"Thus, President James Monroe observed that a growing network of canals and turnpikes and the development of the steamboat were helping stitch a disparate country together, even as other Americans, like DeWitt Clinton, foresaw a calamitous 'dismemberment of the Union,' East to West, unless it were bound together by a common thread like the Erie Canal. Thus, average Americans worshiped Andrew Jackson as 'Everyman writ large,' even as the new Whig party saw him as an unbridled despot. Thus, countless utopian movements blossomed across the country—'We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform,' Ralph Waldo Emerson breathlessly wrote—along with movements to help the poor, heal the sick and assist the deaf, even as Native Americans were brutally marched to their deaths along the Trail of Tears and plans were being made to ship free blacks off to Africa, or elsewhere."
Jay Winik in The New York Times reviews David S. Reynolds's Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.
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