One of the enduring questions in the study of early American history is how to characterize antebellum American society. Charles Sellers, Jr in his landmark study The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 lamented the eclipse of democracy before market forces in the antebellum United States. On the other hand, Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln argued that the United States actually became more democratic over the course of the nineteenth century. Daniel Walker Howe in his 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning book What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 explores the role of the communication and transportation revolutions in the development of antebellum American politics, society and economy. Howe argued that two rival political visions competed in America between 1815 and 1848. The first programme was based on the hope of people who ‘felt largely satisfied with their society the way it was, slavery and all, especially with the autonomy it provided to so many individual white men and their local communities’. These individuals wanted to see their familiar image of America spread across space. On the other hand, other Americans looked forward to diversifying American economy and reforming American society: ‘They envisioned qualitative, not just quantitative, progress for America.’ Howe masterfully discusses the dreams and achievements of the second group of people, paying keen attention both to social and cultural as well as political and economic transformation of American history accompanied by the communication and transportation revolutions.

This study builds on Howe's research and details the American System, the most significant political programme of the early 1800s that sought the economic and moral improvement of American society. I argue that the American System lay at the centre of political and social transformation in the early republic. Its emergence as an intellectual notion among reform-minded Americans since the start of the presidency of George Washington, its sophistication during the Jeffersonian era, its implementation under the presidencies of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, and its failure in the wake of the levelling tendencies of the Jacksonian period and the economic chaos of the Panic of 1837, bore important repercussions for the antebellum political, economic and social life of the United States.