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Preface, from the Authors A t Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dedicated a memorial to the more than 3,000 Union soldiers who had died turning back a Confederate invasion in the ﬁrst days of July. There were at least a few ways that the president could have justiﬁed the sad loss of life in the third year of a brutal war dividing North and South. He could have said it was necessary to destroy the Confederacy’s cherished institution of slavery, to punish southerners for seceding from the United States, or to preserve the nation intact. Instead, at this crucial moment in American history, Lincoln gave a short, stunning speech about democracy. The president did not use the word, but he oﬀered its essence. To honor the dead of Gettysburg, he called on northerners to ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” With these words, Lincoln put democracy at the center of the Civil War and at the center of American history. The authors of this book share his belief in the centrality of democracy; his words, “of the people,” give our book its title and its main theme. We see American history as a story “of the people,” of their struggles to shape their lives and their land. Our choice of theme does not mean we believe that America has always been a democracy. Clearly, it has not. As Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, most African Americans still lived in slavery. American women, north and south, lacked rights that many men enjoyed; for all their disagreements, white southerners and northerners viewed Native Americans as enemies. Neither do we believe that there is only a single deﬁnition of democracy, either in the narrow sense of a particular form of government or in the larger one of a society whose members participate equally in its creation. Although Lincoln deﬁned the northern cause as a struggle for democracy, southerners believed it was anything but democratic to force them to remain in the Union at gunpoint. As bloody draft riots in New York City in July 1863 made clear, many northern men thought it was anything but democratic to force them to ﬁght in Lincoln’s armies. Such disagree- ments have been typical of American history. For more than 500 years, people have struggled over whose vision of life in the New World would prevail. It is precisely such struggles that oﬀer the best angle of vision for seeing and understanding the most important developments in the nation’s history. In particular, the democratic theme concentrates attention on the most fundamental concerns of history: people and power. Lincoln’s words serve as a reminder of the basic truth that history is about people. Across the 31 chapters of this book, we write extensively about complex events, such as the ﬁve-year savagery of the Civil War, and long-term transformations, such as the slow, halting evolution of democratic political institutions. But we write in the awareness that these developments are only abstractions unless they are grounded in the lives of people. The test of a historical narrative, we believe, is whether its characters are fully rounded, believable human beings. We hope that our commitment to a history “of the people” is apparent on every page of this book. To underscore it, we open each chapter with an “American Portrait” feature, a story of someone whose life in one way or another embodies the basic theme of the pages to follow. So, we begin Chapter 8 on the United States in the 1790s with William Maclay, a senator from rural Pennsylvania, who feared that arrogant northeasterners and “pandering” Virginians would quickly turn the new nation into an aristocracy. In Chapter 23, we encounter 19-year-old Gertrude Ederle, whose solo swim across the English Channel and taste for cars and dancing epitomized the individualistic, consumer culture emerging in the 1920s. The choice of Lincoln’s words also reﬂects our belief that history is about power. To ask whether America was democratic at some point in the past is to ask whether all people had equal power to make their lives and their nation. Such questions of power necessarily take us to political processes, to the ways in which people work separately and collectively to enforce their will. We deﬁne politics quite broadly in this book. With the feminists of the 1960s, we believe that 12

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