- What was Shays's Rebellion?
- What was the Constitutional Convention?
- What are "checks and balances?"
- Who were the Federalists, and what were the Federalist Papers?
- Who elected George Washington the first President?
- What was the Bill of Rights?
- Why didn't Jefferson like Hamilton?
- The 1790 Census
- What were the Whiskey Rebellion and the "Revolution of 1800"?
- What was Marbury v. Madison?
- How did America purchase Lousiana?
- Who were Lewis and Clark?
- Why did Aaron Burr shoot Alexander Hamilton?
- Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: Did he or didn't he?
- What was "impressment"?
- Who were Tecumseh and the "Prophet"?
- What was the War of 1812 about?
- Milestones in the War of 1812
- What was the Monroe Doctrine?
- What was the Missouri Compromise?
- The Union in 1821
- What was the "corrupt bargain"?
- What were "Jacksonian Democracy" and the "spoils system"?
- What was the "Trail of Tears"?
- Who was Tocqueville, and why did he say all those things about America?
- What made the South fear a slave named Nat Turner?
- Who were the Whigs?
- Who fought at the Alamo?
- What was Manifest Destiny?
- Why did the Mormons move west?
After the shooting stopped, the United States of America was recognized by the major powers as independent. But this gangling new child was an ugly duckling among nations, a loose collection of states under the Articles of Confederation, not yet a sovereign nation. The big question was "Now what?" Following eight years of fighting, this new entity had to face the realities of governing. As might be expected, different people from different states had a lot of different ideas as to how that should be done.
During the next seventy-odd years, powered by dynamic forces, America would expand swiftly and aggressively. However, in that expansion, and in the way in which the new nation formed itself, the seeds of the next great American crisis were being sown. This chapter highlights the milestones in a developing America between the end of the Revolution and the prelude to the Civil War.
What Was Shays's Rebellion?
Rebellion, as the Founding Fathers quickly discovered, is a catchy tune. Besides independence, the end of the war had brought economic chaos to America. As with most wars, the Revolution had been good for business. Everybody works, soldiers spend money, factories turn out ships and guns, armies buy supplies. That's the good news. The bad news is that after war comes inflation and depression. The years immediately following the Revolution were no different. America went through bad economic times. Established trading patterns were in disarray. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress had no power to tax. In the thirteen states, where power was centered, the separate currencies were a shambles.
While the situation was bad almost everywhere, in Massachusetts, the home of the Adamses and birthplace of the patriot cause, the economic dislocation boiled over into bloodshed between Americans. Like the prewar Bacon's Rebellion, the Regulator Movement in the Carolinas, and the Paxton Boys of Pennsylvania, this "little rebellion" (Jefferson's phrase) was a sign of class conflict, a symptom of the economic tension that had always existed in America between, on one side, the working-class frontier farmers, inner-city laborers, the servant class, smaller merchants, and free blacks, and on the other side the bourgeoisie, the landed, slaveholding gentry, and international merchants of the larger cities.
When Massachusetts passed a state constitution in 1780, it found few friends among the poor and middle class, many of them veterans of the Continental Army still waiting for promised bonuses. When they learned that they were now barred from voting and holding office, they must have wondered what they had been fighting for. As the economy worsened, many farms were seized to pay off debts. When the local sheriffs looked to the militia to defend the debt courts against angry crowds, the militia sided with the farmers.
In the summer of 1786, an army veteran named Daniel Shays emerged on the scene. With 700 farmers and working-class people, Shays marched on Springfield and paraded around town. Onetime radical Sam Adams, now part of the Boston Establishment, drew up a Riot Act, allowing the authorities to jail anyone without a trial. Revolt against a monarch was one thing, said Adams, but against a republic it is a crime punishable by death.
Shays soon had a thousand men under arms and was marching on Boston, the seat of wealth and power. Then General Benjamin Lincoln, one of Washington's war commanders, brought out an army paid for by Boston's merchants. There was an exchange of artillery fire, leaving some casualties on both sides, and Shays's army scattered. Lincoln's army pursued the rebels, but refrained from attacking when the rout was assured. A harsh winter took its toll, and the army disintegrated. Some of the rebels were caught, tried, and hanged. Others were pardoned. Shays, on the run in Vermont, was pardoned, but died in poverty in 1788.
Writing from the safe distance of Paris, Thomas Jefferson said of the uprising, "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.... God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.... The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Lacking cohesion and stronger leadership, the Shaysites disintegrated. However, several of the reforms they had demanded were made, including the end of the state's direct taxation, lowered court costs, and the exemption of workmen's tools and household necessities from the debt process.
What Was The Constitutional Convention?
While the Massachusetts uprising was a relatively minor affair that did not spread armed insurrection throughout the states, it shook up the new American ruling class. Something stronger than the Confederation was in order; the states had little ability to control local rebellion, let alone a foreign attack, a real threat as Spain and England kept troops in America. Equally pressing was the substantial threat posed by Indians on the western frontier who outnumbered the state militias. Nor could the states adequately handle the other two related crises facing America: the disruption of overseas trade and the postwar financial and currency collapse.
But the idea for a stronger central government did not spring out of the ashes of Shays's defeat. In 1785 a group in Virginia had already called for a meeting of the states, and again, in January 1786, the Virginia legislature called for a gathering at Annapolis, Maryland. Although only five states sent delegates to Annapolis in September 1786, they were able to persuade Congress to accept a plan for a meeting of delegates from the states "to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union." This constitution would correct, in Alexander Hamilton's words, "such defects as may be discovered to exist" in the Articles of Confederation, an understatement if ever there was one.
On May 25, 1787, after a delay of ten days because too few delegates had arrived, the convention to draw up a new plan of government gathered in Philadelphia. Every state but Rhode Island sent delegates, and George Washington was unanimously selected to preside over the convention. In the course of the next four months, they would create the Constitution.
At various times during the four months, fifty-five delegates were present. In his book The Vineyard of Liberty, James McGregor Burns neatly encapsulated this group as "the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read, and the well-wed." To other modern historians, they represented not the broad masses, but the wealthy merchants of the North and the wealthy, slaveholding plantation owners of the South.
Of them, the oldest was also perhaps the most famous, eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin; Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey was youngest at twenty-seven. Their median age was forty-three. A little more than half (thirty-one) were college-educated, the same number as were lawyers. Seventeen of the delegates who were present to "establish justice ... and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity ..." (in the words of the Preamble), owned some 1,400 black slaves; three delegates, George Mason (Virginia), John Rutledge (South Carolina), and George Washington (Virginia), were the largest slaveholders in the country.
After two hundred years of rule under the Constitution, we have come to think of it as a perfect ideological and idealistic document created by a gathering of legislative geniuses. It has often been said that no new nation before or since has enjoyed a more politically experienced group than the men who wrote the Constitution. It might be useful to think of them as a collection of, in a modern phrase, "special interest groups" and regionally minded legislators, almost all of them admittedly brilliant politicians. And in politics, then as now, the art of compromise is the secret of success.
The Constitution was no different; it was a political creation, hammered together in a series of artfully negotiated compromises, balancing political idealism with political expediency. There were conflicts everywhere: between small states and large states, North and South, slave states and abolitionist states.
While there was near unanimity that a federal government was necessary, there was less agreement about the structure of such a government. The first broad scheme for the Constitution came from the Virginians, young James Madison chief among them, and came to be known as the Virginia Plan. Its key points were a bicameral (two-chamber) legislature; an executive chosen by the legislature; and a judiciary also named by the legislature. An alternate, known as the New Jersey Plan, was favored by smaller states. Through the heat of summer, debate dragged on, the convention facing a deadlock essentially over two key questions.
The first was representation. Should Congress be based on population, with larger states getting proportionately more votes, or should each state receive equal representation?
The second question was that of slavery. The southern states wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Faced with growing abolitionist sentiments, the southern delegates would not bend on questions affecting slavery, nor would they grant freed blacks the vote. On the other hand, they wanted slaves counted for the purpose of determining representation in Congress. In other words, it was "Now you see 'em, now you don't."
With an impasse near, Roger Sherman proposed what is called the Connecticut Compromise, or Great Compromise. Seen in retrospect, it seems an obvious solution to the representation issue, providing for equal representation in the upper house of Congress (the Senate) and proportional representation in the lower house (the House of Representatives).
Two more compromises "solved" the issue of slavery and slaves, words that appear nowhere in the Constitution. Instead, flowery euphemisms like "no person held in service," and "all other persons" were coined in accordance with the Constitution's flowing legal prose. Under these bargains, Congress was prohibited from taking any action to control slavery for a period of twenty years (until 1808), although the gentlemen did agree that the slave trade could be taxed. (Apparently the anti-slave forces thought, "We may not like it, but at least let's make some money out of it.") And for the purposes of determining representation, slaves ("all other persons") would be counted as three-fifths of their total population. In hindsight, it was a small step forward for blacks. At least they had gone from being ignored to being three-fifths human. If they could hold out for another seventy years, they would be free! In turn, the southern states agreed to allow a maximum of three new future states that would ban slavery.
And in the ultimate exercise of compromise, the men who put the Constitution together recognized that it might have to be changed, so they built in an acceptable form of amending their work. Change would not be easy, but it was possible.
As is true of other moments in American history, cynicism born of perfect hindsight is easy. On the other hand, credit should be given where it is due. The Framers were intelligent, even brilliant men; they knew their history and their law. The Constitution they forged was then the pinnacle of thousands of years of political development. They were familiar with, and could draw on, such sources and models as the Greek philosophers, the Roman Republic, and the evolution of the English democratic tradition running from the Magna Carta through Parliament and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Above all, in the Constitution - and earlier, in the Declaration - they embodied the triumph of the Enlightenment, that glorious flowering of ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that elevated the powers of human reason and strove for new forms of government, free of tyranny. The philosophies they were striving to fulfill had been expressed by such giants of the age as Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Kant. They were all familiar to the Framers, and these ideas contributed to the heady debate, a debate that centered on the ongoing struggle between liberty and democracy, two ideas that often clash.
As for debate, there was plenty. Even with the broad outlines agreed upon, major differences cropped up at every turn. It took nearly six hundred separate votes to settle them all. These were not small matters of detail, either, but large questions that might have altered the course of the nation. For instance, New York's Alexander Hamilton, one of the staunchest advocates of powerful central government and the chief representative of northern commercial interests - he was one of the founders of the Bank of New York - wanted the President and the Senate appointed for life. He also argued for giving the "first class," the wealthy men of America, among whom he could certainly be counted, "a distinct permanent share of the government."
Hamilton's suggestion was turned down, but the Constitution did not provide for direct elections, except for the House of Representatives, where it was still left to the states to determine who voted. Property ownership was the key qualification in almost every state. And of course, women, Indians, and blacks - free or slave - had no vote. It is simple to dismiss even that basic decision as the result of sexism and racism. But, again, the temper of the times must be considered. In a period in which class differences were so clearly delineated, though less so in America than in Europe, it may have been inconceivable for these men to consider allowing just anyone to vote. They took as an article of faith that to participate responsibly in a democracy required education and the measure of property that would allow one the leisure to read and think. That said, however, they also did everything they could to make sure that women, Indians, blacks, and the white poor would be excluded from obtaining such education and property.
The final form of the Constitution, prepared by New York's Gouverneur Morris, was put to a vote on September 17, 1787. Thirty-nine of the delegates present voted in favor; three were opposed. Another thirteen of the principals were absent, but seven of these were believed to favor the Constitution. It was sent on to Congress, which decided to submit the document to the states for ratification, with the approval of nine states needed for passage.
What Are "Checks And Balances"?
This has nothing to do with monthly bank statements. Whether out of wisdom or fear, the Constitution's architects created a fundamental principle underlying the strength and tension of the federal government. The fear was obvious: no one wanted anyone else to become too powerful. So for almost every power they granted to one branch of government, they created an equal power of control for the other two. The legislature could "check" the power of the President, the Supreme Court could "check" the power of Congress, and so on, maintaining a careful symmetry or "balance" among the three branches.
Basic Powers and Checks
Executive Powers (President)
- Approves or vetoes federal bills.
- Carries out federal laws.
- Appoints judges and other high officials.
- Makes foreign treaties.
- Can grant pardons and reprieves to federal offenders.
- Acts as commander-in-chief of armed forces.
Checks on Executive Powers
- Congress can override vetoes by two-thirds vote.
- Senate can refuse to confirm appointments or ratify treaties.
- Congress can impeach and remove the President.
- Congress can declare war.
- Supreme Court can declare executive acts unconstitutional.
Legislative Powers (Congress)
- Passes federal laws.
- Establishes lower federal courts and the number of federal
judges.
- Can override the President's veto with two-thirds vote.
Checks on Legislative Powers
- Presidential veto of federal bills.
- Supreme Court can rule laws unconstitutional.
- Both houses of Congress must vote to pass laws, checking
power within the Legislature.
Judicial Powers
- Interprets and applies the law by trying federal cases.
- Can declare laws passed by Congress and executive actions
unconstitutional.
Checks on Judicial Powers
- Congress can propose constitutional amendments to overturn
judicial decisions. (These require two-thirds majority
in both houses, and ratification by two-thirds of states.)
- Congress can impeach and remove federal judges.
- The President appoints judges (who must be confirmed by
Senate).
Who Were The Federalists, And What Were The Federalist Papers?
Two hundred years of miseducation have left an image of the Constitution as a sort of American Ten Commandments, divinely inspired and carved in stone. So it is hard to imagine that its ratification was not assured. Like an unsuccessful organ implant, it was nearly rejected by the body politic. When the Constitution left Philadelphia, the country was almost evenly split between those favoring the strong central government it promised, who came to be known as Federalists, and those for a weaker central government with stronger states' rights, a.k.a. the anti-Federalists.
Loyal Americans and staunch patriots - many of them were Revolutionary leaders and veterans - the anti-Federalists feared a new brand of elected monarchy at the expense of individual liberties. They were led by such major contemporary figures as Virginia's governor Patrick Henry, Boston's Samuel Adams of Revolution fame, and New York's longtime governor, George Clinton. Their disdain for the Constitution might best be summed up in the words of Thomas Paine: "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil."
But no small part of their resistance was personal; many anti-Federalists simply didn't like their opposites among the Federalists. No better example of this could be found than in New York, where the anti-Federalists were led by George Clinton, who had only disdain for Alexander Hamilton, or in Virginia, where Patrick Henry kept James Madison, the chief architect of the Constitution, from being elected to the Senate.
Championing the Federalist cause, Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay - then serving as the head of the Confederation's state department - attempted to influence the ratification debate with a series of pseudonymous newspaper letters signed "Publius" and later collected as The Federalist Papers. Eighty-five of these essays were published, and while they are considered among the most significant political documents in American history, after the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, their direct impact on the debate of the day is dubious. Probably most of the people who counted had already made up their minds.
Of far greater consequence than the Papers was the proratification stance of America's two most prominent men, Franklin and Washington, the latter of whom everyone assumed would become the first President under the new Constitution. (Of Washington's impact on Virginia's ratification vote, James Monroe wrote to Jefferson, "Be assured his influence carried this government.") One by one, the state conventions voting on the question came to ratification - some unanimously; others, like Massachusetts, by the narrowest of margins. The oldest kind of "smoke-filled room" politicking was often required, and several states agreed only with the proviso that a bill of rights be added to the Constitution. Delaware, a small state happy with the representation it would receive, was first to ratify and was joined in succession by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, and New Hampshire, the ninth ratifying state.
But even with the required nine states, there was uncertainty. Virginia and New York had not spoken, and rejection by either or both of these powerful, wealthy states might have rendered the Constitution meaningless. With the bill-of-rights compromise that had worked elsewhere, Virginia voted in favor. In New York, aggressive speechmaking and buttonholing by Alexander Hamilton, combined with John Jay's gentler persuasion, carried the day for ratification.
Who Elected George Washington The First President?
In its wisdom and foresight, not to mention its fear of the rabble, the Framers of the Constitution had created a remarkably curious beast when it came to selecting the President. The "electoral college" was the Constitution's last-ditch defense against an overdose of democracy.
In the Framers' scheme, each state would choose electors equal to its representation in Congress (House seats plus Senate seats). How the electors were chosen was a decision left to the separate states. The electors would then meet in their states and vote for two persons for President. The winner was the man with a majority. The Framers figured nobody - besides George Washington, that is - could win a clear majority, in which case the election would be decided in the House of Representatives, where each state got one vote.
Political parties were not only absent at this time, but were considered contemptible. Ideally in a debate, men would line up on one side or the other and then fall back into nonalignment, awaiting the next issue. The men who made the Constitution did not foresee the rise of the two-party system as we know it, although its beginnings were apparent in the debate over ratification. The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, would be the first political party formed in America.
Although February 4, 1789, has come down as the traditional first presidential election date, that was actually the day on which the first electors cast their ballots. It was preceded by a crazy quilt of elections taking place in late 1788 and the first months of 1789, with each state setting its own rules as to who could vote for what. Some states allowed the electors to be chosen directly by voters; in other states, electors were chosen by the state legislature. While being a male freeholder (property owner) was generally the key to a vote, some states had very ambiguous voting rules. In New Jersey, for instance, women indeed did vote for President in the first election. In Pennsylvania, any taxpayer was eligible.
But the result was the same. On March 4 the first Congress was supposed to convene in New York; but a quorum wasn't reached until April 1. Finally, on April 6, the Senate counted the electoral ballots and declared the inevitable. Washington was elected unanimously. John Adams had been named on enough ballots to qualify as Vice-President. Officially informed of his election on April 14, Washington left Mount Vernon two days later for an eight-day triumphal journey past adoring crowds along the way, and on April 30, 1789, he took the oath of office at Federal Hall in New York, which would be the seat of government for the next year and a half.
What Was The Bill Of Rights?
For the new government, no order of business was more pressing than delivering on a promised set of amendments to the Constitution. These were demanded during ratification by those who feared the states would be destroyed by the new central government. Madison took the lead in preparing the amendments and on September 25, 1789, a list of twelve were submitted for ratification by the states. Ten of the twelve amendments were finally ratified and in force on December 15, 1791, and became known as the Bill of Rights.
Although England had a Bill of Rights, it was narrower and could be repealed by Parliament. The American version was broader, and repeal could only be made through the states. The intention of the amendments was to guarantee freedoms not specifically named in the original Constitution. While legal scholars argue that such guarantees may have been logically unnecessary, they have become an integral part of the American legal system and remain at the core of many of the major controversies in American history, including those confronting contemporary America.
Rights Guaranteed by the Bill of Rights
First Amendment. Guarantees separation of church and state and
freedom to worship; freedom of speech and the press; the
right to assemble and petition for changes.
Second Amendment. The right to bear arms. (The key to the legal-gun
debate. Those who favor gun control point to the Bill's
specification of "a well-regulated militia," while advocates of
gun ownership cite this amendment in its literal sense.)
Third Amendment. Soldiers cannot be housed in a private home
without the consent of the owner. (A reaction to the British
Quartering Act, one of the "intolerable acts" leading to the
Revolution.)
Fourth Amendment. The right to be free from "unreasonable search
and seizure." (Another "hot" issue, criminal rights versus law
enforcement, hinges on the interpretation of this amendment.)
Fifth Amendment. Provides for laws concerning prosecution, including
the requirement of a grand-jury indictment and the
protection from testifying against oneself. (See "Who was
Miranda?" in Chapter 8.)
Sixth Amendment. Guarantees the right to a speedy, public trial in
the district where the crime has been committed, as well as
other protections for the accused.
Seventh Amendment. Guarantees trial by jury.
Eighth Amendment. Prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment," the
amendment at the heart of the capital-punishment debate.
Ninth Amendment. Defines the rule of the construction of the
Constitution.
Tenth Amendment. Guarantees that any powers not specifically
delegated to the federal government or denied to the states in
the Constitution rest with the states or the people.
(Two proposed amendments dealing with the apportionment of members and
congressional compensation were not ratified.)
Amended by the Bill of Rights, the Constitution was still a political document, not an act of God. Like most works of men, it was flawed and imperfect in many ways - its flagrant denial of the rights of blacks, women, and Indians chief among its flaws. Many modern commentators argue that the Constitution was the perfectly realized means of assuring the control of the wealthy over the weak, with enough table scraps for the working and middle classes to assure popular support. From the beginning, critics have said the Constitution and Bill of Rights were selectively enforced and often ignored, as in the case of the Alien and Sedition Acts of the Adams Administration (1798), which clearly trampled the guarantees of the First Amendment.
On the other hand, what was the alternative? If the northern delegates had taken the moral high ground and not compromised on the issue of slavery, the Constitutional convention would have disintegrated. Under the Articles of Confederation, the states would have remained economically weak and ripe for invasion by awaiting foreign forces.
Why Didn't Jefferson Like Hamilton?
Under Washington and the new Congress, the government moved rapidly toward organization. Drawing from a rich array of political talent, Washington selected appointees to the key posts in his administration, often turning to old friends and war veterans, such as Henry Knox, who became Secretary of War. A 1,000-man army was established, principally to confront the Indians on the western frontier. The Supreme Court was created, and John Jay was chosen first Chief Justice. But the two giants of this administration, and the men who would personify the great debate and division within the country in the years ahead, were Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Dumas Malone, Jefferson's most prominent biographer, has stated their difference simply. "No other statesman has personified national power and the rule of the favored few so well as Hamilton, and no other has glorified self-government and the freedom of the individual to such a degree as Jefferson."
America's envoy in Paris as the Bastille was stormed in 1789, beginning the French Revolution, Jefferson returned to New York to lead the State Department. Once Washington's wartime confidential secretary, Hamilton had become an attorney in New York, founder of the Bank of New York and one of that state's and the nation's most powerful men. He would fill the critical role of Washington's chief adviser in money matters. Hamilton had his work cut out for him. The nation's finances were chaotic. America owed money to foreign nations, principally France and the Netherlands, and there was massive domestic debt. Even worse, there was no money to pay them off. The government needed money, and a series of excise taxes were passed, not without a little argument from congressmen, who either wanted local products free from taxes, or overseas products protected by tariffs. Many of them were the same items that had been taxed by the English a few years earlier, prompting the first rebellious actions in the colonies.
There were two key components of Hamilton's master plan for the financial salvation of America. The first came in his Report on Public Credit, which provoked a firestorm of controversy by recommending that all creditors of the government be given securities at par with old, depreciated securities. Since most of these older securities were in the hands of speculators (mostly northern) who had bought them from original holders (mostly southern farmers) for a fraction of their worth, Hamilton was attacked viciously for selling out to the "eastern" speculators. When he added the suggestion that the federal government assume the debts of the states, he was also pilloried by the southern states because most of them had already paid their debts, and Hamilton's plan would be a boon to the "eastern" states.
A real-estate deal solved this problem. Opposed to Hamilton's plan, Jefferson and James Madison, the latter a leader in the House of Representatives, swung the South to support it in exchange for an agreement establishing the site for a new federal city in the South. The nation's future capital would be located on the banks of the Potomac. (Until the new city was ready, Philadelphia would become the nation's capital.) But this compromise did not patch up the differences between Hamilton and Jefferson. Their political differences over almost every issue confronting the new government eventually grew to personal enmity.
The second major component of Hamilton's master plan was the establishment of a national bank to store federal funds safely; to collect, move, and dispense tax money; and to issue notes. The bank would be partly owned by the government, but 80 percent of the stock would be sold to private investors. Again, Jefferson balked. It was unconstitutional, he argued; the government had no such power. Hamilton responded by arguing that the bank was legal under the congressional power to tax and regulate trade. This time there was no compromise, and President Washington went along with Hamilton.
The differences between Jefferson and Hamilton extended to foreign affairs. With England and France again at war and the French Revolution under way, Hamilton openly favored the English. Jefferson admired the French and their Revolution, which America had certainly helped inspire even if he detested the rushing rivers of blood that the guillotine was creating. The lines were similarly drawn over Jay's Treaty, a settlement made with the British in the midst of another English-French war that threatened to involve the United States. Under its terms, British soldiers withdrew from their last outposts in the United States, but other portions of the treaty were viewed as excessively pro-British, and it was attacked by Jefferson's supporters. (The treaty was ratified by the Senate in 1795.)
As part of their ongoing feud, both men supported rival newspapers whose editors received plums from the federal pie. Jefferson's platform was the INational Gazette, and Hamilton's was the Gazette of the United States, both of which took potshots at the opposition. These were not mild pleasantries, either, but mudslinging that escalated into character assassination. More important, the feud gave birth to a new and unexpected development, the growth of political parties.
To this point, organized parties were viewed as sinister. There was no scheme for a two-party system consisting of a government party and a loyal opposition. Instead this sytem evolved piecemeal, and the seeds were sown in the Jefferson-Hamilton rivalry. Jefferson and James Madison, a Federalist during the ratification debate but now swung to Jefferson's views, began to organize factions to support their growing opposition to Washington's Federalist Administration. Their supporters eventually adopted the name Democratic Republicans in 1796. (Now stay with this: the name was shortened to Republicans, but during Andrew Jackson's presidency, they became Democrats.) These first Republicans generally favored a democratic, agrarian society in which individual freedoms were elevated over strong, centralized government. Hamilton and his supporters coalesced in 1792 as the Federalist party, favoring a strong central government, promoting commercial and industrial interests and supported by the elite and powerful of the nation. Under Washington, who openly disdained any "factions," the Federalists held most of the power in Washington for several years to come, dominating Congress during the two Washington administrations and the Adams presidency.
To call these two groups the forerunners of the modern Democrats and Republicans is a bit of an oversimplification. The process leading to the present two-party system was a long, slow one, with several interruptions along the way. If he were alive today, would Jefferson be a Democrat or Republican? Hard to say. His notions of less federal government would sit well with conservative Republicans who want to dismantle the federal bureaucracy. His preoccupation with civil liberties would seem more at home with the Democrats. And Hamilton? Certainly his commercial and banking instincts would place him in the Republican mainstream. But his insistence on a powerful federal government pulling the economic strings would be heresy to laissez-faire Republicans.
The 1790 Census
To determine how many delegates each state would have in the House of Representatives, the Census Act was passed in 1790. The first was completed in August 1790. Some highlights:
- Total U.S. population: 3,929,625
- Black population: 697,624 slaves; 59,557 free blacks. (Massachusetts reported no slaves.)
- Philadelphia is the largest city, with 42,000; New York is second, with 33,000.
- Virginia is the most populous state, with more than 820,000 people.
- Nearly half of the population (48.5 percent) lives in the southern states, with the rest divided between New England and the Middle States.
- America is youthful: 490 of every 1,000 whites is under the age of sixteen.
What Were The "Whiskey Rebellion" And The "Revolution Of 1800?"
With a last hurrah, Washington led troops once more in 1794 to suppress the so-called Whiskey Rebellion in the frontier of western Pennsylvania. Like Shays's Rebellion, it was a revolt of backwoods farmers against the Establishment, this time over a stiff excise tax placed on whiskey. With 13,000 troops - more men than he had led during the war - Washington rode out in uniform, with Alexander Hamilton by his side, to put down the uprising with ease.
In September 1796, Washington made the last of his many retirement speeches in his "Farewell Address," warning against political parties and "passionate attachments" to foreign nations. He was ignored on both counts. The first true presidential campaign then got under way. Gathering in a "caucus," the Federalist congressmen selected John Adams, the Vice-President, as their standard-bearer, with Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina as a second candidate. The other Federalist leader, Hamilton, was deemed too strong-willed and monarchist for even the staunchest of Federalists. Jefferson was the obvious choice of the Democratic Republicans, with their second on the ticket being Aaron Burr, an ambitious New Yorker who brought control of Tammany Hall, the first "political machine," to the ticket.
Shrewd and ambitious, Hamilton thought he could pull a power play by getting Pinckney elected and becoming the man pulling the strings, but this strategem backfired when New England Federalists caught on to Hamilton's plan and voted for Jefferson instead. Adams squeaked into the presidency, and Jefferson, although of the opposing party, won the second most electoral votes and became Vice-President. Obviously, it would be back to the drawing board for presidential elections.
Adams's years in office were distinguished mostly by the animosity that had been unleashed between the two competing parties. Although the Federalists had held sway through Washington's administrations and into Adams's, their power was beginning to decline. Neither the Jay Treaty nor Adams was broadly popular, and Adams endured much abuse from the Republican press. His greatest accomplishment was managing to avoid war with France when it seemed likely; his low point came with passage of a series of repressive measures called the Alien and Sedition Acts, which expressed the fear of foreigners in the young nation while attempting to suppress all criticism of the Federalist administration.
Yet the next election, in 1800, would be a close one, in more than one way. Adams once again led the Federalist ticket, with Charles C. Pinckney (the brother of Thomas Pinckney) as his party's number-two choice. Jefferson and Burr were again the Republican nominees. The campaign produced a torrent of slurs and abuses from both sides. And newspapers loyal to either party were filled with crude rumors of sexual philandering by both Adams and Jefferson. To the Federalists, Jefferson was an atheist who would allow the excesses of the French Revolution to come to America. When the ballots were counted, however, the Republicans held the day. But the problem was, which Republican? Since there was no separate election of President and Vice-President, Jefferson and Burr had collected seventy-three votes each. Under the Constitution, the tie meant the House of Representatives, still under Federalist control, would decide the question.
Faced with a choice between these two, Hamilton lobbied for Jefferson. He hated Jefferson but he detested Burr, in his opinion a "most unfit and dangerous man." Burr played his hand cautiously, not campaigning for himself, but not withdrawing either. The votes of nine states were needed to win, and Jefferson failed to gain them through thirty-five ballots. The crisis was real, and some historians believe that civil war over this election was not only possible but likely. Some Republican leaders were threatening to call out their state militias to enforce the popular will. Finally, Jefferson privately assured the Federalists that he would maintain much of the status quo, and the House elected him on February 17, 1801. He was inaugurated on March 4, 1801, in the new federal capital of Washington. (The difficulties of selecting the President in 1800 resulted in passage of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, which provides for separate balloting for the Vice-President and President.)
This electoral crisis marked a triumph of level heads in both parties, who put the orderly succession and continuity of government first. This "Revolution of 1800," as Jefferson himself called it, was a bloodless one, but its impact was real. The Federalist party was all but guillotined; it lost both the presidency and Congress, but John Adams had made certain that their influence did not die with his defeat.
What Was Marbury V. Madison?
In his last weeks before leaving the presidency, John Adams did what Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and other Presidents have only dreamed of accomplishing. Working with a "lame duck" Federalist Congress that would soon be out of power, Adams created dozens of new judgeships. He signed appointments until late into the night before Jefferson was inaugurated, and these "midnight appointments" of staunch Federalists throughout the federal courts resulted in the most successful "court-packing" operation in American judicial history. In doing so, Adams influenced the course of events long after his rather inconsequential four years in office were over.
Most prominent among these "midnight appointments" was that of John Marshall, Adams's Secretary of State, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1801. Although he had studied law only briefly and had no judicial experience, Marshall held that post until his death in 1835. He placed a stamp on the court and the young nation that is still felt today. Of his many decisions, one of the most important came in the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison.
The case grew out of the ongoing political fight to the death between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans, and directly resulted from Marshall's own actions as Secretary of State. In the last-minute rush to appoint judges who would uphold the Federalist principle of a strong central government, William Marbury was named to a lower federal court. But Marshall, as Secretary of State, failed to present Marbury with his commission, and James Madison, the Secretary of State for the incoming Jefferson administration, refused to grant Marbury's commission. Marbury appealed to the Supreme Court - now with Marshall presiding - to order Madison to grant the commission.
But Marshall refused the request in a brilliant ploy that sacrificed Marbury as a pawn. Although he said Marbury was theoretically entitled to the post, Marshall denied him, ruling that a section of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which had established the federal court system, was unconstitutional and void. For the first time the Supreme Court had overturned an act of Congress. Although Marshall's decision in this case affected only the right of the court to interpret its own powers, the concept of judicial review, a key principle in the constitutional system of "checks and balances", got its first test.
American Voices
From Chief Justice Marshall's decision in Marbury v. Madison:
It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. . . . Thus the particular phraseology of the constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the constitution is void. . . .
How Did America Purchase Louisiana?
While America enjoyed its bloodless "Revolution of 1800," France was still in the throes of its more violent contortions. In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte engineered the coup that overturned the Revolutionary Directory, eventually making himself ruler of France. While most of Napoleon's grandiose plans focused on Europe, America had a place in the little colonel's heart. His first step was to force a weak Spain to return the Louisiana Territory to France, which it did in 1800. The second step was to regain control of the Caribbean island of St. Domingue. In 1793, at the time of the French Revolution, the island had come under control of a self-taught genius, General Toussaint L'Ouverture, who had led a successful slave revolt. To launch any offensive in North America, Napoleon needed the island as a base, and he sent 20,000 troops to retake it.
All of this French scurrying around in America's backyard alarmed President Jefferson, who knew that French control of New Orleans and the western territories would create an overwhelming threat to America. Jefferson had an option play ready. Although he preferred neutrality between the warring European nations, Jefferson dropped hints to the British about an alliance against the French, and found them receptive. At the same time he directed Robert Livingston and James Monroe to offer to buy New Orleans and Florida from France. Such a sale seemed unlikely until the French army sent to St. Domingue was practically wiped out by yellow fever after regaining control of the island. (The French withdrew to the eastern half of St. Domingue and the western half was renamed Haiti, the original Arawak name for the island, with Toussaint's successor, Dessalines, proclaiming himself Emperor. The island, Columbus's Hispaniola, remains split today between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.)
Without the safe base on the island, a French adventure into Louisiana was out of the question. Preparing to open a new European campaign, Napoleon wrote off the New World. He needed troops and cash. Almost on a whim, he ordered his foreign minister, Talleyrand, to offer not only New Orleans and Florida but the whole of the Louisiana Territory to America. Livingston and Monroe dickered with the French over price, but in May 1803 a treaty turning over all of Louisiana was signed. Nobody knew exactly what Napoleon sold, but under the treaty's terms, the United States would double in size for about $15 million, or approximately four cents an acre. Left unclear were the rights to Texas, western Florida, and the West Coast above the Spanish settlements in California. Spain had its own ideas about these territories. Ironically, the purchase was made with U.S. bonds, the result of Hamilton's U.S. Bank initiative, which Jefferson had resisted as unconstitutional.
Who Were Lewis And Clark?
Months before the purchase was made, Jefferson had the foresight to ask Congress for $2,500 to outfit an expedition into the West. Ostensibly its purpose was to "extend the external commerce" of the United States, but Jefferson had several other motives: to get America into the fur trade; to feel out the political and military uses of the West; and, reflecting his philosophy as a true Enlightenment man, to collect scientific information about this vast, uncharted land.
With the purchase complete, the little expedition now became a major adventure to find out what exactly America now owned. For this job Jefferson selected Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809), his private secretary, an army veteran and a fellow Virginian. Lewis selected another Virginian soldier, William Clark (1770-1838), a veteran of the Indian wars, as his co-commander. With some forty soldiers and civilians, they set out from St. Louis in the winter of 1803-04 aboard three boats, a fifty-five-foot keelboat with twenty-two oars and two pirogues or dugout canoes, each large enough to hold seven men. Working their way upstream was arduous, and strict martial discipline was maintained with regular floggings, but the company reached what is now North Dakota in the fall of 1804, built Fort Mandan (near present-day Bismarck), and wintered there.
In the spring of 1805 they set out again for the West, now joined by a French-Canadian trapper and his pregnant Indian squaw, Sacagawea, who acted as guides and interpreters. Crossing the Rockies in present Montana, they built boats to take them down the Clearwater and Columbia rivers, reaching the Pacific Coast in November, where they built Fort Clatsop (near the site of Astoria, Oregon). Hearing the Indians speak some "sailor's" English, presumably learned from traders, the expedition believed a ship might pass and they decided to winter there. When no ship appeared, they set off for an overland return, splitting the expedition in two after crossing the Rockies to explore alternate routes. The parties reunited at the site of Fort Union, and arrived together in St. Louis on September 23, 1806.
After twenty-eight months of incredible hardships met in traveling over difficult, uncharted terrain, in skirmishes with Indians, and in encounters with dangerous animals from rattlesnakes to grizzly bears, the Lewis and Clark expedition had suffered only a single casualty: one man had succumbed to an attack of appendicitis.
The journals they kept, the specimens they brought or sent back, the detailed accounts of Indians they had encountered and with whom they had traded were of inestimable value, priming an America that was eager to press westward.
While William Clark lived long and was influential in Indian affairs, Lewis suffered from melancholy and committed suicide, although many historians claim it was murder. Contrary to common myth, Sacagawea died in her twenty-eighth year.
Why Did Aaron Burr Shoot Alexander Hamilton?
Thomas Jefferson did not sit around idly while waiting for his two adventurers to return. The deal with France was the centerpiece of Jefferson's first administration, and while the few remaining Federalists in Congress tried to undermine it on constitutional grounds, the acquisition and the President were so popular that resistance was futile.
Jefferson had earlier made the historically popular move of cutting taxes, including repeal of the Whiskey Tax that Washington had led an army to enforce. He won more admirers when he balked at the widely accepted practice of paying tribute to pirates based in North Africa - the "Barbary pirates." A brief naval war followed, which did not end the tribute payments, but did give America some new naval heroes (Stephen Decatur chief among them), inspired the line in "The Marines' Hymn" about "the shores of Tripoli," and earned America a new measure of international respect.
By election time in 1804, Jefferson's popularity was so great that opposition Federalism was all but dead.
But a group of Federalists known as the "Essex Junto" did attempt a bizarre break from the Union. Their conspiracy would have been historically laughable had it not ended in tragedy. Part of their plan was to support Aaron Burr for governor of New York. No friend of Jefferson's, Burr had been frozen out of power in the Jefferson administration, and then unceremoniously dumped by his party as candidate for Vice-President (and replaced by George Clinton, the aging governor of New York). The long-standing hatred between Burr and Alexander Hamilton resurfaced as Hamilton used all his influence to defeat Burr in the governor's race. To Hamilton, Burr was a "dangerous man, and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government." That was the polite attack; others were aimed at Burr's notorious sexual exploits. (Hamilton, it should be noted, was no paragon of marital fidelity, either, and Burr pulled no punches in his counterassaults.)
Hamilton's political destruction of Burr was successful, but with awful results. A few months after the election, Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel, and they met on the morning of Wednesday, July 11, 1804, on the cliffs above the Hudson in Weehawken, New Jersey. Hamilton's son had died in a duel, and he opposed the idea of dueling, but personal honor and that of the fading Federalist party forced his hand. The accepted version of events is that Hamilton fired his pistol but deliberately missed. Others dispute that, and say Hamilton just missed. Burr did not. (As Gore Vidal's fictional Aaron Burr put it in the novel Burr, "at the crucial moment his hand shook and mine never does.") Hamilton was mortally wounded, and suffered for thirty hours before dying. Aaron Burr, who had nearly been President a few years before, was now a fugitive.
But Burr was hardly finished as a factor in American politics, or as a thorn in Thomas Jefferson's side. Perhaps inspired by Napoleon, an ambitious colonel who had become an emperor, Burr envisioned securing a western empire he intended to rule. With James Wilkinson, one of Washington's wartime generals who was appointed by Jefferson to govern Louisiana, but who was secretly on the Spanish payroll, Burr organized a small force in 1806 to invade Mexico and create a new nation in the West. For some reason, Wilkinson betrayed Burr and the conspiracy was foiled. Burr was captured and placed on trial for treason, with Chief Justice John Marshall presiding. Jefferson's hatred for Burr was unleashed as he did everything in his power to convict his former Vice-President. But the crafty old Federalist Marshall saw the trial as another way to undermine Jefferson, and his charge to the jury all but acquitted Burr. Following a second treason charge, Burr jumped bail and fled to Europe, where he remained for five years, attempting to persuade Napoleon to organize an Anglo-French invasion of America. He did return to New York in 1812, where he continued a colorful and lusty life until his death in 1836.
Thomas Jefferson And Sally Hemings: Did He Or Didn't He?
While Jefferson won the election of 1804 in a landslide, the campaign was notable for the one juicy bit of mudslinging gossip it produced. A popular Federalist claim of the day was that Jefferson had carried on an affair with a slave girl named Sally Hemings while he was envoy in Paris, and that the young slave had given birth to Jefferson's illegitimate children. Jefferson remained silent on the charges, and they certainly had no impact on the election.
The controversy gained new life with the publication of two books, IJefferson: The Intimate Man (1974), Fawn Brodie's "psychobiography," and Barbara Chase Riboud's novel Sally Hemings (1979), both of which became best-sellers by claiming the relationship was real. Defenders of Jefferson counter that while Jefferson certainly had a love affair while in Paris, it was with Maria Conway, the wife of a painter, and whether it was consummated is a matter of conjecture. Others, including Virginius Dabney, author of IThe Jefferson Scandals (1981), a refutation of the Sally Hemings rumor, point to two of Jefferson's nephews as Sally's lovers and the sires of her children.
What Was "Impressment"?
Following Washington's example, Jefferson declined an opportunity to run again. (There was no constitutional limitation on the number of presidential terms of office a single individual might serve until after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's unique election to a fourth term in 1944. The Twenty-second Amendment, proposed in 1947 and ratified in 1951, limits the President to two terms in office, or, in the case of a President who succeeds to the office, a single term after the completion of the predecessor's term. (When Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, he stated his opposition to this limitation on principle, expressing the belief that the people should be entitled to vote for the candidate of their choice.) Although Jefferson had been reelected at the peak of his popularity, he left under less happy circumstances, primarily because of his unpopular Embargo Act.
Passed in 1807, the act was the result of America's international weakness at a time when Napoleon had turned the world into a battleground with England and its allies. Jefferson wanted to keep America - a weak, third-rate nation with no real army and a skeleton navy - neutral in the wars that had left Napoleon in control of Europe and had made the British masters of the seas. America had actually flourished economically during the fighting, as the warring nations eagerly bought American goods and ships. But American neutrality did not protect her merchant ships from being stopped by British vessels, which could take any British subject off the ship and "impress" him into Royal Navy service. On board the ships, legal distinctions such as "naturalized citizenship" were meaningless, and Americans were being seized along with British subjects.
The Embargo Act, which prohibited all exports into America as economic retaliation for the British impressment policy and as a means to keep America out of war, was one of the most unpopular and unsuccessful acts in American history. In his last week in office, Jefferson had it abolished, replaced by the Nonintercourse Act, which prohibited trade only with England and which provoked only more impressment attacks.
Jefferson's hand-picked successor was his Secretary of State, fellow Virginian and longtime ally, James "Jemmy" Madison, who was elected in 1808 for the first of two terms. He was the first President to occupy the new Executive Mansion that would later be christened the White House, which his charming and amply endowed wife Dolley decorated with $26,000 granted by Congress for the purpose. When Madison took office, war with England and perhaps with France seemed inevitable.
Who Were Tecumseh And "The Prophet"?
The coming war got some provocation from one of the most remarkable Indian leaders of American history. A young Shawnee chief from the Ohio valley, Tecumseh envisioned a vast Indian confederacy strong enough to keep the Ohio River as a border between Indians and whites, preventing further westward expansion. He and his brother, Tenskwatawa, "the Prophet," an Indian mystic who called for a revival of Indian ways and a rejection of white culture, traveled extensively among tribes from Wisconsin to Florida. With Tecumseh's organizing brilliance and the Prophet's religious fervor, younger warriors began to fall in line, and a large army of braves gathered at the junction of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers.
General William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory (and a future President), took 1,000 men out to camp near the Indians. On one of his organizing and recruiting trips, Tecumseh was absent when the Prophet ordered a badly calculated attack on Harrison's troops in November 1811. The Indians inflicted heavy losses, but were eventually driven back and scattered. Harrison destroyed their food stores, their village, and the Prophet's claim of invincible magic, shattering Indian confidence and ending hopes for Tecumseh's confederation.
To western Americans, the Indian confederation was a convenient excuse to fan anti-British sentiment in Congress. Calling Tecumseh's movement a British scheme, land-hungry Westerners heightened the war fever, clamoring for the expulsion of the British from North America, even if it meant invading Canada to do it.
What Was The War Of 1812 About?
The continuing controversy over English impressment of sailors taken from American ships, and the cry of the land-crazed "war hawks" of the West, led by the bellicose but powerful young House Speaker, Henry Clay of Kentucky, pushed Madison to what Jefferson had tried to avoid, a war with England. The War of 1812 finally got under way in June, in the midst of the presidential campaign.
It was not a war that America was ready to fight. A regular army of 12,000 was scattered and led by political appointees rather than by experienced commanders. There was a small navy, hardly equal in numbers or experience to England's.
The results showed in a meandering war effort that went on for the next two and a half years, ending early in 1815. After its humbling experience in the Revolution, and preoccupied with Napoleon's armies on the Continent, England fought a reluctant war. English commercial interests saw America as an important market and supplier, so their support for war was halfhearted. America didn't lose this war. Nor did it really win. The greatest American victory in the war, at the Battle of New Orleans, came after peace had already been signed.
Milestones in the War of 1812
1812
July
Aiming to conquer Canada, American troops under General William Hull launch an assault. British-Canadian troops, augmented by 1,000 of Tecumseh's braves, send Hull's army reeling. Hull is later court-martialed and sentenced to death for cowardice, but is pardoned by Madison.
August-December
A series of surprising American sea victories by the Constitution ("Old Ironsides") and the United States commanded by Stephen Decatur are morale boosters, but have no influence on the war's outcome.
December
Madison is reelected President, beginning an American political tradition: no President has been turned out of office in wartime. Madison's new Vice-President is Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration, who wins a place in posterity for creating another political tradition. Gerry carved Massachusetts into election districts that favored his party. These districts, say his opponents, were shaped like wriggling salamanders, giving the American political dictionary a new word, gerrymander.
December
The British begin a naval blockade of Chesapeake and Delaware Bays.
1813
March
Commodore Isaac Chauncey, with the assistance of young Captain Oliver Perry, begins to build warships on Lake Erie to control the Great Lakes.
April
American forces capture York (Toronto) and burn government buildings there.
May
American forces under Winfield Scott take Fort George, forcing British withdrawal from Lake Erie.
June
The American frigate Chesapeake is captured by the British. Before dying, the American captain, James Lawrence, orders his men, "Don't give up the ship." They listened, prevailed, and the words soon become the American navy's rallying cry.
September
The American fleet on Lake Erie, led by Oliver Hazard Perry, defeats a British counterpart, giving the United States control of this strategic waterway. Perry's message to a happy President Madision: "We have met the enemy and they are ours."
October
The Battle of the Thames. Americans under William Henry Harrison defeat retreating British and Indian forces. Harrison's Indian adversary, Tecumseh, is killed in the battle, depriving the Indians of the strong leader who might have united them.
November
American forces under James Wilkinson are defeated at Montreal. A disgraced Wilkinson is later court-martialed for cowardice, but is acquitted.
November
The British navy extends its blockade north to Long Island. Only ports in New England remain open to commerce, and merchants in New York and New England continue to supply the British.
1814
March
While the war against the British goes on, General Andrew Jackson of the Tennessee militia has been fighting the Creek Indian War. Jackson achieves a decisive victory in this war at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama ending the Creek War.
April
Napoleon Bonaparte is overthrown, freeing some 14,000 British troops to concentrate on the war in America.
April
The British blockade is extended to New England. The Americans retaliate by privateering, and capture 825 British vessels by the summer.
July
Battle of Chippewea. Outnumbered American forces under Winfield Scott defeat British forces.
August
Peace negotiations begin in Ghent.
August
After routing an American army at Bladensburg in a battle watched by President Madison, British troops march unopposed into Washington, D. C. In retaliation for the earlier American buring of York, the British set fire to the Capitol, the White House, and other government buildings. The British withdraw from the capital for an attack on Baltimore, and Madison returns to Washington at the end of August.
September
An American victory on Lake Champlain forces the British to abort a planned offensive south from Canada.
September
The siege of Baltimore. A successful defense of the city and Fort McHenry is witnessed by Francis Scott Key, an American civilian held on board a British ship, who is inspired to write "The Star-Spangled Banner." Two elements of the British strategy, one assault from Canada and another into the Middle States, have now been thwarted, leaving a third British army aimed at the Gulf Coast.
December
Andrew Jackson arrives in New Orleans, unaware that a large British invasion fleet is sailing there from Jamaica. When he learns of the attacking force, he begins preparing a defense of New Orleans and an elaborate system of fortifications is completed just before Christmas.
December 24
The Treaty of Ghent is signed, ending the war. The treaty leaves unresolved most of the issues that led to the fighting, including impressment, now a moot point because the end of the Napoleonic wars ends the British need for more sailors. Clear boundaries between Canada and the United States are set, and a later agreement demilitarizes the Great Lakes. The Oregon Territory in the Pacific Northwest is placed under joint British-American control for a period of ten years.
1815
January
The Battle of New Orleans. Unaware that peace was made two weeks earlier, the British attack. The American defenders, under General Andrew Jackson, are aided by the French privateer Jean Lafitte, who has been courted by the British as well. Heavily outnumbered by British troops fresh from the victory over Napoleon's armies, the Americans use artillery and sharpshooting riflemen to repulse numerous British charges against their defensive position, inflicting massive losses. The British suffer more than two thousand dead; U.S. casualties are eight dead and a small number wounded. Although the war's outcome is unaffected by this rout, Jackson becomes an instant national hero. The news of the Treaty of Ghent finally reaches America in February.
What Was The Monroe Doctrine?
America suffered one notable casualty in the War of 1812. The Federalist Party, which had opposed the war, was mortally wounded. Peace had delivered a large political bonus for Madison and his party. In 1816 the Federalists barely mounted opposition to Madison's chosen successor, James Monroe, next in the "Virginian Dynasty" that started with Washington, was delayed by Adams, and continued through Jefferson and Madison.
Elected at age fifty-eight, Monroe had seen much in his life. A veteran of the War of Independence, he had fought at Trenton, was twice governor of Virginia and then a senator from that state. As a diplomat he helped engineer the Louisiana Purchase. Like Jefferson and Madison before him, he had served as Secretary of State, giving that post and not the vice-presidency the luster of heir apparent's office.
With the great foreign disputes settled and the nation comfortably accepting one-party rule, Monroe's years were later dubbed "The Era of Good Feelings." It was a period of rapid economic expansion, especially in the Northeast, as manufacturing began to replace shipbuilding as the leading industry. These calm years saw the beginnings of the machine age, as men like Eli Whitney, Seth Thomas of mechanical clock fame, and Francis Cabot Lowell were bringing America into the first stages of the Industrial Revolution. A series of postwar treaties with the British solidified the nation's boundaries and eliminated the threat of another war with England.
But the most notable historical milestone in this administration came in an address given to Congress in 1823. The speech was as much the work of Monroe's Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, son of the second President, but some decades later it came to be called the Monroe Doctrine.
In this speech, Monroe essentially declared that the United States would not tolerate intervention in the Americas by European nations. Monroe also promised that the United States wouldn't interfere with already established colonies or with governments in Europe. In one sense, this declaration was an act of isolationism, with America withdrawing from the political tempests of Europe. But it was also a recognition of a changing world order. Part of this new reality was the crumbling of the old Spanish empire in the New World, and rebellions swept South America, creating republics under such leaders as Simon Bolivar, Jose de San Martin, and - the most unlikely name in South American history - Bernardo O'Higgins, the son of an Irish army officer and leader of the new republic of Chile. By 1822, America recognized the independent republics of Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and La Plata (comprising present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama).
On the positive side, the Doctrine marked what might be called the last step in America's march to independence, which had begun in the Revolution and moved through post-independence foreign treaties, the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, and the postwar agreements. But from another historical perspective, the Doctrine became the basis for a good deal of highhanded interference in South American affairs as the United States embarked on a path of meddling in Central and South America that, as the Nicaragua situation of the 1980s proves, is not yet finished.
What Was The Missouri Compromise?
As proof of the "Good Feelings," Monroe was almost unanimously reelected in 1820, winning 231 of the 232 electoral votes cast that year. Popular legend has it that one elector withheld his vote to preserve Washington's record as the only unanimously elected President. But the facts show that the one elector who voted for Secretary of State John Quincy Adams did not know how everyone else would vote, and simply cast his ballot for Adams because he admired him.
While it may have been "The Era of Good Feelings," not everyone felt so good. Certainly the Indians who were being decimated and pushed into shrinking territories by the rapacious westward push didn't feel so good. Nor did the slaves of the South, who now had to harvest a new crop in cotton, which had replaced tobacco as king. And it was the question of slavery that led to the other noteworthy milestone in the Monroe years - one about which Monroe had little to say - the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
From the day when Jefferson drafted the Declaration, through the debates at the Philadelphia convention, slavery was clearly an issue that America would be forced to confront. The earlier compromises of the Declaration and Constitution were beginning to show their age. Even though the slave trade had been outlawed in 1808 under a provision of the constitutional compromise, an illicit trade in slaves continued. The chief argument of the day was not about importing new slaves, however, but about the admission of new states to the union, and whether they would be free or slave states.
It is important to realize that while strong abolitionist movements were beginning to gather force in America, the slavery debate was essentially about politics and economics rather than morality. The "Three-Fifths" compromise written into the Constitution, allowing slaves to be counted as part of the total population for the purpose of allocating congressional representation, gave slave states a political advantage over free states. Every new state meant two more Senate votes and a proportional number of House votes. Slave states wanted those votes to maintain their political power. Of course, there was an economic dimension to this issue. Wage-paying northerners were forced to compete against slave labor in the South. For southerners, wealth was land. With Eli Whitney's cotton gin (the wood gin is short for "engine") allowing huge increases of efficiency in production, and the new factories of Lowell in New England to make cloth, the market for cotton was booming. Slave-holding southerners needed more land to grow more cotton to sell to the textile mills of the northeast and England and slaves were needed to work that land. If gaining new land to plant meant creating new states, slaveholders wanted them to be slave states.
By adding massive real estate to the equation under the Louisiana Purchase, the United States brought the free-state/slave-state issue to a head, particularly in the case of Missouri, which petitioned for statehood in 1817. With Henry Clay taking the lead, Congress agreed upon another compromise. Under Clay's bill, Missouri would be admitted as a slave state, but slavery would not be allowed anywhere else north of Missouri's southern border. But every politician in America, including an aging Thomas Jefferson, could see the strict sectional lines that were being drawn, and few believed that this Missouri Compromise would solve the problem forever. Of course, the issue would soon explode.
The Union In 1821
The following is an alphabetical list of the twenty-four states in the Union following the Missouri Compromise, divided into free and slave states. The dates given denote the date of entry into the union or ratification of the Constitution for the original thirteen states; the number following the date denotes order of entry.)
Table 2
Free States Slave States
Connecticut (1788; 5) Alabama (1819; 22)
Illinois (1818; 21) Delaware (1787; 1)
Indiana (1816; 19) Georgia (1788; 4)
Maine (1820; 23) Kentucky (1792; 15)
Massachusetts (1788; 6) Louisiana (1812; 18)
New Hampshire (1788; 9) Maryland (1788; 7)
New Jersey (1787; 3) Mississippi (1817; 20)
New York (1788; 11) Missouri (1821; 24)
Ohio (1803; 17) North Carolina (1789; 12)
Pennsylvania (1787; 2) South Carolina (1788; 8)
Rhode Island (1790; 13) Tennessee (1796; 16)
Vermont (1791; 14) Virginia (1788; 10)
The possessions of the United States at this time also included the Florida Territory, ceded by Spain in 1819; the Arkansas Territory, which extended west to the existing border with Mexico (farther north than the modern border); the Michigan and Missouri Territories, comprising the Midwest to the Rockies; and the Oregon Country, then under joint British-American rule.
According to the census of 1820, the U.S. population was 9,638,453. New York had become the most populous state with 1.3 million people, followed by Pennsylvania with a little over a million. The population in the northern free states and territories was 5,152,635; the total for the southern states was 4,485,818.
What Was The "Corrupt Bargain"?
There is a good deal of talk today about the problem of negative advertising in presidential campaigns. We like to look back fondly to the genteel days of the past, when high-minded gentlemen debated the great issues in the politest terms. Take 1824, for example. Candidate Adams was a slovenly monarchist who had an English wife. Candidate Clay was a drunkard and a gambler. And candidate Jackson was a murderer.
If America needed any evidence that Monroe's "Era of Good Feelings" was over, it came with the election of 1824. For a second time, the choice of a President would be sent to the House of Representatives after a ruthlessly bitter campaign demonstrated how clearly sectionalism, or the division of the country into geographic areas with their own agendas, had replaced party loyalties. The leading candidates for President in 1824 were all ostensibly of the same party, the Democratic Republicans of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. Even John Quincy Adams, son of the last Federalist President, was now a member of this party and, as Monroe's Secretary of State, a leading contender for the presidency. The other chief candidates, all from the South or West, were General Andrew Jackson, senator from Tennessee; House Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky; William H. Crawford, Monroe's Treasury Secretary from Georgia; and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. After considerable infighting, Calhoun dropped from the race and opted for the vice-presidency, with an eye on a future presidential bid.
Crawford was the choice of the congressional power brokers who nominated him in caucus. But given the growing popular resentment against the caucus system, that designation did more harm than good. When Crawford suffered a stroke during the campaign, his candidacy was left crippled. Issues became negligible in the campaign; personalities were the only subject of debate, and slanderous charges were thrown about by all. Adams and Jackson took the lead as popular favorites, but the election was inconclusive, with neither winning a majority of electoral votes, and the choice was given to the House, as it had been in 1800. Jackson, with 43.1 percent of the popular vote and ninety-nine electoral votes, had a legitimate claim to the office. But Clay, also a powerful westerner, wanted to keep his rival Jackson from the office. It is more than likely that Clay legitimately believed Adams was the more experienced candidate but that an Adams election would clearly benefit Clay's political future at the expense of Jackson's. Clay threw his considerable influence in the House behind Adams, who won on the first ballot. Adams then named Clay to be his Secretary of State. Jackson supporters screamed that "a corrupt bargain" had been made between the two. In Jackson's words, Clay was the "Judas of the West."
Whether a deal was made in advance or not didn't matter. The damage was done. In the public eye, the people's choice had been circumvented by a congressional cabal. Brilliant in many ways and well intentioned, Adams was an inept politician. His administration was crippled from the start by the political furor over the "corrupt bargain," and Adams never recovered from the controversy. The Tennessee legislature immediately designated Jackson its choice for the next election, and the campaign of 1828 actually began in 1825.
What Were "Jacksonian Democracy" And The "Spoils System"?
Jackson got his revenge in 1828, after a campaign that was even more vicious than the one of four years earlier. The label of murderer was reattached to Jackson, an outgrowth of the general's numerous dueling encounters and his penchant for strict martial law, which had led to hangings of soldiers under his command. One Adamsite newspaper claimed that Jackson's mother was a prostitute brought to America by British soldiers, and that she had married a mulatto. Jackson's own marriage became an issue as well. He had married Rachel Robards in 1791, after she had presumably been divorced from her first husband. But the first husband had not legally divorced her until after her marriage to Jackson. Jackson remarried Rachel following the official divorce, but Adams supporters asked, "Ought an adultress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest offices?" One popular campaign ditty went,
Oh Andy! Oh Andy!
How many men have you hanged in your life?
How many weddings make a wife?
(The attacks on his wife particularly enraged Jackson, as Rachel was sick and died soon after the election.)
John Quincy Adams was not safe from character assault either. For purchasing a chess set and a billiard table, he was accused of installing "gaming furniture" in the White House at public expense. In another campaign charge, Adams was charged with having procured a young American girl for the pleasure of Tsar Alexander I when he had served as minister to Russia in 1809-11, under Madison.
Jackson won a substantial victory in the popular vote, and took 178 electoral votes to Adams's eighty-three. For the first time in America's brief history, the country had a President who was neither a Virginian nor an Adams. (John Quincy Adams left the White House and returned to Congress as a representative from Massachusetts, the only former President ever to serve in Congress. He served there with considerable dignity and distinction, leading the antislavery forces in Congress until his death in 1848.) That a new American era was born became apparent with Jackson's victory and inaugural. A large crowd of Old Hickory's supporters, mostly rough-hewn western frontiersmen with little regard for niceties, crowded into Washington, flush with the excitement of defeating what they saw as the aristocratic power brokers of the Northeast. When Jackson finished his inaugural address, hundreds of well-wishers stormed into the White House, where tables had been laid with cakes, ice cream, and punch. Jackson was hustled out of the mansion for his own protection, and the muddy-booted mob overturned chairs and left a chaotic mess. All of the Adamsite fears of rule by "King Mob" seemed to be coming true.
This was the beginning of so-called Jacksonian democracy. Part of this new order came with reformed voting rules in the western states, where property ownership was no longer a qualification to vote. Unlike the earlier "Jeffersonian democracy," which was a carefully articulated political agenda voiced by Jefferson himself, this new democracy was, in modern political language, a grassroots movement. Jackson was no political theorist and hardly a spokesman for the changing order, but he was its symbol. Orphan, frontiersman, horseracing man, Indian fighter, war hero, and land speculator, Andrew Jackson embodied the new American spirit and became the idol of the ambitious, jingoistic younger men who now called themselves Democrats. At its best, Jacksonian democracy meant an opening of the political process to more people (although blacks, women, and Indians still remained political nonentities). The flip side was that it represented a new level of militant, land-frenzied, slavery-condoning, Indian-killing greed.
A large number of the unruly crowd that upset the ice cream in the White House had come to Washington looking for jobs. It was expected that Jackson would sweep out holdovers from the hated Adams administration. They had won the war and were looking for the "spoils" of that war in the form of patronage jobs in the Jackson White House. There was nothing new about this "spoils system"; it had been practiced by every administration from the beginning of the republic. But the widespread and vocal calls for patronage that followed Jackson's election have linked the "spoils system" to Jackson. Ironically, only a few new patronage jobs were created during his years in office, with most posts going to previous jobholders, all established Washington insiders-proof once again that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
What Was The "Trail Of Tears"?
From the moment Columbus stepped onto the sands of San Salvador, the history of European relations with the natives they encountered could be written in blood. It was a story of endless betrayals, butchery, and broken promises, from Columbus and the conquistadores through John Smith, the Bay Colony, the French and Indian War, right up to the War of 1812. From the outset, superior weapons, force of numbers, and treachery had been the Euro-American strategy for dealing with the Indians in manufacturing a genocidal tragedy that surely ranks as one of the cruelest episodes in man's history.
Hollywood has left the impression that the great Indian wars came in the Old West during the late 1800s, a period that many think of simplistically as the "cowboy and Indian" days. But in fact that was a "mopping-up" effort. By that time the Indians were nearly finished, their subjugation complete, their numbers decimated. The killing, enslavement, and land theft had begun with the arrival of the Europeans. But it may have reached its nadir when it became federal policy under President Jackson.
During the Creek War of 1814 that first brought him notice, Jackson earned a reputation as an Indian fighter, and a particularly ruthless one. To the Indians, Jackson became "Long Knife." Confronted by a tenacious Creek Nation in the South as commander of the Tennessee militia, Jackson had used Cherokees, who had been promised governmental friendship, to attack the Creeks from the rear. As treaty commissioner, Jackson managed to take away half the Creek lands, which he and his friends then bought on attractive terms.
In 1819 he embarked on an illegal war against the Seminoles of Florida. Claiming that Florida, still in Spanish hands, was a sanctuary for escaped slaves and marauding Indians, Jackson invaded the territory, unleashing a bloody campaign that left Indian villages and Spanish forts smoldering. Jackson's incursion set off a diplomatic crisis, eventually forcing the Spanish to sell Florida to the United States in 1819 on terms highly favorable to the Americans. Again, Jackson became governor of the newly conquered territory. As a land speculator, Jackson knew that he and his friends would profit handsomely by moving the Indians off the land.
But the harsh treatment of the Indians by Jackson as a general, as well as throughout earlier American history, was later transformed. It went from popular anti-Indian sentiment and sporadic regional battles to official federal policy initiated under Jackson and continued by his successor, Martin Van Buren. The tidy word given this policy was "removal," suggesting a sanitary resolution of a messy problem, an early-nineteenth-century equivalent of Hitler's "final solution." The Indians called it the Trail of Tears.
Some historians ascribe humane motives to Jackson's call for the wholesale forced migration of Indians from the southeastern states to unsettled lands across the Mississippi. Better to move them, argued Jackson, than to slaughter them, which was already happening. In 1831, for instance, Sac tribes under Black Hawk balked at leaving their ancestral lands in Illinois. But when a group of some 1,000 Indians attempted to surrender to the militia and the regular army, they were cut off by the Mississippi River and cut down by bayonets and rifle fire, with about 150 surviving the slaughter.
The removals were concentrated on the "Five Civilized Tribes" of the Southeast. Contrary to popular sentiment of the day and history's continuing misrepresentation, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole tribes had developed societies that were not only compatible with white culture, but even emulated European styles in some respects. The problem was that their tribal lands happened to be valuable cotton-growing territory. Between 1831 and 1833 the first of the "removals" forced some 15,000 Choctaws from Mississippi into the territory west of Arkansas. During the winter, pneumonia took its toll, and with the summer came cholera, killing the Choctaws by the hundreds. The Choctaws were followed by the Chickasaws and then the Creeks. In the new Indian Territory, 3,500 of 15,000 immigrants died of hardship, disease, and exposure.
The final removal began in 1835, when the Cherokees, centered in Georgia, became the target. Like the other tribes that had been forced out, the Cherokees were among the "Civilized Tribes" who clearly provided proof that the "savages" could coexist with white, Euro-American culture. The Cherokees, at the time of their removal, were not nomadic savages. In fact, they had assimilated many European-style customs, including the wearing of gowns by Cherokee women. They built roads, schools, and churches, had a system of representational government, and were becoming farmers and cattle ranchers. A written Cherokee language had also been perfected by a warrior named Sequoya. The Cherokees even attempted to fight removal legally by challenging the removal laws in the Supreme Court and by establishing an independent Cherokee Nation.
But they were fighting an irresistible tide of history. In 1838, after Long Knife Jackson left office, the United States government forced out the 15,000-17,000 Cherokees of Georgia. About 4,000 of them died along the route, which took them through Tennessee and Kentucky, across the Ohio and Missouri rivers, and into what would later become Oklahoma (the result of another broken treaty). This route and this journey were the Trail of Tears.
The strongest resistance to removal came from the Seminoles of Florida, where the Indians were able to carry out another costly war, in which 1,500 U.S. soldiers died and some $20 million was spent. The leader of the Seminoles was a young warrior named Osceola, and he was only captured when lured out of his camp by a flag of truce. He died in a prison camp three months later. With Osceola gone, the Seminole resistance withered and many Seminoles were eventually removed to the Indian Territory. But several bands remained in the Everglades, continuing their struggle against the Federals.
Who Was Tocqueville, And Why Did He Say All Those Things About America?
One of the most eloquent witnesses to the cruelties against the Indians was a young French magistrate studying America's penal system. Observing a Choctaw tribe - the old, the sick, the wounded, and newborns among them - forced to cross an ice-choked Mississippi River during the harsh winter, he wrote, "In the whole scene, there was an air of destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn't watch without feeling one's heart wrung." The Indians, he added, "have no longer a country, and soon will not be a people."
The author of those words was a young aristocrat named Alexis Charles Henri Clerel de Tocqueville (1805-1859), who arrived in America in May 1831 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. As young men who had grown up in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic empire, they came to examine American democracy with an eye to understanding how the American experience could help form the developing democratic spirit in France and the rest of Europe. The two spent nine months traveling the nation, gathering facts and opinions, interviewing Americans from President Jackson to frontiersmen and Indians. On their return to France, Tocqueville reported on the U.S. prison system, and Beaumont wrote a novel exploring the race problem in America.
But it is for an inspired work combining reportage, personal observation, and philosophical explorations, and titled Democracy in America, that Tocqueville's name became a permanent part of the American sociopolitical vocabulary. The book appeared in two volumes, the first of which appeared in 1835, the second in 1840. More than 150 years after its appearance, IDemocracy in America remains a basic text in American history and political theory. With his keen insight into the American character and his extraordinary prescience, Tocqueville is still regarded as a valuable commentator on American politics and democracy in general.
While he admired the republican system, Tocqueville found what he considered a great many shortcomings. Perhaps his aristocratic background left Tocqueville unprepared for the "general equality of condition among the people" he found. There were clearly class differences in America, but Tocqueville found that the lines were not as sharply or as permanently drawn as they were in Europe, with its centuries of aristocratic tradition. Admittedly, he also spent most of his time with the upper and middle classes, overlooking much of the rank poverty that existed in America among the working poor. Most of the latter were gathered in the sprawling urban centers of New York, Philadelphia, and other northern cities, where waves of poor European immigrants were drawn by the millions and consigned to the spreading inner-city slums and tenements. In this "equality of condition," Tocqueville saw a social leveling that would result, in his opinion, in a reign of mediocrity, conformity, and what he called the "tyranny of the majority."
Although many of his commentaries and observations were remarkably astute, and seem to apply as neatly to modern America as they did to the United States he found in 1831, Tocqueville did not always bat a thousand. Perhaps one of his greatest oversights was his assessment of the presidency as a weak office. In fact, he wrote at a time when Andrew Jackson was shaping the office as preeminent among the three branches, establishing the mold of a strong presidency that would be repeated in such chief executives as Lincoln and the Roosevelts. Critical of slavery (as well as the treatment of the Indians), the Frenchman could see civil strife ahead. However, his prediction that the Union would fall in the face of such a regional conflict was wide of the mark.
In many more matters, however, he was right on target and remains eerily correct about the American addiction to practical rather than philosophical matters and the relentless and practically singleminded pursuit of wealth. As he observed, "I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men...."
Perhaps his most accurate and astute forecast was the prediction of the future competition that would arise between the United States and Russia.
What Made The South Fear A Slave Named Nat Turner?
Nothing struck deeper fear into the hearts of southerners, whether they held slaves or not, than the idea of a slave revolt. Contrary to the popular image of docile slaves working in peaceful servitude, there had been numerous small rebellions and uprisings of slaves, often in union with Indians or disaffected whites, as far back as slavery in the New World under the Spanish. These were not limited to the South, as murderous uprisings took place in colonial Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. One of the bloodiest of these uprisings occurred in South Carolina in 1739, when slaves killed some twenty-five whites under the leadership of a slave named Jemmy.
But the greatest horror for young America came from the Caribbean, where Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former carriage driver and a natural military genius, led the slaves of St. Domingue (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in a successful rebellion during the 1790s. Inspired by the revolutions in America and France, L'Ouverture's rebellion resulted in some 60,000 deaths and a republic of freed slaves on the island. Yet Toussaint was a remarkable administrator as well, and successfully integrated the white minority into the island's government. In 1800, Napoleon sent troops to retake the island with little success until Toussaint was lured to the French headquarters under a truce flag, arrested, and jailed in the Alps, where he died in a jail cell.
Slaveholders tried for years to keep the news of Toussaint and his rebellion from their slaves. But as Lerone Bennet writes in Before the Mayflower, "Wherever slaves chafed under chains, this man's name was whispered." In 1831 a new name came to the fore as the most fearful threat to white control, that of Nat Turner (1800-1831). Nat Turner's rebellion followed two earlier unsuccessful rebellions by slaves. The first was of some thousand slaves led by Gabriel Prosser in an aborted assault on Richmond, Virginia, in 1800. The second, in Charleston in 1822, was led by another charismatic slave, Denmark Vesey, and failed because of betrayals.
Although Turner's rebellion also ultimately failed, it changed the South. Born in 1800, Turner was also marked by birth for an unusual life. A mystic and preacher, he used his visions and biblical authority to build a devoted following. In August 1831, Turner and about seventy followers started their rampage. Beginning with his own masters, Turner embarked on a death march that spared no one. The whites around Southampton, Virginia, were thrown into utter panic, many of them fleeing the state. Turner's small army, lacking discipline, halted their march, allowing a group of whites to attack. Turner counterattacked, but was soon vastly outnumbered and went into hiding. Thousands of soldiers were pressing the search for this one man who had thrown the country into hysterical terror. A massacre of any slaves even suspected of complicity followed. Turner eluded capture for some two months, during which he became a sort of bogeyman to the people of the South. To whites and slaves alike, he had acquired some mystical qualities that made him larger than life, and even after his hanging, slaveowners feared his influence. Stringent new slave laws were passed, strict censorship laws aimed at abolitionist material were passed with Andrew Jackson's blessing, and, perhaps most important, the militant defense of slavery took on a whole new meaning.
American Voices
William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), in the first issue of the abolitionist journal The Liberator (1831):
On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not excuse - I will not retreat a single inch - And I Will Be Heard....
Who Were The Whigs?
Andrew Jackson's Democratic party was largely an outgrowth of Jackson's personality and individual opinions rather than of the strict orthodoxy associated with modern party politics. And Jackson's popularity was undeniable, resulting in his handy 1832 reelection (55 percent of the popular vote; 77 percent of the electoral vote), which also brought in New York politico Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) as the new Vice-President.
Jackson's personal platform was fairly simple: suspicion of the upper classes and big business, typified by the Bank of the United States, which Jackson vetoed in 1832; freedom of economic opportunity, including elimination of Indians to open up their lands for white expansion; increased voting rights (for white men, at least); and a general opening of the political process to the middle and lower classes, which had been closed out by the earlier, gentry-based administrations. On the growing question of the Union versus states' rights, Jackson tiptoed a cautious path, proclaiming a strong Unionist position but tending to limit the powers the federal government held over the states, the ostensible reason behind his opposition to the Bank of the United States.
Jackson's general popularity almost completely stifled opposition, but not entirely. Out of the ashes of the old Federalists came heirs of Hamilton who believed in a national approach to economic problems, coupled with the more extremist states'-rights advocates and those who simply disliked Jackson and feared his unchecked power. From this loose coalition a new party started to take life with two congressional giants, Daniel Webster (1782-1852) and Henry Clay (1777-1852), its most prominent leaders. In 1834 they took the name Whigs, recalling the pre-Revolution days when patriots adopted that name to contrast themselves with Tories loyal to the British crown. For this new generation of Whigs, the tyrant was not a foreign monarch but "King Andrew," as Jackson was called by friend and foe alike.
The Whigs mounted their first presidential campaign in 1836, but failed to coalesce behind a single nominee, sending out three "favorite sons" instead. William Henry Harrison, a former general, did best, with Hugh White and Daniel Webster finishing far out of the running. Easily outdistancing them was Martin Van Buren, Jackson's Vice-President and handpicked successor, who also carried the distinction of being the first President born an American citizen. An adept tactician, Van Buren had begun to master the new politics of group voting, or "machine politics," and was responsible for delivering New York's electoral votes to Jackson. But he utterly lacked Jackson's ability to win popular support. A severe economic depression during his term - the Panic of 1837 - ruined Van Buren's chances for a second term, but he was really undone by a new Whig strategy that turned the tables on Andrew Jackson's earlier campaign against John Quincy Adams, which had cast Adams as a remote aristocrat.
In the "log cabin" campaign of 1840, the Whigs cast Van Buren, nicknamed "Martin Van Ruin," as a bloated aristocrat. They presented themselves as the people's party and General Harrison (1773-1841), their candidate, as a common man living in a log cabin. In fact, he was from a distinguished family, the son of one of the Declaration's signers. He was also presented as a war hero in Jackson's image for his battles against Tecumseh at Tippecanoe. With Virginia's John Tyler (1790-1862) as his running mate, their campaign slogan was the memorable "Tippecanoe and Tyler too!" The campaign of 1840 was a raucous affair, with huge rallies, an impressive voter turnout, and plenty of hard cider spilled. One linguistic legacy of the campaign: a distiller named E. C. Booz bottled whiskey in log-cabin-shaped containers. Although the word "booze" was derived from the Dutch word "bowse," Booz reinforced the use of the word, and soon it became a permanent part of the language.
One month after he was inaugurated, Harrison fell ill with pneumonia and died. John Tyler, his Vice-President, a Virginian and an ardent states' righter, became the first "accidental President."
Who Fought At The Alamo?
When Jackson left office, there were clearly unanswered questions about the nation's future. Southern politicians were already setting forth the argument that because states had freely joined the Union, they could just as freely leave. And while there was much talk of tariffs and banks, the real issue was slavery. The slave question pervaded the national debate on almost every question before Congress, including the momentous one regarding the fate of Texas, then a part of Mexico.
Led by Stephen F. Austin (1793-1836), Americans settled the area at the invitation of Mexican authorities. President Jackson, and Adams before him, offered to buy Texas from Mexico, but were turned down. By 1830, more than 20,000 white Americans had been drawn to the fertile, cotton-growing plains, bringing with them some 2,000 slaves. They soon outnumbered the Mexicans in the territory, and in 1834 Austin asked the authorities in Mexico City to allow Texas to separate from Mexico as a prelude to statehood. Besides the obvious reason that these Americans wanted to remain American, an overriding cause for their request was Mexico's prohibition of slavery. Austin was arrested and jailed. By 1836, President Santa Anna of Mexico announced a unified constitution for all Mexican territories, including Texas.
The Americans in Texas decided to secede. With an army of 6,000 men, Santa Anna marched against what he viewed as the treasonous Texans. With a force of 3,000, Santa Anna approached San Antonio, held by 187 men under the command of Colonel William B. Travis. The defenders took a defensive stand behind the walls of a mission called the Alamo. For ten days, in a now-legendary stand, the small group fended off Santa Anna's massed troops, inflicting tremendous casualties on the Mexicans. But the numbers were insurmountably in the Mexicans' favor. As the Mexican bands played the Deguello, literally "throat-cutting," artillery breached the walls of the Alamo, and Travis's band was overrun. The five American survivors of the final onslaught, including the wounded, were executed. All of the Americans' corpses were soaked in oil and then set on fire. Among the dead were the Bowie brothers, a pair of slave smugglers who are better known for Jim's famous long knife, and Davy Crockett (1786-1836), the professional backwoodsman, congressman, and veteran of Andrew Jackson's Creek War. (Unlike Jackson, Crockett had grown to respect the Indians and had become friendly with them.) Only three Americans came out of the Alamo alive: a woman named Susanna Dickinson, her fifteenth-month-old baby, and Travis's slave Joe. They were freed by Santa Anna to warn Sam Houston (1793-1863), commander of the Texas army, of the fate that awaited them if they continued to resist.
A second slaughter, in which hundreds of Texans were slain by Santa Anna's troops at the town of Goliad, stoked the flames higher. Santa Anna pressed the small Texan army that remained under Houston until the forces met at San Jacinto in April 1836. With "Remember the Alamo!" as their rallying cry, the vastly outnumbered Texans swept into the Mexican lines, who had been granted a siesta by the self-assured Santa Anna. The battle was over in eighteen minutes. With the loss of nine men, the Texans killed hundreds of Mexicans, captured hundreds more, including Santa Anna, and sent the bulk of the Mexican army into a confused retreat across the Rio Grande.
The Texans immediately ratified their constitution, and Houston, who nearly died from gangrene after the San Jacinto battle, was made President of the new Republic. They then petitioned for annexation into the United States. Jackson did nothing until his last day in office, when he recognized Texan independence. Van Buren also hesitated. Both men feared war with Mexico, but more seriously, the admission of Texas added fuel to the burning slave debate. The southern states wanted another slave territory. The North saw annexation of Texas as breaching the balance that had been reached in the Missouri Compromise (under which slave-state Arkansas and free-state Michigan had been admitted as the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth states). For the next nine years the Texas question simmered, further dividing North and South over slavery, and pushing relations with Mexico to the brink of war.
What Was "Manifest Destiny"?
The annexing of Texas was a symptom of a larger frenzy that was sweeping through America like a nineteenth-century version of "Lotto fever." In 1845 this fervor was christened. In an expansionist magazine, The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, journalist John L. O'Sullivan wrote of "the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."
O'Sullivan's phrase, quickly adopted by other publications and politicians, neatly expressed a vision that sounded almost like a religious mission. Behind this vision was some ideological saber-rattling, but the greatest motivator was greed, the obsessive desire for Americans to control the entire continent from Atlantic to Pacific. As each successive generation of Americans had pressed the fringes of civilization a little farther, this idea took on the passion of a sacred quest. The rapid westward movement of large groups of settlers was spurred by the development of the famous trails to the West. The Santa Fe Trail linked Independence, Missouri, with the Old Spanish Trail to Los Angeles. The Oregon Trail, mapped by trappers and missionaries, went northwest to the Oregon Territory. The Mormon Trail, first traveled in 1847, first took the religious group and then other settlers from Illinois to Salt Lake City. And in the Southwest, the Oxbow Route, from Missouri west to California, carried mail under a federal contract.
The fact that California, with its great ports, was still part of Mexico, and that England still lay claim to Oregon, only heightened the aggressiveness of the American desire to control all of it.
Why Did The Mormons Move West?
While the majority of nineteenth-century Americans believed that God's plan was to send them west, others in America were finding other religious paths. The early part of the century saw an extraordinary period of spiritual reawakening that produced such groups as the Shakers, founded in New York in 1774 by an Englishwoman called Mother Ann Lee. They flourished for some years, but eventually died out when their policy of celibacy became self-induced extinction. Other "spiritual" movements of this period included the utopian communities of Oneida, where, in contrast to the Shakers, promiscuity was encouraged, and Brook Farm, the retreat of the New England Transcendentalists.
But the most historically significant and prominent new religious group to emerge in this period was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also called the Mormons. The group was founded in western New York in 1820 by Joseph Smith, a visionary who claimed that he had been given, by an angel named Moroni, an ancient text, The Book of Mormon, written in hieroglyphics on golden plates. Smith and a small band of followers moved to Ohio, where their communal efficiency attracted converts but their unorthodox religious views attracted the ridicule and enmity of traditional Christians, setting off a pattern of antagonism that would send the Mormons on an odyssey in search of a home in the wilderness. With his church growing in numbers of converts, Smith was gaining political clout as well, but resentment exploded into persecution when another of Smith's visions called for polygamy. In 1844 a mob killed Smith and his brother, Hyrum.
The group was held together under the autocratic hand of Brigham Young, who saw the church's future in the far West, away from further persecution. In 1847, Young and small band of Mormons pushed to the basin of the Great Salt Lake, the new Promised Land. They began a community that became so entrenched as a Mormon power base that Young was able to dictate federal judgeships. As waves of Mormons pressed along the trail to Utah, it became a major route to the West, and the Mormons profited handsomely from the thousands heading for California and gold.
American Voices
From "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe (1845):
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And that lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on
the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the
floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!
Drug addict. Alcoholic. Cradle robber. Necrophiliac. These are some of the epithets associated with Poe (1809-1849). Most of them were the creations of a vindictive literary executor who spread the lies following the poet's death. Later research proved many of those charges to be unfounded slanders. But there was still plenty about Poe that was strange, and his work certainly seemed to justify those bizarre stories.
Born in Boston, Poe was raised by an uncle after the death of his parents when he was three. He first attended the University of Virginia, but dropped out, then later went to West Point, but managed to get dismissed from that institution also. He turned to newspaper editing and writing, and published a few poems and short stories. He also married his thirteen-year-old cousin - an act considered less outrageous in those days than it seems now. In 1845, The Raven and Other Poems appeared, winning Poe instant recognition. He continued as a successful magazine editor, at the same time writing the short stories of mystery, horror, and the supernatural - "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Gold Bug" "The Fall of the House of Usher" - for which he is most famed. After the death of his wife, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Two years later, while on a train taking him to a planned second marriage, he died of unexplained causes.
Poe was a member of America's first generation of noteworthy authors, including Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau, who began to flourish in this period. They represented, as Poe did, the Romantic spirit in writing that flowered in the early nineteenth century, as well as a burst of American cultural maturity that reflected a nation moving out of adolescence.
§
Title:
Don't Know Much About History
Author:
Davis, Kenneth C.
Date: New
York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1990