Justice Marshall, will probably prove most instructive to the
reader. The author has made his narrative much clearer and the factors
which entered into the political struggles of the time more intelligible
by resort to many black-and-white maps; for example, those which show
the popular attitude toward the Constitution in 1787-89 and the
alignment of parties in the contest of 1800.

From 1829 to 1865 was the stormy period of our national history--a
period in which the nationality planned by the "Fathers" was being
forged from the discordant elements of East, South, and West,--from the
economic interests of cotton and tobacco planters; of the owners of the
industrial plants of the Middle States and the East; and of the
necessities of the isolated West striving always for markets. What made
the process so doubtful and so long drawn out was the unfortunate fact
that the great industrial and agricultural interests coincided so
exactly with the older social and political antagonisms. The leadership
of the times was, therefore, sectional in a very vital way; so much was
this the case that the most popular and captivating of all the public
men of the time, Henry Clay, was defeated again and again for the
Presidency because no common understanding between New England and the
South, or between New England and the West, could be found.

Twice during the period a permanent _modus vivendi_ seemed to have been
agreed upon, in the Jacksonian Democracy of 1828, and in the Pierce
organization of 1852, combinations of South and West which rested on the
big plantation system with slavery underlying, and on the small farmer
vote of the West charged always with the potential revolt which
democracy connotes. While these subjects receive the careful attention
of the author, the "way out," and the national expansion of the Polk
Administration, are none the less carefully studied. But aside from the
sharp and challenging problems of the time, an earnest effort has been
made to describe the cultural life of the people, the pastimes, the
religious revivals, the literary and artistic output of the exuberant
America of 1830 to 1860. The Civil War and its attendant ills are
compressed into relatively small space, though here, too, the effort is
made to include all that is vital.

In like manner Professor Paxson gives much space to the "interests"
which came to dominate the country soon after the cessation of
hostilities in 1865. The business and