What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848
by Daniel Walker Howe
Summary
Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought follows the United States through the three decades after the War of 1812, a period Howe deliberately declines to call the Age of Jackson, arguing that new communication technologies, alongside religious revival and a genuine political fight over the country's future, mattered as much as any single president. Howe treats the era's expanding transportation and communication networks, canals, railroads and finally Samuel Morse's telegraph, as forces that bound a physically expanding country together even as they widened new divisions within it.
Howe gives extended attention to the political battle between Andrew Jackson's Democrats and the Whig Party, and he treats the Whigs, not Jackson, as the era's more forward looking force, connecting them to movements for antislavery, women's rights and public education that Jackson's own party resisted, a reading that pushes back against decades of historical writing more sympathetic to Jackson. He devotes real space to the Second Great Awakening, the religious revival that Howe treats as a genuine engine of reform rather than background noise, and the book closes with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention in the United States, as a fitting symbolic endpoint for the transformation he traces.
Howe writes as a volume of the Oxford History of the United States, comprehensive and built for a general reader across more than nine hundred pages, and reading the book means following political, religious and technological change together rather than any one of them in isolation. It suits a reader who wants the buildup to the Civil War understood through the full range of forces that reshaped ordinary American life in the decades before it.
Historical Context & Significance
Howe won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for History, ahead of finalists Robert Dallek's Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power and David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. The book also won the New York Historical Society Book Prize and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic's best book award.
Historian Richard Carwardine said it lays powerful claim to being the best work ever written on this period of the American past, and Publishers Weekly named it one of the decade's most outstanding syntheses of American history, though historian Manisha Sinha faulted it for understating how the Black church differed from predominantly white mainline Protestantism. Howe, Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus at Oxford and Professor of History Emeritus at UCLA, wrote the book as volume five of the Oxford History of the United States, taking up the story where Gordon S. Wood's Empire of Liberty leaves off.