Oxford University Press, 1991.
Sellers's book was a major reevaluation of the period when first published a quarter-century ago; it's still an important survey of the period. Sellers covers a lot of ground--each chapter is somewhat thematic in approach, even as they very slowly move the chronology forward--but largely keeps focused on a single, broadly-defined arena. He argues that this era saw the negotiation of power between capitalism and democracy in the early phase the growth of the market economy unleashed in the wake of the conclusion of the War of 1812. Carries out in the fields of politics, religion, and social change, the overriding conflict involved the tension between the imperatives of the forces of the market versus the political fact of an increasingly empowered electorate which included many groups which were either leery of the market or sought to tame it or redirect it in accordance with their values and interests.
Sellers locates much of this tension in the conflict between two very different religious impulses: arminianism and antinomianism. The distinction between the two reflected two different moral economies (my phrase, not Sellers') which ultimately needed to accommodate each other in the new democratic capitalist orthodoxy--one which, at the conclusion of this period, still contained the fatal contradiction of slavery. The tension over slavery would be push the polity to the breaking point in the wake of James Polk's recklessly successful efforts to annex new lands for expansion while ignoring the niceties of sectional balance.
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