Dead Sea Scrolls
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 53, No. 1 – Fall 2010
Managing Editor: Malcolm B. Yarnell III
By Daniel Walker Howe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 904 pages. Hardcover, $35.00.
“Like the people of 1848, we look with both awe and uncertainty at what God hath wrought in the United States of America” (855). So distinguished political and religious historian Daniel Walker Howe concludes his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, What Hath God Wrought. Howe takes his title from the first message sent over Morse’s telegraph. Based on Numbers 23:23, he quite purposefully follows Morse’s (accidental?) omission of the closing punctuation. Howe recognizes the phenomenal—even providential—multifaceted development and growth of America in the early decades of the 1800s, yet he does not hide the dark side of this era that leads to the lowest point in our country’s history.
Wonderfully readable and accessible to a wide audience, Howe offers a true general history, covering political, economic, military, social, and religious themes. He tries to avoid a strong thesis as might be found in a history such as America’s God, and for the most part succeeds. However, underlying this book is a very clear opinion: most of the government’s actions—federal and state—in this period, as well as many by famous entrepreneurs, were driven by a desire to maintain white male superiority. While this approach may seem to downplay the heroic actions of antislavery Americans, the opposite is true. Racism so pervaded the American consciousness (against Africans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and many immigrants) that it took monumental events and monumental Americans to bring the incongruity between racism and the American dream, not to mention American Protestantism, to light and resolution.
Howe writes about much more than racial issues—importantly, he concludes his history of the era by describing the events that would eventually lead to women’s suffrage—but that tension helps drive his narrative through many historical themes. He uses it to help identify scoundrels (fans of Andrew Jackson and James Polk beware) and exemplars (Winfield Scott and a young Abraham Lincoln come to mind). But readers will appreciate his overall impartial treatment of social, religious, and philosophical developments.
Indeed, Howe’s ability to weave complex yet divergent narratives together at both national and personal levels is a highpoint of the book. For students, however, the most valuable contribution is Howe’s bibliographic essay in which he summarizes his opinion of the best secondary literature available on each of the subjects covered in the book. Of course, no one can completely master the primary and secondary literature of an era. For example, Howe’s description of Alexander Campbell as “tolerant” indicates that he is not completely familiar with that polemicist’s works, and his failure to connect the dots between Phoebe Palmer, the Five Points Mission, Charles Finney, and Oberlin College are seeds of a wider harvest he may have missed. Most disappointing is his failure to engage the theses of Tim Smith’s Revivalism and Social Reform and Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.
What Hath God Wrought is a necessary read for students of American history, religious or otherwise, offering a valuable perspective to augment those of eminent religious historians such as Nathan Hatch, Brooks Holifield, and Mark Noll.
