The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846.

Broad interpretations of a period, such as Charles Sellers has written, are comparatively rare, and it is a pleasure to read one as lively, provocative and conceptually rich as this. The Market Revolution skillfully works an analysis of early 19th-century economic, social and cultural change into a more traditional account of the origins and evolution of Jacksonian politics. For years scholars have been urged to "put the politics back into social history." Sellers has done the reverse. The result is a powerful book, which all American historians will want to read.

The underlying narrative explains the triumph and rapid fragmentation of republicanism after 1815, the eruption of popular politics, the discontent spread by the economic crisis of 1819 and the subsequent emergence of a democratic insurgency focused on the candidature of Andrew Jackson. It traces familiar landmarks of Jackson's presidency, the Nullification crisis and the Bank War, and the egalitarian conduct of political campaigning as the second party system crystallized. But Sellers shows that framing these issues, and giving them symbolic as well as practical force, was a broader struggle over the character of American economy and society. The expansion of commercial capitalism challenged and began to transform the vision of a rural republic. Jacksonian democracy was in large measure an attempt to confront this, a counter-attack of the "land" against the rationale of the "market." Sellers identifies an alliance of rural and poorer urban people, attached to a culture of use-values and religious "antinomianism," who sought to resist commercial-capitalist, "arminian," entrepreneurial elites. The resistance ultimately failed but in doing so helped forge a new politics and a new culture.

Sellers rejects "consensus" interpretations of Jacksonian politics which emphasize ethnocultural sources of party support, or regard debates over policy as pragmatic differences within an agreed set of rules. The downfall of Clay's "American System," the Bank War and the pursuit of hard-money policies in the 1830s were, he argues, popularly-sanctioned efforts to turn back the expansionist tide of market capitalism. In the 1830s, more than at any other time in American history, presidential politics reflected class conflict. Democracy and capitalism were not inherently compatible; only as a consequence of the changes Jacksonianism provoked did there emerge a "middle-class mythology of democratic capitalism...that has ever since muffled the contradiction between capitalism and democracy in a mythology of consensual and democratic enterprise" (p. 363).

In part, the logic of the two-party system that arose in the 1830s helped neutralize popular insurgency and made democracy safe for capitalism by channeling sections of the democratic majority into other parties. At the same time a series of cultural struggles weakened popular resistance and brought a divided people more under the sway of a new middle-class hegemony. Sellers emphasizes the role of "antinomian" religious revivalism and its transmutation towards "Moderate-Light" bourgeois evangelicalism, the radicalizing impact of Charles Finney and the accommodation of much popular religion to the imperatives of self-help and self-discipline, which both assisted and helped legitimize the social and psychic demands of market culture. Above all, by the 1840s the cultural and political processes of the market revolution forced the issue of slavery permanently into contention, and helped sow the final seeds of the civil war to come.

Into this account are woven a succession of brief analyses of special topics, which sum up and apply the findings of recent specialist research. A discussion of the role of lawyers ("the shock troops of capitalism" [p. 47]), on the legal revolution which permitted economic expansion in many states and on the rise of the Supreme Court under John Marshall, is particularly good. Sellers pulls no punches on the expropriation of Native Americans or exploitation of slaves and (increasingly) workers. But he also illuminates the growing importance of literacy, education and print culture and the emergence of a romanticism which illustrated the "schizophrenia of capitalist transformation," as "[a] people competing fiercely to level a wilderness luxuriated in a literature of nature and love" (p. 372). There are also pithy biographical sketches of the more prominent individuals who inhabited this cultural and political landscape; some characters, like John C. Calhoun and his perpetually wounded ambition, keep turning up like bad pennies. Sellers evidently has sympathies and dislikes, but conveys the drama of circumstance and motivation without creating either heroes or devils. Altogether, he succeeds in the difficult task of showing familiar material in a new light.

Sellers' synthesis of the Jacksonian period is inevitably selective; though he covers much ground, he tends to emphasize federal rather than state politics, Democrat rather than Whig, the North rather than the South or West. The political resistance to capitalism epitomized by Jackson's attacks on financial privilege was defeated or circumvented by the broader influence of middle-class cultural and economic power, though we are not given answers to all the questions we might ask about this. Was resistance to capitalism in the 1830s as well organized or articulated at state level as Sellers argues it was in presidential politics? Or were the 26 state legislatures, in which he suggests Jackson's assault on paper money and credit was neutralized (p. 357), guided by expediency and corruption rather than by principles?

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in The Age of Jackson (1945), portrayed a democracy which popular pressure had radicalized and from which business elites had in good measure withdrawn. Political activity was at the heart of American culture, and the increasing participation of (white, male) voters signified its importance. Sellers' book calls attention to a disjuncture between popular feeling and the inability of politics to translate it into action, and so leaves us with more of a puzzle. Why did voting grow so rapidly at a time when parties were apparently unable to deliver what people wanted? In the late 20th century, we often use this disjuncture to explain the decline of the party system, but Sellers' implication that it was there from the system's beginning should encourage us to think hard about the American experience of capitalism and democracy.