H-SHEAR FORUM ON DANIEL WALKER HOWE'S _WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT_

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NEXT MONDAY: David Henkin on the "Communications Revolution"
TODAY: Michael A. Morrison on Political History

Daniel Walker Howe's approach to politics can be neatly and concisely
summed up by the book's dedication and an observation he makes in his
conclusion. Howe dedicates _What Hath God Wrought_ "To the Memory of
John Quincy Adams," and he concludes with the reflection that "history
is made both from the bottom up and from the top down, and historians
must take account of both in telling their stories" (p. 853). Thus, on
the one hand Howe's politics have a distinctly W(w)higgish flavor,
and, on the other, his scope is broad, his interpretations are
judicious, his deft handling of evidence is nuanced, and personal
vignettes illustrative of major issues structure his narrative. He has
digested a vast secondary literature and, to switch the metaphor, has
distilled it into a political narrative that argues for the important
interplay of belief and behavior.  For Howe political debates are
substantive and by extension meaningful.

Certain important themes emerge that, woven together, provide a rich
tapestry of politics and political culture in the early republic. One
is the way in which revolutions in transportation and communication
(technological changes) were political issues in and of themselves,
facilitated the democratization (up to a point) of politics, and had a
moral and personal dimension often overlooked by historians. For
example, Howe contends that because the national government "dithered"
over a national internal improvement program, state and local
governments were obliged--and empowered--to undertake the designs and
construction themselves. Although their internal improvements projects
were not always wise, often illogical, and sometimes bizarre in
concept, their effect (if not intent) was dramatic, important, and as
Howe notes "conspicuous" on popular politics.  "The availability of
information coming in from the outside," he maintains, "liberated
people from the weight of local tyrannies, whether that of a local
elite or local majority" (p. 237).

This leitmotif also has personal dimensions. Howe argues that South
Carolina's hostility to internal improvements and the tariff helped to
transform John C. Calhoun "from nationalist to particularist" (p.
250). Although Calhoun's particularism and extremism would play
themselves out in the sectional crisis and the tragedy of civil war,
the tragic figure in the battle of internal improvements is John
Quincy Adams. For Adams the spirit of improvement--personal and
public--lay at the core of his being and of his presidency. Believing
in economic modernization (propelled in large measure by the
improvements in transportation and communication), Adams hoped to
promote that end through government--and governance--by consensus. But
ironically the very spirit of political democratization that issued
from those twin revolutions precluded a widespread (or even modest)
consensus on a national design or plan. Put in other terms, the
modernity of democratic politics trumped Adams's vision of economic
modernization.

Although Howe stops just short of keening over the fate of Adams and
his presidency (in print at any rate), Andrew Jackson and, especially,
Martin Van Buren (who was determined, ruthless, and skilled--and thus
had the makings of a perfect department head) come in for some very
rough treatment. Frustration with the Adams-Clay alliance (built on an
alleged corrupt bargain), not principled opposition to improvements,
drove their opposition to the administration. Jackson and Van Buren
appear in Howe's narrative to have been amoral (at best), mean-
spirited (to the point of cruelty), and wholly absorbed with
controlling the national government and not at all concerned with
intelligent or enlightened governance. Jackson combined his
authoritarian presidency with the language (or pretense) of democratic
ideology. His values and his programs (and later those of Van Buren)
were divisive not inclusive. Thus, Howe contends rightly that the "Age
of Jackson" is a misnomer, and the concept of a single Jacksonian
America misleading. The democratization of politics was as notable for
those excluded (women, Indians, and free blacks) as it was for the
expansion of the franchise.

Yet there is a certain ambivalence (so it seems to me) in Howe's
analysis of the Democracy. Portraits of Jackson and Van Buren are so
vivid and, frankly, unpleasant that they tend to obscure more
principled differences between Democrats and Whigs. Politics was not
all personal. If Adams and Clay were an extension of the Republican
nationalism that followed and grew out of the near disasters of the
War of 1812, Jackson's Democratic Republicans were a reflection and
extension of states-rights tradition of Old Republicanism. Furthermore
Howe concedes that the party's ambivalent stand on internal
improvements reflected "the mixed feelings of the American public
toward the dramatic changes being wrought by the transportation and
communications revolution" (p. 363). Moreover, Howe concedes that
Jackson's ability to capitalize (pardon the pun) on populist
resentment of the rich and faith in limited government tapped into "a
distinctively American political tradition going back to the colonial
times, expressed most notably in the Revolution and more recently by
Antifederalists. ... Jackson's hostility toward the Bank resonated
with much in American culture" (p. 381).

Concomitant themes to the revolution in communications, internal
improvements, and politics are the interrelated issues of sovereignty
and public virtue. For Jackson the demagogue, who proclaimed-- one
would say he hardly proved--that the people were sovereign, virtue
belonged not to "a public-spirited elite" (read: Adams, Clay, and
their ilk) but "to the common people" (p. 381). In a not-so-subtle but
nevertheless delicious observation, Howe snorts that "Jackson believed
in popular virtue--and himself as its embodiment" (p. 488). His
successor Van Buren maintained that parties were a virtue not a vice,
and that the sovereignty of the people was executed through them. For
the particularist and proslavery zealot Calhoun, "sovereignty rested
in the people of the separate states and not in the national
people" (p. 397). To Chief Justice Roger Taney, "law originated in the
will of the sovereign," which Howe contends "undermined minority
rights and the rule of law" (pp. 441, 437). (Taney would be a prime
candidate in some circles for today's Supreme Court.)

For all of the loose blathering by Democrats about the sovereignty of
the people and popular sovereignty, Howe is quick to point out that
the party "was not the spontaneous creation of a mass movement from
the bottom up" (p. 489). To be sure, there were grassroots movements
in this period--Antimasonry, nativism, sabbatarianism, and the labor
movement. In Howe's view, the Democracy is the party of intolerance,
exclusiveness, and at the presidential level demagoguery. The so-
called Democracy was hostile to Native Americans, contemptuous of
women's participation in politics, defenders of slavery, and champions
of a racist imperialism. Democratic presidents (Jackson and especially
James K. Polk) vastly expanded the powers of the presidency.  And Van
Buren, who did as much as anyone to legitimize sustained partisan
conflict, stressed party loyalty sustained by patronage that turned
more on fealty than on talent.  Jacksonian democracy, Howe concludes,
was an oxymoron.

The Whigs, for all their bad luck--including what Howe characterizes
as the "cruel fate" and "appalling blunder" of electing a president
who joined the Choir Invisible a month into his administration and was
succeeded by a lapsed-Democrat vice president who clung tenaciously to
his democratic principles--were more reflective of the spirit of
improvement that was afoot in the early republic (p. 611). Party
members' support of reform movements of various stripes (anti-removal,
anti-slavery, women's rights, education) and their work for literacy
and economic development infused politics at the national, state and
local level with a moral dimension that was sorely lacking in the
Democracy. As "the party of America's future," he argues, Whigs were
the party of inclusion "more receptive than their rivals to talent
regardless of race or gender." (p. 612). It is this conflict between
the modernization of party politics (advantage: Democratic party) and
the improvement and modernization of society (advantage: Whiggery)
that lies at the heart of Dan Howe's understanding of politics in the
early republic. Because the party of Jackson was so successful at the
polls nationally, the many important contributions of Whigs to the
improvement of the human condition are, he concludes, obscured.

For all the clarity of Dan Howe's narrative, the crispness of his
prose, and the many subtle and provocative insights of his argument
there is an underlying tension that bridges this sprawling and rich
work. A spirit of improvement--personal, social, economic, and
technological--was abroad in the land from the end of the War of 1812
to the conclusion of the Mexican-American conflict in 1848. But as
society, culture, religion, and politics became increasingly
democratic, so too did government and not necessarily for the better.
Enlightened governance--government by consensus--became problematic
during the Adams administration and then impossible under the
Democratic and faux democratic regimes that followed. Small-minded
politicians and ambitious demagogues pursuing narrow-minded, self-
serving agendas frustrated the designs and the hopes of not only John
Quincy Adams but also women's rights and antislavery activists,
educational reformers, modernizers, and just about anyone with an IQ
that hit triple digits.

Thus the ambiguity implicit in the title of Dan Howe's magnum opus--
_What Hath God Wrought_--is both appropriate and in its own way
revelatory. This is that rare work in which the whole is greater than
the sum of its parts. It is also the touchstone of one of the
profession's most creative and inclusive scholarly organizations. More
to the point, _What Hath God Wrought_ is also the capstone (though one
trusts not the final work) of a distinguished historian's career.

Michael A. Morrison
Purdue University

***

Catch up on previous parts of Howe Forum:

INTRODUCTION (Oct. 27)
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0810&week=d&msg=/eKgyeicCgpYSkmSDVdJng

JAMES HUSTON ON ECONOMIC HISTORY (Oct. 27)
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0810&week=d&msg=xC7PayA4egD0XIRVNPkdcA

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