2006 Bancroft Prize, Winner
2005 New York Times Notable Selection, Winner
With the publication of The Rise of American Democracy, add Sean Wilentz to the ranks of great American historians. His groundbreaking tour de force about the transformation of American political life from the earliest days of the Republic to the opening shots of the Civil War stands as a model of dramatic storytelling and riveting history. This is a book that is sure to change the way we look at a fundamental period in the nation's development.
This enormous book by Sean Wilentz has been in the works a long time, and the results are nothing less than monumental. An old-fashioned account of the rise of democracy during the first half of the 19th century, it is a tour de force of historical compilation and construction that more than justifies all the articles and monographs on antebellum politics written by historians over the past several decades. Wilentz, the Dayton-Stockton professor of history at Princeton, has drawn extensively on these secondary sources and on his own research. He has brought it all together into a clear and generally readable narrative.
— The New York Times Sunday Book Review
The Rise of American Democracy deserves to be read slowly. Mr. Wilentz takes on an enormous subject and articulates a grand theme, supported by a wealth of detailed scholarship. Inch by inch, he covers a broad expanse of ground, analyzing countless local struggles to widen the voting franchise, dislodge entrenched privilege and make good on the lofty promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
— The New York Times
Wilentz's account of the rise of American democracy is a triumph of scholarship and industry. Ranging with immense learning from the politics of New York State to the ethnic, class, and moral politics that shaped the emerging mass democracy, Wilentz has prepared a feast for all those drawn to this crucial but little-known era in the United States' past. In spite of its many virtues, the book unfortunately falls short of the kind of transformative work that would open this era to modern readers in the way that the Civil War and Revolutionary War periods have been opened. Eschewing some of the shibboleths of mid-twentieth-century historiography, Wilentz is driven by a sort of historical affirmative action to focus excessively on figures and movements of the period that share key values with the enlightened twenty-first-century academy (applications from antibank, antislavery, pro-labor feminists of color eagerly sought) while neglecting less enlightened figures who, alas, often had more influence at the time. The most striking failure of this kind has to do with Wilentz's near-total neglect of the rise of party organizations and political corruption and influence peddling. The net result is that Wilentz's picture, although finely detailed and masterfully drawn, bears less relationship than it should to the actual flow of American history. The future of the Democratic Party for more than a century would be a coalition of "master race" democracy Southerners and corrupt urban machines in the North, while the Republicans cemented a large popular base to Whig and Federalist economic ideas. Little in Wilentz's book prepares the reader for this anticlimactic result.
Is the U.S. a democracy, or a republic? As Wilentz (History/Princeton Univ.) shows in this sprawling account, Americans debated the issue from the post-revolutionary era to the Civil War. In classical terms, a republic is governed "through the ministrations of the most worthy, enlightened men," whereas a democracy "dangerously handed power to the impassioned, unenlightened masses." One-time revolutionary firebrand Noah Webster so mistrusted the mob that, he thundered, had he foreseen popular rule, he would never have fought for freedom; even Thomas Jefferson, that most impassioned of democrats, allowed that given a free choice, the public chose wrongly more often than not. Democracy as such was an oxymoron, Wilentz observes, with power limited to white propertied men in the early days of the republic; the extension of rights throughout the 19th century to a wider polity was a matter of fierce fighting, and eventually war. The battle over just who was to be in charge began almost as soon as national freedom was achieved, an early test, Wilentz writes, being the Whisky Rebellion of 1794, fought by country people against an excise tax on distilled liquor imposed by urbanite arch-republican Alexander Hamilton. As the contest expanded, Wilentz notes, some of the differences between country and city people gave way to other divisions, and by the time Andrew Jackson ran for office in 1824, the gulf between North and South was beginning to widen (as, for a time, was that between those who believed in a cash economy and those who argued for the merits of credit). Abraham Lincoln, though deeply committed to democratic values, would insist on the supremacy of federal over states' rights, while thenominally democratic leaders of the South meant to exalt "the supreme political power of local elites." Wilentz shows that none of these battles was new when Lincoln took office; in some respects, they are still being fought today. Wilentz's book, though very long, wastes no words. A well-crafted, highly readable political history.
