The Era of Good Feelings
by George Dangerfield
Summary
George Dangerfield examines the years from the War of 1812 through Andrew Jackson's 1829 inauguration, a period contemporaries nicknamed the Era of Good Feelings for its apparent absence of party conflict under President James Monroe. Dangerfield argues that the label was a surface illusion: beneath the calm ran genuine and hardening disputes over slavery's expansion, the power of the national bank, protective tariffs that pitted region against region, and the pace and direction of westward settlement, all of which the one party consensus of the period had merely postponed rather than resolved. He frames the era as a hinge point, the moment American political thought shifted away from the founding conviction that government governs best by governing least, toward a newer conviction that government would sometimes need to intervene actively on behalf of the weak and the exploited.
Dangerfield, an English born journalist who had already made his name with a history of the collapse of British Liberalism before the First World War, brings the same eye for underlying tension beneath apparent calm to American politics a century earlier. He treats the collapse of the Federalist Party as the real hinge of the era, an event that left Monroe presiding without organized opposition and made disagreement look, on the surface, like it had simply vanished from national politics, when in fact it had only lost its party structure and gone looking for a new one. The book reads with real narrative energy for a study of a period usually remembered, if at all, as uneventful, and it suits a reader who wants to see how a supposedly placid decade was actually loaded with the exact disputes, over slavery, money, and expansion, that would define the following generation of American politics.
Historical Context & Significance
The Era of Good Feelings won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for History for its 1952 publication, along with the 1953 Bancroft Prize; no finalists were named, since the category did not publish them before 1980. Dangerfield had established himself as a historian more than fifteen years earlier with The Strange Death of Liberal England, an account of the British Liberal Party's collapse between 1906 and 1914 that was initially overlooked by academics but gained lasting recognition for its sharp analysis and vivid style.
The Era of Good Feelings brought that same combination of narrative energy and argument to American political history, and it remains a standard account of a period historians had previously tended to treat as a quiet interval between the more dramatic eras on either side of it.