Telegram From a Parallel Universe

For 10 years I immersed myself in writing a big book about the United States between 1815 and 1848. Now that it's out I enjoy the chance to look at America today in the light of what I learned about an earlier period. Many of the contrasts between that time and our own are obvious enough: the slowness of travel then, the practice of slavery, the unashamed discrimination based on sex and race, the far lower standard of living, the prevalence of disease, discomfort and dirt. More surprising, perhaps, are the many close parallels between the challenges faced in that America and our own.

The antebellum United States witnessed a communications revolution at least as dramatic as ours. In 1844 Samuel F.B. Morse demonstrated his new electric telegraph by transmitting along a wire for 40 miles a quotation from the Book of Numbers: "What hath God wrought." For thousands of years messages had been limited by the speed messengers could travel and the distance eyes could see signals like flags and smoke. Now, instant long-distance communication has become a practical reality. The wide-ranging consequences of the telegraph in the 19th century bear comparison with those of the Internet in the 21st, facilitating commercial transactions and investment decisions, fostering globalization. The telegraph, along with improvements in printing, paper-making and transportation, stimulated mass-market newspapers and the popular politics that fed upon their partisan reporting. The enhanced media empowered reform movements—including antislavery and women's rights—by spreading their demonstrations and manifestoes before wide audiences. The tsar of Russia worried about the democratic implications of the telegraph for his country, just as the rulers of China today worry about the democratic implications of the Internet.

The years between 1815 and 1848 witnessed a vast expansion of international commerce. Then as now the United States participated in the global economy with massive agricultural exports. Improved communications enabled American farmers and planters to get news of distant prices and credit. The invention of steamboats and railroads, along with the expansion of canals like the Erie, helped them ship their produce to distant markets. Cotton was "king," people said, and Southern cotton provided the key raw material for the Industrial Revolution taking place in Great Britain and New England. The antebellum United States, an importer of capital and manufactured goods, paid its way in world trade partly with wheat grown on family farms, but primarily with products of enslaved labor like cotton and tobacco.

The two major American political parties of that time were the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs (the latter precursors of the present Republican Party, founded in 1854). Like today's parties, they balanced each other in strength just about evenly, and polarized sharply over policy. Often they debated modern-sounding issues such as banking, tariffs, education and highway-building. To win elections, each concentrated more on mobilizing its own supporters than on persuading moderates.

The events of the war with Mexico have an eerie familiarity for someone of our time. President James K. Polk provoked war with a reluctant adversary by sending the U.S. Army to invade a disputed area between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. When the exasperated Mexicans finally resisted by force of arms, he declared that they had "shed American blood upon American soil," and called upon Congress to support the troops (then as now a powerful appeal). Congress complied. Although the Mexican Army proved weak, the civilian population resisted U.S. occupation with partisan tactics and occasional uprisings. The opposition party (the Whigs) slowly became bolder in denouncing the president's taking the country into war when the conflict dragged on longer than the administration had foreseen. Abraham Lincoln, a young Whig congressman from Illinois, demanded to know if the spot where American blood was shed had not been an area where the local population fled from U.S. troops, and if the "soil" had not been territory defined as Mexican by earlier treaties. The war ended only when a disobedient diplomat signed a treaty agreeing to less than President Polk demanded.

Then as now, Americans were a religious people. Many voted in accord with their religious convictions—the Roman Catholics overwhelmingly Democratic, evangelical Protestants usually Whig. Religious toleration, although a legal principle, was not fully practiced. Animosity between Catholics and Protestants repeatedly led to mob violence. Jews encountered comparatively little hostility in the young republic, largely because they were too few to make anyone feel threatened. Mormons, however, experienced active persecution; the governor of Missouri summoned the state militia to seek their "extermination." After the lynching of their founding prophet, Joseph Smith, the Mormons escaped to Utah, not yet part of the United States.

Organized religion occupied an even more influential place in American culture then than it does now. Communities created public schools as much to teach literacy for Bible reading as to create an informed citizenry. Some of the colleges and universities that seem today bastions of secularism were sectarian institutions then: Presbyterian Princeton, Congregationalist Yale and Unitarian Harvard, to mention three conspicuous examples.

Yale's great professor of chemistry from 1802 to 1853, Benjamin Silliman, affirmed that science reveals "the thoughts of God." Today the proposition that the universe displays a creator's intelligent design has provoked bitter debate in the United States. Then, no one in America denied intelligent design. Even the leading critics of organized religion, the deists like Tom Paine and Robert Owen, insisted that the physical universe displayed evidence of providential design. Indeed, they contrasted the firm evidence of God's existence that nature supplied with what they considered the weak evidence of the Bible's "fables."

One of the most striking differences between our time and the early 19th century is that evangelical Christians then were generally liberal in both theology and politics. Evangelicals were the first Americans to set up the voluntary associations we consider indispensable to civil society. They organized nationwide movements not only to promote overseas missions and the distribution of Bibles, but also humanitarian causes like prison reform, insane asylums, shelters for abused women, even opposition to slavery.

Americans faced serious challenges in the years between 1815 and 1848. In 1815 the United States was what we would call a "third world" country. Most people lived on isolated farmsteads and grew some of their own food. Wives made their families' clothes. What kept lives so primitive was the absence of adequate transportation and communication. But Americans rose to the challenge with innovations. As transportation and communication improved, so did the quality of life. Farm families could send their produce to market and use the money to buy products from around the world. By 1848 the American people enjoyed a powerful and prosperous national economy. Social problems like slavery and sex discrimination proved harder to resolve than economic ones. Expulsion of Native Americans (called "Indian Removal") and aggressive war against Mexico compounded the country's shame. Though reformers and some religious leaders agitated to correct injustices, it would take a civil war to end slavery.

We ourselves inhabit another time of rapid change. As we head off into an unknown future of our own, we can not only draw lessons from the failures of the past, but inspiration from our predecessors' courage, ambition, moral principle and willingness to innovate.