Yesterday morning I completed what is perhaps the longest book I’ve ever read: Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press). The transformation that Howe studies involves the “revolutions” of both communications and transportation during the period. This is in marked contrast to earlier interpretations of the era, which have tended to focus on Andrew Jackson (cf. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Sean Wilentz) or on the “market revolution” (cf. Charles Sellers). In her lucid, engaging New Yorker review of What Hath God Wrought, historian Jill Lepore details some of the background information concerning Howe and Sellers:
Howe’s book is the most recent installment in the prestigious Oxford History of the United States. This would not be worth mentioning except that the book that was initially commissioned to cover this period, Charles Sellers’s “The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846,” was rejected by the series editor, the late, distinguished historian C. Vann Woodward, and it is Sellers against whom Howe argues, if with a kind of gentlemanly diffidence. (Oxford did publish Sellers’s book, in 1991, just not as part of the series.) Sellers, a historian at Berkeley, claimed that the greatest transformation of the first half of the nineteenth century—indeed, the defining event in American and even in world history—was no mere transformation but a revolution, from an agrarian to a capitalist society. “Establishing capitalist hegemony over economy, politics, and culture, the market revolution created ourselves and most of the world we know,” Sellers wrote.
[...]
Sellers’s was the thesis that launched a thousand dissertations; evidence of the market revolution seemed to be everywhere; it seemed to explain everything. In “The Market Revolution Ate My Homework,” a thoughtful essay published in Reviews in American History in 1997, the historian Daniel Feller observed that “a monograph that presupposes a market revolution will certainly discover one.” His caution went unheard.
So it is a rare and refreshing kind of heresy that Daniel Walker Howe, who studied briefly under Sellers at Berkeley in the nineteen-sixties, and who is best known for his 1979 book, “The Political Culture of the American Whigs,” refuses to use the term “market revolution” in his grand synthesis. (Signalling his quarrel with the other recent sweeping interpretation of this period, Sean Wilentz’s pro-Jackson “The Rise of American Democracy,” Howe dedicates his book to the memory of John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s political nemesis, and avoids using the phrase “Jacksonian America,” on the ground that “Jackson was a controversial figure and his political movement bitterly divided the American people.”) Howe has three objections to Sellers’s thesis. First, the market revolution, if it happened at all, happened earlier, in the eighteenth century. Second, it wasn’t the tragedy that Sellers makes it out to be, because “most American family farmers welcomed the chance to buy and sell in larger markets,” and they were right to, since selling their crops made their lives better. Stuff was cheaper: a mattress that cost fifty dollars in 1815 (which meant that almost no one owned one) cost five in 1848 (and everyone slept better). Finally, the revolution that really mattered was the “communications revolution”: the invention of the telegraph, the expansion of the postal system, improvements in printing technology, and the growth of the newspaper, magazine, and book-publishing industries.
Howe’s dedication signals his admiration for Adams; Henry Clay is the other figure he holds in greast esteem. (In fact, Howe engages in some potentially dicey “What If?” speculation three-quarters of the way through the book, deciding that perhaps the United States would have fought neither the Mexican War nor the Civil War had Clay won the extremely close presidential election of 1844.)
Anyway, this is all potentially year-old news were it not for the fact that I just discovered, via Ralph E. Luker’s post on the HNN blog Cliopatria, that H-SHEAR, the electronic mailing list of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, has lately sponsored a series of essays on particular aspects of Howe’s book. In class, my professor related the story that of all the prizes Howe’s book won—including the Pulitzer Prize and the New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize—the author was most proud of receiving SHEAR’s book prize. So it is particularly interesting to read assessments of the book from the perspectives of economic history, political history, Native American history, etc. The easiest way to find all of these responses is to click here, which takes you to a search for Howe’s name in all of the 2008 messages on H-SHEAR; those in the series are titled “HOWE FORUM.”
Tags: Jill Lepore, Daniel Walker Howe, American history, What Hath God Wrought, Charles Sellers, SHEAR
