I finished " The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln " by Sean Wilentz last week. It was a good book; I was unhappy to finish it (i.e., I wanted more).

Probably the most interesting part of the book for me was the period from Jackson to Buchanan: Wilentz does a great job of exploring and explaining the contradictory pulls of a wider franchise for white males (moving from landed property owners early on to nearly all non-felons later) and the rise of "master race" slavery theories in the south. The north was hardly immune from racism; it was more common for free blacks in the north to have the franchise in the first decade of the 1800's than it was by the 1850s.

Ultimately, those contradictions destroyed the Whigs, and split the Democrats between north and south. Wilentz shows something of an affectation for verbally equating Democracy and the Democratic party of that era, but he's clear about the problems within that party that took place from Jackson's time to the Civil War.

It's a great primer on that era, and Wilentz did an impressive amount of research on the presidential campaigns. Not as in depth as an exploration of a single election (like the last book I read), but very thorough - I have a much better feel for how the early US worked now than I did before I got this book.

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