Historian Walter A. McDougall gives at least three cheers for the American hustlers who produced things.

"During the so-called Gilded Age, manufacturers made the U.S. economy the largest and richest on Earth," he writes in the second volume in his ambitious trilogy on American history. The result is a provocative, lively and quotable book.

While he admires the men who built steel mills, on the other hand, Wall Street speculators and government regulators receive the kind of audible tribute usually associated with the Bronx.

Nineteenth-century legislation could not discourage financial buccaneers like Jay Gould "from spreading rumors over the telegraph, plundering companies' assets, or engaging in insider trading," McDougall writes. "Politicians achieved little besides making immigrants docile, blacks invisible, and democracy a bad joke."

McDougall is not a full-fledged fan of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" -- the idea that individuals pursuing economic self-interest inadvertently promote the common good. McDougall's version of Smith's appendage is often clumsy, wasteful and malevolent.

During the same decades that the American economy began to generate more material wealth for more people than in any other time in history, the nation stumbled into its bloodiest war. Short-sighted legislators then fumbled Reconstruction.

McDougall draws on the nation's economic experiences, especially between 1850 and 1880. Drafting regulations and raising taxes with one hand and offering subsidies with the other, government also corrupted business, he concludes.

His tone, however, is not so much condemnatory as explanatory. The links among people, politics and economics are complicated, and the law of unintended consequences defeats best-laid plans.

Consider his examination of "Manifest Destiny," the idea that the United States was destined to be a two-ocean continental power. For almost 200 years, Americans had clung to the narrow strip of land along the Atlantic coast. Then steamboats, railroads and telegraphs shrank distances, allowing trappers, farmers, merchants and missionaries to "infiltrate" the West.

McDougall has a lot of material to cover, from the arrival of Andrew Jackson to the departure of Ulysses S. Grant. He is never dull.

"Andrew Jackson entered the White House in a foul mood. Except for occasional sweet moments of vengeance he stayed angry for eight years."

Not surprisingly, Lincoln is a major figure in "Throes of Democracy" as McDougall seeks to identify his core beliefs. "Lincoln's civic religion rested on mutually supporting propositions about natural rights, practical politics, and utilitarian interests," he concludes.

As he did in his first volume, "Freedom Just Around the Corner," McDougall makes room for oddballs and eccentrics. In this volume, they include poet Walt Whitman, from whose "Leaves of Grass" McDougall gets his title, and impresario Phineas T. Barnum.

Barnum -- "portly, energetic and mirthful" -- realized that Lincoln had been only partly right about the public. "Perhaps you couldn't fool all the people all of the time," McDougall writes, "but to fool all the people some of the time, and some people all of the time, was more than enough to make one famous and rich."