The Rise of American Democracy

Sean Wilentz. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.

Wilentz has written a history of the development and evolution of the American ideal of democracy over the course of several decades that simultaneously covers a lot of ground while in same ways remaining narrow in focus. The time span is implied in the subtitle--From the rise of Thomas Jefferson the election and inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.

After a brief consideration of the Federalist period immediately after ratification of the Constitution, the focus shifts to the Jefferson administration and how the Jeffersonian Republicans coped with their own ideological assumptions--forged in political battles with the Federalists and the conservative hierarchies they represented--as well as with the lingering "country" and "city" democracies which had been stirred up by the Revolution and which continued to flare up from time to time in response to political shifts. The book traces this democratic heritage through the decline of the Federalists, the split between "Democratic" and "National" Republicans, and onto the rise of the Jacksonian Democracy. 

Jackson looms large in this book, which in some ways appears to be Wilentz’s attempt to defend and update Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson for the 21^st century. Although Wilentz is sympathetic to the racial (and, to a much lesser degree, gender) inequities inherent in Jacksonian Democracy, he spends a lot more time defending Jackson’s legacy than in critiquing it, and Old Hickory and his political heirs (Martin Van Buren could not complain too much about his treatment here) generally get the benefit of the doubt in any political battle or ideological conflict.

That said, Wilentz does give the Whigs a more sympathetic hearing than he afforded the Federalists, and acknowledges that the Jacksonians managed to neither fully encompass the democratic yearnings of their era nor address the logical inconsistencies in some of their actions and beliefs.

Hovering over all of this was the institution of slavery and the questions it raised about the meaning and the limits of American democracy. Those contradictions and challenges would ultimately destroy the Whig party completely and split the Democracy in two.

If not already clear, it should be noted that the way in which this hefty study is narrow in focus is this—Wilentz has written an unapologetically political history of the period, which means that it is top-down in focus and pays little mind to the broader tapestry of social and cultural history. While perhaps unfashionable, this is appropriate given Wilentz’s assertion that 19^th century Americans located the center of their social and cultural arguments within the political realm. Politics were central to questions of what it meant to be American. It was a different world than the one we live in, and we can only begin to understand it if we try to see it as contemporaries did.

The Trial

Sadakat Kadri. The Trial: Four Thousand Years of Courtroom Drama. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2005.

Sadakat Kadri studied history in the United Kingdom ane law in both the U.K. and the United States, and has worked as a lawyer in multiple countries in cases concerning international law and human rights. His experience and knowledge are complemented with diligent research and a deft, often dryly humorous writing style in this book. The Trial is a sweeping yet brisk consideration of the long, convoluted history of the modern jury trial that is common in much of the Anglo world.

Although the book begins "In the Beginning" with a consideration of the justice of the ancient Near East (including the ideals of the Old Testament) and the ancient Greeks, and concludes with a consideration of recent high-profile trials, it is organized thematically rather than chronologically. The narrative flows fairly smoothly from chapter to chapter; Kadri does a rather good job of guiding the reader from a consideration of medieval trials of inanimate objects to the Moscow Show Trials of the Stalinist Soviet Union.

Throughout the book, Kadri is concerned with the social and cultural meaning of the jury trial, of its forms and rituals, particularly in relation to the greater public. This is not primarily a legal history, but a cultural one. He also draws the reader to consider how the strengths and weaknesses of the jury trial were arrived at through long development rather than deliberate invention; unforeseen consequences are rife in his telling.

This is a fantastic work of popular history. Recommended for all readers.

Forcing the Issue

William Lee Miller. Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

One problem with the history of the Antebellum period is that it is defined--both in terminology and in the public mind--by what came next; yet at the same time, in the public mind the Civil War is not so much the end product of decades of deliberate agitation in a context of an increasingly stark sectional division as a sudden event that negated everything that came before.

Miller's book is an account of the long campaign for free speech fought in Congress by John Quincy Adams and eventually some allies. Specifically, for the right of anti-slavery petitions from citizens to be heard in the House of Representatives. This entirely parliamentary battle preceded not only the Civil War by more than two decades, it also came before the increasingly heated and open political arguments which came in the decade just prior to the war.

This particular battle--bloodless, sometimes carried out in obtuse parliamentary jargon, and ostensibly concerned with issues of free speech about slavery rather than slavery itself--has understandably failed to register in the public consciousness, However, Miller makes an excellent argument that the debate, and particularly John Quincy Adams leading role in it, deserves to be more widely known.

The battles to come would be more intense, more explicitly about slavery, and ultimately much more deadly. But this extended legislative battle was an important step along the way, and Miller deserves credit both for bringing it to life and making a mostly-forgotten parliamentary battle into a fairly gripping narrative.

Stumbling over Slavery on the way to the Yeoman's Republic

Roger G. Kennedy. Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

In the appendix to this thought-provoking study, Roger Kennedy mentions that his original plan for the book would have mandated a much longer work; as it is this study seems longer than it is. Or perhaps I should say "denser"; the book is not a chore to read. Kennedy is an entertaining stylist, and the story he is telling is compelling and rewards attention. But he is trying to tell a seemingly familiar tale (the Louisiana Purchase and its roles in the spread of slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century) through a novel interpretive approach. Namely, the leading role Jefferson played in opening the new land to slavery by precluding the possibility of  multi-racial yeoman farming.

This is also an environmental history, as Kennedy returns again and again to the damage that plantation slavery agriculture inflicted on the landscape of the American South. This is somewhat ironic given Jefferson's well-documented interest in the theory that working the land developed virtue--thus, his oft-quoted belief that the nation would be best served by spreading as a nation of independent small farmers.

The chapters are broken up into many very short, very specific thematic sections; this allows the text to gain thematic depth and richness, but while Kennedy is an able wordsmith sometimes the narrative it a little hard for the general reader to discern; Kennedy assumes a level of basic knowledge that not every reader might possess.

It would be very difficult to summarize this book briefly; there is simply a lot here to mull over. The ways in which Jefferson and Madison tacitly utilized filibustering and other quasi-national adventuring to extend American sovereignty into former Spanish possessions are just one example of how Kennedy manages to alter the perspective of how the Louisiana Purchase came about. This is a book any student of the era would benefit from studying.

Highly recommended.

Manifest Destinies

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.

The View from the West

Earl J. Hess. The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from The Appalachians to The Mississippi. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

A straightforward work of military history which is arranged chronologically, The Civil War in the West makes a case that the war was actually decided in the West, and that western armies deserve a great deal more credit for defeating the Confederacy than is generally given in mainstream acocunts which center their attention on the Eastern theater. The book is generally told from the Union point of view.

The problems of controlling--to one degree or another--vast expanses of conquered Confederate territory is a recurring theme. So is the logistic difficulties experienced by Union forces as they penetrated deeper into the Confederacy, often connected to sources of supplies and ordnance only by rivers and wagon trails of dubious quality. Western armies and their commanders often found themselves forced to fulfill many civic functions in occupied areas, especially when local government officials were either Confederates or of questionable loyalty. And with the acquisition of more Southern territory came contact with more slaves; the question of what to do with them would evolve with time, circumstance, changing policy, and the decisions and attitudes of different commanders.

Western warfare was generally fought at a smaller scale than the famous battles of the East, but were as fiercely fought. Western armies on both sides were generally less disciplined in terms of dress, demeaner, and tendency to plunder (Confederate forces were seemingly about as likely to exploit Southern farms as the dreaded Yankees) than their Eastern counterparts. Another contrast lies in generalship--in the West, the Union held the advantage from the beginning, unlike in the East, and with sporadic exceptions and setbacks the war in the west was marked by a steady succession of Union success. Hess notes that some generals who were successful in the West then failed in the East (Halleck, Pope, etc.), but follows that observation up noting that Lincoln would finally again give command of Eastern forces to a general who had been fighting in the "Western style". (317) That general was Grant, and in collaboration with the much more provincially Western Sherman, Grant applied lessons and tactics learned in the West to the Eastern theater, with decisive results.

A very readable and well-argued addition to Civil War literature.

Ecstatic Nation

Brenda Wineapple. Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877. New York: Harper Collins, 2013.

Wineapple's book is centered on 'ecstasy' but it begins in apprehension and ends in exhaustion. The United States of America she portrays is wracked throughout this period by extremes of ecstasy triggered by a tendency to appeal to a 'higher law' whether the subject is transcendence, religious revival, territorial expansion, or--and especially--slavery. When the book begins, in 1848, the debate over slavery had become so heated and so grounded in moral absolutes and righteous certainties that sectional conflict seemed inevitable. When the book closes in 1877, the nation's white majority are united in weariness and a desire to put the ecstatic energies of abolitionism, civil war, and a faltering civil rights movement behind them. 

The narrative is framed by two funerals, each of which brought the different sections of the nation together although in very different ways. The first, in 1848, was for John Quincy Adams, and the outpouring of respect for the divisive old foe of the Slave Power and its corrosive effect on the Union could not mask the lingering fear that his dire warnings could not be ignored even after he left the stage. The second, in 1877, was for for former US Senator Charles Sumner, one of the great Congressional abolitionists of the "ecstatic era" the country was coming out of. His eulogy, by former Confederate politician-turned US Senator from Mississippi Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, implicitly called for an end of the political and social divisions that forced whites in both the North and South to acknowledge that the African Americans the Civil War had helped to free were still around, making claims to citizenship and a place in the American polity and American society. But white America was tired, and wanted to believe that this work was done. The answer to that disconnect was burying an ongoing conflict in nostalgia-toned revisionism and acceding to a new racial hierarchy which would ultimately reframe the Civil War as an unfortunate tragedy and Reconstruction as an unmitigated disaster.

Wineapple is a Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, and the book is deeply informed by the literary culture of the era. This is, in many ways, a study of the culture--the zeitgeist--of a tumultuous era that came to a close when the white elite, and much of the electorate, decided that more than enough blood and treasure had been expended on "the negro question" and the values of compromise and conciliation were lauded as fundamental to rebuilding the newly unified nation. American Indians were also victims of this new, determined quest for "order" and peace, even at the expense of justice. The America of the final chapters of Wineapple's book, more than anything, wanted strife and conflict off the front pages of their newspapers. It was time to solidify the economy behind the gold standard and clean up the civil service. A continent was unified, cleansed of both slavery and indigenous people (reservations were just as invisible as the disenfranchised freeman of the South). Further triumphs in the advancement of democracy, further expansions of suffrage, would have to wait for future generations.