Quotes from Daniel Walker Howe

Most long-distance travel and commerce went by water, which explains why most cities were seaports—Cincinnati on the Ohio River and St. Louis on the Mississippi being notable exceptions. To transport a ton of goods by wagon to a port city from thirty miles inland typically cost nine dollars in 1815; for the same price the goods could be shipped three thousand miles across the ocean.

History works on a long time scale, and at any given moment we can perceive its directions but imperfectly.

the Mexican Congress passed a law suspending immigration from the United States in April 1830. Austin got an exemption from it for his own recruits, and others too found it easy to slip through the border. Mexico suffered the problem of illegal immigration from the United States until Austin's lobbying in Mexico City helped secure repeal of the ban in November 1833.

All the rival presidential candidates called themselves Republicans, and each claimed to be the logical successor to the Jeffersonian heritage. Ironically, what the campaign produced was the breakup of the party and the traditions everyone honored. One-party government proved an evanescent phase in American history.

While the size of the armies was small, their casualty rates were high. Indeed, the war against Mexico has been accurately described as the deadliest that the United States has ever fought:

In the early American republic, the most significant challenge to the traditional assumption that the worth of human beings depended on their race, class, and gender came from the scriptural teachings that all are equal in the sight of God and all are one in Christ.

Two legal maxims often helped guide their opinions: salus populi suprema lex est ("the welfare of the people is the supreme law") and sic utere tuo ("so use your right that you injure not the rights of others").

After the Sixteenth Congress convened in December 1819, the debate over Missouri resumed. The speeches seemed interminable as well as intemperate. When Felix Walker of North Carolina was urged to sit down, he replied that he had to give his speech for the folks back home, "for Buncombe County." Ever since, Americans have called a certain kind of inflated political oratory "buncombe"—or "bunk" for short.

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas," noted Henry David Thoreau, "but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."7

Ironically, the Democrats' great insistence on the natural equality of all white men prompted them to make a more glaring exception of non-whites. Taking seriously the motto "all men are created equal," Democrats called into question the very humanity of nonwhites in order to keep them unequal.

Officially, 5 percent of southern slaves worked in industrial occupations. But the statistic understates the reality. It does not include artisans who worked on plantations making articles for use on that plantation, and thus ignores countless enslaved blacksmiths, masons, cabinetmakers, cordwainers, saddle-makers, plow-wrights, and other craftsmen.