What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe

Indian Removal remains one of the most shameful aspects of our nation’s history, and Andrew Jackson was one of its most effective champions. Howe is absolutely relentless in his campaign against Jackson’s apologists, and in many ways he makes a convincing argument.

In the first place it was about the extension of white supremacy across the North American continent.” But in its origins, Jacksonian Democracy…was not primarily about any of these, though it came to intersect with all of them in due course. “…historians have variously pointed to free enterprise, manhood suffrage, the labor movement, and resistance to the market economy. First and foremost, Howe argues that Jackson’s legacy is marked by the insidious morally debilitating advancement of white male supremacy. His characterization of our seventh president throws all notions of bland academic sterility to the winds, instead engaging in fierce and almost-personal skirmishes against Jackson.

The thematic path he treads most commonly is that of the communications and transportation revolution, although he winds enthusiastically down every manner of side trail and parallel road.ĭaniel Walker Howe detests Andrew Jackson. Howe maintains this general dichotomy as he wanders down thirty-odd years of national history. In the other corner sat the Whig’s ideology of national improvement through an active government and strong internal commercial expansion. In one corner sat the Democrat ideals of Andrew Jackson, which lay out a path of white male individualism, territorial and racial conquest, and limited federal government. Howe approaches this task by looking at the nation’s growth through the eyes of the two ideological competitors fighting for its future. In an academic climate of sometimes numbing specialization, What Hath God Wrought is boldly and refreshingly big. Howe is fearless in shouldering the daunting task to chart the the United States’ tumultuous adolescence. Of course, the tome is monumental in every sense of the word, in its subject matter, scope, weight, and approach. That’s my five-word summary of Daniel Walker Howe’s Pulitzer-Prize winning, 900-page, career-defining work What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.

What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe