Daniel Walker Howe > Quotes

“Jackson possessed an appeal not based on issues; it derived from his image as a victor in battle, a frontiersman who had made it big, a man of decision who forged his own rules. Anyone with a classical education knew to regard such men as potential demagogues and tyrants; the word for the danger was “caesarism.” Jefferson delivered a straightforward opinion of Jackson’s presidential aspirations: “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place.”7 In fact, no one liked Jackson for president except the voting public. Many of the latter, however, found in him a celebrity hero. The fact that only men could vote probably helped Jackson. Many”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“History works on a long time scale, and at any given moment we can perceive its directions but imperfectly.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“Most long-distance travel and commerce went by water, which explains why most cities were seaports—Cincinnati on the Ohio River and St. Louis on the Mississippi being notable exceptions. To transport a ton of goods by wagon to a port city from thirty miles inland typically cost nine dollars in 1815; for the same price the goods could be shipped three thousand miles across the ocean.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“the Mexican Congress passed a law suspending immigration from the United States in April 1830. Austin got an exemption from it for his own recruits, and others too found it easy to slip through the border. Mexico suffered the problem of illegal immigration from the United States until Austin’s lobbying in Mexico City helped secure repeal of the ban in November 1833.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“White supremacy remained central to Jacksonian Democracy throughout the second party system, no less pervasively than economic development was to Whiggery. Virtually every aspect of the Democratic political outlook supported white supremacy and slavery in particular one way or another: Indian Removal, local autonomy and state sovereignty, respect for property rights, distrust of government economic intervention, criticism of early industrial capitalism, and (as will become evident) Texas annexation.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“Tell me not in mournful numbers, “Life is but an empty dream, For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem.” Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; “Dust thou art, to dust returnest,” Was not spoken of the soul.... Lives of great men all remind us, We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints in the sands of time.... Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” noted Henry David Thoreau, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”7”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“Two legal maxims often helped guide their opinions: salus populi suprema lex est (“the welfare of the people is the supreme law”) and sic utere tuo (“so use your right that you injure not the rights of others”).”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“He introduced petitions at the start of each session before the rules had been officially adopted, then would challenge the continuation of the gag and force a vote on it. He would inquire of the Speaker whether a certain petition was permissible and then read from it. He would ask if a petition could be referred to a committee instructed to explain why it could not be granted. People sent him petitions not only from his constituency but from all over the country, cleverly worded so as not quite to fall under the ban. Many of the petitions now asked for the repeal of the gag rule. It was he, of course, who named it “the gag.” In his dogged battle, Old Man Eloquent earned the respect of his bitterest foes. The Virginia state-righter Henry Wise called him “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.”79”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“After the Sixteenth Congress convened in December 1819, the debate over Missouri resumed. The speeches seemed interminable as well as intemperate. When Felix Walker of North Carolina was urged to sit down, he replied that he had to give his speech for the folks back home, “for Buncombe County.” Ever since, Americans have called a certain kind of inflated political oratory “buncombe”—or “bunk” for short.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“The writings of the Transcendentalists affirm some of the best qualities characteristic of American civilization: self-reliance, a willingness to question authority, a quest for spiritual nourishment. Their writings, even today, urge us to independent reflection in the face of fads, conformity, blind partisanship, and mindless consumerism.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“Officially, 5 percent of southern slaves worked in industrial occupations. But the statistic understates the reality. It does not include artisans who worked on plantations making articles for use on that plantation, and thus ignores countless enslaved blacksmiths, masons, cabinetmakers, cordwainers, saddle-makers, plow-wrights, and other craftsmen.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“While the size of the armies was small, their casualty rates were high. Indeed, the war against Mexico has been accurately described as the deadliest that the United States has ever fought:”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“He would not risk them in the open field against professional soldiers.14”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“Besides asserting individual rights and equality, Jefferson’s republican ideology celebrated popular virtue and free enterprise, in religion and politics as well as in economic undertakings; it expressed deep suspicion of pretensions to power and privilege.42”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“The Book of Mormon should rank among the great achievements of American literature, but it has never been accorded the status it deserves, since Mormons deny Joseph Smith’s authorship, and non-Mormons, dismissing the work as a fraud, have been more likely to ridicule than read it.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“All the rival presidential candidates called themselves Republicans, and each claimed to be the logical successor to the Jeffersonian heritage. Ironically, what the campaign produced was the breakup of the party and the traditions everyone honored. One-party government proved an evanescent phase in American history.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“In the early American republic, the most significant challenge to the traditional assumption that the worth of human beings depended on their race, class, and gender came from the scriptural teachings that all are equal in the sight of God and all are one in Christ.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“The variations and implications of Christian zeal will recur throughout our story.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“Ohio had achieved statehood in 1803, but it continued to grow dramatically, doubling in population from a quarter of a million to half a million in the decade following 1810. By 1820, it had actually become the fourth most populous state, exceeded only by New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Indiana and Illinois, admitted into the Union as states in 1816 and 1818, had respectively 147,000 and 55,000 people in the census of 1820.33 The southern parts of the three states were settled faster, because the Ohio River provided both a convenient highway for travelers and the promise of access to market. Most early settlers in this area came from the Upland South, the same Piedmont regions that supplied so many migrants to the Southwest. Often of Scots-Irish descent, they got nicknamed “Butternuts” from the color of their homespun clothing. The name “Hoosiers,” before its application to the people of Indiana, seems to have been a derogatory term for the dwellers in the southern backcountry.34 Among the early Hoosiers was Thomas Lincoln, who took his family, including seven-year-old Abraham, from Kentucky into Indiana in 1816. (Abraham Lincoln’s future antagonist Jefferson Davis, also born in Kentucky, traveled with his father, Samuel, down the Mississippi River in 1810, following another branch of the Great Migration.) Some of these settlers crossed the Ohio River because they resented having to compete with slave labor or disapproved of the institution on moral grounds; Thomas Lincoln shared both these antislavery attitudes. Other Butternuts, however, hoped to introduce slavery into their new home. In Indiana Territory, Governor William Henry Harrison, a Virginian, had led futile efforts to suspend the Northwest Ordinance prohibition against slavery. In Illinois, some slaveowners smuggled their bondsmen in under the guise of indentured servants, and as late as 1824 an effort to legalize slavery by changing the state constitution was only defeated by a vote of 6,600 to 5,000.35”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“Ironically, the Democrats’ great insistence on the natural equality of all white men prompted them to make a more glaring exception of non-whites. Taking seriously the motto “all men are created equal,” Democrats called into question the very humanity of nonwhites in order to keep them unequal.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“It is easy to put down Frances Trollope as a Tory embittered by her American business failure. But her observations on American manners, confirmed by many other observers foreign and domestic, actually provide a sharply drawn picture of daily life in the young republic. Most observers at the time agreed with her in finding Americans obsessively preoccupied with earning a living and relatively uninterested in leisure activities. Not only Tories but reformers like Martineau and Charles Dickens angered their hosts by complaining of the overwhelmingly commercial tone of American life, the worship of the 'almighty dollar.' Americans pursued success so avidly they seldom paused to smell the flowers. A kind of raw egotism, unsoftened by sociability, expressed itself in boastful men, demanding women, and loud children. The amiable arts of conversation and cooking were not well cultivated, foreigners complained; Tocqueville found American cuisine 'the infancy of the art' and declared one New York dinner he attended 'complete barbarism.' Despite their relatively broad distribution of prosperity, Americans seemed strangely restless; visitors interpreted the popularity of the rocking chair as one symptom of this restlessness. Another symptom, even more emphatically deplored, was the habit, widespread among males, of chewing tobacco and spitting on the floor. Women found their long dresses caught the spittle, which encouraged them to avoid male company at social events. Chewing tobacco thus reinforced the tendency toward social segregation of the sexes, with each gender talking among themselves about their occupations, the men, business and politics; the women, homemaking and children.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 - 1848

“Secular authorities did not necessarily mind saving the taxpayers money by letting religious groups deal with educational needs.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.” Qualifications and experience were just excuses invoked to justify the perpetuation of privilege.18”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“Despite the harshness of the partisan press, no one attempted to revive the Sedition Act of 1798.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“Jackson exercised presidential authority in new ways, removing competent officeholders and vetoing more bills than all his predecessors put together.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“The president believed in the sovereignty of the American people and in himself as the embodiment of that sovereignty.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“But in its origins, Jacksonian Democracy (which contemporaries understood as a synonym for Jackson’s Democratic Party) was not primarily about any of these, though it came to intersect with all of them in due course. In the first place it was about the extension of white supremacy across the North American continent.”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“The one example of successful state-sponsored higher education in the country also illustrated the unacceptability of state-sponsored secularism.38”
― Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848