Gordon Wood takes Washington Irving's bewildered sleeper as his emblem for the United States between 1789 and 1815, a society whose transformation arrived before industry, cities or railroads. Population doubled every twenty years and spread across half a continent, killing or displacing tens of thousands of Native people; northern farmers became among the most commercially minded people anywhere; politics passed from gentry who stood for election to professional politicians running under party banners, while much constitutional ingenuity went into taming the democracy that resulted. Religious establishments fell and competing denominations multiplied until the republic was the most evangelical nation on earth. Slavery meanwhile hardened in the South and made that section feel a beleaguered minority. Wood's central claim is that almost none of this was intended: the founders' cosmopolitan, enlightened, antislavery hopes were overwhelmed by forces their own revolution released, and the boisterous nationalism of 1815 repudiated what they had wanted.