United States
ers of the nation and the states did not develop after
1789. It was apparent during the Confederation's
darkest years" (p. 22).
Much of the existing Madison scholarship, Banning
argues, rests on cynical (and, for the eighteenth century, wholly ahistorical) assumptions about public
men. Madison continued throughout his career, Banning insists, to define" 'republican' in early revolutionary terms" (p. 77). So fixed have scholars become on
the idea that what drove Madison's ideas on the proper
structuring of a government was his desire to "control
majority abuses" that they have missed Madison's
belief that this could be accomplished "without surrendering the revolutionary faith" (p. 77). Banning contends that he "genuinely understood the Constitution
as the people's law, which was to be revered and not
remolded by their servants" (p. 333). Madison is best
understood, then, throughout his career as a revolutionary republican and a kind of states' rights nationalist. Even so basic and familiar a document as The
Federalist, number 10, Banning argues, has been persistently misread in order to force Madison into the
mold of an antirepublican nationalist: "Even on its
face ... " he argues, "Federalist no. 10 is absolutely not
an unequivocal endorsement of the absolute superiority of larger republics" (p. 211).
Banning's argument is, on the whole, persuasive. He
documents Madison's strong consistency of mind and
belief over the whole course of his career as revolutionary and public man in very convincing fashion. This
book is at times somewhat self-indulgent and repetitive; Banning reaches the same conclusions several
times. And the text is, occasionally, a tract for our
times, lamenting how distrustful historians have become of the founders in particular, people for whom
honorable conduct was not an abstraction. (Madison,
Banning writes, was "to depths that we today are
barely able to imagine-an eighteenth-century gentleman of honor" [po 333].) Such minor irritations detract
little, however, from the significance of this remarkable reconstruction of the mind of a founder.
ROBERT A. BECKER
Louisiana State University
MAURICE G. BAXTER. Henry Clay and the American
System. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 1995.
Pp. 261. $34.95.
This is a largely narrative account of Henry Clay's
economic nationalism from his earliest days as a
Jeffersonian in the Kentucky House of Representatives to his last days as a Whig in the United States
Senate. The book does not limit its discussion to the
traditional banks, tariffs, and internal improvements of
Clay's "American System" but also discusses related
issues such as land policy, distribution, and federal
bankruptcy legislation. It takes, as Maurice G. Baxter
explains in his preface, "a biographical perspective
upon economic history" (p. v). The central focus is, of
course, on Clay, but other prominent figures in Bax-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1563
ter's story include Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy
Adams, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Andrew
Jackson, Nicholas Biddle, Martin Van Buren, Thomas
Hart Benton, and John Tyler. In his discussion of these
figures, Baxter seeks to "explore the character and
impact of Clay's program for the growth of the United
States in a political setting" (p. v).
The result is a very traditional political history of
congressional wranglings over the economic issues that
dominated public life during Clay's career. Baxter's
chief sources are Clay's published papers and the
debates in Congress, supplemented by the basic secondary works (especially biographies) on the period.
He is obviously an admirer of Clay, whom he sees as a
J effersonian in the mold of J ames Madison or Albert
Gallatin. This admiration (and the related endorsement of the economic nationalism Clay espoused) does
not blind Baxter to his faults, however. He is especially
critical of Clay's uncharacteristic failure to compromise during the bank war of the 1830s. Nevertheless,
the author maintains, Clay and his party "made a good
run" against the prevailing Democratic Party's ideas of
limited government in that decade (p. 209). Baxter
declares that September 13, 1841 (the end of the
disappointing special congressional session in Tyler's
first year) was a turning point in American political
history. It marked the end of "the Whigs' last and best
opportunity to set in motion the full range of the
American System" (p. 171). Economic nationalism met
with only limited success thereafter, and Baxter seems
to share Clay's disappointment that the Whigs rejected
both him and his American System to win control of
the national government in 1848. The book manages to
salvage some consolation, however, by looking ahead
to the Civil War, when wartime conditions allowed the
Republicans under Abraham Lincoln to resurrect and
enact much of Clay's program.
The limitations of this brand of traditional political
history are evident in Baxter's work. As in many older
studies, the people's representatives in Washington
strut at center stage and deliver their lines to each
other while their audience, the Americans they represent and legislate for, almost disappears from view.
There is little here about political organization or
political culture. Neither "Republicanism" nor any
other political ideology makes an appearance. Politicians are assumed to be spokesmen for interests,
sections, or parties. When Baxter seeks to understand
why the Whigs prevailed in 1840, he declares that "one
must guess" (p. 96). And though economic issues
dominate the narrative, none of the recent works on
the "Market Revolution" illuminate Baxter's story.
Moreover, Baxter's political focus consciously eschews
any discussion of "economic theory or econometric
analysis" (p. v). Most of the "impact" of economic
policy seems not to be on the country itself but on the
politics of later economic policy fights in Washington.
Unfortunately, even the politicians on whom Baxter
focuses remain wooden figures. He never even manages to breathe life into Clay, the focus of this largely
DECEMBER 1997
1564
Reviews of Books
biographical work. To his credit, he lays the politicians'
positions out clearly and succinctly. But without a
wider context for their actions and a deeper penetration into their lives, most readers will conclude that the
book falls short in its attempt to communicate a full
understanding of the political pursuit of economic
nationalism in Clay's time.
Yet within the relatively narrow confines of its
approach and its objectives, the work will be useful. It
is brief, clearly written, and deals with an important
topic that has surprisingly escaped book-length treatment until now. It will be a good place to send students
to obtain a basic grasp of the economic issues of the
second party system.
LAWRENCE FREDERICK KOHL
University of Alabama
RICHARD R. JOHN. Spreading the News: The American
Postal System from Franklin to Morse. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press. 1995. Pp. xiii, 369. $49.95.
This is an ambitious and intriguing institutional history
of the post office from the 1790s to the 1840s. Richard
R. John argues that American historians have never
fully appreciated how the growth and reach of the mail
delivery system, beginning with the Post Office Act of
1792, spurred a transforming communications revolution and the growth of a more powerful, wide-ranging,
and influential central authority affecting matters far
beyond the agency's delimited responsibility to move
the mail. The post office evolved into "a dynamic
institution that ... [exerted] a major influence on
American commerce, politics, and political thought"
(p. 25). Large and bureaucratically complex at a time
when few American institutions were, its administrative capacity directly and indirectly affected the rest of
society and made a massive contribution to the government's ability to "shape the pattern of everyday
life" (p. 191).
In both the economic and political sectors of American society, people relied on the post office system to
establish and facilitate the kind of communications
network that knit various regions together more
closely and made activities among them possible.
Postal operations provided the means for the development of a national market and a nationwide system of
political activity. The post office became an agent of
rapid and massive dissemination of information, both
commercial and political, and of outlooks and perspectives, largely political, from one end of the Union to
the other. Moving mail, money, and goods, political
publications, newspapers, pamphlets, and franked congressional speeches, it was "an indispensable agent for
change," while its total activities, linking the nation in
ways heretofore unknown, led to the "thickening [of]
the bonds of union" (p. 282).
The post office was also inevitably embroiled in
conflict over its role, reach, and influence. In the
moral-religious realm, the sabbatarian controversy
over whether mail could be delivered on Sunday
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
provoked intense confrontation in the 1830s. More
potently, given its role as the representation and
reality of a centralized state, the post office became the
target for the antistatist J acksonians, who, when they
took control in 1829, successfully turned it into a
partisan network, not a developmental one, successfully challenging its reach and importance and its
modernizing administrative outlook. In the controversy in the 1830s over abolitionist tracts moving
through the mails into the South, the J acksonians
made the post office responsive to the values system of
only one part of the country in a highly contentious
situation. After that, the agency was no longer what it
had been; its developmental, unifying qualities gave
way to a very different construction of its functions and
reach, one that led in less progressive or unifying
directions. A new era emerged with the coming of the
telegraph, an instrument that, along with successors
such as the telephone, would be part of a privatized,
more fragmented system of development. The rationalized public route to national development had
ended.
John makes his case with thorough research and a
strongly assertive style. His is a whiggish temperament,
both in its general and specific meaning. He is a clear
fan of the developmental impulses that were so well
embodied in the modernizing qualities of post office
activities, while, on the other side, he is impatient with,
even hostile to, the way the J acksonians frustrated that
impulse in search of their own, less edifying, purposes.
Part of the book reads, in fact, as if drawn from a range
of Whig Party pamphlets hectoring the disorganzing,
petty, partisan, proslavery Democrats.
There is, of course, more to say about the situation
than the views propounded by the antebellum Whigs.
John's research indicates the seriousness of the ideological divide over such a core issue as the power of the
central state, a seriousness and a divide that deserve
appreciation and more understanding of the antistatists than is given here. At the same time, given the
author's commitment to seeing institutions, rather
than social and economic conflict, as the shapers and
directors of the way in which societies evolve, one also
comes away from John's presentation with the sense of
an argument forced to carry a great deal of weight. He
perhaps exaggerates the power and meaning of the
post office in the developmental, institutional realm.
Alternative explanations of what drove national
growth remain plausible. Still, John has made a most
insightful foray. This is an important and very useful
book, adding a great deal to our understanding of the
nineteenth-century political nation.
J OEL H. SILBEY
Comell University
EDWARD L. AYERs, et al. All over the Map: Rethinking
American Regions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1996. Pp. viii, 136. Cloth $35.00, paper
$13.95.
DECEMBER
1997