But somehow between 1815 and
1880, this loathing of the upper class toward the lower class was so
enervated that an amazing optimism broke through and the lower class
was emancipated and given political power. The argument needs to be
made that economic conditions helped promote this optimism, this
capacity of believing that a bountiful and peaceful future could be
achieved by letting loose millions of poor people and giving them
power; that economic condition was the egalitarian content of
commercialization. (Of course, Howe probably would not accept the
above proposition, as he sees evangelical religion being the driving
force in nineteenth-century America.)

A related topic to economic history is political economy, and that
deserves at least a fleeting consideration. Because political
historians will be diving into this aspect of Howe’s work, I will not
dwell on it. One can, however, anticipate massive fireworks. What Howe
gives is most decidedly a Whig version of politics and public policy.
Howe’s evisceration of the Democrats’ public policy and his
glorification of Whig political economy have more than a few grains of
truth. Nonetheless, I have not seen in print a more devastating
portrait of Andrew Jackson as a brute, an authoritarian, and a law-
breaker. I cannot believe that this depiction will stand without
vociferous protest.

However, Howe pushes too far in his pro-Whig portrayal; perhaps the
first half-century of American life “did not represent the age of pure
laissez-faire that many people imagine,” but it certainly did practice
an impure laissez-faire (p. 561). Simply put, Howe sees far more
economic management and regulation in Whigs (and later Republicans)
than is permissible; he states that the far-seeing economic program
forwarded by the Whigs included “planning and strong government” (p.
583). This stress on the interventionism of the Whigs, and then the
Republicans, is misplaced; the Whigs and Republicans only seem the
advocates of strong government when compared to the Democrats;
compared to the rest of the world, both parties were hopelessly
favorable to minimal government. And Howe ignores one element in the
Whig party that deserves scrutiny: their infuriating sense of
hierarchy, their belief in rule by the betters because of the
incompetence of the masses. Massachusetts Whigs may have formulated
intelligent policy, but their social airs were repellent.

Two observations not connected with the American economy deserve
mention because certain aspects of this book immediately caught my
attention. The first is how Howe used the massive outpouring of
current social history of the early Republic and bent it to the cause
of the Whigs. This work is strewn with the latest work on race and
gender. Historians of race and gender of the early republic, I wager,
are not exactly Whiggish in their political sentiments. It is worth
some reflection about how the circumstance comes to pass that those
people who are oriented to the political left have turned out
histories so supportive of an American Whig interpretation of
Jacksonian politics. Part of the answer is what is missing from the
formula. The chant was, and perhaps still is, studies in race, gender,
and class. Howe simply does not treat class; and with that subject
removed from analysis, the cultural topics of race and gender do not
necessarily at all imply radical democracy.

The second observation deals with historiography and its ebb and flow
as revealed by _What Hath God Wrought_. The book is absolutely
incredible for being up-to-date on the literature and being
comprehensive on the materials published on the age of American
expansion. There was a clear historiographical pattern, interestingly,
in the footnotes, and anyone seeking to chart these trends need only
consult this work. When the subjects are politics, economic history,
and diplomacy for the years 1815 to 1848, the works Howe cites are
older and standard; when the topics turn to Native Americans, slavery,
gender relations, and women’s rights, the literature cited is
overwhelmingly from the past two decades. From the standpoint of how
the profession has moved over time, Howe’s work is a marvelous
revelation, and his fusion of two very different orientations has to
be considered nearly miraculous.

One final assessment needs to be made. No reader of this work will
have any doubt where Howe’s abiding interests lay: politics and
religion. And of these two, religion seems to hold the higher rank.
Howe generally disassociates the evolution of evangelicalism from
economic development or class aspirations; it is contained within the
mental dynamics of the Protestant tradition and is an intellectual
evolution. In his view of the power of religious thought to mold and
shape the world, as the chief motivator of people, Howe joins an
obvious trend in modern antebellum research; Richard Carwardine, John
P. Daly, Mitchell Snay, Kenneth M. Startup, Mark Noll, and Nathan O.
Hatch, amidst a multitude of others, have seen sectional discord over
moral questions–to be precise, the _moral question_ of slavery--as the
key to explaining the path of American history.[2] The older syntheses
are giving way to this new affirmation of the power of religious
thought in the early republic. Republicanism gets a mention or two and
then is swept away by religious revivalism. The same holds only
slightly less true for Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s description of the South
as an honor society. (The batch of New histories that came out in the
1960s and 1970s are similarly slighted, the most visible slight being
given to those who labored in the New Political History.) And of
course, it hardly needs be mentioned that the elevation of religious
commitment as the driving force of the early republic does not require
any reference to economic motivation at all, capitalist or otherwise.

One imagines that this interpretive mode will eventually run its
course, reach an apex, decline, and ultimately be replaced by some
other meta-interpretive scheme. Having to suffer through this cycle, I
offer a caution. In one of his concluding statements on the forces
shaping the United States during the Revolutions of 1848, Howe writes,
“Finally, the Christian religion remained an enduring element of
imponderable magnitude in American life and thought, simultaneously
progressive and conservative, a source of both social reform and
divisive controversy” (p. 836). But foreigners saw that the key to
American life was a mad scramble for wealth, a society devoted to
avariciousness that no longer was held in check by an aristocracy.
Even though Howe emphasizes the importance of evangelical
Protestantism at length, one should weigh those assertions against his
summary of the thoughts of European visitors: “Most observers at the
time agreed with her [Frances Trollope] in finding Americans
obsessively preoccupied with earning a living and relatively
uninterested in leisure activities;” Charles Dickens and Harriet
Martineau commented on “the overwhelmingly commercial tone of American
life, [that is to say,] the worship of the ‘almighty dollar’” (p. 310).

What has to be questioned is the current tilt of the historiography of
the early republic toward the primacy of religious thought and theory
in explaining American developments. Not only does the Scottish common
sense philosophy reveal everything, but the residual is then clarified
by post-millennialism or pre-millennialism. Some of us believe that
more earthy reasons explain activities in the early republic and cast
a suspicious eye on religious enthusiasms that never change people’s
patterns of behavior, only their justifications of them. My favorite
comment on the importance of revivalism in the behavior of Americans
comes from Frederick Douglass:

“In August, 1832, my master attended a Methodist camp-meeting held in
the Bay-side, Talbot county, and there experienced religion. I
indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate
his slaves, and that, if he did not do this, it would , at any rate,
make him more kind and humane. I was disappointed in both these
respects. It neither made him to be humane to his slaves, nor to
emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it made him
more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been
a much worse man after his conversion than before. Prior to his
conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him
in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious
sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.”[3]

Of the power of post-millennialism or pre-millennialism to shape
people’s activities I have my doubts. In American life in the
nineteenth century, the race between untamed self-interest and God was
no contest; God always came in a dismal and exhausted second.
Something about the American record leads me to suspect the operative
morality in the early republic was simple: To the victor belong the
spoils.

James L. Huston
Oklahoma State University

Notes

[1]. Three other books are good starting points: Stanley Engerman and
Robert E. Gallman, eds., _The Cambridge Economic History of the United
States_, II: _The Long Nineteenth Century_ (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 2000); Jonathan Hughes and Louis P. Cain, _American
Economic History_ (5th ed.: Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1998); and
Jeremy Atack and Peter Passell, _A New Economic View of American
History from Colonial Times to 1940_ (2nd ed.: W. W. Norton, 1994),
the latter work being especially informative and surprisingly readable.

[2]. Mitchell Snay, _Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in
the Antebellum South_ (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1993); John Patrick Daly, _When Slavery Was Called Freedom:
Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War _
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002); Richard J.
Carwardine, _Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America_ (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harlow,
eds., _Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the
Present_ (2nd ed.: New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Mark A.
Noll, ed., _God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market,
1790-1860_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Kenneth Moore
Startup, _The Root of All Evil: The Protestant Clergy and the Economic
Mind of the Old South_ (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997);
Nathan O. Hatch, _The Democratization of American Christianity_ (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

[3]. _Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass_ (1845; New York:
Signet, 1968), 67.

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