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EXPANSION AND DIVISION IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC
· SECTIONALISM AND NATIONALISM
LOOKING AHEAD
1. How did the economic developments and territorial expansion of this era affect American nationalism?
2. What was the “era of good feelings,” and why was it given that name?
3. How did the Marshall Court seek to establish a strong national government?
LIKE A “FIRE BELL IN THE NIGHT,” as Thomas Jefferson said, the issue of slavery arose after the War of 1812 to threaten the unity of the nation. The debate began when the territory of Missouri applied for admission to the Union, raising the question of whether it would be a free or a slaveholding state. But the larger issue, one that would rise again and again to plague the republic, was whether the vast new western regions of the United States would ultimately align politically with the North or the South.
The Missouri crisis, settled in 1820, was significant because it was a sign of sectional crises to come. But at the time, it was also significant because it stood in such sharp contrast to the rising American nationalism of the years following the war. Whatever forces might have been working to pull the nation apart, stronger ones were acting, at least for a time, to draw it together. A set of widely shared sentiments and ideals worked to unite white Americans of what historians call the early republic: the memory of the Revolution, the veneration of the Constitution, the belief that America had a special mission in the world.
In their twilight years, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, members of opposing parties, one a northerner, one a southerner, kept up a correspondence in which they fretted over looming sectional conflict. Then, on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the two founders died within hours of each other. Bedside witnesses reported Jefferson asking at the end, “Is it the Fourth?” Adams, meanwhile, comforted those around him moments before his death by saying, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” In fact the Virginian had died a few hours earlier.
STABILIZING ECONOMIC GROWTH
After the War of 1812, the United States continued its economic growth and territorial expansion. Yet a vigorous postwar boom led to a disastrous bust in 1819. This collapse was evidence the United States continued to lack some of the basic institutions necessary to sustain long-term growth.
The Government and Economic Growth
The War of 1812 produced chaos in shipping and banking, and it exposed dramatically the inadequacy of the nation’s existing transportation and financial systems. The aftermath of the war, therefore, led to new efforts to strengthen national economic development.
The wartime experience underlined the need for another national bank. After the expiration of the first bank’s charter, a large number of state banks had issued vast quantities of banknotes, creating a confusing variety of currency of widely differing value. It was difficult to tell what any banknote was really worth, and counterfeiting was easy. In response to these problems, Congress chartered a second Bank of the United States in 1816, much like its predecessor of 1791 but with more capital. The national bank could not forbid state banks from issuing notes, but its size and power enabled it to compel the state banks to issue only sound notes or risk being forced out of business.
Congress also acted to promote manufacturing, which the war (by cutting off imports) had already greatly stimulated. The American textile industry, in particular, had grown dramatically. Between 1807 and 1815, the total number of cotton spindles in the country increased more than fifteenfold, from 8,000 to 130,000. Before the war, the textile factories clustered in New England produced only yarn and thread, while families operating Page 187hand looms at home did the actual weaving of cloth. Then the Boston merchant Francis Cabot Lowell , after examining British textile machinery, developed a power loom that improved upon it. In 1813, in Waltham, Massachusetts, Lowell founded the first mill in America to carry on the processes of spinning and weaving under a single roof.
The end of the war suddenly dimmed the prospects for American industry. British ships swarmed into American ports and unloaded cargoes of manufactured goods, many priced below cost. In response, in 1816, protectionists in Congress passed a tariff law that effectively limited competition from abroad on a wide range of items, including cotton cloth, despite objections from agricultural interests, who stood to pay higher prices for manufactured goods.
Transportation
A pressing economic need of the early republican period was a better transportation system to link the vast territories of the growing United States. But should the federal government help finance roads and other “internal improvements”? The idea of using government funds to finance road building was not a new one. When Ohio entered the Union in 1803, the federal government agreed that part of the proceeds from the sale of public lands there should finance road construction. And in 1807, Congress enacted a law proposed by the Jefferson administration that permitted using revenues from Ohio land sales to finance a National Road from the Potomac River to the Ohio. By 1818, the highway ran as far as Wheeling, Virginia, on the Ohio River; and the Lancaster Pike, financed in part by the state of Pennsylvania, extended westward to Pittsburgh.
At the same time, steam-powered shipping was expanding rapidly. By 1816, river steamers were sailing up the Mississippi to the Ohio River and up the Ohio as far as Pittsburgh. Steamboats were soon carrying more cargo on the Mississippi than all the earlier forms of river transport combined—flatboats, barges, and others. They stimulated the agricultural economy of the West and the South by providing cheaper access to markets, and they enabled eastern manufacturers to send their finished goods west much more readily.
STEAMBOATS ON THE HUDSON Inventor Robert Fulton developed an engine that could propel a boat from Manhattan to Albany, a distance of about 150 miles, in 32 hours. His steam-powered vessels were the first to be large and reliable enough for commercial use. This painting from 1854 by James Bard depicts the towboat “John Birkbeck.”
(Source: National Gallery of Art, Washington)
Page 188Nevertheless, serious gaps in the nation’s transportation network remained, as the War of 1812 had shown. Once the British blockade had cut off Atlantic shipping, the coastal roads had become choked by the unaccustomed volume of north–south traffic. Congress passed a bill introduced by Representative John C. Calhoun that would use government funds to finance internal improvements. But President James Madison, on his last day in office, vetoed it. He believed that Congress lacked authority to fund the improvements without a constitutional amendment. For a time, state governments and private enterprise were left on their own to build the transportation network necessary for the growing American economy.
EXPANDING WESTWARD
Another reason for the rising interest in internal improvements was the dramatic westward surge of white Americans. By 1820, white settlers had pushed well beyond the Mississippi River, and the western population of citizens was increasing more rapidly than the rest of the nation.
The Great Migration
The westward movement of Euro-Americans was one of the most important developments of the early republican period and the nineteenth century more broadly. It occurred for several reasons.
One was population growth, which drove many white Americans out of the crowded East. Between 1800 and 1820, the American population nearly doubled—from 5.3 million to 9.6 million. Most Americans were still farmers, and the agricultural lands of the East were by now largely occupied or exhausted. In the South, the spread of the plantation system limited opportunities for new settlers. Another reason for westward migration was that the West itself was increasingly attractive to white settlers. Land there was much more plentiful than in the East. And in the aftermath of the War of 1812, the federal government continued its policy of pushing Native Americans westward, signing treaties in 1815 that took more land from the tribes. Migrants from throughout the East flocked in increasing numbers to what was then known as the Old Northwest (part of the present-day Midwest). Most settlers floated downstream on flatboats on the Ohio River, then left the river, often at Cincinnati, and traveled overland with wagons, handcarts, packhorses, cattle, and hogs.
White Settlers in the Old Northwest
Having arrived at their new lands, most settlers built lean-tos or cabins, hewed clearings out of the forest, and planted crops of corn to supplement wild game and domestic animals. It was a rough and lonely existence. Men, women, and children worked side by side in the fields, and at times had virtually no outside contact for weeks or months.
Life in the western territories was not, however, entirely solitary or individualistic. Migrants often journeyed westward in groups and built communities with schools, churches, and stores. The labor shortage in the interior led neighbors to develop systems of mutual aid. They gathered periodically to raise a barn, clear land, or harvest crops.
Another common feature of life in the Old Northwest was mobility. Individuals and families were constantly on the move, settling for a few years in one place and then selling Page 189their land (often at a significant profit) and resettling somewhere else. When new areas for settlement opened farther to the west, it was often the people already on the western edges of white settlement—rather than those coming from the East—who flocked to them first.
The Plantation System in the Old Southwest
In the Old Southwest (later known as the Deep South), the new agricultural economy emerged along different lines. The market for cotton continued to grow, and the Old Southwest contained a broad zone where cotton could thrive. That zone became known as the Black Belt, a region of dark, productive soil in Alabama and Mississippi.
The first whites to arrive in the Old Southwest were usually small farmers who made rough clearings in the forest. But wealthier planters soon followed. They bought up the cleared land, as the original settlers moved farther west. Success in the wilderness was by no means assured, even for the wealthiest settlers. Many planters managed to do little more than subsist in their new environment, and others experienced utter ruin. But some planters soon expanded small clearings into vast cotton fields. They replaced the cabins of the early pioneers with more sumptuous log dwellings and ultimately with imposing mansions. They also built up large enslaved workforces.
The rapid seizure and settlement of the Old Northwest and Southwest resulted in the admission of four new states to the Union: Indiana in 1816, Mississippi in 1817, Illinois in 1818, and Alabama in 1819.
Trade and Trapping in the Far West
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, few Anglo-Americans ventured into the far western areas of the continent. The lands comprising what is now Texas, California, and much of the rest of the far Southwest belonged to the Spanish colony of New Spain. But the revolutionary fervor of the age stimulated an independence movement, and in 1821 insurgents declared victory, replacing New Spain with the independent Mexican Empire. Several years later the Mexican Empire became a republic.
After independence, Mexico almost immediately opened its northern territories to trade with and settlement by Americans. The new government hoped that settlers, who were to become Mexican citizens, would help secure their northern border, and that traders would strengthen their connection to the continental economy. Instead, American traders quickly displaced Indian and Mexican traders. In New Mexico, for example, the Missouri merchant William Becknell began in 1821 to offer American manufactured goods for sale, priced considerably below the Mexican goods that had dominated the market in the past. Mexico effectively lost its markets in its own territory as a steady traffic of commercial wagon trains began moving back and forth along the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and New Mexico. Over in Texas, American land speculators like Moses Austin and his son Stephen sold off parcels of their huge land grants from Mexico to small farmers. Rather than assimilating into the Mexican state, the Texas settlers maintained a separate identity and practiced slavery that was banned elsewhere in the republic.
Fur traders created a wholly new kind of commerce. After the War of 1812, John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company and other firms extended their operations from the Great Lakes area westward to the Rockies. At first, fur traders did most of their business by purchasing pelts from indigenous peoples. But increasingly, white trappers entered the region and joined the Iroquois and other Indians in pursuit of beaver and other furs.Page 190
The trappers, or “mountain men,” who began trading in the Far West were small in number, and mostly young, single men. But they developed important commercial relationships with the Indian and Mexican residents of the West. Some entered into intimate relationships with native and Mexican women. They also recruited women as helpers in the difficult work of preparing furs and skins for trading. In some cases, though, white trappers clashed violently with the Mojave and other tribes.
In 1822, Andrew and William Ashley founded the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and recruited white trappers to move permanently into the Rockies. The Ashleys dispatched supplies annually to their trappers in exchange for furs and skins. The arrival of the supply train became the occasion for a gathering of scores of mountain men, some of whom lived much of the year in considerable isolation. But however isolated their daily lives, these mountain men were closely bound up with the expanding market economy, an economy in which the bulk of the profits from the trade flowed to the merchants, not the trappers.
THE TRAPPERS’ CAMP-FIRE This illustration by British artist F. F. Palmer imagines a moment of camaraderie among trappers, with the Rocky Mountains in the background.
(Source: Yale University Art Gallery)
Eastern Images of the West
Americans in the East were only dimly aware of the world of the trappers. They were more aware of the explorers, many of them dispatched by the U.S. government. In 1819 and 1820, the War Department ordered Stephen H. Long to journey up the Platte and South Platte Rivers through what is now Nebraska and eastern Colorado (where he discovered the peak that would be named for him). He then returned eastward along the Arkansas River through what is now Kansas. Long wrote an influential report on his trip, which echoed the dismissive conclusions of Zebulon Pike fifteen years before. The region “between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains,” Long wrote, “is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.” On the published map of his expedition, he labeled the Great Plains the “Great American Desert.”
THE “ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS”
Page 191The expansion of the economy, the growth of white settlement and trade in the West, the creation of new states—all reflected the rising spirit of nationalism that was spreading through the United States in the years following the War of 1812. That spirit found reflection for a time as well in the character of early republican national politics.
The End of the First Party System
Ever since 1800, the presidency seemed to have been the possession of Virginians. After two terms in office, Jefferson secured the presidential nomination for his secretary of state, James Madison, and after two more terms, Madison did the same for his secretary of state, James Monroe, in 1816. Many in the North resented the so-called Virginia Dynasty, but the Republicans had no difficulty electing their candidate that year. Monroe received 183 ballots in the electoral college. His Federalist opponent, Rufus King of New York, received only 34.
Monroe entered office under what seemed to be favorable circumstances. With the decline of the Federalists amid their disloyal talk during the War of 1812, his party faced no serious opposition. And with the conclusion of that conflict, the nation faced no important international threats. Some American politicians had dreamed since the first days of the republic of a time in which partisan divisions and factional disputes might come to an end. In the prosperous postwar years, Monroe attempted to use his office to realize that dream.
He made that clear, above all, in the selection of his cabinet. For secretary of state, he chose former Federalist John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, son of the second president. Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had all served as secretary of state before becoming president. Adams thus became the heir apparent, suggesting the Virginia Dynasty would soon come to an end. Speaker of the House Henry Clay declined an offer to be secretary of war, so Monroe named John C. Calhoun instead.
Soon after his inauguration, Monroe made a goodwill tour through the country. In New England, so recently the scene of rabid Federalist discontent, he was greeted everywhere with enthusiastic demonstrations. The Columbian Centinel, a Federalist newspaper in Boston, observed that an “era of good feelings” had arrived. And on the surface, at least, that seemed to be the case. In 1820, Monroe was reelected without opposition. For all practical purposes, the Federalist Party had ceased to exist.
CELEBRATING THE NATION Celebrations of Independence Day, like this one in New York City, became major festive events throughout the United States in the early nineteenth century, a sign of rising American nationalism.
(©North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy)
John Quincy Adams and Florida
John Quincy Adams had spent much of his life in diplomatic service before becoming secretary of state. He was a committed nationalist, and he considered his most important task to be the promotion of American expansion.
His first challenge was Florida. The United States had already annexed West Florida, but that claim was in dispute. Most Americans, moreover, still believed the nation should gain possession of the entire peninsula. In 1817, Adams began negotiations with the Spanish minister, Luis de Onís, over the territory.
In the meantime, however, events in Florida were taking their own course. Andrew Jackson, now in command of American troops along the Florida frontier, had orders from Secretary of War Calhoun to “adopt the necessary measures” to stop continuing raids on Page 192American territory by Seminole Indians south of the border. Jackson used those orders as an excuse to invade Florida and seize the Spanish forts at St. Marks and Pensacola. This became the first of several operations known as the Seminole Wars .
Instead of condemning Jackson’s raid, Adams urged the government to assume responsibility for it. The United States, he said, had the right under international law to defend itself against threats from across its borders. Jackson’s raid demonstrated to the Spanish that the United States could easily take Florida by force. Adams implied that the nation might consider doing so.
Onís realized, therefore, that he had little choice but to negotiate a settlement. Under the provisions of the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, Spain ceded all of Florida to the United States and gave up its claim to territory north of the 42nd parallel in the Pacific Northwest. In return, the American government gave up its claims to Texas—for a time.
The Panic of 1819
The Monroe administration had little time to revel in its diplomatic successes, for the nation was facing a serious economic crisis: the Panic of 1819 . It followed a period of high foreign demand for American farm goods and thus of exceptionally high prices for American farmers. But the rising prices for farm goods stimulated a land boom in the western United States. Fueled by speculative investments, land prices soared.
The availability of easy credit to settlers and speculators—from the government (under the land acts of 1800 and 1804), from state banks and wildcat banks, even for a time from the rechartered Bank of the United States—fueled the land boom. Beginning in 1819, Page 193however, new management at the national bank began tightening credit, calling in loans, and foreclosing mortgages. This precipitated a series of failures by state banks. The result was a financial panic. Six years of depression followed.
Some Americans saw the Panic of 1819 and the widespread distress that followed as a warning that rapid economic growth and territorial expansion would destabilize the nation. But by 1820, most Americans were irrevocably committed to the idea of growth and expansion.
SECTIONALISM AND NATIONALISM
For a brief but alarming moment in 1819–1820, the increasing differences between the North and the South threatened the unity of the United States—until the Missouri Compromise averted a sectional crisis.
The Missouri Compromise
When Missouri applied for admission to the Union as a state in 1819, slavery was already well established there. Even so, Representative James Tallmadge Jr. of New York proposed an amendment to the Missouri statehood bill that would prohibit the further introduction of slaves into Missouri and provide for the gradual emancipation of those already there. The Tallmadge Amendment provoked a controversy that raged for the next two years.
Page 195Since the beginning of the republic, new states had come into the Union mostly in pairs, one from the North, another from the South. In 1819, there were eleven free states and eleven slave states. The admission of Missouri would upset that balance, hence the controversy over slavery and freedom in Missouri.
Complicating the Missouri question was the admission of Maine as a new (and free) state. Speaker of the House Henry Clay informed northern members that if they blocked Missouri from entering the Union as a slave state, southerners would block the admission of Maine. But ultimately the Senate agreed to combine the Maine and Missouri proposals into a single bill. Maine would be admitted as a free state, Missouri as a slave state. Then Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois proposed an amendment prohibiting slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase territory north of the southern boundary of Missouri (the 36°30′ parallel). The Senate adopted the Thomas Amendment, and Speaker Clay, with great difficulty, guided the amended Maine-Missouri bill through the House.
THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE, 1820 This map illustrates the way in which the Missouri Compromise proposed to settle the controversy over slavery in the new western territories of the United States. The compromise rested on the virtually simultaneous admission of Missouri and Maine to the Union, one a slave state and the other a free one. Note the red line extending beyond the southern border of Missouri, which in theory established a permanent boundary between areas in which slavery could be established and areas where it could not be.
What precipitated the Missouri Compromise?
Nationalists in both the North and South hailed this settlement—which became known as the Missouri Compromise —as the happy resolution of a danger to the Union. Former president Thomas Jefferson was less convinced that sectional harmony would last. (See “ Consider the Source: Thomas Jefferson Reacts to the Missouri Compromise .”) Indeed, during the debate, members of Congress referred to the Mason-Dixon line, surveyed by two Englishmen before the Revolution and separating Pennsylvania and Maryland. That line, now, along with the new parallel and the Ohio River in between, would separate the worlds of slavery and freedom (other than the state of Missouri itself), and in popular parlance, the sociocultural distinctions between North and South.
CONSIDER THE SOURCE
THOMAS JEFFERSON REACTS TO THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE (1820)
In this letter to Massachusetts congressman John Holmes, the former president writes of the sectional divisions supposedly resolved by the recent Missouri Compromise. Jefferson wonders how the Union will hold together amid sharp disagreements over slavery and westward expansion.
Monticello, April 22, 1820 I thank you, Dear Sir, for the copy you have been so kind as to send me of the letter to your constituents on the Missouri question. It is a perfect justification to them. I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers, or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. But this momentous question, like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way.
The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other. Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one state to another would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burden on a greater number of coadjutors. An abstinence too, from this act of power, would remove the jealousy excited by the undertaking of Congress to regulate the condition of the different descriptions of men composing a state. This certainly is the exclusive right of every state, which nothing in the Constitution has taken from them and given to the general government. Could Congress, for example, say that the non-freemen of Connecticut shall be freemen, or that they shall not emigrate into any other state?
I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of ’76, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect.
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. What does Jefferson’s metaphor of “a firebell in the night” suggest about his own feelings about the Missouri Compromise and its geographical line?
2. What was Jefferson referring to when he wrote that Americans had “the wolf by the ears”? How appropriate is this metaphor in your assessment?
3. What seemed to be Jefferson’s position on the powers of states and the federal government with respect to slavery?
Source: Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1. General Correspondence. 1651–1827, Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, http://memory.loc.gov; reproduced in Wayne Franklin (ed.), The Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, 361–362.
Marshall and the Court
John Marshall served as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835. More than anyone but the framers themselves, he molded the development of the Constitution: strengthening the Supreme Court, increasing the power of the federal government, and advancing the interests of the propertied and commercial classes.
Committed to promoting commerce, the Marshall Court staunchly defended the inviolability of contracts. In Fletcher v. Peck (1810), which arose out of a series of notorious land frauds in Georgia, the Court had to decide whether the Georgia legislature of 1796 could repeal the act of the previous legislature granting lands under shady circumstances to the Yazoo Land Companies. In a unanimous decision, Marshall held that a land grant was a valid contract and could not be repealed even if corruption was involved.Page 196
JOHN MARSHALL A former secretary of state, Marshall served as chief justice from 1801 until his death in 1835 at the age of eighty. Such was the power of his intellect and personality that he dominated his fellow justices throughout that period, regardless of their previous party affiliations or legal ideologies. Marshall established the independence of the Court, gave it a reputation for nonpartisan integrity, and established its powers, which were only vaguely described by the Constitution.
(©Stock Montage/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) further expanded the meaning of the contract clause of the Constitution. Having gained control of the New Hampshire state government, Republicans tried to revise Dartmouth College’s charter to convert the private college into a state university. Daniel Webster argued the college’s case. The Dartmouth charter, he insisted, was a contract, protected by the same doctrine that the Court had already upheld in Fletcher v. Peck. The Court ruled for Dartmouth, proclaiming that corporation charters such as the one the colonial legislature had granted the college were contracts and thus inviolable. The decision placed important restrictions on the ability of state governments to control corporations.
In overturning the act of the legislature and the decisions of the New Hampshire courts, the justices also implicitly claimed for themselves the right to override the decisions of state courts. But advocates of states’ rights, especially in the South, continued to challenge this right. In Cohens v. Virginia (1821), Marshall explicitly affirmed the constitutionality of federal review of state court decisions. The states had given up part of their sovereignty in ratifying the Constitution, he explained, and their courts must submit to federal jurisdiction.
Meanwhile, in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Marshall confirmed the “implied powers” of Congress by upholding the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States. The Bank Page 197had become so unpopular in the South and the West that several states tried to drive branches out of business. This case presented two constitutional questions to the Supreme Court: Could Congress charter a bank? And if so, could individual states ban it or tax it? Daniel Webster, one of the Bank’s attorneys, argued that establishing such an institution came within the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution and that the power to tax involved a “power to destroy.” If the states could tax the Bank at all, they could tax it to death. Marshall adopted Webster’s words in deciding for the Bank.
In the case of Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), the Court strengthened Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. The state of New York had granted the steamboat company of Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston the exclusive right to carry passengers on the Hudson River to New York City. Fulton and Livingston then gave Aaron Ogden the business of carrying passengers across the river between New York and New Jersey. But Thomas Gibbons, who had a license granted by Congress, began competing with Ogden for the ferry traffic. Ogden brought suit against him and won in the New York courts. Gibbons appealed to the Supreme Court. The most important question facing the justices was whether Congress’s power to give Gibbons a license superseded the state of New York’s power to grant Ogden a monopoly. Marshall claimed that the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce (which, he said, included navigation) was “complete in itself ” and might be “exercised to its utmost extent.” Ogden’s state-granted monopoly, therefore, was void.
The highly nationalist decisions of the Marshall Court established the primacy of the federal government over the states in regulating the economy and opened the way for an increased federal role in promoting economic growth. They protected corporations and other private economic institutions from local government interference.
The Court and the Tribes
The nationalist inclinations of the Marshall Court were visible as well in a series of decisions concerning the legal status of indigenous tribes. But these decisions did not simply affirm the supremacy of the United States. They also carved out a distinctive position for Native Americans within the constitutional structure.
The first of the crucial Indian decisions was Johnson v. McIntosh (1823). Leaders of the Illinois and Pinakeshaw tribes had sold parcels of their land to a group of white settlers (including Johnson) but had later signed a treaty with the federal government ceding territory that included those same parcels to the United States. The government proceeded to grant homestead rights to new white settlers (among them McIntosh) on the land claimed by Johnson. The Court was asked to decide which claim had precedence. Marshall’s ruling, not surprisingly, favored the United States. But in explaining it, he offered a preliminary definition of the place of Indians within the nation. Native Americans had a basic right to their tribal lands, he said, that preceded all other American law. Individual American citizens could not buy or take land from the tribes. Only the federal government—the supreme authority—could do that.
Even more important was the Court’s 1832 decision in Worcester v. Georgia , in which the Court invalidated a Georgia law that attempted to regulate access by U.S. citizens to Cherokee country. Only the federal government could do so, Marshall claimed. The tribes, he explained, were sovereign entities in much the same way Georgia was a sovereign entity—“distinct political communities, having territorial boundaries within which their authority is exclusive.” In defending the power of the federal government, he was also affirming, indeed expanding, the rights of the tribes to remain free from the authority of state governments.
The Marshall decisions, therefore, did what the Constitution itself had not: define a place for Indian tribes within the American political system. The tribes had basic property rights. Page 198They were sovereign entities not subject to the authority of state governments. But the federal government, like a “guardian” governing its “ward,” had ultimate authority over tribal affairs.
CHEROKEE LEADER SEQUOYAH Sequoyah (who also used the name George Guess) was a mixed-blood Cherokee who translated his tribe’s language into writing through an elaborate syllabary (equivalent to an alphabet) of his own invention, pictured here. He opposed Indian assimilation into white society and saw the preservation of the Cherokee language as a way to protect the culture of his tribe. He moved to Arkansas in the 1820s and became a chief of the western Cherokee tribes.
(©Culture Club/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The Latin American Revolution and the Monroe Doctrine
Just as the Supreme Court was asserting American nationalism in shaping the country’s economic life, so the Monroe administration was asserting nationalism in formulating foreign policy. American diplomacy had been principally concerned with Europe. But in the 1820s, dealing with Europe forced the United States to develop a policy toward Latin America.
Americans looking southward in the years following the War of 1812 beheld a gigantic spectacle: the Spanish Empire in its death throes and a whole continent in revolt. Already the United States had developed a profitable trade with Latin America. Many believed the success of the anti-Spanish revolutions would further strengthen America’s position in the region.
In 1815, the United States proclaimed neutrality in the wars between Spain and its rebellious colonies. But the United States sold ships and supplies to the revolutionaries, a clear indication that it was trying to help the revolutions. Finally, in 1822, President Monroe established diplomatic relations with five new nations—La Plata (later Argentina), Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico—making the United States the first country to recognize them.
In 1823, Monroe went further and announced a policy that would ultimately be known (beginning some thirty years later) as the Monroe Doctrine , even though it was primarily Page 199the work of John Quincy Adams. “The American continents,” Monroe declared, “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” The United States would consider any foreign challenge to the sovereignty of existing American nations as an unfriendly act. At the same time, he proclaimed, “Our policy in regard to Europe . . . is not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers.”
But Monroe also vowed not to interfere with current European powers operating in the Americas, and indeed, without a viable seafaring force, the United States relied on the British Royal Navy to make the implicit threats in the statement credible. The intended targets here were the French, Spain’s allies, who Americans feared might help Spain retake its lost empire, and the Russians, encroaching on the northern Pacific coastline.
The Monroe Doctrine had few immediate effects, but it was important as an expression of the growing spirit of nationalism in the United States in the 1820s. And it established the idea of the United States as the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere.
SECTIONALISM AND NATIONALISM
For a brief but alarming moment in 1819–1820, the increasing differences between the North and the South threatened the unity of the United States—until the Missouri Compromise averted a sectional crisis.
The Missouri Compromise
When Missouri applied for admission to the Union as a state in 1819, slavery was already well established there. Even so, Representative James Tallmadge Jr. of New York proposed an amendment to the Missouri statehood bill that would prohibit the further introduction of slaves into Missouri and provide for the gradual emancipation of those already there. The Tallmadge Amendment provoked a controversy that raged for the next two years.
Page 195Since the beginning of the republic, new states had come into the Union mostly in pairs, one from the North, another from the South. In 1819, there were eleven free states and eleven slave states. The admission of Missouri would upset that balance, hence the controversy over slavery and freedom in Missouri.
Complicating the Missouri question was the admission of Maine as a new (and free) state. Speaker of the House Henry Clay informed northern members that if they blocked Missouri from entering the Union as a slave state, southerners would block the admission of Maine. But ultimately the Senate agreed to combine the Maine and Missouri proposals into a single bill. Maine would be admitted as a free state, Missouri as a slave state. Then Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois proposed an amendment prohibiting slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase territory north of the southern boundary of Missouri (the 36°30′ parallel). The Senate adopted the Thomas Amendment, and Speaker Clay, with great difficulty, guided the amended Maine-Missouri bill through the House.
THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE, 1820 This map illustrates the way in which the Missouri Compromise proposed to settle the controversy over slavery in the new western territories of the United States. The compromise rested on the virtually simultaneous admission of Missouri and Maine to the Union, one a slave state and the other a free one. Note the red line extending beyond the southern border of Missouri, which in theory established a permanent boundary between areas in which slavery could be established and areas where it could not be.
What precipitated the Missouri Compromise?
Nationalists in both the North and South hailed this settlement—which became known as the Missouri Compromise —as the happy resolution of a danger to the Union. Former president Thomas Jefferson was less convinced that sectional harmony would last. (See “ Consider the Source: Thomas Jefferson Reacts to the Missouri Compromise .”) Indeed, during the debate, members of Congress referred to the Mason-Dixon line, surveyed by two Englishmen before the Revolution and separating Pennsylvania and Maryland. That line, now, along with the new parallel and the Ohio River in between, would separate the worlds of slavery and freedom (other than the state of Missouri itself), and in popular parlance, the sociocultural distinctions between North and South.
CONSIDER THE SOURCE
THOMAS JEFFERSON REACTS TO THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE (1820)
In this letter to Massachusetts congressman John Holmes, the former president writes of the sectional divisions supposedly resolved by the recent Missouri Compromise. Jefferson wonders how the Union will hold together amid sharp disagreements over slavery and westward expansion.
Monticello, April 22, 1820 I thank you, Dear Sir, for the copy you have been so kind as to send me of the letter to your constituents on the Missouri question. It is a perfect justification to them. I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers, or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. But this momentous question, like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way.
The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other. Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one state to another would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burden on a greater number of coadjutors. An abstinence too, from this act of power, would remove the jealousy excited by the undertaking of Congress to regulate the condition of the different descriptions of men composing a state. This certainly is the exclusive right of every state, which nothing in the Constitution has taken from them and given to the general government. Could Congress, for example, say that the non-freemen of Connecticut shall be freemen, or that they shall not emigrate into any other state?
I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of ’76, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect.
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. What does Jefferson’s metaphor of “a firebell in the night” suggest about his own feelings about the Missouri Compromise and its geographical line?
2. What was Jefferson referring to when he wrote that Americans had “the wolf by the ears”? How appropriate is this metaphor in your assessment?
3. What seemed to be Jefferson’s position on the powers of states and the federal government with respect to slavery?
Source: Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1. General Correspondence. 1651–1827, Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, http://memory.loc.gov; reproduced in Wayne Franklin (ed.), The Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, 361–362.
Marshall and the Court
John Marshall served as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835. More than anyone but the framers themselves, he molded the development of the Constitution: strengthening the Supreme Court, increasing the power of the federal government, and advancing the interests of the propertied and commercial classes.
Committed to promoting commerce, the Marshall Court staunchly defended the inviolability of contracts. In Fletcher v. Peck (1810), which arose out of a series of notorious land frauds in Georgia, the Court had to decide whether the Georgia legislature of 1796 could repeal the act of the previous legislature granting lands under shady circumstances to the Yazoo Land Companies. In a unanimous decision, Marshall held that a land grant was a valid contract and could not be repealed even if corruption was involved.Page 196
JOHN MARSHALL A former secretary of state, Marshall served as chief justice from 1801 until his death in 1835 at the age of eighty. Such was the power of his intellect and personality that he dominated his fellow justices throughout that period, regardless of their previous party affiliations or legal ideologies. Marshall established the independence of the Court, gave it a reputation for nonpartisan integrity, and established its powers, which were only vaguely described by the Constitution.
(©Stock Montage/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) further expanded the meaning of the contract clause of the Constitution. Having gained control of the New Hampshire state government, Republicans tried to revise Dartmouth College’s charter to convert the private college into a state university. Daniel Webster argued the college’s case. The Dartmouth charter, he insisted, was a contract, protected by the same doctrine that the Court had already upheld in Fletcher v. Peck. The Court ruled for Dartmouth, proclaiming that corporation charters such as the one the colonial legislature had granted the college were contracts and thus inviolable. The decision placed important restrictions on the ability of state governments to control corporations.
In overturning the act of the legislature and the decisions of the New Hampshire courts, the justices also implicitly claimed for themselves the right to override the decisions of state courts. But advocates of states’ rights, especially in the South, continued to challenge this right. In Cohens v. Virginia (1821), Marshall explicitly affirmed the constitutionality of federal review of state court decisions. The states had given up part of their sovereignty in ratifying the Constitution, he explained, and their courts must submit to federal jurisdiction.
Meanwhile, in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Marshall confirmed the “implied powers” of Congress by upholding the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States. The Bank Page 197had become so unpopular in the South and the West that several states tried to drive branches out of business. This case presented two constitutional questions to the Supreme Court: Could Congress charter a bank? And if so, could individual states ban it or tax it? Daniel Webster, one of the Bank’s attorneys, argued that establishing such an institution came within the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution and that the power to tax involved a “power to destroy.” If the states could tax the Bank at all, they could tax it to death. Marshall adopted Webster’s words in deciding for the Bank.
In the case of Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), the Court strengthened Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. The state of New York had granted the steamboat company of Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston the exclusive right to carry passengers on the Hudson River to New York City. Fulton and Livingston then gave Aaron Ogden the business of carrying passengers across the river between New York and New Jersey. But Thomas Gibbons, who had a license granted by Congress, began competing with Ogden for the ferry traffic. Ogden brought suit against him and won in the New York courts. Gibbons appealed to the Supreme Court. The most important question facing the justices was whether Congress’s power to give Gibbons a license superseded the state of New York’s power to grant Ogden a monopoly. Marshall claimed that the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce (which, he said, included navigation) was “complete in itself ” and might be “exercised to its utmost extent.” Ogden’s state-granted monopoly, therefore, was void.
The highly nationalist decisions of the Marshall Court established the primacy of the federal government over the states in regulating the economy and opened the way for an increased federal role in promoting economic growth. They protected corporations and other private economic institutions from local government interference.
The Court and the Tribes
The nationalist inclinations of the Marshall Court were visible as well in a series of decisions concerning the legal status of indigenous tribes. But these decisions did not simply affirm the supremacy of the United States. They also carved out a distinctive position for Native Americans within the constitutional structure.
The first of the crucial Indian decisions was Johnson v. McIntosh (1823). Leaders of the Illinois and Pinakeshaw tribes had sold parcels of their land to a group of white settlers (including Johnson) but had later signed a treaty with the federal government ceding territory that included those same parcels to the United States. The government proceeded to grant homestead rights to new white settlers (among them McIntosh) on the land claimed by Johnson. The Court was asked to decide which claim had precedence. Marshall’s ruling, not surprisingly, favored the United States. But in explaining it, he offered a preliminary definition of the place of Indians within the nation. Native Americans had a basic right to their tribal lands, he said, that preceded all other American law. Individual American citizens could not buy or take land from the tribes. Only the federal government—the supreme authority—could do that.
Even more important was the Court’s 1832 decision in Worcester v. Georgia , in which the Court invalidated a Georgia law that attempted to regulate access by U.S. citizens to Cherokee country. Only the federal government could do so, Marshall claimed. The tribes, he explained, were sovereign entities in much the same way Georgia was a sovereign entity—“distinct political communities, having territorial boundaries within which their authority is exclusive.” In defending the power of the federal government, he was also affirming, indeed expanding, the rights of the tribes to remain free from the authority of state governments.
The Marshall decisions, therefore, did what the Constitution itself had not: define a place for Indian tribes within the American political system. The tribes had basic property rights. Page 198They were sovereign entities not subject to the authority of state governments. But the federal government, like a “guardian” governing its “ward,” had ultimate authority over tribal affairs.
CHEROKEE LEADER SEQUOYAH Sequoyah (who also used the name George Guess) was a mixed-blood Cherokee who translated his tribe’s language into writing through an elaborate syllabary (equivalent to an alphabet) of his own invention, pictured here. He opposed Indian assimilation into white society and saw the preservation of the Cherokee language as a way to protect the culture of his tribe. He moved to Arkansas in the 1820s and became a chief of the western Cherokee tribes.
(©Culture Club/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The Latin American Revolution and the Monroe Doctrine
Just as the Supreme Court was asserting American nationalism in shaping the country’s economic life, so the Monroe administration was asserting nationalism in formulating foreign policy. American diplomacy had been principally concerned with Europe. But in the 1820s, dealing with Europe forced the United States to develop a policy toward Latin America.
Americans looking southward in the years following the War of 1812 beheld a gigantic spectacle: the Spanish Empire in its death throes and a whole continent in revolt. Already the United States had developed a profitable trade with Latin America. Many believed the success of the anti-Spanish revolutions would further strengthen America’s position in the region.
In 1815, the United States proclaimed neutrality in the wars between Spain and its rebellious colonies. But the United States sold ships and supplies to the revolutionaries, a clear indication that it was trying to help the revolutions. Finally, in 1822, President Monroe established diplomatic relations with five new nations—La Plata (later Argentina), Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico—making the United States the first country to recognize them.
In 1823, Monroe went further and announced a policy that would ultimately be known (beginning some thirty years later) as the Monroe Doctrine , even though it was primarily Page 199the work of John Quincy Adams. “The American continents,” Monroe declared, “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” The United States would consider any foreign challenge to the sovereignty of existing American nations as an unfriendly act. At the same time, he proclaimed, “Our policy in regard to Europe . . . is not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers.”
But Monroe also vowed not to interfere with current European powers operating in the Americas, and indeed, without a viable seafaring force, the United States relied on the British Royal Navy to make the implicit threats in the statement credible. The intended targets here were the French, Spain’s allies, who Americans feared might help Spain retake its lost empire, and the Russians, encroaching on the northern Pacific coastline.
The Monroe Doctrine had few immediate effects, but it was important as an expression of the growing spirit of nationalism in the United States in the 1820s. And it established the idea of the United States as the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere.
THE REVIVAL OF OPPOSITION
After 1816, the Federalist Party ceased to exist, discredited by its seemingly treasonous behavior during the War of 1812 and outmatched in several consecutive presidential races by the party of Jefferson. The Republican Party became the only national political organization in America for a short time. In many ways, it now resembled the defunct Federalist Party in its commitment to economic growth and centralized government.
But divisions were growing, just as they had in the late eighteenth century. By the 1820s, a two-party system was emerging once again. The full name of the mighty Republican Party had always been the Democratic-Republican Party. It now split along the lines its name suggested, with the divisions visible in 1824 but explicit in 1828. By the latter election, there would be a Democratic Party, which leaned toward the old Jeffersonian vision of a decentralized nation. The Democrats opposed the federal government’s growing role in the economy. The other party was the National Republican Party (later the Whigs and unrelated to the modern Republican Party), which leaned toward the old Federalist belief in a powerful central government. The Whigs believed in a strong national bank and a centralized economy. Both parties believed in economic growth and expansion. But they disagreed on whether the national government should oversee the economy or release it from federal interference.
The “Corrupt Bargain”
Until 1820, presidential candidates were nominated by party caucuses in Congress. But in 1824, “King Caucus” was overthrown. The Republican caucus nominated William H. Crawford of Georgia, the favorite of the extreme states’ rights faction of the party. But other candidates received nominations from state legislatures and won endorsements from irregular mass meetings throughout the country.
One of them was Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. But he was a man of cold and forbidding manners, with little popular appeal. Another contender was Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House. He had a devoted personal following and a definite and coherent program: the American System , which proposed creating a great home market for factory and farm producers by raising the protective tariff, strengthening the national bank, and financing internal improvements. Andrew Jackson, the fourth major candidate, had no significant political record, even though he was a new member of the U.S. Senate. But he Page 200was a military hero and had the help of shrewd political allies from his home state of Tennessee. All four of these candidates technically ran as Democratic-Republicans, but the splintering of the party was obvious.
Jackson received more popular and electoral votes than any other candidate, but not a majority. The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution (passed in the aftermath of the contested 1800 election) required the House of Representatives, with one vote per state delegation regardless of population, to choose among the three candidates with the largest numbers of electoral votes. Crawford was seriously ill. Clay was out of the running, but he was in a strong position to influence the result. Jackson was Clay’s most dangerous political rival in the West, so Clay supported Adams, in part because Adams was an ardent nationalist and a likely supporter of the American System. With Clay’s endorsement, Adams won election in the House.
The Jacksonians believed that their large popular and electoral pluralities entitled their candidate to the presidency, and they were enraged when he lost. But they grew angrier still when Adams named Clay his secretary of state. The State Department was the well-established route to the presidency, and Adams thus appeared to be naming Clay as his own successor. The outrage the Jacksonians expressed at what they called a “corrupt bargain” haunted Adams throughout his presidency.
The Second President Adams
Adams proposed an ambitiously nationalist program reminiscent of Clay’s American System, but Jacksonians in Congress blocked most of it. Adams also experienced diplomatic frustrations. He appointed delegates to an international conference that the Venezuelan liberator Simón Bolívar had called in Panama in 1826. But Haiti was one of the participating nations, and southerners in Congress opposed the idea of white Americans mingling with the black delegates. Congress delayed approving the Panama mission so long that the American delegation did not arrive until after the conference was over.
Even more damaging to the administration was its support for a new tariff on imported goods in 1828. This measure originated with the demands of New England woolen manufacturers. But to win support from middle and western states, the administration had to accept duties on other items. In the process, it antagonized the original supporters of the bill; the benefits of protecting their manufactured goods from foreign competition now had to be weighed against the prospects of having to pay more for raw materials. Adams signed the bill, earning the animosity of southerners, who cursed it as the “tariff of abominations.”
Jackson Triumphant
By the time of the 1828 presidential election, the new two-party system was now in place. On one side stood the supporters of John Quincy Adams and the National Republicans. Opposing them were the followers of Andrew Jackson, the Democrats. Adams attracted the support of most remaining Federalists. Jackson appealed to a broad coalition that opposed the “economic aristocracy.”
But issues seemed to count for little in the end, as the campaign degenerated into a war of personal invective. The Jacksonians charged that Adams had been guilty of gross waste and extravagance. Adams’s supporters hurled even worse accusations at Jackson. They called him a murderer and distributed a “coffin handbill,” which listed, within coffin-shaped outlines, the names of militiamen whom Jackson was said to have shot in cold blood during the War of 1812. (The men had been deserters who were legally executed after sentence by a court-martial.) And they called his wife a bigamist. Jackson had married his beloved Rachel at a Page 201time when the pair incorrectly believed her first husband had divorced her. (When Jackson’s wife read of the accusations against her, she collapsed and, a few weeks later, died.)
Jackson’s victory was decisive, but sectional. Adams swept virtually all of New England and showed significant strength in the mid-Atlantic region. Nevertheless, the Jacksonians considered their victory as complete and as important as Jefferson’s in 1800. Once again, the forces of privilege had been driven from Washington. Once again, a champion of democracy would occupy the White House. America had entered, some Jacksonians claimed, a new era of democracy, the “era of the common man.”
CONCLUSION
In the aftermath of the War of 1812, a vigorous nationalism increasingly came to characterize the political and popular culture of the United States. In all regions of the country, white men and women celebrated the achievements of the early leaders of the republic, the genius of the Constitution, and the success of the nation in withstanding serious challenges from both without and within. Party divisions faded.
But the broad nationalism of the “era of good feelings” disguised some deep divisions. Indeed, philosophies of governance differed substantially from one region, and one group, to another. Battles continued between those who favored a strong central government committed to advancing the economic development of the nation and those who wanted a decentralization of power to open opportunity to more people. Battles continued as well over the role of slavery in American life—and in particular over the place of slavery in the new western territories. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 postponed the day of reckoning on that issue, but only for a time.
