Daniel Walker Howe

What Hath God Wrought: The
Transformation of America, 1815-1343
Oxford University Press, 2007; 904 pages.

Daniel Walker Howe's Pulitzer Prize-winning
work spans a period that is book-ended by
events that often gain more attention—the
American Revolution and the Civil War.
However, Howe shows in a comprehensive, yet
engaging, style that the period from 1815 to
1848 was of crucial significance to the
development of the country. Indeed, the
material he covers includes well-known figures
such as Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun,
Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster; and famous
events like Indian removal and the Trail of
Tears, the battle over a national bank, the rise
of Mormonism, the gold rush, and
the women's rights convention in Seneca Falls,
to name just a few.

When summing up, Howe writes that
his book “tells a story; it does not argue a
thesis” (p. 849). However, his story is not
without shape and emphasis. He has heroes,
like John Quincy Adams, who was committed
to “national unity, the restriction of slavery,
and economic modernization” (p. 813), and
villains, like Andrew Jackson, who supported
the interests of slave owners and exacerbated
division during his years in the White House.

Howe's most powerful point, however,
is not about any singular individual, but about
the revolution in communication that took
place during this 33-year period. He writes:
“This revolution, with its attendant political
and economic consequences, would be the
driving force in the history of the era” (p. 5). It
was the telegraph, newspapers, and railroads,
he says, that made it possible to create a
market economy, fostered religious revivalism
and the organization of new social movements,
and allowed for the rise of mass political par-
ties that offered rival programs from which the
electorate could choose. And while strife and
struggle would ensue, Howe makes clear that
these developments from the years between
1815 and 1848 established the foundation upon
which modern America is based.

Thovrin Tritter,
University of London

BOOKS IN BRIEF

Lewis E. Lehrman
Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point
Stackpole Books, 2008; 412 pages.

At the very beginning of Abraham Lincoln's
reentry into political activism, he delivered a
speech in Peoria, lllinois, on October 16, 1854,
decrying the passage of Stephen A. Douglas's
Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had opened the
door to the expansion of slavery into the
western territories. As Lewis Lehrman (who is
a trustee of the New-York Historical Society
and co-founder of the Gilder Lehrman
Institute) painstakingly points out in Lincoln at
Peoria (which is, amazingly, the first serious
study of the Peoria speech), “it forms the
foundation of his politics and principles, in the
1850s and in his presidency.”

Indeed, it does, because the Peoria
speech teems with the ideas that will become
the stars Lincoln navigates by. Lincoln replied
to Douglas with a vivid denunciation of the
deceitfulness of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and
with an eloquent appeal to the incompatibility
of slavery with the founding principles of
the American republic: “It is wrong; wrong in
its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and
Nebraska and wrong in its prospective
principle, allowing it to spread to every other
part of the wide world.” Tolerating slavery has
“soiled ... our republican robe,” Lincoln said.
“Let us repurify it” so that “the succeeding
millions of free happy people, the world over,
shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest
generations.”

It is characteristic of Lehrman’s
thoroughness that he not only sets the context
and parses the arguments of the Peoria
speech, but goes on to trace its connections
into Lincoln’s presidential years, and then
deals with the reputation of the Peoria speech
in the hands of historians. As we see from
Lehrman’s final chapter, too many of those
historians, including J.G. Randall, Richard
Hofstadter, and Robert Johannssen, have
scanted either the substance or the intentions
of the Peoria speech. It is high time that
Lincoln’s speech at Peoria be seen for what it
reallyis, the head of a great comet for which all
that comes after is the tail.

Allen C. Guelzo,
Gettysburg College

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