What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe

Three perspectives on the legal aspects are Tim Garrison, The Legal Ideology of Removal (2002); Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land (2005); and Lindsay Robertson, Conquest by Law (2005). For Jackson’s program of Indian Removal and its effects, see Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail (1993); Michael Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975); and Grant Foreman’s classic, Indian Removal (1932). A useful textbook with edited documents is Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, Cherokee Removal , 2nd ed. (2005). Annie Abel, History of Events Resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi River (1908) still has valuable information. On the shaping of federal Indian policy, see Ronald Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (1975) and Bernard Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (1973). Jackson’s policies are defended in Francis Paul Prucha, SJ, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (1984), I, 179–242; and Robert Remini, The Legacy of Andrew Jackson (1988), 45–82; their arguments are rebutted in Donald Cole, The Presidency of Andrew Jackson (1993), 109–19. In his final statement Remini concedes much to Jackson’s critics but reminds the reader that blame for the treatment of the Indians was widely shared: Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (2001). For white opposition to Removal, see John Andrew, From Revivals to Removal (1992); John G. West, The Politics of Revelation and Reason (1996); and Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (2005).
    On suffrage and election procedures, see Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage, 1760–1860 (1960); James S. Chase, Emergence of the Presidential Nominating Convention (1973); Ronald Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture (1983); and Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote (2000). Politics was strongly influenced by the mechanisms of voting and getting out the vote; see Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (2000) and Richard Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (2004).
    Most of the historical writing on the “Bank War” between Jackson and Biddle dates from the period 1945 to 1975. Besides Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson cited above, see Robert Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War (1967); Jean Alexander Wilburn, Biddle’s Bank: The Crucial Years (1967); Thomas Govan, Nicholas Biddle (1959); Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (1957); Walter Buckingham Smith, Economic Aspects of the Second Bank of the United States (1953); and Fritz Redlich, The Molding of American Banking (1947). More recent are two books by Robert Wright, The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered: Integration and Expansion in American Financial Markets, 1780–1850 (2002) and The First Wall Street: Chestnut Street, Philadelphia (2005). Ralph Catterall, The Second Bank of the United States (1902), full of information, remains indispensable. For the influential Democratic banking firm of Corcoran & Riggs, see Henry Cohen, Business and Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Civil War (1971).
    William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina (1965), a model historical monograph, should now be used in conjunction with the same author’s The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (1990). For the impact of the crisis on contemporary politics, see Richard Ellis, The Union at Risk (1987). Much of the best scholarship on nullification is in article form. There is a brilliant assessment in Donald Ratcliffe, “The Nullification Crisis, Southern Discontents, and the American Political Process,” American Nineteeth-Century History 1 (2000): 1–30. Also see Kenneth Stampp, “The Concept of a Perpetual Union,” JAH