Volume 56, Number 9 · May 28, 2009
Goodbye to the 'Age of Jackson'?
By Daniel Howe
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
by Jon Meacham
Random House, 483 pp., $30.00
Andrew Jackson
by Robert V. Remini
Palgrave Macmillan, 204 pp., $21.95
Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson
by David S. Reynolds
Harper, 466 pp., $29.95
Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829–1877
by Walter A. McDougall
HarperPerennial, 787 pp., $19.99 (paper)
During the years between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War of 1846, the United States underwent a great transformation. In 1815, at the close of the second war with Britain, the US was what we would call a 'developing' country. Most people worked in agriculture, often on semisubsistence family farms, eating food they grew, their lives governed by the weather and the hours of daylight. It was the slowness and uncertainty of transportation and communications that kept their lives so primitive. Only people who lived near navigable water could readily market crops; others relied heavily on barter with their neighbors and the local storekeeper. Only luxury goods could bear the cost of long-distance transportation on land, and information from the wider world was among the most precious of luxuries.
Review, 3958 words
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