Chapter 9 - Review

US:  A Narrative History Volume 1 – Chapter 9 Review

The Early Republic [1789-1824]

“I Felt Myself Mad with Passion”

One spring evening in 1794 General John Neville was riding home from Pittsburgh with his wife and granddaughter. As they went up a hill, his wife's saddle started to slip, so Neville dismounted. As he adjusted the strap, he heard the clip-clop of an approaching horse. A rider galloped up and in a gruff voice asked, “Are you Neville the excise officer?”

“Yes,” Neville replied, without turning around.

“Then I must give you a whipping!” cried the rider and leapt from his horse. He grabbed Neville by the hair and lunged at his throat. Breaking free, Neville finally managed to knock the man down: he recognized his attacker as Jacob Long, a local farmer. After Long fled, Neville resumed his journey, badly shaken.

John Neville was not accustomed to such treatment. As one of the wealthiest men in the area, he expected respect from those of lower social rank. And he had received it—until becoming embroiled in a controversy over the new “whiskey tax” on distilled spirits. In a frontier district like western Pennsylvania, farmers regularly distilled their grain into whiskey for barter and sale. Not surprisingly, the excise tax, passed by Congress in 1791, was notoriously unpopular. Still, Neville had accepted an appointment to be one of the tax's regional inspectors. For three years he had endured threats as he enforced the law, but this roadside assault showed that popular hostility was rising.

As spring turned to summer the grain ripened, and so did the people's anger. In mid-July a federal marshal arrived to serve summonses to a number of farmer-distillers who had not paid taxes. One, William Miller, squinted at the paper and was amazed to find the government ordering him to appear in court—hundreds of miles away in Philadelphia—in little more than a month. Even worse, the papers claimed he owed $250.

“I felt myself mad with passion,” recalled Miller. “I thought $250 would ruin me; and … I felt my blood boil at seeing General Neville along to pilot the sheriff to my very door.” Word of the marshal's presence brought 30 or 40 laborers swarming from a nearby field. Armed with muskets and pitchforks, they forced Neville and the marshal to beat a hasty retreat.

Next morning, the local militia company marched to Neville's estate. A battle ensued, and the general, aided by his slaves, beat back the attackers. A larger group, numbering 500 to 700, returned the following day to find Neville fled and his home garrisoned by a group of soldiers from nearby Fort Pitt. The mob burned down most of the outbuildings and, after the soldiers surrendered, torched Neville's elegantly furnished home.

Throughout the region that summer, marauding bands roamed the countryside, burning homes and attacking tax collectors. While the greatest unrest flared in western Pennsylvania, farmers in the western districts of several other states also defied federal officials and refused to pay the tax, thus launching a full-scale “Whiskey Rebellion” in the summer of 1794.

Alexander Hamilton, a principal architect of the strong federal government established by the Constitution, knew a challenge to authority when he saw one: “Shall there be a government, or no government?”

So did an alarmed George Washington, now president and commander-in-chief of the new republic, who led an army of 13,000 men—larger than that he had commanded at Yorktown against the British—into the Pennsylvania countryside.

That show of force cowed the Pennsylvania protesters, snuffing out the Whiskey Rebellion. But the riots and rebellion deepened fears for the future of the new republic. As Benjamin Franklin remarked in 1788, Americans were skilled at overthrowing governments, but only time would tell whether they were any good at sustaining them. By 1794 Franklin's warning seemed prophetic.

Federalists such as Washington and Hamilton—supporters of a powerful national government—had high hopes for their newly created republic. Stretching over some 840,000 square miles in 1789, it was approximately four times the size of France, five times the size of Spain, ten times the size of Great Britain. Yet the founders of the republic knew how risky it was to unite such a vast territory. Yankee merchants living along Boston wharves had economic interests and cultural traditions distinct from those of backcountry farmers who raised hogs, tended a few acres of corn, and distilled whiskey. Even among farmers there was a world of difference between a South Carolina planter who shipped tons of rice to European markets and a New Hampshire family whose stony fields yielded barely enough to survive. Could the new government established by the Constitution provide a framework strong enough to unite such a socially diverse nation? Within a decade national political leaders split into two sharply opposed political parties, drawing ordinary men and women into civic life.

Social and political divisions within the nation were sharpened by currents of global change, both across the Atlantic and westward across the continent. After 1789 an increasingly bloody revolution in France sharpened old rivalries, and as Europe plunged into war, Americans were torn in their loyalties. Britain also determined to make Americans fight for their independence once again, while in the west, Spain and later France pressured white settlers beyond the Appalachians. Indian nations, buffeted by disease and dislocation, sought to unite in a confederacy west of the Appalachian Mountains.

In short, the early republic was a fragile creation, buffeted by changes beyond its borders and struggling to create a stable government at home. During the nation's first three decades, its survival depended on balancing the interests of a socially and economically diverse population.

A Social and Political Portrait of the New Republic

When the constitution went into effect, the United States stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. The first federal census, compiled in 1790, counted approximately 4 million people, divided about evenly between the northern and southern states. Only about 100,000 settlers lived beyond the Appalachians in the Tennessee and Kentucky territories, which were soon to become states.

Within the Republic's boundaries were two major groups that lacked effective political influence: African Americans and Indians. In 1790 black Americans numbered 750,000, almost one-fifth the total population. More than 90 percent lived in the southern states from Maryland to Georgia; most were slaves who worked on tobacco and rice plantations, but there were free blacks as well. The census did not count the number of Indians living east of the Mississippi. North of the Ohio, the powerful Miami Confederacy discouraged settlement, while to the south, five strong, well-organized tribes—the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Seminoles—dominated the region from the Appalachians to the Mississippi River.

Population Growth

That composition would change as the white population continued to double about every 22 years. Immigration contributed only a small part to this astonishing growth. On average, fewer than 10,000 Europeans arrived annually between 1790 and 1820. The primary cause was natural increase, since, on average, American white women gave birth to nearly eight children each. As a result, the United States had an unusually youthful population: in 1790 almost half of all white Americans were under 16 years old. The age at first marriage was about 25 for men, 24 for women—and three or four years younger in newly settled areas—which contributed to the high birthrate.

In short, the early republic was a fragile creation, buffeted by changes beyond its borders and struggling to create a stable government at home.

This youthful, growing population remained overwhelmingly rural. Only 24 towns and cities boasted 2,500 or more residents, and 19 out of 20 Americans lived outside them. In fact, more than 80 percent of American families in 1800 were engaged in agriculture. In such a rural environment the movement of people, goods, and information was slow. Few individuals used the expensive postal system, and most roads were still little more than dirt paths hacked through the forest. In 1790 the country had 92 newspapers, but they were published mostly in towns and cities along major avenues of transportation.

Life in isolated regions contrasted markedly with that in bustling urban centers like New York and Philadelphia. But the most basic division in American society was not between the cities and the countryside, important as that was. What would divide Americans most broadly over the coming decades was the contrast between semisubsistence and commercial ways of life. Semisubsistence farmers lived on the produce of their own land and labor. Americans in the commercial economy were tied more closely to the larger markets of a far-flung world.

Semisubsistence and Commercial Economies

Most rural white Americans in the interior of the northern states and the backcountry of the South lived off the produce of their own land. Wealth in those areas, although not distributed equally, was spread fairly broadly. And subsistence remained the goal of most white families. “The great effort was for every farmer toproduce anything he required within his own family”’ one European visitor noted. In such an economy women played a key role. Wives and daughters had to be skilled in making articles such as candles, soap, clothing, and hats, since the cost of buying such items was steep.

With labor scarce and expensive, farmers also depended on their neighbors to help clear fields, build homes, and harvest crops. If a farm family produced a small surplus, it usually exchanged it locally rather than selling it for cash in a distant market. In this barter economy, money was seldom seen and was used primarily to pay taxes and purchase imported goods.

Indian economies were also based primarily on subsistence. In the division of labor women raised crops, while men fished or hunted—not only for meat but also for skins to make clothing. Because Indians followed game more seasonally than did white settlers, they moved their villages to several different locations over the course of a year. But both whites and Indians in a semisubsistence economy moved periodically to new fields after they had exhausted the old ones. Indians exhausted agricultural lands less quickly because they planted beans, corn, and squash in the same field, a technique that better conserved soil nutrients.

Despite the image of both the independent “noble savage” and the self-reliant yeoman farmer, virtually no one in the backcountry operated within a truly self-sufficient economy.

Although farmers tried to grow most of the food their families ate, they normally bought salt, sugar, and coffee, and they often traded with their neighbors for food and other items. In addition, necessities such as iron, glass, lead, and gunpowder had to be purchased, and many farmers hired artisans to make shoes and weave cloth. Similarly, Indians were enmeshed in the wider world of European commerce, exchanging furs for iron tools or clothing and ornamental materials.

Outside the backcountry, Americans were tied much more closely to a commercial economy. Here, merchants, artisans, and even farmers did not subsist on what they produced but instead sold goods or services in a wider market and lived on their earnings. Cities and towns, of course, played a key part in the commercial economy. But so did the agricultural regions near the seaboard and along navigable rivers.

For commerce to flourish, goods had to move from producers to market cheaply enough to reap profits. Water offered the only cost-effective transportation over any distance; indeed, it cost as much to ship goods a mere 30 miles over primitive roads as to ship by boat 3,000 miles across the Atlantic to London. Cost-effective transportation was available to the planters of the Tidewater South, and city merchants used their access to the sea to establish trading ties to the West Indies and Europe. But urban artisans and workers were also linked to this market economy, as were many farm families in the Hudson valley, southeastern Pennsylvania, and southern New England.

In commercial economies wealth was less equally distributed. By 1790 the richest 10 percent of Americans living in cities and in the plantation districts of the Tidewater South owned about 50 percent of the wealth. In the backcountry the top 10 percent was likely to own 25 to 35 percent of the wealth.

The Constitution and Commerce

In many ways the fight over ratification of the Constitution represented a struggle between the commercial and the subsistence-oriented elements of American society. Urban merchants and workers as well as commercial farmers and planters generally rallied behind the Constitution. They took a broader, more cosmopolitan view of the nation's future, and they had a more favorable view of government power.

Americans who remained a part of the semisubsistence barter economy tended to oppose the Constitution. More provincial in outlook, they feared concentrated power, were suspicious of cities and commercial institutions, opposed aristocracy and special privilege, and in general just wanted to be left alone.

And so in 1789 the United States embarked on its new national course, with two rival visions of the direction that the fledgling Republic should take. Which vision would prevail—a question that was as much social as it was political—increasingly divided the generation of revolutionary leaders in the early republic.

The New Government

Whatever the Republic was to become, Americans agreed that George Washington personified it. When the first Electoral College cast its votes, Washington was unanimously elected, the only president in history so honored. John Adams became vice president. Loyalty to the new Republic, with its untried form of government and diversity of peoples and interests, rested to a great degree on the trust and respect Americans gave Washington.

George Washington Organizes the Government

George Washington realized that as the first occupant of the executive office, everything he did was fraught with significance. “I walk on untrodden ground,” he commented. “There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.”

The Constitution made no mention of a cabinet. Yet the drafters of the Constitution, aware of the experience of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation, clearly assumed that the president would have some system of advisers. Congress authorized the creation of four departments—War, Treasury, State, and Attorney General—whose heads were to be appointed with the consent of the Senate. Washington's most important choices were Alexander Hamilton as secretary of the treasury and Thomas Jefferson to head the State Department. Washington gradually excluded Adams from cabinet discussions, and any meaningful role for the vice president, whose duties were largely undefined by the Constitution, soon disappeared.

The Constitution created a federal Supreme Court but beyond that was silent about the court system. The Judiciary Act of 1789 set the size of the Supreme Court at 6members; it also established 13 federal district courts and 3 circuit courts of appeal. Supreme Court justices spent much of their time serving on these circuit courts, a distasteful duty whose long hours “riding the circuit” caused one justice to grumble that Congress had made him a “traveling postboy.” The Judiciary Act made it clear that federal courts had the right to review decisions of thestate courts and specified cases over which the Supreme Court would have original jurisdiction. Washington appointed John Jay of New York, a staunch Federalist, as the first chief justice.

Hamilton's Financial Program

When Congress called on Alexander Hamilton to prepare a report on the nation's finances, the new secretary of the treasury undertook the assignment eagerly. A brilliant thinker and an ambitious politician, he did not intend to be a minor figure in the new administration. Convinced that human nature was fundamentally selfish, Hamilton was determined to link the interests of the wealthy with those of the new government. He also intended to use federal power to encourage manufacturing and commerce in order to make the United States economically strong and independent of Europe.

Neither goal could be achieved until the federal government solved its two most pressing financial problems: revenue and credit. Without revenue it could not be effective. Without credit; the faith of merchants and other nations that the government would repay its debts—it would lack the ability to borrow. Hamilton proposed that all $52 million of the federal debt, much of it generated by the Revolutionary War, be paid in full (or funded). He also recommended that the federal government assume responsibility for the remaining $25 million in debts that individual states owed—a policy of “assumption.” He intended with these twin policies to put the new federal government on a sound financial footing and enhance its power by increasing its need for revenue and making the wealthy look to the national government, not the states. Hamilton also proposed a series of excise taxes, including a controversial 25 percent levy on whiskey, to help meet government expenses.

After heated debate, Congress deadlocked over funding and assumption. Finally, at a dinner with Hamilton, Jefferson and James Madison of Virginia agreed to support his proposal if, after 10 years in Philadelphia, the permanent seat of government would be located in the South, on the Potomac River between Virginia and Maryland. Aided by this understanding, funding and assumption passed Congress. In 1791 Congress also approved a 20-year charter for the first Bank of the United States. The bank would hold government deposits and issue banknotes that would be received in payment of all debts owed the federal government.

Congress proved less receptive to the rest of Hamilton's program, although a limited tariff to encourage manufacturing and several excise taxes, including the one on whiskey, won approval.

The passage of Hamilton's program caused a permanent rupture among supporters of the Constitution. Madison, who had collaborated closely with Hamilton in the 1780s, broke with his former ally over funding and assumption. Jefferson finally went over to the opposition when Hamilton announced plans for a national bank. Eventually the two warring factions organized themselves into political parties: the Republicans, led by Jefferson and Madison, and the Federalists, led by Hamilton and Adams.1 But the division emerged slowly over several years.

Hamilton's program promoted the commercial sector at the expense of semisubsistence farmers. Thus it rekindled many of the concerns that had surfaced during the struggle over ratification of the Constitution. The ideology of the Revolution had stressed that republics inevitably contained groups who sought power in order to destroy popular liberties and overthrow the republic. To some Americans Hamilton's program seemed a clear threat to establish a privileged and powerful financial aristocracy—perhaps even a monarchy.

Who, after all, would benefit from the funding proposal? During and after the Revolution, the value of notes issued by the Continental Congress dropped sharply. Speculators had bought up most of these notes for a fraction of their face value from small farmers and workers. If the government finally paid back the debt, speculators would profit accordingly. Equally disturbing, members of Congress had been purchasing the notes before the adoption of Hamilton's program. Nearly half the members of the House owned U.S. securities, a dangerous mimicking of Britain, where the Bank of England's loans to many members of Parliament gave it great political influence.

Fears were heightened because Americans had little experience with banks: only three existed in the country when the Bank of the United States was chartered. One member of Congress expressed a common attitude when he said that he would no more be caught entering a bank than a house of prostitution. Then, too, banks and commerce were a part of the urban environment that rural Americans so distrusted. Although Hamilton's opponents admitted that a certain amount of commerce was necessary, they believed that it should remain subordinate. Hamilton's program, in contrast, encouraged manufacturing and urbanization; developments that history suggested were incompatible with liberty and equality.

After Congress approved the bank bill, Washington hesitated to sign it. When he consulted his cabinet, Jefferson stressed that the Constitution did not specifically authorize Congress to charter a bank. Both he and Madison upheld the idea of strict construction—that the Constitution should be interpreted narrowly and the federal government restricted to powers expressly delegated to it. Otherwise, the federal government would be the judge of its own powers, and there would be no safeguard against the abuse of power.

Hamilton countered that the Constitution contained implied as well as enumerated powers. He particularly emphasized the clause that permitted Congress to make all laws “necessary and proper” to carry out its duties. A bank would be useful in carrying out the enumerated powers of regulating commerce and maintaining the public credit; Congress thus had a right to decide whether to establish one. In the end Washington accepted Hamilton's arguments and signed the bill.

Economically Hamilton's program was a success. The government's credit was restored, and the national bank ended the inflation of the previous two decades and created a sound currency.

In addition, Hamilton's theory of implied powers and broad construction gave the nation the flexibility necessary to respond to unanticipated crises.

The Emergence of Political Parties

Members of the Revolutionary generation fervently hoped that political parties would not take root in the United States. “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go at all,” remarked Jefferson. Influenced by radical English republican thought, American critics condemned parties as narrow interest groups that placed selfishness and party loyalty above a concern for the public good. Despite Americans' distrust of such institutions, however, the United States became the first nation to establish truly popular parties.

Social conditions encouraged the rise of parties. Because property ownership was widespread, the nation had a broad suffrage. During the American Revolution, legislatures lowered property requirements in many states, increasing the number of voters still further. If party members hoped to hold office, they had to offer a program attractive to the broader voting public. When parties acted as representatives of economic and social interest groups, they became one means by which a large electorate could make its feelings known. In addition, the United States had the highest literacy rate in the world and the largest number of newspapers, further encouraging political interest and participation. Finally, the fact that well-known patriots of the Revolution headed both the Federalists and the Republicans; helped defuse the charge that either party was hostile to the Revolution or the Constitution.

Americans and the French Revolution

Although domestic issues first split the supporters of the Constitution, it was a crisis in Europe that pushed the nation toward political parties. Americans had hoped that their revolution would spark similar movements for liberty on the European continent, and in fact the American Revolution was only one of a series of revolutions in the late eighteenth century that shook the Western world, the most important of which began in France in 1789. There a rising population and the collapse of government finances sparked a challenge to royal authority that became a mass revolution. The French revolutionary ideals of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” eventually spilled across Europe.

Americans first hailed the Revolution. Many rejoiced to learn that the Bastille prison had been stormed and that a new National Assembly had abolished feudal privileges and adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But by 1793, American enthusiasm for the Revolution had cooled after radical elements instituted a reign of terror, executing the king and queen and many of the nobility. The French republic even outlawed Christianity and substituted the worship of Reason. Finally, in 1793 republican France and monarchical England went to war. Americans were deeply divided over whether the United States should continue its old alliance with France or support Great Britain.

Hamilton and his allies viewed the French Revolution as sheer anarchy. French radicals seemed to be destroying the very institutions that held civilization together: the church, social classes, property, law and order. The United States, Hamilton argued, should renounce the 1778 treaty of alliance with France and side with Britain. By contrast, Jefferson and his followers supported the treaty and regarded France as a sister republic. They believed that despite deplorable excesses, its revolution was spreading the doctrine of liberty.

Washington's Neutral Course

Washington, for his part, was convinced that in order to prosper, the United States must remain independent of European quarrels and wars. Thus he issued a proclamation of American neutrality and tempered Jefferson's efforts to support France.

Under international law, neutrals could trade with belligerents—nations at war—as long as the trade had existed before the outbreak of hostilities and did not involve war supplies. But both France and Great Britain refused to respect the rights of neutrals in the midst of their desperate struggle. They began intercepting American ships and confiscating cargoes. In addition, Britain, which badly needed manpower to maintain its powerful navy, impressed into service American sailors it suspected of being British subjects. Britain also continued to maintain the western forts it had promised to evacuate in 1783, and it closed the West Indies, a traditional source of trade, to American ships.

Recognizing that the United States was not strong enough to challenge Britain militarily, Washington sent John Jay to negotiate the differences between the two countries. Although Jay did persuade the British to withdraw their troops from the Northwest, he could gain no other concessions. Disappointed, Washington nonetheless submitted Jay's Treaty to the Senate. After a bitter debate, the Senate narrowly ratified it in June of 1795.

The Federalists and the Republicans Organize

Thus events in Europe contributed directly to the rise ofparties in the United States by stimulating fears over the course of American development. By the mid-1790s both sides were organizing on a national basis. Hamilton took the lead in coordinating the Federalist party, which grew out of the voting bloc in Congress that had enacted his economic program. Increasingly, Washington drew closer to Federalist advisers and policies and became the symbol of the party, although he clung to the vision of a nonpartisan administration.

The guiding genius of the opposition movement was Hamilton's onetime colleague James Madison. Jefferson, who resigned as secretary of state at the end of 1793, became the symbolic head of the party, much as Washington reluctantly headed the Federalists. But it was Madison who orchestrated the Republican strategy and lined up their voting bloc in the House. The disputes over Jay's Treaty and over the whiskey tax in 1794 and 1795 gave the Republicans popular issues, and they began organizing on the state and local levels. Republican leaders had to be careful to distinguish between opposing the administration and opposing the Constitution. And they had to overcome the ingrained idea that an opposition party was seditious.

As more and more members of Congress allied themselves with one faction or the other, voting became increasingly partisan. By 1796 even minor matters were decided by partisan votes. Gradually, party organization filtered downward to local communities.

The 1796 Election

As long as Washington remained head of the Federalists, they enjoyed a huge advantage. But in 1796 the weary president, stung by the abuse heaped on him by the opposition press, announced that he would not accept a third term. In doing so, he set a two-term precedent that future presidents followed until Franklin Roosevelt. In his Farewell Address Washington warned against the dangers of parties and urged a return to the earlier nonpartisan system. That vision, however, had become obsolete: parties were an effective way of expressing the interests of different social and economic groups within the nation. When the Republicans chose Thomas Jefferson to oppose John Adams, the possibility of a constitutional system without parties ended.

The framers of the Constitution did not anticipate that political parties would run competing candidates for both the presidency and the vice presidency. Thus they provided that, of the candidates running for president, the one with the most electoral votes would win and the one with the second highest number would become vice president. But Hamilton strongly disliked both Adams and Jefferson. Ever the intriguer, he tried to manipulate the electoral vote so that the Federalist vice presidential candidate, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, would be elected president. In the ensuing confusion, Adams won with 71 electoral votes, and his rival, Jefferson, gained the vice presidency with 68 votes.

Federalist and Republican Ideologies

The fault line between Federalists and Republicans reflected basic divisions in American life. Geographically, the Federalists were strongest in New England, with its commercial ties to Great Britain and its powerful tradition of hierarchy and order. Moving farther south, the party became progressively weaker. Of the southernmost states, the Federalists enjoyed significant strength only in aristocratic South Carolina. The Republicans won solid support in semisubsistence areas such as the West, where farmers were only weakly involved with commerce. The middle states were closely contested, although the most cosmopolitan and commercially oriented elements remained the core of Federalist strength.

In other ways, each party looked both forward and backward: toward certain traditions of the past as well as toward newer social currents that would shape America in the nineteenth century.

Most Federalists viewed themselves as a kind of natural aristocracy making a last desperate stand against the excesses of democracy. They clung to the notion that the upper class should rule over its social and economic inferiors. In supporting the established social order, most Federalists opposed unbridled individualism. In their view, government should regulate individual behavior for the good of society and protect property from the violent and unruly.

Yet the Federalists were remarkably forward-looking in their economic ideas. They sensed that the United States would become a major economic and military power only by government encouragement of economic development.

The Republicans, in contrast, looked backward to the traditional Revolutionary fear that government power threatened liberty. The Treasury, they warned, was corrupting Congress, the army would enslave the people, and interpreting the Constitution broadly would make the federal government all-powerful. Nor did Republican economic ideals anticipate future American development. For the followers of Madison and Jefferson, agriculture—not commerce or manufacturing—was the foundation of American liberty and virtue. Republicans also failed to appreciate the role of financial institutions in promoting economic growth, condemning speculators, bank directors, and holders of the public debt.

Yet the Jeffersonians were more farsighted in matters of equality and personal liberty. Their faith in the people put them in tune with the emerging egalitarian temper of society. They embraced the virtues of individualism, hoping to reduce government to the bare essentials. And they looked to the West—the land of small farms and a more equal society—as the means to preserve opportunity and American values.

The Presidency of John Adams

As president, John Adams became the head of the Federalists, although in many ways he was out of step with his party. Unlike Hamilton, Adams felt no pressing need to aid the wealthy, nor was he fully committed to Hamilton's commercial-industrial vision.

As a revolutionary leader who in the 1780s had served as American minister to England, Adams also opposed any alliance with Britain.

Increasingly Adams and Hamilton clashed over policies and party leadership. Part of the problem stemmed from personalities. Adams was so thin-skinned that it was difficult for anyone to get along with him, and Hamilton's intrigues in the 1796 election had not improved relations between the two men. Although Hamilton had resigned from the Treasury Department in 1795, key members of Adams's cabinet regularly turned to the former secretary for advice. Indeed, they opposed Adams so often that the frustrated president sometimes dealt with them, according to Jefferson, “by dashing and trampling his wig on the floor.”

Naval War with France

Adams began his term trying to balance relations with both Great Britain and France. Because the terms of Jay's Treaty were so favorable to the British, the French in retaliation set their navy and privateers to raiding American shipping. To resolve the conflict, Adams dispatched three envoys to France in 1797, but the French foreign minister demanded a bribe before negotiations could even begin. The American representatives refused, and when news of these discussions became public, it became known as the XYZ Affair.

In the public's outrage over French bribery, Federalist leaders saw a chance to retain power by going to war. In 1798 Congress repudiated the French alliance of 1778 and enlarged the army and navy. Republicans suspected that the real purpose of the army was not to fight the French army—none existed in North America—but to crush the opposition party and establish a military despotism. All that remained was for Adams to whip up popular feeling and lead the nation into war.

But Adams feared he would become a scapegoat if his policies failed. Furthermore, he distrusted standing armies and preferred the navy as the nation's primary defense. So an unofficial naval war broke out between the United States and France as ships in each navy raided the fleets of the other, while Britain continued to impress American sailors and seize ships suspected of trading with France.

Suppression at Home

Meanwhile, Federalist leaders attempted to suppress disloyalty at home. In the summer of 1798 Congress passed several measures known together as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien Act authorized the president to arrest and deport aliens suspected of “treasonable” leanings. Although never used, the act directly threatened immigrants who had not yet become citizens, many of whom were prominent Jeffersonians. To limit the number of immigrant voters—again, most of them Republicans—Congress increased the period of residence required to become a naturalized citizen from 5 to 14 years. But the most controversial law was the Sedition Act, which established heavy fines and even imprisonment for writing, speaking, or publishing anything of “a false, scandalous and malicious” nature against the government or any officer of the government.

 

Because of the partisan way it was enforced, the Sedition Act quickly became a symbol of tyranny. Federalists convicted and imprisoned a number of prominent Republican editors, and several Republican papers ceased publication. In all, 25 people were arrested under the law and 10 convicted and imprisoned.

The crisis over the Sedition Act forced Republicans to develop a broader conception of freedom of the press. Previously, most Americans had agreed that newspapers should not be restrained before publication but that they could be punished afterward for sedition. Jefferson and others now argued that the American government was uniquely based on the free expression of public opinion, and thus criticism of the government was not a sign of criminal intent. Only overtly seditious acts, not opinions, should be subject to prosecution. The courts eventually endorsed this view, adopting a new, more absolute view of freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The Republican-controlled legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky each responded to the crisis of 1798 by passing a set of resolutions. Madison secretly wrote those for Virginia, and Jefferson those for Kentucky. These resolutions proclaimed that the Constitution was a compact among sovereign states that delegated strictly limited powers to the federal government. When the government exceeded those limits and threatened the liberties of citizens, states had the right to interpose their authority.

But Jefferson and Madison were not ready to rend a union that had so recently been forged. The two men intended for the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions only to rally public opinion to the Republican cause. They opposed any effort to resist federal authority by force.

The Election of 1800

With a naval war raging on the high seas and the Alien and Sedition Acts sparking debate at home, Adams shocked his party by negotiating a peace treaty with France. It was a courageous act, for Adams not only split his party in two but also ruined his own chances for reelection by driving Hamilton's pro-British wing of the party into open opposition. But the nation benefited, as peace returned.

With the Federalist Party split, Republican prospects in 1800 were bright. Again the party chose Jefferson to run against Adams, along with Aaron Burr for vice president. Sweeping to victory, the Republicans won the presidency, as well as control of both houses of Congress for the first time. Yet the election again demonstrated the fragility of the fledgling political system. Jefferson and Burr received an equal number of votes, but the Constitution did not distinguish between the votes for president and vice president. With the election tied, the decision lay with the House of Representatives, where each state was allotted one vote. Because Burr refused to step aside for Jefferson, the election remained deadlocked for almost a week, until the Federalists decided that Jefferson represented the lesser of two evils. They allowed his election on the 36th ballot. In 1804 the Twelfth Amendment corrected the problem, specifying that electors were to vote separately for president and vice president.

John Marshall and Judicial Review

Having lost both the presidency and control of Congress in 1800, the Federalists took steps to shore up their power before Jefferson took office. They did so by expanding the size of the federal court system, the one branch of the federal government that they still controlled. The Judiciary Act of 1801 created 6 circuit courts and 16 new judgeships. Federalists justified these “midnight appointments” (executed by Adams in the last weeks of his term) on the grounds that the expanding nation required a larger judiciary.

Among Adams's last-minute appointments was that of William Marbury as justice of the peace for the District of Columbia. When James Madison assumed the office of secretary of state under the new administration, he found a batch of undelivered commissions, including Marbury's. Wishing to appoint loyal Republicans to these posts, Jefferson instructed Madison not to hand over the commissions, whereupon Marbury sued. The case of Marbury v. Madison went directly to the Supreme Court in 1803.

Chief Justice John Marshall, a Federalist and one of Adams's late-term appointments, actually ruled in favor of Madison—but in a way that strengthened the power of the federal courts. Marshall affirmed the right of the Supreme Court to review statutes and interpret the meaning of the Constitution. “It is emphatically the province of and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” he wrote in upholding the doctrine of judicial review. In Marshall's view, the Court “must of necessity expound and interpret” the Constitution and the laws when one statute conflicted with another or when a law violated the framework of the Constitution.

Marshall and his colleagues later asserted the power of the Court to review the constitutionality not only of federal but also of state laws. In fact, during his long tenure as Chief Justice (over 30 years), John Marshall extended judicial review to all acts of government.

Federalist Achievements and Disappointments

As John Adams left office, he looked back with mixed feelings on the 12 years that the Federalist party had held power. Under Washington's firm leadership and his own, his party had made the Constitution a workable instrument of government. The Federalists had proved that a republican form of government was compatible with stability and order. They had established economic policies that brought a return of prosperity. Washington had established the principle of American neutrality in foreign affairs, which became an accepted ideal by both parties for decades to come.

But most Federalists took no solace in such reflections, because the forces of history seemed to be running against them. In the election of 1800 they stood as the champions of order and hierarchy, of government by the wellborn, of a society in which social betters guided their respectful inferiors. They had waged one last desperate battle to save their disintegrating world—and had lost. Power had fallen into the hands of the ignorant rabble, led by that demagogue Thomas Jefferson.

The Political Culture of the Early Republic

Such extreme views poisoned the political atmosphere of the early republic. Two distinct parties had emerged during the 1790s, but both longed to reestablish a one-party system. Neither Federalists nor Republicans could accept the novel idea that political parties might peacefully resolve differences among competing social, geographic, and economic interests. Instead, each party regarded its opponents as a dangerous faction of ambitious men striving to increase their wealth and power at the expense of republican liberty.

What resulted was a political culture marked by verbal and, at times, physical violence. Republicans accused Washington and Hamilton of being British agents and monarchists; Federalists denounced Jefferson as an atheist and his partisans as a pack of “blood-drinking cannibals.” The leading Republican newspaper editor in Philadelphia plunged into a street brawl with his Federalist rival; two members of Congress slugged it out on the floor of the House of Representatives. Mobs threatened the leaders of both parties, and at the height of the crisis of 1798–1799, Adams smuggled guns into his home for protection.

Popular Participation in Political Festivals

The deepening divisions among national leaders also encouraged ordinary Americans to take an interest in politics. Beginning in the 1790s and for decades thereafter, activists in cities and villages everywhere in the new republic organized grand festivals to celebrate American patriotism and the glories of the Republicans or the Federalists. That grassroots movement democratized the conduct of politics by educating men and women, white and black, voters and nonvoters alike, about the issues of the day. In doing so, such activities encouraged strong partisan loyalties.

Holidays such as the Fourth of July or Washington's Birthday became prime occasions for local party leaders to rally their fellow citizens. They hosted celebrations that began with parades in which marchers, hoisting banners to identify their particular trade, militia company, or social club, processed through the main street to a church, meeting hall, or public square. There the assembled throng of marchers and onlookers sang patriotic songs, recited prayers, and listened to the reading of the Declaration of Independence, all capped by a rousing sermon or political oration. Then the party started: in the North, taverns and hotels hosted community banquets; in the South, the crowds flocked to outdoor barbecues. Everywhere the feasts ended with many toasts to the glories of republican liberty and, of course, to the superiority of Federalists or Republicans.

These local celebrations not only made an impact on those who were able to attend the festivities but also reached a wider audience through newspaper accounts. During the 1790s and beyond, the number of local or regional newspapers in the new republic mushroomed, but their coverage was far from objective. Most editors were either staunch Federalists or ardent Republicans who could be counted on to publish glowing accounts of the festivities sponsored by their party and to instruct a much wider audience about party policies and values.

African-American Celebrations

African Americans, too, were drawn to political festivals, but only to discover that party organizers were determined to keep them away. In the years after 1800, bullies often drove black men and women from Fourth of July celebrations with taunts, threats, and assaults. James Forten, a leading citizen of Philadelphia's African-American community, complained that because of the hostility of drunken whites, “black people, upon certain days of public jubilee, dare not to be seen” on the streets after noon.

The growing free black population of northern cities countered that opposition by organizing celebrations to express their own political convictions. They established annual holidays to celebrate the abolition of the slave trade in Britain and the United States as well as the successful slave revolt in the Caribbean that resulted in the founding of Haiti in 1804 (see page •••). Those acts of defiance—the spectacle of blacks marching down the main streets with banners flying and bands of music playing, and of black audiences cheering orators who publicly condemned slavery—only inflamed racial hatred and opposition among many whites.

But African Americans continued to press for full citizenship by persuading sympathetic white printers to publish poetry, slave narratives, and pamphlets composed by black authors. The strategy of those writings was to refute racist notions by drawing attention to the intelligence, virtue, and patriotism of black American women and men, both free and enslaved. Typical was the autobiography of Venture Smith, the first slave narrative published in the United States (1798), which followed his captivity as a young boy in West Africa through his lifelong struggle in New England to purchase his own freedom and that of his wife and children.

Hard-working and thrifty, resourceful and determined to better himself and his family, Venture Smith's story invited white readers to conclude that he was as true a republican and a self-made man as Benjamin Franklin.

Jefferson in Power

The growing political engagement of ordinary white Americans played an important role in electing Thomas Jefferson to the presidency. He later referred to his election as “the Revolution of 1800,” asserting that it “was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.” That claim exaggerates: Jefferson's presidency did little to enhance political rights or social opportunities of white women or African Americans. Even so, during the following two decades Republicans did set the United States on a more democratic course. And in their dealings with Britain and France, as well as with the Indian tribes of the West, Republican administrations defined, for better and worse, a fuller sense of American nationality.

The New Capital City

Thomas Jefferson was the first president to be inaugurated in the new capital, Washington, D.C. In 1791 George Washington had commissioned Pierre Charles L'Enfant, a French architect and engineer who had served in the American Revolution, to draw up plans for the new seat of government. L'Enfant designed a city with broad avenues, statues and fountains, parks and plazas, and a central mall. Because the Federalists believed that government was the paramount power in a nation, they had intended that the city would be a new Rome—a cultural, intellectual, and commercial center of the Republic.

The new city fell far short of this grandiose dream. It was located in a swampy river bottom near the head of the Potomac, and the surrounding hills rendered the spot oppressively hot and muggy during the summer. The streets were filled with tree stumps and became seas of mud after a rain. Much of the District was wooded, and virtually all of it remained unoccupied. When the government moved to its new residence in 1800, the Senate chamber, where Jefferson took the oath of office, was the only part of the Capitol that had been completed.

This isolated and unimpressive capital reflected the new president's attitude toward government. Distrustful of centralized power of any kind, Jefferson deliberately set out to remake the national government into one of limited scope that touched few people's daily lives. The states rather than the federal government were “the most competent administrators for our domestic concerns,” he asserted in his inaugural address. Ever the individualist, he recommended a government that left people “free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.”

Jefferson's Philosophy

Jefferson was a product of the Enlightenment, with its faith in the power of human reason to improve society and decipher the universe. He considered “the will of the majority” to be “the only sure guardian of the rights of man,” which he defined as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Although he conceded that the masses might err, he was confident they would soon return to correct principles. His faith in human virtue exceeded that of most of the founding generation, yet in good republican fashion, he feared those in power, even if they had been elected by the people. Government seemed to Jefferson a necessary evil at best.

To Jefferson, agriculture was a morally superior way of life. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787). Jefferson praised rural life for nourishing the honesty, independence, and virtue so essential in a republic.

Although Jefferson asserted that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants,” his reputation as a radical was undeserved. While he wanted to extend the suffrage to a greater number of Americans, he clung to the traditional republican idea that voters should own property and thus be economically independent. One of the largest slaveholders in the country, he increasingly muffled his once-bold condemnation of slavery, and in the last years of his life he reproached critics of the institution who sought to prevent it from expanding westward.

Slaveholding aristocrat and apostle of democracy, lofty theorist and pragmatic politician, Jefferson was a complex, at times contradictory, personality. But like most politicians, he was flexible in his approach to problems and tried to balance means and ends. And like most leaders, he quickly discovered that he confronted very different problems in power than he had in opposition.

Jefferson's Economic Policies

The new president quickly proceeded to cut spending and to reduce the size of the government. He also abolished the internal taxes enacted by the Federalists, including the controversial excise on whiskey, and thus was able to get rid of all tax collectors and inspectors. Land sales and the tariff duties would supply the funds needed to run the scaled-down government.

The most serious spending cuts were made in the military branches. Jefferson slashed the army budget in half, decreasing the army to 3,000 men. In a national emergency, he reasoned, the militia could defend the country. Jefferson reduced the navy even more, halting work on powerful frigates authorized during the naval war with France.

By such steps, Jefferson made significant progress toward paying off Hamilton's national debt. Still, he did not entirely dismantle the Federalists' economic program. Funding and assumption could not be reversed—the nation's honor was pledged to paying these debts, and Jefferson understood the importance of maintaining the nation's credit. More surprising, Jefferson argued that the national bank should be left to run its course until 1811, when its charter would expire. In reality, he expanded the bank's operations and, in words reminiscent of Hamilton, advocated tying banks and members of the business class to the government by rewarding those who supported the Republican party. In effect, practical politics had triumphed over agrarian economics.

Whites and Indians in the West

For all his pragmatism, Jefferson still viewed the lands stretching from the Appalachians to the Pacific through the perspective of his agrarian ideals. America's vast spaces provided enough land to last for a thousand generations, he predicted in his inaugural address, enough to transform the United States into “an empire of liberty.”

The Miami Confederacy Resists

That optimistic vision contrasted sharply with the views of most Federalists, who feared the West as a threat to social order and stability. In the 1790s they had good reason to fear. British troops refused to leave their forts in the Northwest, and Indian nations still controlled most of the region. Recognizing that fact; the United States conceded that Indian nations had the right to negotiate as sovereign powers. North of the Ohio; leaders of the Miami Confederacy, composed of eight tribes, stoutly refused to sell their homelands without “the united voice of the confederacy.”

 

In response the Washington administration sent 1,500 soldiers in 1790 under General Josiah Harmar to force the Indians to leave by burning their homes and fields. The Miami Confederacy, led by Blue Jacket and Little Turtle, roundly defeated the whites. Harmar was courtmartialed, the nation embarrassed, and a second expedition organized the following year under General Arthur St. Clair. This force of over 2,000 was again routed by Little Turtle, whose warriors killed 600 and wounded another 300. The defeat was the worst in the history of Indian wars undertaken by the United States. (In contrast, Custer's defeat in 1876, counted 264 fatalities.)

Treaty of Greenville

President Washington dispatched yet another army of 2,000 to the Ohio Valley, commanded by “Mad Anthony” Wayne, an accomplished general. At the Battle of Fallen Timbers in August 1794, Wayne won a decisive victory, breaking the Indians' hold on the Northwest. In the Treaty of Greenville (1795), the tribes ceded the southern two-thirds of the area between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, opening it up to white families. Federalists were still not eager to see the land settled. Although they allowed the sale of federal land, they kept the price high, with a required purchase of at least 640 acres—more than four times the size of most American farms.

Once in power, Jefferson and the Republicans encouraged settlement by reducing the minimum tract that buyers could purchase (to 320 acres) and by offering land on credit. Sales boomed. By 1820 more than 2 million whites lived in a region they had first entered only 50 years earlier. From Jefferson's perspective, western expansion was a blessing economically, socially, and even politically, because most of the new westerners were Republican.

Doubling the Size of the Nation

With Spain's colonial empire weakening, Americans were confident that before long they would gain control of Florida and the rest of the Mississippi, either through purchase or by military occupation. Spain had already agreed, in Pinckney's Treaty to allow Americans to navigate the lower Mississippi River. But in 1802 Spain suddenly retracted this right. More alarming, word came that France was about to take control of Louisiana—the territory lying between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains—after a secret agreement with Spain. Under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte, France had become the most powerful nation on the European continent, with the military might to protect its new colony and to block American expansion.

Jefferson dispatched James Monroe to Paris to join Robert Livingston, the American minister, in negotiating the purchase of New Orleans and West Florida from the French and thus securing control of the Mississippi. The timing was fortunate: With war looming again in Europe, Napoleon lost interest in Louisiana. He needed money, and in April 1803 he offered to sell not just New Orleans but all of Louisiana to the United States. This proposal flabbergasted Livingston and Monroe. Their instructions said nothing about acquiring all of Louisiana, and they had not been authorized to spend what the French demanded. But here was an opportunity to expand dramatically the boundaries of the United States. Pressed for an immediate answer, Livingston and Monroe took a deep breath and, after haggling over a few details, agreed to purchase Louisiana for approximately $15 million. In one fell swoop, the American negotiators had doubled the country's size by adding some 830,000 square miles.

While Jefferson was pleased at the prospect of acquiring so much territory, he found the legality of the act troubling. The Constitution, after all, did not authorize the acquisition of territory by treaty. In the end, the president sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification, noting privately, “The less we say about constitutional difficulties the better.” Once again pragmatism triumphed over theory.

Even before the Louisiana Purchase was completed, Congress secretly funded an expedition up the Missouri River to the Pacific. Leading that party were Meriwether Lewis, Jefferson's secretary, and William Clark, a younger brother of George Rogers Clark. Jefferson instructed them to make detailed observations of the soil, climate, rivers, minerals, and plant and animal life. They were also to investigate the practicability of an overland route to the Pacific and engage in diplomacy with the Indians along the way. By pushing onward to the Pacific, Lewis and Clark would strengthen the American title to Oregon, which several nations claimed but none effectively occupied.

In the spring of 1804 Lewis and Clark left St. Louis and headed up the Missouri River with 48 men. They laboriously hauled their boats upstream to present-day North Dakota, where they spent the winter with the Mandan Indians. The next spring, they headed west again. Only with great difficulty did the expedition pass the rugged mountains ahead of the winter snows and then float down first the Snake and then the Columbia River to the Pacific.

The western country Lewis and Clark traversed had been shaken by momentous changes over the previous quarter of a century. The trade routes across the plains and through the mountains circulated goods in greater quantities than ever before. Horses and guns in particular upset older Indian ways, making tribes more mobile and more dangerous. Lewis and Clark's expedition spotted Spanish horse gear from Mexico in villages along the upper Missouri River, guns from French traders to the northeast, and British teapots along the Columbia River. In one example of these trading networks at work, members of Lewis and Clark's expedition sold war hatchets to Indians during their winter stay at Fort Mandan. The expedition ran into the same hatchets the following summer in distant Idaho, the trade goods having made their trip across the Plains faster than the expedition.

Most disruptive to these western lands was smallpox, which had made its way along the same trade routes ever since the pandemic of the 1780s (see Chapter 7). The disease decimated Indian populations and forced many tribes to resettle. The Arikaras, who before 1780 had numbered perhaps 24,000, had dwindled to about 2,000 by the time Lewis and Clark passed through. Portions of tribes to the east had migrated westward, including the Delawares, Shawnees, Miamis, Chickasaws, and Cherokees. Captain Clark, who was present when the Treaty of Greenville was signed in 1795, discovered a Delaware chief he had seen there, along the Missouri, 500 miles west of his earlier home.

After a bleak winter in Oregon, the expedition returned home over the Rockies in 1806. It brought back thousands of plant and animal specimens and produced a remarkably accurate map of its journey. Lewis and Clark had crossed a continent disrupted by change. In the century to come the changes would only accelerate.

Pressure on Indian Lands and Culture

East of the Mississippi, white settlers continued to flood into the backcountry. Jefferson endorsed the policy that Indian tribes either would have to assimilate into American culture by becoming farmers and abandoning their seminomadic hunting or would have to move west. Jefferson defended these alternatives as in the best interests of the Indians, because he believed that otherwise they faced extermination. But he also recognized that by becoming farmers they would need less land. He encouraged the policy of selling goods on credit in order to lure Indians into debt. “When these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay,” the president observed, “they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.”

Between 1800 and 1810 whites pressed Indians into ceding more than 100 million acres in the Ohio River valley. The loss of so much land devastated Indian cultures and transformed their environment by reducing hunting grounds and making game and food scarce. “Stop your people from killing our game,” the Shawnees complained in 1802 to federal Indian agents. “They would be angry if we were to kill a cow or hog of theirs, the little game that remains is very dear to us.” Tribes also became dependent on white trade to obtain blankets, guns, metal utensils, alcohol, and decorative beads. To pay for these goods with furs, Indians often overtrapped, which forced them to invade the lands of neighboring tribes, provoking wars.

The strain produced by white expansion led to alcoholism, growing violence among tribe members, family disintegration, and the collapse of the clan system designed to regulate relations among different villages. The question of how to deal with white culture became a matter of anguished debate. Although some Native Americans attempted to take up farming and accommodate to white ways, for most the course of assimilation proved unappealing and fraught with risk.

White Frontier Society

Whites faced their own problems on the frontier. In the first wave of settlement came backwoods families who cleared a few acres of forest by girdling the trees, removing the brush, and planting corn between the dead trunks. Such settlers were mostly squatters without legal title to their land. As a region filled up, these pioneers usually sold their improvements and headed west again.

Taking their place, typically, were young single men from the East, who married and started families. These pioneers, too, engaged in semisubsistence agriculture, save for the lucky few whose prime locations allowed them to transport their crops down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans for shipment to distant markets. But many frontier families struggled, moving several times but never managing to rise from the ranks of squatters or tenant farmers to become independent landowners. Fledgling western communities lacked schools, churches, and courts, and inhabitants often lived miles distant from even their nearest neighbors.

The Beginnings of the Second Great Awakening

This hardscrabble frontier proved the perfect tinder for sparking a series of dramatic religious revivals in the decades surrounding 1800. What lit the fire were missionary efforts by major Protestant churches—particularly the Baptists and the Methodists—who sent their ministers to travel the countryside on horseback and to preach wherever they could gather a crowd. Often those religious meetings took place outdoors and drew eager hearers from as far as 100 miles away, who camped for several days in makeshift tents to listen to sermons and to share in praying and singing hymns.

Thus was born a new form of Protestant worship, the camp meeting, which drew national notice after a mammoth gathering at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August of 1801. At a time when the largest city in the state had only 2,000 people, more than 10,000 men, women, and children, white and black, flocked there to hear dozens of ministers preaching the gospel. Many in the crowd were overwhelmed by powerful religious feelings, some shrieking and shaking over guilt for their sins, others laughing and dancing from their high hopes of eternal salvation.

Some Protestant ministers denounced the “revival” at Cane Ridge and elsewhere as yet another instance of the ignorance and savagery of westerners. Other ministers were more optimistic: they saw frontier camp meetings as the first sign of a Protestant Christian renewal that would sweep the new republic.

Their hopes set the stage for what would come to be called the Second Great Awakening, a wave of religious revivals that swept throughout the nation after 1800 (see Chapter 12).

The Prophet, Tecumseh, and the Pan-Indian Movement

Native peoples also turned to religion to meet the challenges of the early national frontier. Indeed, in traditional Indian religions, they found the resource to revitalize their cultures by severing all ties with the white world. During the 1790s a revival led by Handsome Lake took hold among the Iroquois, following the loss of most of the Iroquois lands and the collapse of their military power in western New York. Later Lalawethika, also known as the Prophet, sparked a religious renewal among the Shawnees. The Prophet's early life was bleak: he was a poor hunter and as a child accidentally blinded himself in the right eye with an arrow; the ridicule of his fellow tribe members drove him to alcoholism. Suddenly, in April 1805 he lapsed into a trance so deep that he was given up for dead. When he revived he spoke of being reborn. From this vision and others he outlined a new creed for the Shawnees.

Taking a new name—Tenskwatawa (Open Door)—he urged the Shawnees to renounce whiskey and white goods and return to their old ways of hunting with bows and arrows, eating customary foods such as corn and beans, and wearing traditional garb. The Shawnee could revitalize their culture, the Prophet insisted, by condemning intertribal violence, embracing monogamous marriage, and rejecting the idea of private instead of communal property. Except for guns, which could be used in self-defense, his followers were to discard all items made by whites. Intermarriage with white settlers was forbidden.

Setting up headquarters in 1808 at the newly built village of Prophetstown in Indiana, Tenskwatawa led a wider revival among the tribes of the Northwest. Just as thousands of white settlers traveled to Methodist or Baptist camp meetings in the woods, where preachers denounced the evils of liquor and called for a return to a purer way of life, so thousands of Indians from northern tribes traveled to the Prophet's village for inspiration. Many were concerned about the threatened loss of Indian lands.

Tecumseh's Political Strategy

Whereas Tenskwatawa's strategy of revitalization was primarily religious, his older brother Tecumseh turned to political and military solutions. William Henry Harrison described Tecumseh as “one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things.” Tall and athletic, an accomplished hunter and warrior, Tecumseh traveled throughout the Northwest, urging tribes to forget ancient rivalries and unite to protect their lands. Just as Indian nations in the past had adopted the strategy of uniting in a confederacy, Tecumseh's alliance brought together the Wyandot, Chippewa, Sauk and Fox, Winnebago, Potawatomi, and other tribes on an even larger scale.

But the campaign for pan-Indian unity ran into serious obstacles. Often, Tecumseh was asking tribes to unite with their traditional enemies in a common cause. When he headed south in 1811, he encountered greater resistance. Most southern tribes were more prosperous, were more acculturated, and felt less immediate pressure on their land from whites. His southern mission ended largely in failure.

To compound Tecumseh's problems, while he was away a force of Americans under Governor Harrison defeated the Prophet's forces at the Battle of Tippecanoe in November 1811 and destroyed Prophetstown.

As a result, Tecumseh became convinced that the best way to contain white expansion was to play off the Americans against the British, who still held forts in the Great Lakes region. Indeed, by 1811, the United States and Great Britain were on the brink of war.

The Second War for American Independence

As Tecumseh worked to achieve a pan-Indian alliance, Jefferson encountered his own difficulties in trying to achieve American political unity. The president hoped to woo all but the most extreme Federalists into the Republican camp. His re-election in 1804 showed how much progress he had made, as he defeated Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and carried 15 of 17 states. With the Republicans controlling three-quarters of the seats in Congress, one-party rule seemed at hand.

But events across the Atlantic complicated the efforts to unite Americans. Only two weeks after Napoleon agreed to sell Louisiana to the United States, war broke out between France and Great Britain. As in the 1790s the United States found itself caught between the world's two greatest powers. Jefferson insisted that the nation should remain neutral in a European war. But the policies he proposed to maintain neutrality sparked sharp divisions in American society and momentarily revived the two-party system.

In the past, Jefferson had not shrunk from the use of force in dealing with foreign nations—most notably the Barbary states of North Africa—Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli, and Tunis. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their corsairs plundered the cargo of enemy ships and enslaved the crews. European nations found it convenient to pay tributes to the Barbary states so their ships could sail unmolested. But both Jefferson and John Adams disliked that idea. The “policy of Christendom” of paying tribute, complained Adams, “has made Cowards of all their Sailors before the Standard of Mahomet [Mohammed].”

By the time John Adams became president, he had subdued his outrage and agreed to tributes. But when Tripoli increased its demands in 1801, President Jefferson sent a squadron of American ships to force a settlement. In 1803 Tripoli captured the U.S.S. Philadelphia. Only the following year did Lieutenant Stephen Decatur repair the situation by sneaking into Tripoli's harbor and burning the vessel. The American blockade that followed forced Tripoli to give up its demands for tribute. Even so, the United States continued paying tribute to the other Barbary States until 1816.

The Embargo

Jefferson was willing to fight the Barbary States, but he drew back from declaring war against Britain or France. Between 1803 and 1807, Britain seized more than 500 American ships; France more than 300. The British navy also impressed into service thousands of sailors, some of who were deserters from England's fleet but others who were native-born Americans. Despite such harassment; Jefferson pursued a program of “peaceable coercion” designed to protect neutral rights without war. His proposed embargo not only prohibited American ships from trading with foreign ports but also stopped the export of all American goods. The president was confident that American exports were so essential to the two belligerents that they would quickly agree to respect American neutral rights. In December 1807 Congress passed the Embargo Act.

Jefferson had seriously miscalculated. France did not depend on American trade and so managed well enough, while British ships quickly took over the carrying trade as American vessels lay idle.

Under the embargo, both American imports and exports plunged. As the center of American shipping, New England port cities protested the loudest, and their merchants smuggled behind officials' backs.

Madison and the Young Republicans

Following Washington's example, Jefferson did not seek a third term. A caucus of Republican members of Congress selected James Madison to run against Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Madison triumphed easily, although in discontented New England, the Federalists picked up 24 seats in Congress.

Few men have assumed the presidency with more experience than James Madison, yet his tenure as president proved disappointing. Despite his intellectual brilliance, he lacked the force of leadership and the inner strength to impose his will on less capable men.

With a president reluctant to fight for what he wanted, leadership passed to Congress. The elections of 1810 swept in a new generation of Republicans, led by the magnetic 34-year-old Henry Clay of Kentucky, who gained the rare distinction of being elected Speaker in his first term. These younger Republicans were more nationalistic than the generation led by Jefferson and Madison. They sought an ambitious program of economic development and were aggressive expansionists, especially those from frontier districts. Their willingness to go to war earned them the name of War Hawks. Though they numbered fewer than 30 in Congress, they quickly became the driving force in the Republican Party.

The Decision for War

During Jefferson's final week in office in early 1809, Congress repealed the Embargo Act. The following year Congress authorized trade with France and England but decreed that if one of the two belligerents agreed to stop interfering with American shipping, trade with the other would be prohibited.

Given these circumstances, Napoleon outmaneuvered the British by announcing that he would put aside the French trade regulations. Madison took the French emperor at his word and reimposed a ban on trade with England. French raiders continued to seize American ships, but American anger focused on the British, who then seized many more ships and continued to impress American sailors. Finally, on June 16, 1812, the British ministry suspended the searches and seizures of American ships.

The concession came too late. Two days earlier, unaware of the change in policy, Congress granted Madison's request for a declaration of war against Britain. The vote was mostly along party lines, with every Federalist voting against war. By contrast, members of Congress from the South and the West clamored most strongly for war. Their constituents were consumed with a desire to seize additional territory in Canada or in Florida (owned by Britain's ally Spain). In addition, they accused the British of stirring up hostility among the Indian tribes.

Perhaps most important, the War Hawks were convinced that Britain had never truly accepted the verdict of the American Revolution. To them, American independence—and with it republicanism—hung in the balance. For Americans hungering to be accepted in the community of nations, nothing rankled more than still being treated by the British as colonials.

 

With Britain preoccupied by Napoleon, the War Hawks expected an easy victory. In truth, the United States was totally unprepared for war. Crippled by Jefferson's cutbacks, the navy was unable to lift the British blockade of the American coast, which bottled up the country's merchant marine and most of its navy. As for the U.S. army, it was small and poorly led. When Congress moved to increase its size to 75,000, even the most hawkish states failed to meet their quotas. Congress was also reluctant to levy taxes to finance the war.

A three-pronged American invasion of Canada from Detroit, Niagara, and Lake Champlain failed dismally in 1812. Americans fared better the following year, as both sides raced to build a navy on the strategically located Lake Erie. Led by Commander Oliver Hazard Perry, American forces won a decisive victory at Put-In Bay in 1813.

As the United States struggled to organize its forces, Tecumseh sensed that his long-awaited opportunity had come to drive Americans out of the western territories. “Here is a chance … such as will never occur again,” he told a war council, “for us Indians of North America to form ourselves into one great combination.” Allying with the British, Tecumseh traveled south in the fall to talk again with his Creek allies. To coordinate an Indian offensive for the following summer, he left a bundle of red sticks with eager Creek soldiers. They were to remove one stick each day from the bundle and attack when the sticks had run out.

Some of the older Creeks were more acculturated and preferred an American alliance. But about 2,000 younger “Red Stick” Creeks launched a series of attacks, climaxed by the destruction of Fort Mims along the Alabama River in August 1813. Once again, the Indians' lack of unity was a serious handicap, as warriors from the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw tribes, traditional Creek enemies, allied with the Americans. At the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in March 1814, General Andrew Jackson and his Tennessee militia soundly defeated the Red Stick Creeks. Jackson promptly dictated a peace treaty under which the Creeks ceded 22 million acres of land in the Mississippi Territory. They and the other southern tribes still retained significant landholdings, but Indian military power had been broken in the South, east of the Mississippi.

Farther north, in October 1813, American forces under General William Henry Harrison defeated the British and their Indian allies at the Battle of the Thames. In the midst of heavy fighting Tecumseh was killed. With him died any hope of a pan-Indian movement.

The British Invasion

As long as the war against Napoleon continued, the British were unwilling to divert army units to North America. But in 1814 Napoleon was at last defeated. Free to concentrate on America, the British devised a coordinated strategy to invade the United States in the northern, central, and southern parts of the country. The main army headed south from Montreal but was checked when Americans destroyed the British fleet on Lake Champlain.

Meanwhile, a smaller British force captured Washington and burned several public buildings, including the Capitol and the president's home. To cover the scars of this destruction, the executive mansion was painted with whitewash and became known as the White House. The burning of the capital was a humiliating event: President Madison and his wife, Dolley, were forced to flee. But the defeat had little military significance. The principal British objective was Baltimore, where for 25 hours their fleet bombarded Fort McHenry in the city's harbor. When Francis Scott Key saw the American flag still flying above the fort at dawn, he hurriedly composed the verses of “The Star Spangled Banner,” which was eventually adopted as the national anthem.

The third British target was New Orleans, where a formidable army of 7,500 British troops was opposed by a hastily assembled force commanded by Major General Andrew Jackson. The Americans included regular soldiers; frontiersmen from Kentucky and Tennessee; citizens of New Orleans, including several companies of free African Americans; Choctaw Indians; and a group of pirates. Jackson's outnumbered and ill-equipped forces won a stunning victory, which made the general an overnight hero.

In December 1814, while Jackson was organizing the defense of New Orleans, New England Federalists met in Hartford to map strategy against the war. Angry as they were, the delegates still rejected calls for secession. Instead they proposed a series of amendments to the Constitution that showed their displeasure with the government's economic policies and their resentment of the South's national political power.

To the convention's dismay, its representatives arrived in Washington to present their demands just as news of Andrew Jackson's victory was being trumpeted on the streets. The celebrations badly undercut the Hartford Convention, as did news from across the Atlantic that American negotiators in Ghent, Belgium, had signeda treaty ending the war. Hostilities had ceased, technically, on Christmas Eve 1814, two weeks before the Battle of New Orleans. Both sides were relieved to end the conflict, even though the Treaty of Ghent left unresolved the issues of impressment, neutral rights or trade.

America Turns Inwards

The return of peace hard on the heels of Jackson's victory sparked a new confidence in many Americans. The new nationalism sounded the death knell of the Federalist Party, for even talk of secession at the Hartford Convention had tainted the party with disunion and treason. In the 1816 election, Madison's secretary of state, James Monroe, resoundingly defeated Federalist Rufus King of New York. Four years later Monroe ran for reelection unopposed.

Monroe's Presidency

The major domestic challenge that Monroe faced was the renewal of sectional rivalries in 1819, when the Missouri Territory applied for admission as a slave state. Before the controversy over Missouri erupted, slavery had not been a major issue in American politics. Congress had debated the institution when it prohibited the African slave trade in 1808, the earliest year this step could be taken under the Constitution. But lacking any specific federal legislation to stop it, slavery had crossed the Mississippi River into the Louisiana Purchase. Louisiana entered the Union in 1812 as a slave state, and in 1818 Missouri, which had about 10,000 slaves in its population, asked permission to come in, too.

In 1818 the Union contained 11 free and 11 slave states. As the federal government became stronger and more active, both the North and the South worried about maintaining their political power. The North's greater population gave it a majority in the House of Representatives, 105 to 81. The Senate, of course, was evenly balanced, because each state had two senators regardless of population. But Maine, which previously had been part of Massachusetts, requested admission as a free state. That would upset the balance unless Missouri came in as a slave state.

Representative James Tallmadge of New York disturbed this delicate state of affairs when in 1819 he introduced an amendment that would establish a program of gradual emancipation in Missouri. For the first time Congress directly debated the morality of slavery, often bitterly. The House approved the Tallmadge amendment, but the Senate refused to accept it, and the two houses deadlocked.

When Congress reconvened in 1820, Henry Clay of Kentucky promoted what came to be known as the Missouri Compromise. Under its terms Missouri was admitted as a slave state and Maine as a free state. In addition, slavery was forever prohibited in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36°30” (the southern boundary of Missouri). Clay's proposal, the first of several sectional compromises he would engineer in his long career, won congressional approval and Monroe signed the measure, ending the crisis. But southern fears for the security of slavery and northern fears about its spread remained.

Monroe's greatest achievements were diplomatic, accomplished largely by his talented secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, the son of President John Adams. An experienced diplomat, Adams thought of the Republic in continental terms and was intent on promoting expansion to the Pacific. Such a vision required dealing with Spain, which had never recognized the legality of the Louisiana Purchase. In addition, between 1810 and 1813 the United States had occupied and unilaterally annexed Spanish West Florida.

But Spain was preoccupied with events farther south in the Americas. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, its colonies one after another revolted and established themselves as independent nations. These revolutions increased the pressure on the Spanish minister to America, Luis de Onís, to come to terms with the United States. So, too, did Andrew Jackson, who marched into East Florida and captured several Spanish forts in 1818. Jackson had exceeded his instructions, but Adams understood the additional pressure this aggression put on Onís and refused to disavow it.

Fearful that the United States might next invade Texas or other Spanish territory, Spain agreed to the Transcontinental Treaty in February 1819. Its terms set the boundary between American and Spanish territory all the way to the Pacific. Spain not only gave up its claims to the Pacific Northwest but also ceded Florida. To obtain the line to the Pacific, the United States abandoned its contention that Texas was part of the Louisiana Purchase.

More importantly, the United States also came to terms with Great Britain. Following the War of 1812, the British abandoned their connections with the western Indian tribes and no longer attempted to block American expansion to the Rocky Mountains. In a growing spirit of cooperation, the countries agreed in 1818 to the 49th parallel as the northern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase and also to joint control of the Oregon Territory for 10 years, subject to renewal.

In his annual message to Congress, on December 2, 1823, Monroe also announced that the United States would not interfere with already established European colonies in the Western Hemisphere. But any intervention in the new republics of Latin America, he warned, would be considered a hostile act: “The American continents … are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” The essence of this policy was the concept of two worlds, one old and one new, each refraining from interfering in the other's affairs. American public opinion hailed Monroe's statement and then promptly forgot it. Only years later would it be referred to as the Monroe Doctrine.

The three decades after 1789 demonstrated how profoundly events in the wider world could affect life within the United States, shaping its politics, its boundaries, its economy—its future.

The French Revolution contributed to splintering the once-united leaders of the American Revolution into two rival parties. The wars that followed, between France and England, deepened the divisions between Federalists and Republicans and prompted both parties to mobilize the political loyalties of ordinary white American men and women. Napoleon's ambitions to conquer Europe handed Jefferson the Louisiana Territory, while British efforts to reclaim its American empire tempted some New Englanders to secede from the Union and encouraged Tecumseh's hopes of mounting a pan-Indian resistance on the frontier. The Haitian Revolution in the Caribbean prompted free blacks in northern cities to protest racial inequalities and slavery within the United States.

But by the 1820s most white Americans paid less attention to events abroad than to expanding across the vast North American continent. Jefferson had dreamed of an “empire of liberty,” delighting in expansion as the means to preserve a nation of small farmers. But younger, more nationalistic Republicans had a different vision of expansion. They spoke of internal improvements, protective tariffs to foster American industries, roads and canals to link farmers with towns, cities, and wider markets. These new Republicans were not aristocratic, like the Federalists of old. Still, their dream of a national, commercial republic resembled Franklin's and Hamilton's more than Jefferson's. They had seen how handsomely American merchants and commercial farmers profited when European wars swelled demand for American wheat and cotton. They looked to profit from speculation in land, the growth of commercial agriculture, and new methods of industrial manufacturing. If they represented the rising generation, what would be the fate of Crèvecoeur's semisubsistence farm communities? The answer was not yet clear.

Chapter Summary

This chapter covers the tumultuous 1790s, the first decade of the Republic's existence under the new Constitution. The chapter opens by describing the celebrations over ratification of the Constitution, celebrations that could not hide basic divisions in society and the great uncertainty many Americans felt over their republican experiment. Two of the central purposes of the chapter are to describe the basic division in the United States between the commercial and semi-subsistence economies and to explain how this division was central to the development of two competing political parties.

1789: A Social Portrait
As the new government began operation in 1789, the Republic divided roughly between commercial and semi-subsistence areas of the country. Hector St. John de Crvecoeur celebrated the life of semi-subsistence farm families, where wealth remained fairly evenly distributed and where people tried to provide as much of their own food and wants as they could. They had only limited contact with regions beyond their local community, seldom saw cash, and functioned in a largely barter economy. Benjamin Franklin, by contrast, came to symbolize the world of commerce. In his writings, he praised the marketplace and upheld the commercial side of America; he showed how urban economies and commercial farm families had become tied to larger markets that sold specialized goods or services were sold and created increased social distance between the rich and the poor.

Americans who participated in the commercial economy held different attitudes about wealth and opportunity than did those who lived in semi-subsistence areas. Urban merchants and workers--as well as commercial farmers--generally supported the Constitution during the debate over ratification, while semi-subsistence farmers tended to oppose it, fearing too much concentration of power in the hands of aristocrats and urban merchants. Content with their lives and harboring the traditional fear of taxes, debt, and intrusive government, they wanted to preserve their society and avoid any outside interference in their lives.

The New Government
Americans put their faith in George Washington, who more than any individual personified the Republic. Washington organized the executive branch into Departments and created a cabinet of advisors. The most important positions in the cabinet went to Alexander Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury, and Thomas Jefferson, as Secretary of State. To mollify opponents of the Constitution, Congress approved and the states ratified a series of amendments to safeguard certain basic liberties. These first 10 amendments became known as the Bill of Rights.

A strong nationalist, Hamilton emerged as the dominant figure in the cabinet. He worked to strengthen the power of the federal government by assuming the states' remaining Revolutionary war debts and funding, or paying, the outstanding federal debt.

This process became known as funding and assumption. Congress finally approved these policies once Hamilton agreed to the compromise of locating the permanent capital on the Potomac River. Eager to tie the wealthy to the new government, Hamilton also proposed that Congress charter a national bank to aid the Treasury in its transactions, a protective tariff to stimulate manufacturing, and a series of internal or excise taxes (the one on whiskey was most controversial). Congress eventually approved most of Hamilton's recommendations. His argument that the Constitution gave the national government implied as well as explicit powers and that legislators and executive should interpret the document loosely persuaded Washington to sign the bill creating the national bank.

While these ideas appealed to citizens active in the commercial life of the nation, they stimulated fears among other Americans. Eventually the Republican Party, organized by James Madison and headed by Thomas Jefferson, opposed the policies of the Federalists. Republicans feared that a corrupt aristocracy would come to dominate American society, that financial speculators, wealthy bankers, and unprincipled politicians would gain power, as had happened in Great Britain with the powerful Bank of England. They endorsed a strict construction of the Constitution, and wanted a less active federal government.

Expansion and Turmoil in the West

Washington tried to remain above the hostility developing between Jefferson and Hamilton, but Hamilton succeeded in gaining the president's support to send an army against citizens in western Pennsylvania. There, a whiskey rebellion had arisen against Hamilton's excise tax, an effort to raise money for the federal government and assert its power. Hamilton strategy proved an overreaction, for the army encountered little resistance and easily restored order.

The Washington administration also sought to tie the West more firmly to the Union by defeating the Miami Confederacy and opening new tracts of land in the Ohio valley to white settlement. Thomas Pinckney also negotiated a favorable treaty with Spain that allowed western farmers to use the Mississippi River to ship their produce.

The Emergence of Political Parties
Political parties emerged slowly because the ideology of republicanism taught Americans to fear parties. But the sharp controversy over Hamilton's domestic policies led to the formation of the first national parties in American history. The Federalists, led by Hamilton and Washington, took shape first. In general, Federalists believed in order and hierarchy and supported a loose construction of the Constitution (in order to allow the federal government to actively encourage commerce and manufacturing). Eventually the Republican Party, organized by Madison and headed by Jefferson, opposed the policies of the Federalists.

Differences over foreign policy also sparked the formation of parties. The French Revolution became a focus of controversy in the United States. When monarchical England and republican France went to war, Washington pursued a neutral course. The Federalists, however, favored Britain, while the Jeffersonians backed France.

Efforts to settle the differences between the U.S. and Britain failed, particularly on issues of trade, neutral rights, and impressment. The U.S. gained little from Jay's Treaty (1795), which tied the nation economically to Britain. Bitter debates over the treaty further stimulated the creation of rival parties. In 1796, Washington announced that he would not seek another term. In the first contested presidential election in American history, John Adams, the Federalist candidate, defeated Jefferson, who was elected Vice President.

The Presidency of John Adams
Differences of opinion over America's role in European affairs continued to fester during the administration of Federalist John Adams. The major events of these years--the XYZ Affair, the Quasi-War with France, the Federalist-sponsored Alien and Sedition Acts, and the Republican response in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions--all became part of the debate over America's diplomatic course. They also demonstrated the violence and bitterness in politics during the 1790s. The Federalists increasingly lost support because of their suppression of civil liberties and their aristocratic disdain for the masses. An increasingly fierce personal feud between Adams and Hamilton also hurt the party. Thus in 1800, Jefferson defeated Adams (although the House had to break the tie between him and his vice-presidential running mate, Aaron Burr). Despite the threat of violent tumult and even civil war, power passed peacefully from one administration and party to another. Under Washington's firm leadership, the Federalists had made the Constitution a workable instrument of government and established economic policies and principles of foreign affairs (particularly of neutrality) that even Jefferson's Republicans would continue.

Jefferson in Power
The first section examines Jefferson's political philosophy. A complex individual, Jefferson combined a fondness for making seemingly radical pronouncements with a large dose of political realism. Jefferson had a strong faith in the people and a belief in limited government. Convinced that agriculture nurtured the values necessary to preserve republicanism, he wanted to keep commerce and urbanization distinctly subordinate in the American economy. Jefferson found, however, that he confronted different problems in power than in opposition. His agrarian principles led him to push actively for the United States' geographic expansion, but on economic questions he increasingly compromised. In particular, he failed to dismantle Hamilton's economic program, opposition to which had largely caused the original formation of the Republican Party. Jefferson's radical rhetoric contrasted sharply with his more pragmatic actions.

In another crucial development, the Supreme Court established the principle of judicial review -- the right of the Court to interpret the Constitution -- primarily as a result of the influence of Chief Justice John Marshall, a staunch Federalist appointed by John Adams at the end of his term. Based on this theory, the Court asserted its right to rule on the constitutionality of any laws passed by Congress and state legislatures, as well as its right to review decisions on constitutional matters by state courts. Marshall first laid out the principle of judicial review in the case of Marbury v. Madison (1803). Eager to bring all branches of government under their party's control, Republicans attempted to impeach several notoriously partisan Federalist judges, but Congress balked at this action, thereby preserving the independence of the judiciary.

Jefferson and Western Expansion
Jefferson viewed western expansion as a blessing. He believed that it would preserve his republic of liberty by keeping agriculture and the values of the semi-subsistence economy dominant. When France suddenly offered to sell the entire Louisiana region to the United States, Jefferson leapt at the chance to double the size of the country, even though he believed that the federal government lacked the power under the Constitution to acquire territory. Once again, as with his economic policies, practical politics prevailed over ideological purity. Jefferson dispatched an expedition under the leadership of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the new territory, find a route to the Pacific, and strengthen American claims to Oregon.

Whites and Indians on the Frontier
As whites poured across the Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio Valley, a series of revivals broke out on the frontier. These revivals marked the beginning of the Second Great Awakening and were characterized by strong displays of emotion. The camp meetings offered social outlets for isolated pioneer families and offered an emotional release from the hard life on the frontier, while the revivalists preached a message of hope and the ability of individuals to gain salvation.

As white settlement increased, tensions between whites and Indians steadily grew across the Ohio Valley. White encroachment on Indian lands and disputes over Indian trade with whites led to cultural disorder among the northwestern tribes. In this situation, some Indian leaders, such as Black Hoof, urged adoption of white culture. Most of the tribes in the region, however, rallied behind a religious movement promoted by the Shawnee leader Tenskwatawa, who was known as the Prophet, much as frontier families turned to the revivalism of camp meetings. The Prophet sought to revitalize Indian cultures by limiting contact with whites, rejecting white goods, and preserving tribal lands. His movement, however, proved unable to prevent further land cessions.

As the Prophet's prestige declined, his brother Tecumseh assumed leadership of the western tribes. Tecumseh advocated combining the western and southern tribes into a political and military alliance to protect their lands and way of life.

The Second War for American Independence
increasingly, foreign affairs dominated American politics. Efforts to define an American cultural identity led to conflicts with both the Barbary States of North Africa and with Britain and France. When the latter two nations resumed their war in 1805, neither power was willing to respect the United States' rights as a neutral nation, and began to raid American shipping on the high seas and impress American sailors. American grievances were stronger against Britain, which had the more powerful navy. Reluctant to resort to force, Jefferson tried to use peaceful coercion by imposing an embargo on American trade with both countries. Some areas, especially New England, openly flouted the law, and eventually the Republican Party had to abandon this policy.

James Madison, Jefferson's successor, came under mounting pressure from younger nationalistic Republicans, known as the War Hawks. The War Hawks grew increasingly indignant over British interference with American shipping and meddling with western Indians. When renewed efforts at peaceful coercion and negotiation failed, the U.S. finally declared war on Britain in order to preserve American rights and uphold national independence.

Americans proved woefully ill-prepared for war, however. Efforts to invade Canada failed dismally, the British occupied Washington and burned a number of government buildings, and only Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans redeemed American pride. Meanwhile, Tecumseh allied his followers with the British, seeing such an alliance as the western tribes' best chance to safeguard their lands. His death in battle ended his pan-Indian movement. Federalist leadership incited New England states to refuse to support the war, and the region's opposition culminated in the Hartford Convention of 1814, which rejected calls for disunion but proposed several constitutional amendments to reduce the South's political influence. Despite the country's many military failures, the war produced several long-term consequences. It broke the power of Tecumseh's movement, opening the way for white settlement of the Northwest. It destroyed the Federalist Party, which suffered irreparable damage due to its opposition to the war. Finally, it led to a groundswell of American nationalism.

America Turns Inward
this postwar nationalism emerged in the foreign policy of President James Monroe. The Transcontinental Treaty established the principle of American expansion to the Pacific, while the Monroe Doctrine proclaimed the New World's independence from Europe. American relations with Britain improved dramatically after 1815, as the two nations reached agreement on a number of long-standing differences.

Britain's recognition of American sovereignty ended the threat of foreign interference in American affairs, bringing to a close the quest for independence from British control and interference that had begun with the Revolution.

However, the Missouri crisis of 1819-1821, which brought the issue of slavery to the forefront of national politics for the first time, offered an example of the formidable challenges that remained for the American republic and its leaders.

Sample Quiz

1. The chapter introduction tells the story of General John Neville's efforts to enforce the federal Whiskey Tax in the frontier district of Western Pennsylvania to make the point that:

A) Since the time of the Revolution, Americans refused to recognize that any government had the legitimate power to tax them.

B) Americans living in the West would not tolerate the inequalities of wealth and status that Neville represented.

C) Differences between Americans living in semi-subsistence and commercial economies would frustrate efforts of the new government to unite the nation.

D) Federalists, like Neville, trampled on the individual liberty of frontier farmers for the purpose of enriching themselves.

2. A family's work in a subsistence economy:

            A) Remained predominantly the responsibility of the men of the family.

            B) Included the making of such articles as soap, candles, and clothing.

            C) Isolated the family from the rest of the community.

            D) Included trade based primarily on cash purchases from local merchants.

3. A fundamental division between two kinds of Americans helps explain how they felt about the Constitution and what party they identified with. This division was between:

            A) Semi-subsistence farmers and those tied to a commercial economy.

            B) Mainstream religious groups and those professing dissenting faiths.

            C) Northern and southern states and territories.

            D) Eastern states and western territories.

4. Which of the following civil liberties was NOT included in the Bill of Rights?

            A) Rights of assembly and petition

            B) Freedom of religion

            C) Limits on states infringing on individual rights

            D) Limits on courts and legal authorities infringing upon individual rights

5. Federal Indian policy stressed:

            A) Reserving small tracts of land for friendly tribes.

            B) Purchasing land by negotiating with tribes.

            C) Letting the wave of settlers, protected by the army, gradually push the tribes off their       ancestral lands.

            D) Exterminating the Indians only by armed force.

6. In the XYZ affair:

            A) England agreed to abandon the forts in the Northwest.

            B) French officials demanded a bribe to open negotiations with the United States.

            C) Adams broke with his party and sent a new peace commission to France.

            D) The United States agreed to end the Quasi-War.

7. Jefferson's Republican Party:

            A) Appealed to workers in cities and others tied to the commercial economy.

            B) Sought to overturn the federal system and restore a unitary central government.

            C) Appealed to fears of commerce and urbanization.

D) Articulated a conceptual framework that understood both the party in power and the loyal opposition as legitimate.

8. According to the doctrine established in the Supreme Court Case Marbury v. Madison:

            A) The high court could rule on the constitutionality of federal laws.

            B) The high court could compel public officials to perform their duties.

            C) The executive branch must defer to the rulings of the legislative branch.

            D) The judicial branch must defer to the rulings of the executive branch.

9. The Louisiana Purchase was significant for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:

A) Jefferson's pragmatism caused him to overlook his doubts about the constitutionality of the Purchase.

            B) It illustrated Jefferson's enthusiastic interest in the West.

            C) It rekindled the American alliance with France.

            D) It secured Western access to the sea.

10. What is NOT true about the Second Great Awakening?

            A) It featured a new style of moralistic preaching known as strict construction.

            B) Its effects were felt by women as well as men, and by blacks as well as whites.

            C) Its effects were felt both in the settled East and on the frontier.

D) the most effective organizational technique on the frontier was the Methodist system of circuit riders.

11. The American declaration of war against Britain in 1812 occurred because:

            A) Americans were outraged by the violation of neutral rights.

            B) Representatives from coastal regions demanded retribution for the loss of American ships.

C) Many members of Congress felt the British continued to view Americans as colonials and that the nation's independence hung in the balance.

            D) all of the above.

12. The Hartford Convention (1814) was:

            A) A meeting of New England literary figures.

            B) A diplomatic agreement concerning Oregon.

            C) The business conference when the first American insurance company was organized.

            D) A protest meeting of anti-war New Englanders.

13. The Monroe Doctrine:

            A) Proclaimed that the U. S. would be a continental nation.

            B) Warned Europe not to interfere in the Americas.

            C) Guaranteed the independence of Spain's former colonies.

            D) Laid claims to the Oregon County.

14. The new generation of Republicans favored all of the following domestic policies EXCEPT:

            A) Protective tariffs.

            B) The abolition of slavery.

            C) The development of better roads and canals.

            D) Territorial expansion.

 15. The Missouri Crisis:

            A) Erupted over rival fur trappers' activities along the upper Missouri River.

            B) Was the first great sectional crisis in American history.

            C) Was ended by the panic of 1819.

            D) Led to the abolition of slavery in the territories.

Chapter Test

1. In the Constitution, political parties were:

A.    not mentioned.

B.     described as dangerous.

C.     encouraged.

D.    viewed as temporary factions.

E.     specifically proscribed.

 

2. In 1812, Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun could best be described as:

A.    Jeffersonians.

B.     pacifists.

C.     secessionists.

D.    Federalists.

E.     war hawks.

3. During the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson made a name for himself in Florida and at New Orleans.

A.    True

B.     False

4. In 1819, the Transcontinental Treaty negotiated by John Quincy Adams-Luis de Onís dealt with the American purchase of:

A.    Texas.

B.     Ohio.

C.     Florida.

D.    Illinois.

E.     Puerto Rico.

5. The greatest accomplishment of Chief Justice John Marshall was that he:

A.    stopped the growth of Republican power.

B.     prevented a Federalist revival in New England.

C.     refused to expand the power of the judiciary.

D.    made the judiciary a coequal branch of government.

E.     prevented New England from seceding.

6. President Jefferson's response to the violations of American neutral rights was to prohibit American ships from leaving any American port for any port in the world.

A.    True

B.     False

 

7. The Prophet, Tenskwatawa, was significant because he:

A.    brought Indians to the Christian faith.

B.     was Tecumseh's brother.

C.     advocated a religious war with southern tribes.

D.    convinced the Indians to accept Jefferson's policies.

E.     inspired an Indian religious revival that helped unite the tribes.

8. Tecumseh was important because he:

A.    advocated Indian unity to stop white expansion.

B.     allied the northwestern Indians with the British in Canada.

C.     was able to defeat the Americans at Tippecanoe.

D.    helped his brother, the Prophet, in his religious work.

E.     became a British army general.

9. The policy expressed in the Monroe Doctrine was principally directed at:

    Mexico.

    Europe.

    American Indians.

    Asia.

    southern slaveholders

10. The Federalists made a last gasp attempt to maintain power by:

A.    repealing the Alien and Sedition Acts.

B.     supporting Aaron Burr for president.

C.     creating new federal courts and judges.

D.    plotting a revolution to prevent the election of Jefferson.

E.     expanding the number of Supreme Court justices.

11. Under Alexander Hamilton's plan, a new national bank would:

A.    obtain most of its capital from private investors.

B.     facilitate the collection of taxes.

C.     provide loans to private businesses.

D.    act as a storehouse for federal deposits.

E.     All these answers are correct.

12. Following the British bombardment of Fort McHenry, Francis Scott Key wrote:

A.    "Yankee Doodle."

B.     "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

C.     "The Pledge of Allegiance."

D.    "Stars and Stripes Forever."

E.     "The Star-Spangled Banner."

13. Opponents of Alexander Hamilton's proposed national bank argued:

A.    Congress had no authority to create a national bank.

B.     a national bank would lead to currency inflation.

C.     a national bank would lead to rampant speculation.

D.    Congress had no authority to create a national bank, and a national bank would lead to currency inflation.

E.     a national bank would lead to currency inflation and rampant speculation.

  

14. The Supreme Court's ruling in the case of Marbury v. Madison (1803):

A.    stated that Congress had the authority to expand the power of the Supreme Court.

B.     stated that the Supreme Court did not have the power to nullify an act of Congress.

C.     ordered Secretary of State Madison to deliver Marbury his commission.

D.    stated that the Congress had no authority to expand the power of the Supreme Court, and that the Supreme Court had the power to nullify an act of Congress.

E.     stated that the Supreme Court had the power to nullify an act of Congress, and ordered Secretary of State Madison to deliver Marbury his commission.

15. John Marshall was a Federalist who served during several Republican administrations.

A.    True

B.     False