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THE JEFFERSONIAN ERA
· THE RISE OF CULTURAL NATIONALISM
· DOUBLING THE NATIONAL DOMAIN
LOOKING AHEAD
1. How successful was Jefferson’s effort to create a “republican” society dominated by sturdy, independent farmers?
2. How did the Napoleonic Wars affect the United States?
3. What events and issues led to the War of 1812?
THOMAS JEFFERSON AND HIS FOLLOWERS assumed control of the national government in 1801 as the champions of a distinctive vision of America. They favored a society of sturdy, independent farmers, happily free from the workshops, industrial towns, and urban mobs of Europe. They celebrated localism and simplicity. Above all, they proposed a federal government of sharply limited power.
Almost nothing worked out as they had planned, for during the Republican years in power the young republic was developing in ways that made much of their vision obsolete. The American economy became steadily more diversified and complex, making the ideal of a simple, agrarian society impossible to maintain. American cultural life was dominated by a vigorous and ambitious nationalism. Jefferson himself contributed to the changes by exercising strong national authority at times and by arranging the greatest single increase in the size of the United States in its history.
THE RISE OF CULTURAL NATIONALISM
In many respects, American cultural life in the early nineteenth century reflected the Republican vision of the nation’s future. Opportunities for education increased, the nation’s literary and artistic life began to free itself from European influences, and American religion began to adjust to the spread of Enlightenment rationalism. In other ways, however, the new culture was posing a serious challenge to Republican ideals.
Educational and Literary Nationalism
Central to the Republican vision of America was the concept of a virtuous and enlightened citizenry. Republicans believed, therefore, in the creation of a nationwide system of public schools in which all male citizens would receive free education. Such hopes were not fulfilled, as it would be many decades before some states, particularly in the South, established viable public education systems. Schooling remained primarily the responsibility of private institutions, most of which were open only to those who could afford to pay for them. In southern and mid-Atlantic states, most schools were run by religious groups. In New England, private academies were often more secular, many of them modeled on those founded by the Phillips family at Andover, Massachusetts, in 1778, and at Exeter, New Hampshire, three years later. Many were frankly aristocratic in outlook. Some educational institutions were open to the poor, but not nearly enough to accommodate everyone, and the education they offered was usually clearly inferior to that provided for more prosperous students.
Private secondary schools such as those in New England as well as many public schools generally excluded females from the Page 157classroom. Yet the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did see some important advances in education for women. As Americans began to place a higher value on the importance of the “republican mother” who would help train the new generation for citizenship, people began to ask how mothers could raise their children to be enlightened if the mothers themselves were uneducated. Such concerns helped speed the creation of female academies throughout the nation, usually for the daughters of affluent families. In 1789, Massachusetts required that its public schools serve females as well as males. Other states, although not all, soon followed.
Some women aspired to more. In 1784, Judith Sargent Murray published an essay defending the right of women to education. Women and men were equal in intellect and potential, Murray argued, so their educational opportunities should be equivalent. And they should have opportunities to earn their own livings and establish roles in society apart from their husbands and families. Murray’s ideas attracted relatively little support.
Because Jefferson and his followers liked to think of Native Americans as “noble savages” (uncivilized but not necessarily uncivilizable), they hoped that schooling the Indians in white culture would “uplift” the tribes. Missionaries and mission schools proliferated among the tribes. But there were no comparable efforts to educate enslaved African Americans.
Higher education similarly diverged from Republican ideals. The number of colleges and universities in America grew substantially, from nine at the time of the Revolution to twenty-two in 1800. None of the new schools, however, were truly public. Even universities established by state legislatures relied on private contributions and tuition fees to survive. Scarcely more than one white man in a thousand (and virtually no women, blacks, or indigenous people) had access to any college education, and those few who did attend universities were, almost without exception, members of prosperous, propertied families.
Medicine and Science
Medicine and science were not always closely connected to each other in the early nineteenth century, but many physicians were working hard to strengthen the link. The University of Pennsylvania created the first American medical school in 1765. Most doctors, however, studied medicine by working with an established practitioner. Some American physicians believed in applying new scientific methods to medicine, but they had to struggle against age-old prejudices and superstitions. Efforts to teach anatomy, for example, encountered strong public hostility because of the dissection of cadavers that the study required. Municipal authorities had virtually no understanding of medical science and almost no idea of what to do in the face of the severe epidemics that often swept their populations; only slowly did they respond to warnings that the lack of adequate sanitation programs was to blame for much disease.
Individual patients often had more to fear from their doctors than from their illnesses. Even the leading advocates of scientific medicine often embraced ineffective or dangerous treatments. George Washington’s death in 1799 was probably less a result of the minor throat infection that had afflicted him than of his physicians’ efforts to cure him by bleeding and purging.
The medical profession also used its newfound commitment to the scientific method to justify expanding its control over kinds of care that had traditionally been outside its domain. Most childbirths, for example, had been attended by female midwives in the eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, physicians began to handle deliveries themselves. Among the results of that change were a narrowing of opportunities for women and a restriction of access to childbirth care for poor mothers, who could afford midwives but not physicians.Page 158
Cultural Aspirations of the New Nation
Many Americans dreamed of an American literary and artistic life that would rival the greatest achievements of Europe. The 1772 “Poem on the Rising Glory of America” predicted that America was destined to become the “seat of empire” and the “final stage” of civilization. Noah Webster , the Connecticut schoolmaster, lawyer, and author of widely used American spellers and dictionaries, echoed such sentiments, arguing that the American schoolboy should be educated as a nationalist. “As soon as he opens his lips,” Webster wrote, “he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty, and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen who have wrought a revolution in her favor.”
A growing number of writers began working to create a strong American literature. Among the most popular was Washington Irving of New York, who won popular acclaim for his satirical histories of early American life and his powerful fables of society in the New World. His folktales, recounting the adventures of American fictional literary heroes such as Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle, made him the widely acknowledged leader of American literary life in the early eighteenth century.
Religion and Revivalism
By elevating ideas of individual liberty and reason, the American Revolution had weakened traditional forms of religious practice and challenged many ecclesiastical traditions. By the 1790s, only a small proportion of white Americans were members of formal churches, and ministers were complaining about the “decay of vital piety.”
Religious traditionalists were particularly alarmed about the emergence of new, “rational” religious doctrines—theologies that reflected modern, scientific attitudes. Deism , which had originated among Enlightenment philosophers in France, attracted such educated Americans as Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and by 1800 was reaching a moderately broad popular audience. Deists accepted the existence of God, but they considered God a remote “watchmaker” who, after having created the universe, had withdrawn from direct involvement with the human race and its sins. Religious skepticism also produced the philosophies of “universalism” and “unitarianism.” Disciples of these new ideas rejected the traditional Calvinist belief in predestination and the idea of the Trinity. Jesus was only a great religious teacher, they claimed, not the son of God.
But religious skepticism attracted relatively few people. Most Americans who remained religious clung to more traditional faiths. And beginning in 1801, those traditions staged a dramatic comeback in a wave of revivalism known as the Second Great Awakening . The origins of the Awakening lay in the efforts of conservative theologians to fight the spread of religious rationalism. Presbyterians expanded their efforts on the western fringes of white settlement. Itinerant Methodist preachers traveled throughout the nation to win recruits for their new church, which soon became the fastest-growing denomination in America. Almost as successful were the Baptists, who found an especially fervent following in the South.
By the early nineteenth century, the revivalist energies of all these Protestant denominations were combining to create the greatest surge of evangelical fervor since the first Great Awakening sixty years before. In only a few years, membership in churches embracing revivalism was mushrooming. At Cane Ridge , Kentucky, in the summer of 1801, a group of evangelical ministers presided over the nation’s first “camp meeting”—an extraordinary revival that lasted several days and impressed all who saw it with its fervor and its size (some estimated that 25,000 people attended). Such events became common in subsequent years.Page 159
METHODIST CAMP MEETING, c. 1819 Camp (or revival) meetings were popular among some evangelical Christians in America as early as 1800. By the 1820s, there were approximately 1,000 meetings a year, most of them in the South and the West. After one such meeting in 1806, a participant wrote: “Will I ever see anything more like the day of Judgement on the side of eternity—to see the people running, yes, running from every direction to the stand, weeping, shouting, and shouting for joy. . . . O! Glorious day they went home singing shouting.” This image from the 1810s suggests the degree to which women participated in many revivals.
(Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZC4-772])
The basic message of the Second Great Awakening was that individuals must readmit God and Christ into their daily lives. They must embrace a fervent, active piety, and they must reject the skeptical rationalism that threatened traditional beliefs. Yet the wave of revivalism did not restore the religion of the past whole cloth. Few denominations any longer accepted the idea of predestination, and the belief that people could affect their own destinies added intensity to the individual’s search for salvation. The Awakening, in short, combined a more active piety with a belief in a God whose grace could be attained through faith and good works.
One of the striking features of the Awakening was the preponderance of women within it. Female converts far outnumbered males. That may have been due in part to the movement of industrial work out of the home and into the factory. That process robbed women of one of their roles as part of a household-based economy and left many feeling isolated. Religious enthusiasm provided, among other things, access to a new range of activities—charitable societies ministering to orphans and the poor, missionary organizations, and others—in which women came to play important parts.
In some areas of the country, revival meetings were open to people of all races. From these revivals emerged a group of black preachers who became important figures within the enslaved community. Some of them translated the apparently egalitarian religious message of the Awakening—that salvation was available to all—into a similarly liberating message for blacks in the present world. Out of black revival meetings in Virginia, for example, arose Page 160an elaborate plan in 1800 (devised by Gabriel Prosser, the brother of a black preacher) for a slave rebellion and an attack on Richmond. The plan was discovered and foiled in advance by whites, but revivalism continued in subsequent years to create occasional racial unrest in the South.
The spirit of revivalism was particularly strong among Native Americans. Presbyterian and Baptist missionaries were active among the southern tribes and sparked a wave of conversions. But the most important revivalist was Handsome Lake , a Seneca whose seemingly miraculous “rebirth” after years of alcoholism helped give him a special stature within his tribe. Handsome Lake blended traditionalism and change, calling for a revival of Indian ways and a repudiation of the individualism of white society, but also encouraging Christian missionaries to become active within the tribes and Iroquois men to abandon their roles as hunters and become sedentary farmers. As in much of white society, Iroquois women, who had traditionally done the farming, were to move into more domestic roles. His mixture of messages spread through the scattered Iroquois communities that had survived the military and political setbacks of previous decades and inspired many Indians to give up whiskey, gambling, and other destructive customs derived from white society.
STIRRINGS OF INDUSTRIALISM
While Americans had been engaged in a revolution to win their independence, a momentous economic transformation had been in progress in Great Britain: the Industrial Revolution . Power-driven machines were permitting manufacturing to become more rapid and extensive, with profound social and economic consequences. (See “ America in the World: The Global Industrial Revolution. ”)
AMERICA IN THE WORLD
The Global Industrial Revolution
While Americans were engaged in a revolution to win their independence, they were also taking the first steps toward another great revolution—one that was already in progress in England and Europe. It was the emergence of modern industrialism. Historians differ over precisely when the Industrial Revolution began, but it is clear that by the end of the eighteenth century it was well under way in many parts of the world. A hundred years later, the global process of industrialization had transformed the societies of Britain, most of continental Europe, Japan, and the United States. Its social and economic consequences were complex and profound and continue to shape the nature of global society.
For Americans, the Industrial Revolution largely resulted from rapid changes in Great Britain, the nation with which they had the closest relations. Britain was the first nation to develop significant industrial capacity. The factory system took root in Britain in the late eighteenth century, revolutionizing the manufacture of cotton thread and cloth. One invention followed another in quick succession. Improvements in weaving drove improvements in spinning, and these changes created a demand for new devices for carding (combing and straightening the fibers for the spinner). Water, wind, and animal power continued to be important in the textile industry. But more important was the emergence of steam power, which began to proliferate after the appearance of James Watt’s advanced steam engine (patented in 1769). Cumbersome and inefficient by modern standards, Watt’s engine was nevertheless a major improvement over earlier “atmospheric” engines. Britain’s textile industry quickly became the most profitable in the world, and it helped encourage comparable advances in other fields of manufacturing as well.
Despite the efforts of the British government to prevent the export of industrial technology, knowledge of the new machines reached other nations quickly, usually through the emigration of people who had learned the technology in British factories. America benefited the most because it received more immigrants from Great Britain than from any other country, but technology spread quickly to the nations of continental Europe as well. Belgium was the first, developing a significant coal, iron, and armaments industry in the early nineteenth century. France, profiting from the immigration of approximately fifteen thousand British workers with advanced technological skills, had created a substantial industrial capacity in textiles and metals by the end of the 1820s, which in turn contributed to a great boom in railroad construction later in the century. German industrialization progressed rapidly after 1840, beginning with coal and iron production and then, in the 1850s, moving into large-scale railroad construction. By the late nineteenth century, Germany had created some of the world’s largest industrial corporations. In Japan, the sudden intrusion of American and European traders helped spur the so-called Meiji reforms of the 1880s and 1890s, which launched a period of rapid industrialization there as well.
Industrialization changed not just the world’s economies but also its societies. First in England and then in Europe, America, and Japan, social systems underwent wrenching changes. Hundreds of thousands of men and women moved from rural areas into cities to work in factories, where they experienced both the benefits and the costs of industrialization. The standard of living of the new working class, when objectively quantified, was usually significantly higher than that of the rural poor, and factory laborers experienced some improvement in nutrition and other material circumstances. But the psychological costs of being suddenly uprooted from one way of life and thrust into a fundamentally different one could outweigh the economic gains. There was little in most workers’ prior experience to prepare them for the nature of industrial labor. It was disciplined, routinized work with a fixed and rigid schedule, a sharp contrast to the varying, seasonal work pattern of the rural economy. Nor were many factory workers prepared for life in the new industrial towns and expanding cities.
Industrial workers experienced, too, a fundamental change in their relationship with their employers. Unlike rural landlords and local aristocrats, factory owners and managers were usually remote and inaccessible figures. The new class of industrial capitalists , many of them accumulating unprecedented wealth, dealt with their workers impersonally, and the result was a growing schism between the two classes, each lacking access to or understanding of the other. Working men and women throughout the globe began thinking of themselves as a distinct class, with common goals and interests. And their efforts simultaneously to adjust to their new way of life and to resist its most damaging aspects sometimes created great social turbulence. Battles between workers and employers became a characteristic feature of industrial life throughout the world.
Life in industrial nations changed at every level. Populations grew rapidly, and people began to live longer. At the same time, pollution, crime, and infectious disease (until modern sanitation systems emerged) increased greatly in industrialized cities. Around the industrial world, middle classes expanded and came, in varying degrees, to dominate the economy, although not always the culture or the politics, of their nations.
Not since the agrarian revolution thousands of years earlier, when many humans had turned from hunting to farming for sustenance, had there been an economic change comparable to the Industrial Revolution. Centuries of traditions, social patterns, and cultural and religious assumptions were challenged and often shattered. The tentative stirrings of industrialism in the United States in the early nineteenth century, therefore, were part of a vast movement that over the course of the next century transformed much of the globe.
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. Why did the British government attempt to prevent the export of Britain’s industrial technology?
2. What did the Industrial Revolution mean for ordinary people around the world?
Technology in America
Nothing comparable to the European Industrial Revolution occurred in America in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Yet even while Jeffersonians warned of the dangers of rapid economic change, they witnessed a series of technological advances that would ultimately transform the United States. Some of these innovations were British imports. Despite efforts by the London government to prevent the export of textile machinery or the emigration of skilled mechanics, a number of immigrants with advanced technological knowledge arrived in the United States, eager to introduce the new machines to America. Samuel Slater, for example, used knowledge he had acquired before leaving England to build a spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, for the Quaker merchant Moses Brown in 1790.
PAWTUCKET BRIDGE AND FALLS One reason for the growth of the textile industry in New England in the early nineteenth century was that there were many sources of water power in the region to run the machinery in the factories. That was certainly the case with Slater’s Mill, one of the first American textile factories. It was located in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, alongside a powerful waterfall, demonstrating the critical importance of water power to early American industry.
(©Bettmann/Corbis)
America also produced notable inventors of its own. In 1793, Eli Whitney developed a machine that performed the arduous task of removing the seeds from short-staple cotton quickly and efficiently. It was dubbed the cotton “gin,” a derivative of “engine.” With the device, a single operator could clean as much cotton in a few hours as it once took a group of workers to do in a day. The results were profound. Previously cotton cultivation had been restricted largely to the coast and the Sea Islands, the only places where long-staple cotton—easily cleaned by hand—could be grown. With the invention of an efficient mechanical means for cleaning short-staple cotton, it too became a profitable crop, and one that could be grown throughout the South. Cotton cultivation spread, and within a decade, the total crop increased eightfold. African American slavery, which with the decline of tobacco Page 161production had seemed to be a dwindling institution, expanded and firmly fixed itself upon the South. The large supply of domestically produced fiber also encouraged entrepreneurs in New England and elsewhere to develop a native textile industry.
Whitney was an important figure in the history of American technology for another reason as well. He helped introduce the concept of interchangeable parts to the United States. As machines such as the cotton gin became widely used, it was increasingly important for owners of such machines to have access to spare parts, and for the parts to be made so that they fit the machines properly. Whitney designed not only the cotton gin, but also machine tools that could manufacture its component parts to exact specifications. The U.S. government later commissioned Whitney to manufacture 1,000 muskets for the army. Each part of the gun had to be interchangeable with the equivalent part in every other gun.
Interchangeability was of great importance in the United States because of the great distances many people had to travel to reach towns or cities and the relatively limited transportation systems available to them. Interchangeable parts meant a farmer could repair a machine himself. But interchangeability was not easy to achieve. In theory, many parts were designed to be interchangeable. In reality, the actual manufacturing of such parts was for many years not nearly precise enough. Farmers and others often had to do considerable fitting before the parts would work in their equipment. Not until later in the century would machine tools be developed to the point that they could make truly interchangeable parts.Page 163
Transportation Innovations
One of the prerequisites for industrialization is a transportation system that allows the efficient movement of raw materials to factories and of finished goods to markets. The United States had no such system in the early years of the republic, and thus it had no domestic market extensive enough to justify large-scale production. But projects were under way that would ultimately expand the transportation network.
One such project was the development of the steamboat. Britain had pioneered steam power, and even steam navigation, in the eighteenth century, and there had been experiments in America in the 1780s and 1790s in various forms of steam-powered transportation. Page 165A major advance emerged out of the efforts of the inventor Robert Fulton and the promoter Robert R. Livingston, who made possible the launching of a steamboat large enough to carry passengers. Their Clermont, equipped with paddle wheels and a British-built engine, sailed up the Hudson River in the summer of 1807.
Meanwhile, what was to become known as the “turnpike era” had begun. In 1794, a corporation built a toll road running the sixty miles from Philadelphia to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with a hard-packed surface of crushed stone that provided a good year-round surface with effective drainage, but was very expensive to construct. The Pennsylvania venture proved so successful that similar turnpikes, so named from the kind of tollgate frequently used, were laid out from other cities to neighboring towns. Like they do today, travelers on these roads paid to use them.
The process of building the turnpikes was a difficult one. Companies had to survey their routes with many things in mind, particularly elevation. Horse-drawn vehicles had great difficulty traveling along roads with more than a five-degree incline, which required many roads to take very circuitous routes to avoid steep hills. Building roads over mountains was Page 166an almost insurmountable task, and no company was successful in doing so until governments began to participate in the financing of the projects.
Country and City
Despite all these changes, America remained an overwhelmingly rural and agrarian nation. Only 3 percent of the population lived in towns of more than 8,000 in 1800. Even the nation’s largest cities could not begin to compare with such European capitals as London and Paris, though Philadelphia, with 70,000 residents, New York, with 60,000, and others were becoming centers of commerce, learning, and urban culture comparable to many of the secondary cities of Europe.
People in cities and towns lived differently from the vast majority of Americans who continued to work as farmers. Among other things, urban life often required affluence, and affluent people sought increasing elegance and refinement in their homes, their grounds, and their dress. They also looked for diversions—music, theater, dancing, and, for many people, horse racing. Informal horse racing had begun as early as the 1620s, and the first formal race course in North America opened near New York City in 1665. By the early nineteenth century, it was a popular activity in most areas of the country. The crowds that gathered at horse races were an early sign of the vast appetite for popular, public entertainments that would be an enduring part of American culture. (See “ Patterns of Popular Culture: Horse Racing. ”)
PATTERNS OF POPULAR CULTURE
Horse Racing
Informal horse racing began in North America almost as soon as Europeans settled the English colonies. Formal racing followed quickly. The first racetrack in North America—New Market (named for a popular racecourse in England)—was established in 1665 on Long Island, near present-day Garden City, New York. Tracks quickly developed wide appeal, and soon horse racing had spread up and down the Atlantic Coast. By the time of the American Revolution, it was popular in almost every colony and was moving as well into the newly settled areas of the Southwest. Andrew Jackson was a founder of the first racetrack in Nashville, Tennessee, in the early nineteenth century. Kentucky—whose native bluegrass was early recognized as ideal for grazing horses—had eight tracks by 1800.
Like almost everything else in the life of early America, the world of horse racing was bounded by lines of class and race. For many years, it was considered the exclusive preserve of “gentlemen,” so much so that in 1674, a Virginia court fined James Bullocke, a tailor, for proposing a race, “it being contrary to Law for a Labourer to make a race, being a sport only for Gentlemen.” But while white aristocrats retained control of racing, they were not the only people who participated in it. Southern planters often trained young male slaves as jockeys for their horses, just as northern horse owners employed the services of free blacks as riders. In the North and the South, African Americans eventually emerged as some of the most talented and experienced trainers of racing horses. And despite social and legal pressures, free blacks and poor whites often staged their own informal races.
Racing also began early to reflect the growing sectional rivalry between North and South. In 1824, the Union Race Course on Long Island established an astounding $24,000 purse for a race between two famous thoroughbreds: American Eclipse (from the North) and Sir Henry (from the South). American Eclipse won two of the three heats. A southern racehorse prevailed in another such celebrated contest in 1836. These intersectional races, which drew enormous crowds and created tremendous publicity, continued into the 1850s, until the North–South rivalry began to take a more deadly form.
Horse racing remained popular after the Civil War, but two developments changed its character considerably. One was the successful effort to drive African Americans out of the sport. At least until the 1890s, black jockeys and trainers remained central to racing. At the first Kentucky Derby, in 1875, fourteen of the fifteen horses had African American riders. One black man, Isaac Murphy, won a remarkable 44 percent of all races in which he rode, including three Kentucky Derbys. Gradually, however, the same social dynamics that enforced racial segregation in so many other areas of American life penetrated racing as well. By the beginning of the twentieth century, white jockeys and organized jockey clubs had driven almost all black riders and many black trainers out of the sport.
The second change was the introduction of formalized betting. In the late nineteenth century, racetracks created betting systems to lure customers to the races. At the same time that the breeding of racehorses was moving into the hands of enormously wealthy families, the audience for racing was becoming increasingly working class and lower middle class. The people who now came to racetracks were mostly white men, and some white women, who were lured not by a love of horses but by the usually futile hope of quick and easy riches through gambling.
“TROTTING CRACKS” ON THE SNOW, 1858 This lithograph by Louis Maurer portrays trotting racehorses hitched to sleighs. The publishing duo Currier and Ives circulated this and many other images of trotters, reflecting and contributing to the popularity of the sport in the nineteenth century.
(Source: Bequest of Adele S. Colgate, 1962/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. Why do you think horse racing was such a popular spectator sport in early America? Why has it continued to be popular?
2. How did changes in the sport of horse racing reflect similar changes in American society at large?
It was still possible for some to believe that this small nation might not become a complex modern society. But the forces pushing such a transformation were already at work. And Thomas Jefferson, for all his commitment to the agrarian ideal, found himself as president obliged to confront and accommodate them.
JEFFERSON THE PRESIDENT
Privately, Thomas Jefferson may well have considered his victory over John Adams in 1800 to be what he later termed it: a revolution “as real . . . as that of 1776.” Publicly, however, he was restrained and conciliatory, attempting to minimize the differences between the two parties and calm the passions that the bitter campaign had aroused. There was no public repudiation of Federalist policies, no true “revolution.” Indeed, at times Jefferson seemed to outdo the Federalists at their own work.
The Federal City and the “People’s President”
The modest character of the federal government during the Jeffersonian era was symbolized by the newly founded national capital, the city of Washington, D.C. There were many who envisioned that the uncompleted town, designed by the French architect Pierre L’Enfant, would soon emerge as the Paris of the United States.
In reality, throughout most of the nineteenth century Washington remained little more than a straggling, provincial village. Although the population increased steadily from the 3,200 counted in the 1800 census, it never rivaled that of New York, Philadelphia, or the other major cities of the nation and remained a raw, inhospitable community. Members of Congress viewed Washington not as a home but as a place to visit briefly during sessions of the legislature. Most lived in a cluster of simple boardinghouses in the vicinity of the Capitol. It was not unusual for a member of Congress to resign his seat in the midst of a Page 167session to return home if he had an opportunity to accept the more prestigious post of member of his state legislature.
Jefferson was a wealthy planter by background, but as president he conveyed to the public an image of plain, almost crude disdain for pretension. Like an ordinary citizen, he walked to and from his inauguration at the Capitol. In the presidential mansion, which had not yet acquired the name “White House,” he disregarded the courtly etiquette of his predecessors. He did not always bother to dress up, prompting the British ambassador to complain of being received by the president in clothes that were “indicative of utter slovenliness and indifference to appearances.”
Yet Jefferson managed to impress most of those who knew him. He probably had a wider range of interests and accomplishments than any other major political figure in American history, with the possible exception of Benjamin Franklin. In addition to politics and diplomacy, he was an active architect, educator, inventor, farmer, and philosopher-scientist.
Jefferson was a shrewd and practical politician. He worked hard to exert influence as the leader of his party, giving direction to Republicans in Congress by quiet and sometimes even devious means. Although the Republicans had objected strenuously to the efforts of their Federalist predecessors to build a network of influence through patronage, Jefferson Page 168used his powers of appointment as an effective political weapon. Like Washington before him, he believed that federal offices should be filled with men loyal to the principles and policies of the administration. By the end of his second term, practically all federal jobs were held by loyal Republicans. Jefferson was a popular president and had little difficulty winning reelection against Federalist Charles C. Pinckney in 1804. Jefferson won by the overwhelming electoral college majority of 162 to 14, and Republican membership of both houses of Congress increased.
THOMAS JEFFERSON This 1805 portrait by the noted American painter Rembrandt Peale shows Jefferson at the beginning of his second term as president. It also conveys (through the simplicity of dress and the slightly unkempt hair) the image of democratic simplicity that Jefferson liked to project as the champion of the “common man.”
(©Bettmann/Getty Images)
Dollars and Ships
Under Washington and Adams, the Republicans believed, the government had been needlessly extravagant. Yearly federal expenditures had almost tripled between 1793 and 1800, as Hamilton had hoped. The public debt had also risen, and an extensive system of internal taxation had been erected.
The Jefferson administration moved deliberately to reverse these trends. In 1802, the president persuaded Congress to abolish all internal taxes, leaving customs duties and the sale of western lands as the only sources of revenue for the government. Meanwhile, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin drastically reduced government spending. Although Jefferson was unable entirely to retire the national debt as he had hoped, he did cut it almost in half (from $83 million to $45 million).
Jefferson also scaled down the armed forces. He reduced the already tiny army of 4,000 men to 2,500 and pared down the navy from twenty-five ships in commission to seven. Anything but the smallest of standing armies, he argued, might menace civil liberties and civilian control of government. Yet Jefferson was not a pacifist. At the same time that he was reducing the size of the army and navy, he helped establish the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, founded in 1802. And when trouble started brewing overseas, he began again to build up the fleet. Such trouble appeared first in the Mediterranean, off the coast of northern Africa.
For years the Barbary states of North Africa—Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—had been demanding protection money from all nations whose ships sailed the Mediterranean. Even Great Britain regularly paid off the Barbary pirates to ensure safe passage. During the 1780s and 1790s the United States, too, had agreed to treaties providing for annual tribute to the Barbary states to protect American vessels trading in the region. But Jefferson showed reluctance to continue this policy of appeasement. “Tribute or war is the usual alternative of these Barbary pirates,” he said. “Why not build a navy and decide on war?”
He got it. In 1801, the pasha (leader) of Tripoli forced Jefferson’s hand. Unhappy with American responses to his demands for tribute, he ordered the flagpole of the American consulate chopped down and declared war. Jefferson built up American naval forces in the area and the Marines defeated a contingent of the pasha’s forces. Finally, in 1805, Jefferson agreed to terms by which the United States ended the payment of tribute to Tripoli but paid a substantial ransom for the release of American prisoners seized by Barbary pirates.
Conflict with the Courts
Having won control of the executive and legislative branches of government, the Republicans looked with suspicion on the judiciary, which remained largely in the hands of Federalist judges. Soon after Jefferson’s first inauguration, his followers in Congress launched an attack on this last preserve of the opposition. Their first step was the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, thus eliminating the judgeships to which Adams had made his “midnight appointments.”Page 169
The debate over the courts led to one of the most important judicial decisions in the history of the nation. Federalists had long maintained that the Supreme Court had the authority to nullify acts of Congress, and the Court itself had actually exercised the power of judicial review in 1796 when it upheld the validity of a law passed by Congress. But the Court’s authority in this area would not be secure, it was clear, until it actually declared a congressional act unconstitutional. In 1803, in the case of Marbury v. Madison , it did so. William Marbury, one of Adams’s midnight appointments, had been named a justice of the peace in the District of Columbia. But his commission, although signed and sealed, had not been delivered to him before Adams left office. When Jefferson took office, his secretary of state, James Madison, refused to hand over the commission. Marbury asked the Supreme Court to direct Madison to perform his official duty. But the Court ruled that while Marbury had a right to his commission, the Court had no authority to order Madison to deliver it. On the surface, therefore, the decision was a victory for the administration. But of much greater importance than the relatively insignificant matter of Marbury’s commission was the Court’s reasoning in the decision.
The original Judiciary Act of 1789 had given the Court the power to compel executive officials to act in such matters as the delivery of commissions, and it was on that basis that Marbury had filed his suit. But the Court ruled that Congress had exceeded its authority, that the Constitution defined the powers of the judiciary, and that the legislature had no right to expand them. The relevant section of the 1789 act was, therefore, unconstitutional and void. In seeming to deny its own authority, the Court was in fact radically enlarging it. The justices had repudiated a relatively minor power (the power to force the delivery of a commission) by asserting a vastly greater one (the power to nullify an act of Congress).
The chief justice of the United States at the time of the ruling (and until 1835) was John Marshall . A leading Federalist and prominent Virginia lawyer, he had served John Adams as secretary of state. Ironically, it was Marshall who had failed to deliver Marbury’s commission. In 1801, just before leaving office, Adams had appointed him chief justice, and almost immediately Marshall established himself as the dominant figure of the Court, shaping virtually all its most important rulings, including Marbury v. Madison. Through a succession of Republican presidents, he battled to give the federal government unity and strength. And in so doing, he established the judiciary as a coequal branch of government with the executive and the legislature.
DOUBLING THE NATIONAL DOMAIN
In the same year Jefferson was elected president of the United States, Napoleon Bonaparte made himself ruler of France with the title of first consul. In the year Jefferson was reelected, Napoleon named himself emperor. The two men had little in common, yet for a time they were of great assistance to each other in international politics.
Jefferson and Napoleon
Having failed in a grandiose plan to seize India from the British Empire, Napoleon began to dream of restoring French power in the New World. The territory east of the Mississippi, which France had ceded to Great Britain in 1763, was now part of the United States, but Napoleon hoped to regain the lands west of the Mississippi, which had belonged to Spain since the end of the Seven Years’ War. In 1800, under the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso, Page 170France regained title to Louisiana, which included almost the whole of the Mississippi Valley to the west of the river. The Louisiana Territory would, Napoleon hoped, become the heart of a great French empire in America.
Jefferson was unaware at first of Napoleon’s imperial ambitions in America. For a time he pursued a foreign policy that reflected his well-known admiration for France. But he began to reassess American relations with the French when he heard rumors of the secret transfer of Louisiana. Particularly troubling to Jefferson was French control of New Orleans, the outlet through which the produce of the fast-growing western regions of the United States was shipped to the markets of the world.
Jefferson was even more alarmed when, in the fall of 1802, he learned that the Spanish intendant at New Orleans (the French had not yet taken formal possession) had announced a disturbing new regulation. American ships sailing the Mississippi River had for many years been accustomed to depositing their cargoes in New Orleans for transfer to oceangoing vessels. The intendant now forbade the practice, even though Spain had guaranteed Americans that right in the Pinckney Treaty of 1795.
Westerners demanded that the federal government do something to reopen the river, and the president faced a dilemma. If he yielded to the frontier clamor and tried to change the policy by force, he would run the risk of a major war with France. If he ignored the westerners’ demands, he would lose political support. But Jefferson envisioned another solution. He instructed Robert Livingston, the American ambassador in Paris, to negotiate for the purchase of New Orleans. Livingston, on his own authority, proposed that the French sell the United States the rest of Louisiana as well.Page 171
THE LEVEE IN NEW ORLEANS Because of its location near the mouth of the Mississippi River, New Orleans was the principal port of western North America in the early nineteenth century. Through it, western farmers shipped their produce to markets in the East and Europe. This 1884 lithograph shows a busy traffic in goods through the port.
(Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-pga-00809])
In the meantime, Jefferson persuaded Congress to appropriate funds for an expansion of the army and the construction of a river fleet, and he hinted that American forces might descend on New Orleans and that the United States might form an alliance with Great Britain if the problems with France were not resolved. Perhaps in response, Napoleon suddenly decided to offer the United States the entire Louisiana Territory.
Napoleon had good reasons for the decision. His plans for an empire in America had already gone seriously awry, partly because a yellow fever epidemic had wiped out much of the French army sent to quell the rebellion in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) and partly because the expeditionary force he wished to send to reinforce the troops had been icebound in a Dutch harbor through the winter of 1802–1803. By the time the harbor thawed in the spring of 1803, Napoleon was preparing for a renewed war in Europe. He would not, he realized, have the resources to secure an empire in America.
The Louisiana Purchase
Faced with Napoleon’s sudden proposal, Livingston and James Monroe, whom Jefferson had sent to Paris to assist in the negotiations, had to decide whether they should accept it even if they had no authorization to do so. But fearful that Napoleon might withdraw the offer, they decided to proceed. After some haggling over the price, Livingston and Monroe signed an agreement with Napoleon on April 30, 1803.
By the terms of the treaty, the United States was to pay a total of $15 million to the French government, a bargain at under three cents an acre. The Americans would also grant certain exclusive commercial privileges to France in the port of New Orleans and incorporate the white residents of Louisiana into the Union with the same rights and privileges as other citizens. The boundaries of the purchase were not clearly defined. What was clear, however, was that the lands were far from uninhabited. The Osages, Kiowas, Mandans, Pawnees, Arapahos, Cheyennes, Shoshones, Omahas, Arikaras, Sioux, Otos, Crows, and other tribes lived within the Louisiana Purchase. But terrible smallpox epidemics had ravaged the West during the Revolution and then again in 1801. The decimation, though not destruction, of the native population allowed white people in the east to tell themselves stories of an empty West awaiting divinely ordained American expansion.
In Washington, the president was both pleased and embarrassed when he received the treaty. He was pleased with the terms of the bargain, but he was uncertain about his authority to accept it, since the Constitution said nothing about the acquisition of new territory. But Jefferson’s advisers persuaded him that his treaty-making power under the Constitution would justify the purchase, and Congress promptly approved it. Finally, late in 1803, General James Wilkinson, a commissioner of the United States, took formal control of the territory. Before long, the Louisiana Territory was organized on the general pattern of the Northwest Territory, with the assumption that it would be divided eventually into states. The first of these was admitted to the Union as the state of Louisiana in 1812.
Exploring the West
Meanwhile, a series of explorations revealed the geography of the far-flung new territory to white Americans. In 1803, Jefferson helped plan an expedition that was to cross the continent to the Pacific Ocean, gather geographical information, and investigate prospects for trade with indigenous peoples. (See “ Consider the Source: Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis. ”) The expedition began in May 1804. He named as its leader the twenty-nine-year-old Page 174Meriwether Lewis, a veteran of wars against Native Americans who was skilled in the ways of the wilderness. Lewis chose as a colleague the thirty-four-year-old William Clark, an experienced frontiersman and soldier. Lewis and Clark , with a company of four dozen men, started up the Missouri River from St. Louis. With the Shoshone woman Sacajawea as their interpreter, they eventually crossed the Rocky Mountains, descended along the Snake and Columbia Rivers, and in the late autumn of 1805 camped on the Pacific Coast. In September 1806, they were back in St. Louis with elaborate records of the geography and the native civilizations they had observed along the way.
CONSIDER THE SOURCE
THOMAS JEFFERSON TO MERIWETHER LEWIS (1803)
In the summer of 1803, between the purchase and the incorporation of the Louisiana Territory, President Jefferson sent the following instructions to the explorer Meriwether Lewis. Here Jefferson reveals not only his own expansive curiosity, but also his administration’s plans for the newly acquired lands.
To Meriwether Lewis, esquire, Captain of the 1st regiment of infantry of the United States of America: Your situation as Secretary of the President of the United States has made you acquainted with the objects of my confidential message of Jan. 18, 1803, to the legislature . . . you are appointed to carry them into execution.
Instruments for ascertaining by celestial observations the geography of the country thro’ which you will pass, have already been provided. Light articles for barter, & presents among the Indians, arms for your attendants, say for from 10 to 12 men, boats, tents, & other travelling apparatus, with ammunition, medicine, surgical instruments & provisions you will have prepared with such aids as the Secretary at War can yield in his department; & from him also you will receive authority to engage among our troops, by voluntary agreement, the number of attendants above mentioned, over whom you, as their commanding officer are invested with all the powers the laws give in such a case. . . .
Your mission has been communicated to the Ministers here from France, Spain & Great Britain, and through them to their governments: and such assurances given them as to it’s objects as we trust will satisfy them. The country of Louisiana having been ceded by Spain to France, the passport you have from the Minister of France, the representative of the present sovereign of the country, will be a protection with all its subjects: And that from the Minister of England will entitle you to the friendly aid of any traders of that allegiance with whom you may happen to meet.
The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it’s course & communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce.
Beginning at the mouth of the Missouri, you will take observations of latitude & longitude, at all remarkable points on the river, & especially at the mouths of rivers, at rapids, at islands & other places & objects distinguished by such natural marks & characters of a durable kind, as that they may with certainty be recognized hereafter. . . . The interesting points of the portage between the heads of the Missouri & the water offering the best communication with the Pacific Ocean should also be fixed by observation, & the course of that water to the ocean, in the same manner as that of the Missouri.
Your observations are to be taken with great pains & accuracy, to be entered distinctly, & intelligibly for others as well as yourself, to comprehend all the elements necessary, with the aid of the usual tables, to fix the latitude and longitude of the places at which they were taken, & are to be rendered to the war office, for the purpose of having the calculations made concurrently by proper persons within the U.S. Several copies of these, as well as your other notes, should be made at leisure times & put into the care of the most trustworthy of your attendants, to guard by multiplying them, against the accidental losses to which they will be exposed. A further guard would be that one of these copies be written on the paper of the birch, as less liable to injury from damp than common paper.
The commerce which may be carried on with the people inhabiting the line you will pursue, renders a knowledge of these people important. You will therefore endeavor to make yourself acquainted, as far as a diligent pursuit of your journey shall admit, with the names of the nations & their numbers; the extent & limits of their possessions; their relations with other tribes or nations; their language, traditions, monuments; their ordinary occupations in agriculture, fishing, hunting, war, arts, & the implements for these; their food, clothing, & domestic accomodations; the diseases prevalent among them, & the remedies they use; moral & physical circumstances which distinguish them from the tribes we know; peculiarities in their laws, customs & dispositions; and articles of commerce they may need or furnish, & to what extent.
And considering the interest which every nation has in extending & strengthening the authority of reason & justice among the people around them, it will be useful to acquire what knowledge you can of the state of morality, religion & information among them, as it may better enable those who endeavor to civilize & instruct them, to adapt their measures to the existing notions & practises of those on whom they are to operate.
Other objects worthy of notice will be the soil & face of the country, it’s growth & vegetable productions; especially those not of the U.S.; the animals of the country generally, & especially those not known in the U.S., the remains and accounts of any which may be deemed rare or extinct; the mineral productions of every kind; but more particularly metals, limestone, pit coal & saltpetre; salines & mineral waters, noting the temperature of the last, & such circumstances as may indicate their character. Volcanic appearances. Climate as characterized by the thermometer, by the proportion of rainy, cloudy & clear days, by lightening, hail, snow, ice, by the access & recess of frost, by the winds prevailing at different seasons, the dates at which particular plants put forth or lose their flowers, or leaf, times of appearance of particular birds, reptiles or insects.
[. . .]
In all your intercourse with the natives treat them in the most friendly & conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit; allay all jealousies as to the object of your journey, satisfy them of it’s innocence, make them acquainted with the position, extent, character, peaceable & commercial dispositions of the U.S., of our wish to be neighborly, friendly & useful to them, & of our dispositions to a commercial intercourse with them; confer with them on the points most convenient as mutual emporiums, & the articles of most desireable interchange for them & us. If a few of their influential chiefs, within practicable distance, wish to visit us, arrange such a visit with them, and furnish them with authority to call on our officers, on their entering the U.S. to have them conveyed to this place at public expence. If any of them should wish to have some of their young people brought up with us, & taught such arts as may be useful to them, we will receive, instruct & take care of them, such a mission.
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. At the time that Jefferson wrote this letter, who held official possession of Louisiana? What European nations were present in the Louisiana Territory?
2. What do the details of this letter reveal about Jefferson’s own interest in nature and science?
3. What guidance did Jefferson offer Lewis in regard to natives? What policy toward Native Americans did Jefferson seem to have in mind for the future?
Source: Barth, Gunther (ed.), The Lewis and Clark Expedition: Selections from the Journals, Arranged by Topic. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1998, 18–22. Original manuscript in Bureau of Rolls, Jefferson Papers, ser. 1, vol. 9, doc. 269, reprinted in Thwaites, Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 7:247–252.
While Lewis and Clark explored, Jefferson dispatched groups to other parts of the Louisiana Territory. Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike, twenty-six years old, led an expedition in the fall of 1805 from St. Louis into the upper Mississippi Valley. In the summer of 1806, he set out again, proceeding up the valley of the Arkansas River and into what later became Colorado. His account of his western travels helped create an enduring (and inaccurate) impression among most Americans that the land between the Missouri River and the Rockies was an uncultivable desert.
EXPLORING THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE, 1804—1807 When Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, he doubled the size of the nation. But few Americans knew what they had bought. The Lewis and Clark expedition set out in 1804 to investigate the new territory, and this map shows their route, along with that of another explorer, Zebulon Pike. Note the vast distances the two parties covered (including, in both cases, a great deal of land outside the Louisiana Purchase), as well as the fact these lands were already inhabited by indigenous groups. Note, too, how much of this enormous territory lay outside the orbit of even these ambitious explorations.
What might explain why the explorers took such winding routes through the territories?
Page 175
The Burr Conspiracy
Jefferson’s triumphant reelection in 1804 suggested that most of the nation approved of the new territorial acquisition. But some New England Federalists raged against it. They realized that the more new states joined the Union, the less power their region and party would retain. In Massachusetts, a group of the most extreme Federalists, known as the Essex Junto, concluded that the only recourse for New England was to secede from the Union and form a separate “northern confederacy.” If such a breakaway state were to have any hope for survival, the Federalists believed, it would have to include New York and New Jersey as well as New England. But the leading Federalist in New York, Alexander Hamilton, refused to support the secessionist scheme.
Federalists in New York then turned to Hamilton’s greatest political rival, Vice President Aaron Burr. Burr accepted a Federalist proposal that he become their candidate for governor of New York in 1804, and there were rumors he had also agreed to support the Federalist plans for secession . Hamilton accused Burr of plotting treason and made numerous private remarks, widely reported in the press, about Burr’s “despicable” character. When Burr lost the election, he blamed his defeat on Hamilton’s malevolence and challenged him to a duel. Hamilton feared that refusing Burr’s challenge would brand him a coward. And so, on a July morning in 1804, the two men met at Weehawken, New Jersey. Hamilton was wounded and died the next day.
Burr now had to flee New York to avoid an indictment for murder. He found new outlets for his ambitions in the West. Even before the duel, he had begun corresponding with General James Wilkinson, now governor of the Louisiana Territory. Burr and Wilkinson, it seems clear, hoped to lead an expedition that would capture Mexico from the Spanish. But there were also rumors they wanted to separate the Southwest from the Union and create a western empire that Burr would rule. (There is little evidence that these rumors were true.)
Whether true or not, many of Burr’s opponents chose to believe the rumors, including, ultimately, Jefferson himself. When Burr led a group of armed followers down the Ohio River by boat in 1806, disturbing reports flowed into Washington (the most alarming from Wilkinson, who had suddenly turned against Burr) that an attack on New Orleans was imminent. Jefferson ordered the arrest of Burr and his men as traitors. Burr was brought to Richmond for trial. But to Jefferson’s chagrin, Chief Justice Marshall limited the evidence the government could present and defined the charge in such a way the jury had little choice but to acquit. Burr soon faded from the public eye. But when he learned of the Texas revolution against Mexico years later, he said, “What was treason in me thirty years ago is patriotic now.”
The Burr conspiracy was in part the story of a single man’s soaring ambitions and flamboyant personality. But it also exposed the larger perils still facing the new nation. With a central government that remained deliberately weak, with ambitious political leaders willing, if necessary, to circumvent normal channels in their search for power, the legitimacy of the federal government—and indeed the existence of the United States as a stable and united nation—remained tenuous.
EXPANSION AND WAR
Two very different conflicts were taking shape in the last years of Jefferson’s presidency. One was the continuing tension in Europe, which in 1803 escalated once again into a full-scale conflict (the Napoleonic Wars). As fighting between the British and the French Page 176increased, each side took steps to prevent the United States from trading with the other. The other conflict occurred in North America itself, a result of the ceaseless westward expansion of white settlement, which was colliding with a native population committed to protecting its lands from intruders. In both the North and the South, the threatened tribes mobilized to resist white encroachments. They began as well to forge connections with British forces in Canada and Spanish forces in Florida. The Indian conflict on land, therefore, became intertwined with the European conflict on the seas, and ultimately helped cause the War of 1812.
Conflict on the Seas
In 1805, at the Battle of Trafalgar, a British fleet virtually destroyed what was left of the French navy. Because France could no longer challenge the British at sea, Napoleon now chose to pressure Britain in other ways. The result was what he called the Continental System, designed to close the European continent to British trade. Napoleon issued a series of decrees barring British and neutral ships touching at British ports from landing their cargoes at any European port controlled by France or its allies. The British government replied to Napoleon’s decrees by establishing a blockade of the European coast. The blockade required that any goods being shipped to Napoleon’s Europe be carried either in British vessels or in neutral vessels stopping at British ports—precisely what Napoleon’s policies forbade.
In the early nineteenth century, the United States had developed one of the most important merchant marines in the world, one that soon controlled a large proportion of the trade between Europe and the West Indies. But the events in Europe now challenged that control, because American ships were caught between Napoleon’s decrees and Britain’s blockade. If they sailed directly for the European continent, they risked being captured by the British navy. If they sailed by way of a British port, they ran the risk of seizure by the French. Both of the warring powers were violating America’s rights as a neutral nation. But most Americans considered the British, with their greater sea power, the worse offender—especially since British vessels frequently stopped American ships on the high seas and seized sailors off the decks, making them victims of impressment .
Impressment
Many British sailors called their navy—with its floggings, low pay, and terrible shipboard conditions—a “floating hell.” Few volunteered. Most had had to be “impressed” (forced) into service, and at every opportunity they deserted. By 1807, many of these deserters had emigrated to the United States and joined the American merchant marine or navy. To check this loss of manpower, the British claimed the right to stop and search American merchantmen and reimpress deserters. They did not claim the right to take native-born Americans, but they did insist on the right to seize naturalized Americans born on British soil. In practice, the British navy often made no careful distinctions, impressing British deserters and native-born Americans alike.
In the summer of 1807, the British went to more provocative extremes. Sailing from Norfolk, with several alleged deserters from the British navy among the crew, the American naval frigate Chesapeake was hailed by the British ship Leopard. When the American commander, James Barron, refused to allow the British to search the Chesapeake, the Leopard opened fire. Barron had no choice but to surrender, and a boarding party from the Leopard dragged four men off the American frigate.Page 177
When news of the Chesapeake-Leopard incident reached the United States, there was a great popular clamor for revenge. Jefferson and his secretary of state James Madison tried to maintain the peace. Jefferson expelled all British warships from American waters to lessen the likelihood of future incidents. Then he sent instructions to his minister in London, James Monroe, to demand from the British government an end to impressment. Britain disavowed the actions of the Leopard’s commanding officer and recalled him, offered compensation for those killed and wounded in the incident, and promised to return three of the captured sailors (the fourth had been hanged). But the British cabinet refused to renounce impressment and instead reasserted its right to recover deserting seamen.
“Peaceable Coercion”
To prevent future incidents that might bring the nation again to the brink of war, Jefferson persuaded Congress to pass a drastic measure late in 1807. Known as the Embargo Act, it prohibited all foreign trade. The embargo was widely evaded, but it was effective enough to create a serious depression throughout most of the nation. Hardest hit were the merchants and shipowners of the Northeast, most of them Federalists.
The presidential election of 1808 came in the midst of this embargo-induced depression. James Madison was elected president, but the Federalist candidate, Charles Pinckney again, ran much more strongly than he had in 1804. The Embargo Act was clearly a growing political liability, and Jefferson decided to back down. A few days before leaving office, he approved a bill ending his experiment with what he called “peaceable coercion.”
STRUGGLING WITH THE EMBARGO This cartoon shows a merchant being injured by the terms of the U.S. embargo, which is personified by the snapping turtle. The word Ograbme is “embargo” spelled backward. The embargo not only enraged American merchants but also failed to resolve the maritime tensions with the British that ultimately helped lead to war in 1812.
(©North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy)
Page 178To replace the embargo, Congress passed the Non-Intercourse Act just before Madison took office. It reopened trade with all nations but Great Britain and France. A year later, in 1810, the Non-Intercourse Act expired and was replaced by Macon’s Bill No. 2, which reopened free commercial relations with those two powers but authorized the president to prohibit commerce with either belligerent if it should continue violating neutral shipping after the other had stopped. Napoleon, in an effort to induce the United States to reimpose the embargo against Britain, announced that France would no longer interfere with American shipping. Madison announced that an embargo against Great Britain alone would automatically go into effect early in 1811 unless Britain renounced its restrictions on American shipping.
In time, this new, limited embargo persuaded London to repeal its blockade of Europe. But the repeal came too late to prevent war. In any case, naval policies were only part of growing tensions between Britain and the United States.
The “Indian Problem” and the British
Given the ruthlessness with which white settlers in North America had continued to dislodge native tribes, it was hardly surprising that indigenous peoples continued to look to England for protection. The British in Canada, for their part, had relied on Native Americans as partners in the lucrative fur trade. There had been relative peace in the Northwest for over a decade after Jay’s Treaty and Anthony Wayne’s victory over the tribes at Fallen Timbers in 1794. But the 1807 war crisis following the Chesapeake-Leopard incident revived the conflict between Indians and white settlers.
The Virginia-born William Henry Harrison , already a veteran of combat against Native Americans at age twenty-six, went to Washington as the congressional delegate from the Northwest Territory in 1799. An advocate of development in the western lands, he was largely responsible for the passage in 1800 of the so-called Harrison Land Law, which enabled white settlers to acquire farms from the public domain on much easier terms than before.
In 1801, Jefferson appointed Harrison governor of the Indiana Territory to administer the president’s proposed solution to the “Indian problem.” Jefferson offered native groups a choice: they could convert themselves into settled farmers and become part of white society, or they could migrate west of the Mississippi. In either case, they would have to agree by treaty to give up claims to their tribal lands in the Northwest.
Jefferson considered the assimilation policy a benign alternative to continuing conflict between Indians and white settlers. But to the tribes, the new policy seemed terribly harsh, especially given the cruel efficiency with which Harrison set out to implement it. He used threats, bribes, trickery, and whatever other tactics he felt would help him conclude treaties. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the number of white Americans who had settled west of the Appalachians had grown to more than 500,000—a population far larger than that of the Native Americans. The tribes would face ever-growing pressure to move out of the way of the rapidly growing white settlements. By 1807 the United States had extracted treaty rights to eastern Michigan, southern Indiana, and most of Illinois from reluctant tribal leaders.
Meanwhile, in the Southwest, white Americans were taking millions of acres from other tribes in Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. The Indians wanted desperately to resist, but the separate tribes were helpless by themselves against the power of the United States. Yet two new factors emboldened them. One was the policy of British authorities in Canada. After the Chesapeake incident, they began to expect an American invasion of Canada and therefore renewed efforts to forge alliances with the Indians. A second and more important factor was the rise of two remarkable native leaders, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh.Page 179
Tecumseh and the Prophet
Tenskwatawa was a charismatic religious leader and orator known as “ the Prophet .” Like Handsome Lake, he had experienced a mystical awakening in the process of recovering from alcoholism. Having freed himself from what he considered the evil effects of white culture, he began to speak to his people of the superior virtues of Indian civilization and the sinfulness and corruption of the white world. In the process, he inspired a religious revival that spread through numerous tribes and helped unite them. The Prophet’s headquarters at the meeting of Tippecanoe Creek and the Wabash River (known as Prophetstown) became a sacred place for people of many tribes. Out of their common religious experiences, they began to consider joint military efforts as well. Tenskwatawa advocated an Indian society entirely separate from that of white Americans and a culture rooted in tribal tradition. The effort to trade with the Anglos and to borrow from their culture would, he argued, lead to the death of native ways.
Tecumseh—the chief of the Shawnees, called by his tribe “the Shooting Star”—was in many ways more militant than his brother Tenskwatawa. “Where today are the Pequot,” he thundered. “Where are . . . the other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man.” He warned of his tribe’s extermination if they did not take action against the white Americans moving into their lands.
Tecumseh understood that only through united action could the tribes hope to resist the steady advance of white civilization. Beginning in 1809, he set out to unite all the tribes of the Mississippi Valley into what became known as the Tecumseh Confederacy. Together, he promised, they would halt white expansion, recover the whole Northwest, and make the Ohio River the boundary between the United States and Indian country. He maintained that Harrison and others, by negotiating treaties with individual tribes, had obtained no real title to land. The land belonged to all the tribes; none of them could rightfully cede any of it without the consent of the others. In 1811, Tecumseh left Prophetstown and traveled down the Mississippi to visit the tribes of the South and persuade them to join the alliance.
During Tecumseh’s absence, Governor Harrison saw a chance to destroy the growing influence of the two Indian leaders. With 1,000 soldiers, he camped near Prophetstown, and on November 7, 1811, he provoked an armed conflict. Although the white forces suffered losses as heavy as those of the Native Americans, Harrison drove off the Indians and burned the town. The Battle of Tippecanoe, named for the creek, disillusioned many of the Prophet’s followers, and Tecumseh returned to find the confederacy in disarray. But there were still warriors eager for combat, and by the spring of 1812 they were raiding white settlements along the frontier.
The mobilization of the tribes resulted largely from indigenous initiative, but Britain’s agents in Canada had encouraged and helped supply the uprising. To Harrison and most white residents of the regions, there seemed only one way to make the West safe for Americans: drive the British out of Canada and annex that province to the United States.
Florida and War Fever
While white frontiersmen in the North demanded the conquest of Canada, those in the South looked to the acquisition of Spanish Florida. The territory was a continuing threat to whites in the southern United States. Enslaved people escaped across the Florida border, and Indians there launched frequent raids north. But white southerners also coveted Florida’s network of rivers that could provide residents of the Southwest with access to valuable ports on the Gulf of Mexico.Page 180
In 1810, American settlers in West Florida (presently part of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana) seized the Spanish fort at Baton Rouge and asked the federal government to annex the territory to the United States. President Madison happily agreed and then began planning to get the rest of Florida, too. The desire for Florida became yet another motivation for war with Britain. Spain was Britain’s ally, and a war might provide an excuse for taking Spanish as well as British territory.
By 1812, therefore, war fever was raging on both the northern and southern borders of the United States. The demands of the residents of these areas found substantial support in Washington among a group of determined young congressmen who earned the name War Hawks .
In the congressional elections of 1810, voters elected a large number of representatives of both parties eager for war with Britain. The most influential of them came from the new states in the West or from the backcountry of the old states in the South. Two of their leaders, both recently elected to the House of Representatives, were Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, men of great intellect, magnetism, and ambition. Both were supporters of war with Great Britain.
Clay was elected Speaker of the House in 1811, and he appointed Calhoun to the crucial Committee on Foreign Affairs. Both men began agitating for the conquest of Canada. Madison still preferred peace but was losing control of Congress. On June 18, 1812, he approved a declaration of war against Britain.
THE WAR OF 1812
The British were not eager for conflict with the United States. Even after the Americans declared war, Britain largely ignored them for a time, occupied as they were with fighting the French in the Napoleonic Wars. But in the fall of 1812, Napoleon launched a catastrophic campaign against Russia that left his army in disarray. By late 1813, with the French Empire on its way to final defeat, Britain was able to turn its military attention to America.
Battles with the Tribes
In the summer of 1812, American forces invaded Canada through Detroit. They soon had to retreat back to Detroit and in August surrendered the fort there. Other invasion efforts also failed. In the meantime, Fort Dearborn (later Chicago) fell before an Indian attack.
Things went only slightly better for the United States on the seas. At first, American frigates won some spectacular victories over British warships. But by 1813, the British navy was counterattacking effectively, driving the American frigates to cover and imposing a blockade on the United States.
The United States did, however, achieve significant early military successes on the Great Lakes. First, the Americans took command of Lake Ontario, permitting them to raid and burn York (now Toronto), the capital of Canada. American forces then seized control of Lake Erie, mainly through the work of the young Oliver Hazard Perry, who engaged and dispersed a British fleet at Put-in-Bay on September 10, 1813. This made possible, at last, a more successful invasion of Canada by way of Detroit. William Henry Harrison pushed up the Thames River into upper Canada and on October 5, 1813, won a victory notable for the death of Tecumseh, who was serving as a brigadier general in the British army. The Battle of the Thames resulted in no lasting occupation of Canada, but it weakened and disheartened the Native Americans of the Northwest.Page 181
In the meantime, another white military leader was striking an even harder blow at Indians in the Southwest. The Creek, supplied by the Spaniards in Florida, had been attacking white settlers near the Florida border. Andrew Jackson, a wealthy Tennessee planter and a general in the state militia, set off in pursuit of the Creek. On March 27, 1814, in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson’s men took terrible revenge on the Indians, slaughtering women and children along with warriors. The tribe agreed to cede most of its lands to the United States and would eventually retreat westward. The vicious battle also won Jackson a commission as major general in the U.S. Army, and in that capacity he led his men south into Florida. On November 7, 1814, he seized the Spanish fort at Pensacola.
Battles with the British
But the victories over the tribes did not end the war. After the surrender of Napoleon in 1814, Britain decided to invade the United States. A British armada sailed up the Patuxent River Page 182from Chesapeake Bay and landed an army that marched to nearby Bladensburg, on the outskirts of Washington, where it dispersed a poorly trained force of American militiamen. On August 24, 1814, British troops entered Washington and put the government to flight. Then they set fire to several public buildings, including the White House, in retaliation for the earlier American burning of the Canadian capital at York.
Leaving Washington in partial ruins, the invading army proceeded up the bay toward Baltimore. But that city, guarded by Fort McHenry, was prepared. To block the approaching fleet, the American garrison had sunk several ships in the Patapsco River (the entry to Baltimore’s harbor), thus forcing the British to bombard the fort from a distance. Through the night of September 13, Francis Scott Key, a Washington lawyer on board one of the British ships to negotiate the return of prisoners, watched the bombardment. The next morning, “by the dawn’s early light,” he could see the flag on the fort still flying. He recorded his pride in the moment by writing a poem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The British withdrew from Baltimore, and Key’s words were soon set to the tune of an old English drinking song. (In 1931 “The Star-Spangled Banner” became the official national anthem.)
Meanwhile, American forces repelled another British invasion in northern New York. At the Battle of Plattsburgh, on September 11, 1814, they turned back a much larger British naval and land force. In the South, a formidable array of battle-hardened British veterans landed below New Orleans and prepared to advance north up the Mississippi. Awaiting the British was Andrew Jackson with a contingent of Tennesseans, Kentuckians, Creoles, blacks, pirates, and regular army troops drawn up behind earthen breastworks. On January 8, 1815, the redcoats advanced on the American fortifications, but the exposed British forces were no match for Jackson’s well-protected men. After the Americans had repulsed several waves of attackers, the British finally retreated, leaving behind 700 dead, 1,400 wounded, and 500 prisoners. Jackson’s losses were 8 killed and 13 wounded. Only later did news reach North America that the United States and Britain had signed a peace treaty several weeks before the Battle of New Orleans.
THE WAR OF 1812 This map illustrates the military maneuvers of the British and the Americans during the War of 1812. It shows all the theaters of the war, from New Orleans to southern Canada, the extended land and water battle along the Canadian border and in the Great Lakes, and the fighting around Washington and Baltimore. Note how in all these theaters there are about the same number of British and American victories.
What finally brought this inconclusive war to an end?
The Revolt of New England
With a few notable exceptions, the military efforts of the United States between 1812 and 1815 had failed. As a result, the Republican government became increasingly unpopular. In New England, opposition both to the war and to the Republicans was so extreme that some Federalists celebrated British victories. In Congress, in the meantime, the Republicans had continual trouble with the Federalist opposition, led by the young New Hampshire congressman Daniel Webster.
By now the Federalists were in the minority in the country, but they were still the majority party in New England. Some of them began to dream once again of creating a separate nation. Talk of secession reached a climax in the winter of 1814–1815.
On December 15, 1814, delegates from the New England states met in Hartford, Connecticut, to discuss their grievances against the Madison administration. The would-be seceders at the Hartford Convention were outnumbered by a comparatively moderate majority. But while the convention’s report only hinted at secession, it reasserted the right of nullification and proposed seven amendments to the Constitution designed to protect New England from the growing influence of the South and the West.
Because the war was going so badly, the New Englanders assumed that the Republicans would have to agree to their demands. Soon after the convention adjourned, however, the news of Jackson’s victory at New Orleans reached the cities of the Northeast. A day or Page 183two later, reports of a peace treaty arrived from abroad. In the changed atmosphere, the aims of the Hartford Convention and the Federalist Party came to seem futile, irrelevant, even treasonable. The party would never recover from those associations with disloyalty.
The Peace Settlement
Negotiations between the United States and Britain began in August 1814, when American and British diplomats met in Ghent, Belgium. John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and Albert Gallatin led the American delegation. Although both sides began with extravagant demands, the final treaty did little except end the fighting itself. The Americans gave up their demand for a British renunciation of impressment and for the cession of Canada to the United States. The British abandoned their call for the creation of an Indian buffer state in the Northwest and made other, minor territorial concessions. The treaty was signed on Christmas Eve 1814.
Both sides had reason to accept this skimpy agreement. The British, exhausted and in debt from their prolonged conflict with Napoleon, were eager to settle the lesser dispute in North America. The Americans realized that with the defeat of Napoleon in Europe, the British would no longer have much incentive to interfere with American commerce.
Other settlements followed the Treaty of Ghent. A commercial treaty in 1815 gave Americans the right to trade freely with England and much of the British Empire. The Rush-Bagot agreement of 1817 provided for mutual disarmament on the Great Lakes. Eventually, though not until 1872, the Canadian–American boundary became the longest “unguarded frontier” in the world.
For Native Americans east of the Mississippi, the conflict dealt another disastrous blow to their ability to resist white expansion. Tecumseh was dead. The British were gone from the Northwest. And the intertribal alliance of Tecumseh and the Prophet had collapsed. As the end of the war spurred a new white movement westward, indigenous peoples were less able than ever to defend their land.
CONCLUSION
Thomas Jefferson called his election to the presidency the “Revolution of 1800,” and his supporters believed that his victory would bring a dramatic change in the character of the nation—a retreat from Hamilton’s dreams of a powerful, developing nation and a return to an ideal of a simple agrarian republic.
But American society was changing rapidly, making it virtually impossible for the Jeffersonian dream to prevail. The nation’s population was expanding and diversifying. Its cities were growing, and its commercial life was becoming ever more important. In 1803, the Jefferson administration made one of the most important contributions to the growth of the United States: the Louisiana Purchase, which dramatically expanded the physical boundaries of the nation and extended white settlement deeper into the continent. In the process, it greatly widened the battles between Europeans and Native Americans.
The growing national pride and commercial ambitions of the United States gradually created another serious conflict with Great Britain: the War of 1812, a war that was settled finally in 1814 on terms at least mildly favorable to the United States. By then, the bitter party rivalries that had characterized the first years of the republic had to some degree subsided, and the nation was poised to enter what became known, quite inaccurately, as the “era of good feelings.”
