Steven E. Woodworth. Manifest Destinies: America's Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
Steven E. Woodworth is a well-regarded historian who has written extensively on the Civil War. His background in military history is clear in this book, a history of the 1840s which devotes nearly half its length to a fairly detailed account of the Mexican-American War. Woodworth is at his best in this section; he is an able prose stylist and has a knack for summarizing tactical and strategic movements as well as humanizing his narrative with seemingly well-chosen observations, quotes, and anecdotes. Woodworth takes his subject seriously without being portentous or solemn.
The thesis of his book is that in 1840, the moral and ethical contradictions of a democratic republic that practiced slavery had been largely subsumed in the two-party system. Many major religious denominations had split along sectional lines over the slavery issue, but the two-party system managed to keep political tensions under control. By 1850, that fragile balance had been severely undermined. The acquisition of the North American continent west of the Louisiana Purchase, and the rapid peopling of California in the wake of the discovery of gold, forced policy makers and the public to confront the issue of the spread of slavery in new states and territories. The book ends with the Compromise of 1850, which rather put off the issue rather than truly settling it.
None of this is particularly controversial or new; Woodworth is writing for a general audience and he is certainly an able enough writer to be up to the task. But he doesn't have much new or insightful to add. His view of the Whig Party in general, as well as of Henry Clay, seems a bit dated. Dismissing the Whigs because of the admittedly superficial nature of their only two successful Presidential campaigns makes sense on the surface, but ignores that those elections took place in a context in which the voters were already well aware of Whig policies; the campaign rhetoric might indeed have been tawdry and content-free, but most voters and certainly most party regulars had more substantive reasons for their support. And it seems a bit unfair that Woodworth relies so strongly on Robert Remini's biography of Henry Clay yet uses it to support a much less flattering view of the man.
Another issue is his tendency to make too strong a parallel between events in the book and his interpretation of contemporary history and culture. It is one thing to find commonalities in American history over time and to find linkages between past and current events, but Woodworth's conservatism and religious convictions sometimes lead him to make sweeping pronouncements about what Americans as a whole believe, or do. There is nothing wrong with bringing one's own ideological beliefs into historical inquiry, but sometimes his eagerness to do so seems to cloud his judgement. His assertion that the gradualist abolitionists such as Lewis Tappan followed an approach which was "more practical and political than that of the Garrisonians" (47) seems to be a reaction to Garrison's break with mainstream evangelical Christians, who figure larger in Woodworth's narrative than they might deserve. He claims this is because Garrison was wrong and the moderates were right about the Constitution--that it was not, as he claimed, a fundamentally pro-slavery document, but rather that it was flawed but fundamentally anti-slavery. Woodworth does not elaborate on this assertion, which ignores the fact that it took two Amendments and the Civil War to get rid of slavery within the framework of that supposedly "anti-slavery" document.
This book isn't bad despite its flaws, and general readers eager for an implicitly conservative view of this period in American history which does not get as much attention from popular historians as it should will probably find much to like here. Readers who know the era better--who have a more nuanced understanding of the Whig Party, or the Panic of 1837--won't get much out of it. I would be interested in reading some of his works on the Civil War; I suspect he knows the literature and his primary sources better, and as noted above he seems an able military historian.
