The Market and Its Discontents

Abstract

of the New Light persuasion. While The Market Revolution succeeds better than any other work in relating the Era of Good Feelings to Jacksonian Democracy, it may have placed undue stress on democratic insurgency and not enough emphasis on concerns over slavery. Struck by the force of unexpected events and interacting personalities, some scholars will question the view that the policies of the Jackson presidency represented a logical unfolding of the essential mandate given in the election of 1828. As the Whig and Democratic parties began to decline in the later 1840s, Sellers skillfully traces the pervasive racism at work in the emerging free-soil North and among subsistence farmers who supported slaveholder capitalism. In doing so, however, he tends to blur important differences between the political economies of the two sections. Whatever the particular criticisms, The Market Revolution will be recognized as a magisterial synthesis of social and political history. It makes sense of the wealth of scholarship over the last three decades and will serve, in the dialectic of historical thought, as a point of departure for new research. One important item on the agenda for further study will be, as perceptively noted in a dust-jacket comment, to look more closely at the related meanings of democracy and capitalism. And hopefully the new studies will be informed in their different ways with that degree of moral passion Sellers here imparts to his work-a passion signaled by his loving memory of Giles Sellers, a two-mule farmer and democrat of a bygone day, and the wish, expressed in the last sentence of the text, that the long struggle for true equality will at last realize its Jacksonian promise by confronting arminian capital on behalf of antinomian humanity and ravaged land (427).