fter the War of 1812, the British stopped interfering with American shipping.

The
United States could now develop new industries and exploit new markets around the
globe.

It was not simply Alexander Hamilton’s financial initiatives and the capitalistic
energies of wealthy investors and entrepreneurs that sparked the nation’s dramatic
economic growth. Prosperity was also powered by the efforts of ordinary men and
women who were willing to take risks, uproot families, use unstable paper money
issued by unregulated local banks, and tinker with new machines and inventions. By
1828, the young agrarian republic was poised to become a sprawling commercial
nation connected by networks of roads and canals as well as regional economic
relationships—all energized by a restless spirit of enterprise, experimentation,
and expansion.

Yet for all the energy and optimism exhibited by Americans after the war, the
fundamental tension between nationalism and sectionalism (or regionalism) remained:
how to balance the different economic, political, and social needs of the nation’s
three diverse regions—North, South, and West—with the national interest.

Some sectionalists focused on promoting their region’s priorities: shipping and

manufacturing in the Northeast, slavery-based agriculture in the South, low land
prices and transportation improvements in the West. Nationalists, on the other
hand, promoted the interests of the nation as a whole. This required each region to
recognize that no single section could get all it wanted without threatening the
survival of the nation. Among the issues dividing the young republic, the passions
aroused by the expansion of slavery proved to be the most difficult to resolve. A
NEW NATIONALISM
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After the War of 1812, Americans experienced a wave of patriotic excitement. They
had reasserted their independence from Britain, and a postwar surge of prosperity
fed a widespread sense of optimism. In a message to Congress in 1815, President
James Madison revealed how the challenges of the war, especially the weaknesses of
the armed forces and federal finances, had changed his attitudes toward the role of
the federal government.

Now, Madison and other leading southern Republicans, such as South Carolina’s John
C. Calhoun, acted like nationalists rather than states’ rights sectionalists. They
abandoned many of Thomas Jefferson’s presidential initiatives (for example, his
efforts to reduce the armed forces and his opposition to the national bank) in
favor of the economic nationalism promoted earlier by Federalists Alexander
Hamilton and George Washington. Madison now supported a larger army and navy, a new
national bank, and tariffs to protect American manufacturers from foreign
competitors. “The Republicans have out-Federalized Federalism,” one New Englander
commented after Madison’s speech.

THE BANK OF THE UNITED STATES After President Madison and congressional Republicans
allowed the charter for the First Bank of the United States to expire in 1811, the
nation’s finances fell into a muddle. States began chartering local banks with
little or no regulation, and their banknotes (paper money) flooded the economy with
different currencies of uncertain value. Imagine trying to do business on a
national basis when each state-chartered bank had its own currency, which often was
not accepted by other banks or in other states.
In response to the growing financial turmoil, Madison in 1816 urged Congress to
establish the Second Bank of the United States (B.U.S.), and with the help of
powerful legislators Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina,
Congress followed through. The new B.U.S.—which, like its predecessor, was based in
Philadelphia and was chartered for twenty years—was intended primarily to support a
stable national currency that would promote economic growth. In return for issuing
national currency and opening branches in every state, it had to handle all the
federal government’s funds without charge, lend the government up to $5 million
upon demand, and pay it $1.5 million annually.

The bitter debate over the B.U.S. helped set the pattern of regional alignment for
most other economic issues. Generally speaking, westerners opposed the national
bank because it catered to eastern customers.

A PROTECTIVE TARIFF The long controversy with Great Britain over maritime rights
convinced most Americans of the need to end their dependence on imported British
goods. Efforts to develop iron and textile industries, begun in New York and New
England during the embargo of 1807, had accelerated during the War of 1812, when
America lost access to European goods.
After the war, however, British companies flooded U.S. markets with their less
expensive products, which undercut their American competitors. In response,
northern manufacturers lobbied Congress for tariffs to protect their infant
industries from “unfair” British competition.

Congress responded by passing the Tariff of 1816, which placed a 20–25 percent tax
on a long list of imported goods. Tariffs benefited some regions (in the Northeast)
more than others (in the South), thus aggravating sectional grievances. Debates
over federal tariffs would dominate national politics throughout the nineteenth
century, in part because tariffs provided much of the annual federal revenue and in
part because they benefited manufacturers rather than consumers.

THE NATIONAL ROAD, 1811–1838

A map of the United States entitled, “The National Road, from 1811 to 1838.” A road
built from 1811 to 1818 runs from Cumberland, Maryland to Wheeling, Ohio. The road
continues from Wheeling to Vandalia, Illinois. This portion of the road was built
from 1825 to 1838.
Why were internal improvements so important in the early nineteenth century?
How did the National Road affect agriculture and trade?
What were the constitutional issues that limited the federal government’s ability
to enact internal improvements?
INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS The third major element of economic nationalism in the first
half of the nineteenth century involved federal financing of internal improvements,
specifically the construction of roads, bridges, canals, and harbors. Most American
rivers flowed from north to south, so the nation needed a network of roads running
east to west.
In 1817, John C. Calhoun urged the House to fund internal improvements. He believed
that a federally financed network of roads and canals in the West would help his
native South by opening up trading relationships between the two regions. Support
for Calhoun’s proposal came largely from the West, which badly needed
transportation infrastructure. Opposition was centered in New England, which
expected to gain the least from projects intended to spur western development.

Using federal money to finance internal improvements remained controversial.

Critics concerned about the expansion of federal power argued that the U.S.
Constitution did not allow for such activities; only the local and state
governments, or private investors, should fund road, canal, and harbor projects.

POSTWAR NATIONALISM AND THE SUPREME COURT The postwar emphasis on economic
nationalism also flourished in the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice John Marshall
strengthened the constitutional powers of the federal government at the expense of
states’ rights. Marshall was a consistent nationalist. He viewed his cousin Thomas
Jefferson and his Republican followers as a danger to the nation because they
preferred states’ rights over federal authority.
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A portrait done of chief justice John Marshall. The face is in profile, facing
right.
John Marshall A pillar of judicial nationalism, Marshall became chief justice of
the U.S. Supreme Court at the young age of forty-six, ruling on Marbury v. Madison
just two years later.
During Marshall’s early years as chief justice (he served thirty-four years
altogether), his judicial nationalism affirmed that the Supreme Court had the
authority (and responsibility) to judge the constitutionality of state and federal
legislative actions (oversight called judicial review). In the pathbreaking case of
Marbury v. Madison (1803), the Court had, for the first time, declared a federal
law unconstitutional. In the cases of Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816) and Cohens
v. Virginia (1821), the Court ruled that the Constitution, as well as the nation’s
laws and treaties, could remain the supreme law of the land only if the Court could
review and at times overturn the decisions of state courts.

PROTECTING CONTRACT RIGHTS The Supreme Court made two major decisions in 1819 that
strengthened the power of the federal government at the expense of the states. One,
Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) , involved the New Hampshire legislature’s
effort to change the charter of Dartmouth College to stop the college’s trustees
from electing their own successors. In 1816, the legislature created a new board of
trustees for the college. The original trustees sued to block the move. They lost
in the state courts but won on appeal to the Supreme Court. The college’s original
charter, wrote John Marshall in drafting the Court’s majority opinion, was a valid
contract that the state legislature had violated, an act forbidden by the U.S.
Constitution.
This decision implied an enlarged definition of contract that seemed to put
corporations beyond the reach of the states that chartered them. Thereafter, states
commonly wrote into the charters incorporating businesses and other organizations
provisions that made charters subject to modification. Such provisions were then
part of the “contract.”

PROTECTING A NATIONAL CURRENCY The second major Supreme Court case of 1819 produced
Chief Justice Marshall’s most significant interpretation of the constitutional
system: McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) . James McCulloch, a B.U.S. clerk in
Baltimore, had refused to pay state taxes on B.U.S. currency as required by a
Maryland law. The state indicted McCulloch. Acting on behalf of the national bank,
he appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that Congress had the
authority to charter the B.U.S. and that states had no right to tax the national
bank.
Speaking for the Court, Marshall ruled that given the “implied powers” granted it,
Congress had the right to take any action not forbidden by the Constitution as long
as the purpose of such laws was within the “scope of the Constitution.” One great
principle that “entirely pervades the Constitution,” Marshall wrote, is “that the
Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof are supreme: . . . They control
the Constitution and laws of the respective states, and cannot be controlled by
them.” The effort by a state to tax a federal bank therefore was unconstitutional,
for the “power to tax involves the power to destroy.”

INTERSTATE COMMERCE John Marshall’s last great decision, Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) ,
affirmed the federal government’s supremacy in regulating interstate commerce. In
1808, the New York legislature granted Robert Fulton and Robert R. Livingston the
exclusive right to operate steamboats on the state’s rivers and lakes. Fulton and
Livingston then gave Aaron Ogden, a former New Jersey governor, the exclusive right
to ferry people and goods up the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey.
Thomas Gibbons, however, operated ships under a federal license that competed with
Ogden, his New Jersey neighbor.
A watercolor of an early steamboat painted in 1811 by russian diplomat, Pavel
Petrovich Svinin. The ship plows through choppy water. A cliff looms over the
starboard side. The American flag flies at the stern.
Steamboat Travel on the Hudson River (1811) This watercolor of an early steamboat
was painted by a Russian diplomat, Pavel Petrovich Svinin, who was fascinated by
early technological innovations and the unique entrepreneurial culture of America.
On behalf of a unanimous Court, Marshall ruled in Gibbons v. Ogden that the
monopoly granted by the state to Ogden conflicted with the federal license issued
to Gibbons. Marshall added that Congress could regulate commerce not only between
states but also activities within a state “connected with” interstate commerce. He
said that Congress could exercise power “to its utmost extent” in such
circumstances.

Thomas Jefferson detested Marshall’s judicial nationalism. To Jefferson, the

Court’s ruling in the Gibbons case revealed how “the Federal branch of our
Government is advancing towards the usurpation of all the rights reserved to the
States, and the consolidation in itself of all powers, foreign and domestic.”
DEBATES OVER THE AMERICAN SYSTEM
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The major economic initiatives debated by Congress after the War of 1812—the
national bank, federal tariffs, and federally financed roads, bridges, ports, and
canals—were interrelated pieces of a comprehensive economic plan called the
American System. The term was coined by Henry Clay, the powerful young Kentucky
congressman. Clay wanted to free America’s economy from its dependence on Great
Britain while tying together the diverse regions of the nation politically. He
said, “I know of no South, no North, no East, no West to which I owe my allegiance.
The Union is my country.”

A portrait of Henry Clay as depicted on a fifty dollar bill distributed in the

1860s. He has a thick, fleshy face with a high forehead. He looks directly at the
viewer.
Henry Clay A committed nationalist, Clay was the chief architect of the American
System. Here Clay is pictured on a $50 bill issued in the 1860s, long after his
death.
In promoting the American System, Clay sought to deliver to each region its top
economic priority. He argued that high tariffs on imports were needed to block the
sale of British products in the United States in order to protect new industries in
New England and New York from unfair foreign competition. To convince western
states to support tariffs wanted by New England manufacturers, Clay first called
for the federal government to use tariff revenues to build much-needed
infrastructure—roads, bridges, canals, and other internal improvements—in the
frontier West to enable speedier travel and faster shipment of goods to markets.
Second, Clay’s American System would raise prices for the purchase of federal lands
and “distribute” the additional revenue to the states to help finance more roads,
bridges, and canals. Third, Clay endorsed a strong national bank to create a
national currency and to regulate the unstable state and local banks.

Clay’s program depended on the willingness of each region to compromise. For a

while, it worked. Critics, however, argued that higher prices for federal lands
would discourage western migration and that tariffs benefited the northern
manufacturing sector at the expense of southern and western farmers and the
“common” people, who had to pay higher prices for the goods produced by tariff-
protected industries.

Many westerners and southerners also feared that the Second B.U.S. would become so
powerful and corrupt that it could dictate the nation’s economic future at the
expense of states’ rights and the needs of particular regions. Missouri senator
Thomas Hart Benton feared that the West would be “devoured” by the East.
Westerners, Benton worried, “are in the jaws of the monster! A lump of butter in
the mouth of a dog! One gulp, one swallow, and all is gone!”

The bitter debate over the B.U.S. helped set the pattern of deepening sectional
disputes over economic issues associated with Clay’s American System. Support for
federal spending on internal improvements came largely from the West, while many
New Englanders and southerners argued that the states should fund such projects.

On his last day in office, in 1817, President Madison vetoed a bill that would have
funded more internal improvements because he could not find a provision in the
Constitution authorizing such federal expenditures. Nor was he willing to claim
that such funding was an “implied power” within the Constitution. As a result,
internal improvements remained, with few exceptions, the responsibility of the
states for another hundred years. The federal government did not enter the field
again on a large scale until passage of the Federal Highways Act of 1916.

In championing his American System, Henry Clay was forced to resolve explosive
sectional conflicts over slavery in the western territories and states. Many
Americans pouring across the Appalachian Mountains were southerners who took with
them a commitment to cotton production and the slave system that supported it. The
possibility of new western states becoming “slave states” created the greatest
political controversy of the nineteenth century. Thomas Jefferson admitted that the
issue scared him “like a firebell in the night.” It “awakened and filled me with
terror. I considered it at once as the [death] knell of the Union.”

An aging Jefferson realized that the United States was increasingly at risk of
disintegrating over the future of slavery. Like Jefferson, Clay lived with the
contradiction of being a slave owner who denounced the evils of slavery and opposed
its expansion into western territories. “I consider slavery as a curse—a curse to
the master, a wrong, a grievous wrong to the slave,” he explained. Nonetheless, he
insisted that slavery was allowed by the Constitution and had become essential to
the southern way of life. “AN ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS”
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In the 1816 election, Virginian James Monroe overwhelmed his Federalist opponent,
Rufus King of New York, by a 183–34 margin in the Electoral College. The “Virginia
dynasty” of presidents continued. The nation that Monroe would preside over was
remarkably changed from the new republic led by George Washington. By 1817, the
Union had nineteen states; five more would be added under Monroe. Perhaps the most
remarkable evidence of the fast-growing nation was the number of post offices.
There had been seventy-five in 1789, when Washington was inaugurated. In 1817,
there were 3,459.

Soon after his inauguration, Monroe embarked on a goodwill tour of New England, the
stronghold of the Federalist party. In Boston, a Federalist newspaper complimented
the Republican president for striving to “harmonize feelings, annihilate
dissentions, and make us one people.”

JAMES MONROE Like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, James
Monroe was a slaveholding Virginia planter who claimed that he hated slavery. At
the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, he joined the army at the age of sixteen,
served under Washington during the Revolution, and later studied law with
Jefferson.
A watercolor by John Lewis Krimmel envisioning the Era of Good Feelings. Several
tents and tables are set up and the area is crowded with people. Flags are flying
and some people are lifting their hands in jubilation. People are playing music,
selling food, and milling about. In the background is a building with a domed roof.
Independence Day Celebration, 1819 Monroe’s election and his presidential tour that
followed became associated with an “Era of Good Feelings,” here envisioned in
watercolor by John Lewis Krimmel. In reality, Monroe’s presidency was tainted by
the Panic of 1819 and the controversial Missouri Compromise.
James Monroe was eminently qualified to be president. He had served as a
representative in the Virginia Assembly; as governor of the state; as a
representative in the Confederation Congress; as a U.S. senator; and as U.S.
minister (ambassador) to Paris, London, and Madrid. Under President Madison, he had
served as secretary of state and doubled as secretary of war. John C. Calhoun, who
would serve as Monroe’s secretary of war, said that the new president was “among
the wisest and most cautious men I have ever known.” Jefferson was even more lavish
with his praise, noting that Monroe was “a man whose soul might be turned wrong
side outwards without discovering a blemish to the world.”

Monroe’s administration began with the nation at peace and its economy flourishing.
A Boston newspaper said the new president’s arrival in office coincided with what a
Boston editor called an “Era of Good Feelings,” and the label became a popular
catchphrase for the strong economy and political goodwill during Monroe’s
administration.

The nationalist priorities during the Era of Good Feelings did not last long,
however, for sectional loyalties continued to battle with national perspectives.
Two crucial events signaled the end of the Era of Good Feelings and warned of
stormy times ahead: the financial Panic of 1819 and the political conflict over
statehood for Missouri.

THE PANIC OF 1819 The young republic experienced its first economic depression when
the Panic of 1819 triggered a prolonged financial slowdown. After the War of 1812,
European demand for American products soared, especially for agricultural crops
like cotton, tobacco, and flour, leading farmers and planters to increase
production. To fuel the roaring postwar economy, unsound local and state banks made
it easy for people and businesses to get loans. The B.U.S. aggravated the problem
by issuing risky loans, too.
At the same time, the federal government sold vast tracts of public land, which
spurred reckless real estate speculation by people buying large parcels with the
intention of reselling them. On top of all that, good weather in Europe led to a
spike in crop production there, thus reducing the need to buy American commodities.
Prices for American farm products plunged.

The Panic of 1819 was ignited by the sudden collapse of cotton prices after British
textile mills quit buying high-priced American cotton—the nation’s leading export—
in favor of cheaper cotton from other parts of the world. As the price of cotton
fell and the flow of commerce slowed, banks began to fail and unemployment soared.
The collapse of cotton prices was especially devastating for southern planters, but
it also reduced the world demand for other American goods. Owners of new factories
and mills, most of them in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, struggled to
find markets for their goods and to fend off more-powerful foreign competitors. The
financial panic thus renewed sectional tensions between northern and southern
economic interests.

As the financial panic deepened, a widespread distrust of banks and bankers

emerged. Tennessee congressman David Crockett dismissed the “whole Banking system”
as nothing more than “swindling on a large scale.” Thomas Jefferson told John Adams
that “the paper [money] bubble is then burst. This is what you and I, and every
reasoning man . . . have long foreseen.”

Other factors caused the financial panic to become a depression. Business owners,
farmers, and land speculators had recklessly borrowed money to expand their
ventures or to purchase more land. With the collapse of crop prices and the decline
of land values during and after 1819, both land speculators and settlers saw their
income plummet.

The equally reckless lending practices of the numerous unregulated new state banks
compounded the economic confusion. Between 1815 and 1818, the number of banks grew
some 30 percent. To generate more loans, the wobbly new banks issued more paper
money. Even the B.U.S., which was supposed to provide financial stability, was
caught up in the easy-credit mania.

In 1819, newspapers uncovered extensive fraud and embezzlement in the Baltimore

branch of the B.U.S. The scandal prompted the appointment of Langdon Cheves, a
former South Carolina congressman, as the bank’s new president. Cheves restored
confidence in the national bank by forcing state banks to keep more gold coins in
their vaults to back up the loans they were making. State banks in turn put
pressure on their debtors, who found it harder to renew old loans or to get new
ones.

The economic depression lasted about three years, and people blamed the B.U.S.
After the panic subsided, many Americans, especially in the South and the West,
remained critical of the national bank.

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE As the financial panic deepened, another dark cloud
appeared on the horizon: the onset of a fierce sectional controversy over expanding
slavery into the western territories. Ever since the drafting of the U.S.
Constitution, most Americans had sought to bury the toxic issue of slavery in the
misbegotten hope that it would simply die away. Instead, slavery grew enormously,
year after year.
By 1819, the country had an equal number of slave and free states—eleven of each.
The Northwest Ordinance (1787) had banned slavery north of the Ohio River, and the
Southwest Ordinance (1790) had authorized slavery south of the Ohio.

In the vast region west of the Mississippi River, however, no move had been made to
extend the dividing line across the vast Louisiana Territory, where slavery had
existed since France and Spain first colonized the area. At the time, the Missouri
Territory encompassed all the Louisiana Purchase except the state of Louisiana and
the Arkansas Territory. St. Louis became the crossroads through which southerners
brought enslaved people into the Missouri Territory.

In 1819, Missouri Territory residents asked the House of Representatives to let

them draft a constitution and apply for statehood, as the region’s population had
passed the required minimum of 60,000 White settlers. (There were also some 10,000
enslaved people.) It would be the first state west of the Mississippi River, and a
majority of its residents wanted to allow slavery.

At that point, Representative James Tallmadge, Jr., an obscure New York Republican,
stunned Congress by proposing a resolution to ban the transport of any more
enslaved people into Missouri. Tallmadge’s resolution infuriated southern slave
owners, many of whom had developed a profitable trade selling enslaved people to
traders who resold them in the western territories. Any effort to restrict slavery
in the western territories, they believed, could lead to “disunion” and civil war.

Southerners also worried that the addition of Missouri as a free state would tip
the balance of power in the Senate against the slave states. Their fears were
heightened when Congressman Timothy Fuller, an anti-slavery Democratic Republican
from Massachusetts, declared that it was both “the right and duty of Congress” to
stop the spread “of the intolerable evil and the crying enormity of slavery.” After
fiery debates, the House, with its northern majority, passed the Tallmadge
Amendment on an almost strictly sectional vote. The Senate, however, rejected it—
also along sectional lines.

At about the same time, Maine, which had been part of Massachusetts, applied for
statehood. The Senate decided to link Maine’s request for statehood with
Missouri’s, voting in 1820 to admit Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave
state, thus maintaining the political balance between free and slave states.

Illinois senator Jesse Thomas revised the so-called Missouri Compromise (1820) by
introducing an amendment to exclude slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase
north of latitude 36°30', Missouri’s southern border. Slavery thus would continue
in the Arkansas Territory and in Missouri but would be excluded from the remainder
of the area west of the Mississippi River. By a narrow margin, the Thomas Amendment
passed on March 2, 1820.

Then another issue arose. The pro-slavery faction in Missouri’s constitutional

convention inserted in the proposed state constitution a provision banning free
Blacks and Mulattoes (mixed-race people). This violated the Constitution, for free
Blacks were already citizens of many states.

The dispute threatened to unravel the deal to admit Missouri as a state until
Speaker of the House Henry Clay fashioned a “second” Missouri Compromise whereby
Missouri would be admitted as a state only if its legislature pledged never to deny
free Blacks their constitutional rights. He then set about convincing others to
support his proposal. A New Hampshire congressman observed that Clay “uses no
threats or abuse—but is mild, humble, and persuasive—he begs, he instructs,
adjures, and beseeches us to have mercy on the people of Missouri.” If anyone
resisted, however, they would experience Clay’s wrath as “continuous peals of
thunder, interrupted by repeated flashes of lightning.” Clay’s tactics worked. On
August 10, 1821, Missouri became the twenty-fourth state, and the twelfth where
slavery was allowed.

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE, 1820

A map entitled, “The Missouri Compromise, 1820.” Areas on the map are shaded to
indicate either Free States, Slave States, or states and territories covered by the
compromise. Free states include New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island,
Connecticut, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the
Michigan Territory. Slave states include Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky,
Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and
Louisiana. States and territories covered by the compromise include Maine (1820),
Florida Territory, Missouri (1821), Arkansas Territory, and Unorganized Territory.
Spanish Possessions include the southwestern portion of modern-day United States,
as well as Mexico.
What caused the sectional controversy over slavery in 1819?
What were the terms of the Missouri Compromise?
What was Henry Clay’s solution to the Missouri constitution’s ban on free Blacks in
that state?
The compromise did little to settle the issue of slavery, however. In fact, it
hardened positions in both North and South. Sectional disputes erupted even within
the president’s cabinet. President Monroe insisted that any effort to restrict the
spread of slavery violated the Constitution. His secretary of state, future
president John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, disliked the Missouri Compromise for
the opposite reason: because it sustained the Constitution’s immoral “bargain
between freedom and slavery.”
The debate over the Missouri Compromise revealed a widening sectional divide: the
Northeast dominated by shipping, commerce, manufacturing; the Midwest—Illinois,
Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin—centered on small farms; and the South becoming more
and more dependent on cotton and slavery. NATIONALIST DIPLOMACY
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Henry Clay’s economic nationalism and John Marshall’s judicial nationalism were
reinforced by efforts to practice diplomatic nationalism. Secretary of State John
Quincy Adams aggressively exercised America’s growing power to clarify and expand
the nation’s boundaries. He also wanted Europeans to recognize America’s dominance
in the Western Hemisphere.

RELATIONS WITH BRITAIN The Treaty of Ghent (1814) had ended the War of 1812, but it
left unsettled several disputes between the United States and Great Britain.
American statesmen wanted to resolve those disputes in ways that would reinforce
economic nationalism. During James Monroe’s presidency, John Quincy Adams oversaw
the negotiations of two important treaties, the Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1817 (named
after the diplomats who arranged it) and the Convention of 1818, both of which
eased tensions with Great Britain.
In the Rush-Bagot Agreement, the two nations limited the number of warships on the
Great Lakes. The Convention of 1818 settled the disputed northern boundary of the
Louisiana Purchase by extending it along the 49th parallel westward, from what
would become Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains. West of the Rockies, the Oregon
Country would be jointly occupied by the British and the Americans.

FLORIDA Still another disputed boundary involved western Florida. Spanish control
over Florida during the early nineteenth century was more a technicality than an
actuality. Spain was now a declining power, unable to enforce its obligations under
Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795 to keep Indians in the region from making raids into
southern Georgia.
In 1816, U.S. soldiers clashed with freedom seekers who had taken refuge in a
British fort in West Florida, in the present-day Florida Panhandle. At the same
time, Seminole warriors fought White settlers in the area. In 1817, Americans
burned a Seminole village on the border, killing five Indians.

At that point, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun ordered General Andrew Jackson to
lead an army from Tennessee into Florida, igniting what became known as the First
Seminole War. Calhoun told Jackson to pursue marauding Indians into Spanish Florida
but not to attack Spanish forts. Jackson, frustrated by the restrictions, wrote
President Monroe that if the United States wanted Spanish Florida, he could conquer
it in sixty days.

When it came to Spaniards or Indians, few White Tennesseans—and certainly not

Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans—bothered with legal technicalities.
In early 1818, without presidential approval, General Jackson’s force of 2,000
federal soldiers, volunteer Tennessee militiamen, and Indian allies crossed into
Spanish Florida from southern Georgia.

The Americans assaulted a Spanish fort at St. Marks and destroyed several Seminole
villages along the Suwannee River. They also captured and court-martialed British
traders accused of provoking Indian attacks. When told that a military trial of the
British citizens was illegal, Jackson gruffly replied that the laws of war did not
“apply to conflicts with savages.” Jackson ordered the immediate execution of the
British troublemakers, another illegal action that angered the British government
and alarmed President Monroe’s cabinet. But the impulsive general kept moving. In
May, he captured Pensacola, the Spanish capital of West Florida, and established a
provisional American government.

BOUNDARY TREATIES, 1818–1819

A map entitled, “Boundary Treaties, from 1818 to 1819.” The 49th parallel bordering
the United States and British Possessions is named the Convention of 1818. The
Adams-Onis Treaty Line of 1819 is on the 42nd parallel with Spanish Possessions to
the south of the parallel and the United States and its territories and Oregon
Country to the north of the parallel, stipulating joint occupation by Britain and
the United States in 1818.
What territorial disputes did the Convention of 1818 settle?
How did Andrew Jackson’s actions in Florida help Secretary of State John Quincy
Adams claim the territory from Spain?
What were the terms of the treaty with Spain?
While Jackson’s conquests excited expansionists, they aroused resentment in Spain
and concern in Washington, D.C. Spain demanded that its territory be returned and
that the U.S. general be punished for violating international law. Monroe’s cabinet
was at first prepared to disavow Jackson’s illegal acts. Privately, Calhoun
criticized Jackson for disobeying orders—a stand that would later cause bad blood
between them. Jackson, however, remained a hero to most Americans. He also had an
important friend in the cabinet—Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who realized
that Jackson’s unauthorized conquest of Florida had strengthened his own hand in
negotiating with the Spanish to purchase the territory.

A painting of the Massacre of the Whites by Indians and Blacks in Florida. People
are using tools and swords to kill each other. One Indian woman steals a white
woman"s baby.
Massacre of the Whites by Indians and Blacks in Florida (1836) Published in a
southerner’s account of the Seminole War, this is one of the earliest known
depictions of African Americans and Native Americans fighting as allies.
With the fate of Florida a foregone conclusion, Adams turned his eye to a larger
goal: a precise definition of the contested western boundary of the Louisiana
Purchase and—his boldest stroke—extension of its boundary to the Pacific coast. In
lengthy negotiations with Spain, Adams gradually gave ground on American claims to
Texas, then a province of New Spain. In the final version of the deal, however, he
stuck to his demand that the boundary of the Louisiana Purchase extend to the
Pacific Ocean.

In 1819, Adams convinced the Spanish to sign the Transcontinental Treaty (also
called the Adams-Onís Treaty), in which the United States acquired all of Florida
for $5 million in exchange for abandoning any claims to Texas. In 1821, Florida
became a U.S. territory; in 1845, it would become a state. The treaty also
clarified the contested western boundary separating the Louisiana Territory from
New Spain. The boundary would run from the Gulf of Mexico north to the 42nd
parallel and then west to the Pacific coast. The United States now spanned the
continent.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE The most important diplomatic policy crafted by President
Monroe and Secretary of State Adams involved a determined effort to prevent future
European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. One consequence of the Napoleonic
Wars raging across Europe and the French occupation of Spain and Portugal was a
series of independence movements among the Spanish colonies. Between 1809 and 1830,
Spain lost almost its entire empire in the Americas: La Plata (later Argentina),
Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela
had all proclaimed their independence, as had Portuguese Brazil, and the United
States was the first nation to recognize them. The only areas still under Spanish
control were the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico and the colony of Santo Domingo on
the island of Hispaniola.
In 1823, rumors reached America that the monarchs of Europe were planning to help
Spain recover its lost Latin American colonies. The British foreign minister,
George Canning, told the United States that the two countries should jointly oppose
any new incursions by European nations in the Western Hemisphere. Monroe initially
agreed—if the British government would recognize the independence of the new
nations of Latin America. The British refused.

Secretary of State Adams urged President Monroe to go it alone in prohibiting

European involvement in the hemisphere. He stressed that “it would be more candid
as well as more dignified” for America to ban further European intervention than to
tag along with a British statement.

Monroe agreed. He incorporated the substance of Adams’s views into his annual
message to Congress in December 1823. The Monroe Doctrine, as it was named a
generation later, contained four major points: (1) that “the American
continents . . . are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future
colonization by any European powers”; (2) that the United States would oppose any
attempt by European nations to impose their political system anywhere in the
hemisphere; (3) that the United States would not interfere with the remaining
European-controlled colonies; and (4) that the United States would keep out of the
internal affairs of European nations and their wars.

Although the Monroe Doctrine became one of the cherished principles of American
foreign policy, it had no standing in international law; it was merely a bold
statement sent by an American president to Congress. No European nation recognized
the legitimacy of the Monroe Doctrine. Symbolically, however, it has been an
important statement of American intentions to prevent European involvement in the
Western Hemisphere. Since the Monroe Doctrine was announced, not a single Latin
American nation has lost its independence to an outside invader. THE RISE OF ANDREW
JACKSON
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Transcript
After the War of 1812, the United States had in practice become a one-party
political system. The refusal of the Federalists to support the conflict against
Great Britain had virtually killed the party. In 1820, President Monroe was
reelected without opposition.

While the Democratic Republican party was dominant for the moment, however, it was
about to follow the Federalists into oblivion. If Monroe’s first term was the Era
of Good Feelings, his second became an Era of Bad Feelings, as sectional
controversies erupted into disputes so violent that they gave birth to a new
political party: the Democrats, led by Andrew Jackson.

ANDREW JACKSON Born in 1767 along the border between the Carolinas, Jackson grew up
in a struggling single-parent household. His father was killed in a farm accident
three weeks before Andrew was born, forcing his widowed mother, Elizabeth, to
scratch out a living as a housekeeper while raising three sons.
A portrait of Andrew Jackson painted by Anna Claypoole Peale in 1819. His graying
hair is tousled. He wears a high-collared, dark blue dress uniform with gold
epaulettes.
Andrew Jackson The controversial general was painted by Anna Claypoole Peale in
1819, the year of his military exploits in Florida.
During the Revolution, the Jackson boys fought against the British. One of them,
sixteen-year-old Hugh, died of heat exhaustion during a battle; another, Robert,
died while trudging home from a prisoner-of-war camp in Camden, South Carolina,
some forty-five miles. In 1781, fourteen-year-old Andrew was captured. When a
British officer demanded that the boy shine his boots, Jackson refused, explaining
that he was a prisoner of war and expected “to be treated as such.” The angry
officer slashed him with his sword, leaving ugly scars on Andrew’s head and hand.
Soon after he was released, his mother died of cholera. “She was gentle as a dove,”
he remembered, “and as brave as a lioness.” Her orphaned son thereafter despised
the British.

After the Revolution, Jackson went to Charleston, South Carolina, where he learned
to love racehorses, gambling, and fine clothes. He returned home and tried saddle
making and teaching before moving to Salisbury, North Carolina, where he earned a
license to practice law. He also enjoyed life. A friend recalled that Jackson was
“the most roaring, rollicking, game-cocking, card-playing, mischievous fellow that
ever lived in Salisbury.”

In 1788, at age twenty-one, Jackson moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and became an

attorney. Eight years later, when Tennessee became a state, voters elected him to
the U.S. House and later to the Senate, but he served only a year before returning
home and becoming a judge. Jackson also made a lot of money, first as an attorney,
then as a buyer and seller of horses, land, and slaves. He eventually owned 100
enslaved laborers on his cotton plantation, called the Hermitage, some twelve miles
outside Nashville.

Many American political leaders cringed at the thought of the combative, short-
tempered Jackson, who had run roughshod over international law when fighting the
British and Seminoles in Florida, presiding over the nation. “His passions are
terrible,” said Thomas Jefferson. “He is a dangerous man.” John Quincy Adams
scorned Jackson “as a barbarian and savage who could scarcely spell his name.”

Jackson dismissed such criticism as an example of the “Eastern elite” trying to

maintain control of American politics. He responded to Adams’s criticism by
commenting that he never trusted a man who could think of only one way to spell a
word.

ONE-PARTY POLITICS No sooner had James Monroe started his second presidential term,
in 1821, than leading Republicans began positioning themselves to be the next
president, including three members of the cabinet: Secretary of War John C.
Calhoun, Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford, and Secretary of State John
Quincy Adams. The powerful speaker of the House, wily Henry Clay, also hungered for
the presidency. And there was Andrew Jackson, who was elected to the Senate in
1823. The emergence of so many viable candidates revealed how fractured the
Republican party had become.
PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATIONS In 1822, the Tennessee legislature named Andrew Jackson as
its choice to succeed Monroe. Two years later, a mass meeting of Pennsylvanians
endorsed Jackson for president and John C. Calhoun for vice president. Meanwhile,
the Kentucky legislature had nominated its favorite son, Henry Clay, in 1822. The
Massachusetts legislature nominated Adams in 1824. That same year, a group of
Republican congressmen nominated William Crawford of Georgia.
Crawford’s friends emphasized his devotion to states’ rights and strict
construction (interpretation) of the Constitution. For his part, Clay continued to
champion his American System. Adams, the only non-slaveholder in the race, shared
Clay’s belief that the national government should finance internal improvements to
stimulate economic development, but he was less strongly committed to tariffs.

Jackson declared himself the champion of the common people and the foe of the
entrenched social and political elite. He claimed to represent the “old
republicanism” of Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson believed Jackson lacked the
education, polish, and prudence to be president. “He is,” Jefferson told a friend,
“one of the most unfit men I know,” a “dangerous man.” In 1824, Jefferson supported
Crawford.
An 1824 political illustration where John Quincy Adams advertises his presidential
platform. A ship with sails is in the center with the name John Quincy Adams of
Washington. Flags from the masts of the ship read Free Trade and Sailors Rights and
No Colonial Subjection. On the left, is a man working at a loom. A subtitle reads
National Industry is National Wealth. On the right, is a man and horses plowing a
field. A subtitle reads Agriculture is the Source of Prosperity. A flag attached to
a post in the background reads Speed the Plough.
Election Campaign of 1824 In this illustration from an 1824 political broadside,
John Quincy Adams advertises his allegiance to Henry Clay’s American System. His
presidential platform is portrayed as a ship, sailing under the banners of “No
Colonial Subjugation” and “Free Trade.”
As a self-made military hero, Jackson was an attractive candidate, especially to
voters of Irish and Scots-Irish backgrounds. In Jackson, the Irish immigrants found
a hero. The son of poor Scots-Irish colonists, he was beloved for having defeated
the hated English in the Battle of New Orleans. In addition, the Irish immigrants’
distaste for aristocracy, which they associated with centuries of English rule,
attracted them to a politician proud of his rise from poverty.

THE “CORRUPT BARGAIN” The initial results of the 1824 presidential election were
inconclusive. Jackson won the popular vote and the Electoral College, where he had
99 votes, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37. Jackson, however, did not have the
necessary majority of electoral votes. In such a circumstance, as in the 1800
election, the Constitution specified that the House of Representatives would make
the final decision from among the top three candidates. By the time the House could
convene, however, Crawford had suffered a stroke and dropped out.
Whatever else might have been said about the outcome between Jackson and Adams, one
thing seemed apparent—the election revealed how deeply divided the nation had
become. Sectionalism had defeated nationalism as the Republicans split into warring
regional factions. The election was particularly humiliating for Henry Clay and his
American System; voters in New England and New York opposed his call for federal
funding of internal improvements, and the South rejected his promotion of the
protective tariff.

Once the deadlocked election had been thrown into the House of Representatives,
however, Clay’s influence, as speaker of the House, would be decisive. While Adams
and Jackson courted Clay’s support, he claimed they provided only a “choice of
evils.” But he regarded Jackson as a “military chieftain,” a frontier Napoléon
unfit for the presidency. Jackson’s election, Clay predicted, would “be the
greatest misfortune that could befall the country.”

Although Clay and Adams disliked each other, the nationalist Adams supported most
of what Clay wanted policy-wise, particularly high tariffs, transportation
improvements, and a strong national bank. Clay also expected Adams to name him
secretary of state, the office that usually led to the White House. A deal between
Clay and Adams broke the deadlock. Clay endorsed Adams, and the House of
Representatives elected Adams with 13 state delegation votes to Jackson’s 7 and
Crawford’s 4.

The controversial victory proved costly for Adams, however, as it united his foes
and crippled his administration before it began. Jackson dismissed Clay as a
“scoundrel,” the “Judas of the West,” who had entered into a self-serving corrupt
bargain with Adams. Their “corruptions and intrigues,” he charged, had “defeated
the will of the People.”

Almost immediately, Jackson’s supporters launched a campaign to undermine the Adams

administration and elect their hero president in 1828. Crawford’s supporters soon
moved into the Jackson camp, as did the new vice president, John C. Calhoun of
South Carolina, who quickly found himself at odds with the president.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS Adams was one of the ablest men, hardest workers, and finest
intellects ever to enter the White House. Groomed for greatness by his parents,
John and Abigail, the nation’s second president and his accomplished wife, John
Quincy began keeping a diary at age twelve and made daily entries until his death,
eventually filling some 14,000 pages of text. In his diary, Adams often reflected
on the stain of slavery. The Constitution that his father had helped enact was, he
decided, “morally and politically vicious, inconsistent with the principles upon
which alone our Revolution can be justified; cruel and oppressive.”
Adams’s political experience was unmatched. He had been ambassador to four European
nations, during which he became fluent in German, Dutch, and French. After
graduating from Harvard, he served as a U.S. senator, a Harvard professor, and an
outstanding secretary of state, perhaps the greatest ever. He had helped negotiate
the treaty ending the War of 1812 and had drafted the Monroe Doctrine (1823). And
he promoted American isolation from global wars and causes.

Adams was also an unbending moralist obsessed with public service and self-
improvement. After becoming president, he awoke every morning at 4 A.M. to swim
naked in Tiber Creek, which fed into the Potomac River. Then he walked six miles
before having breakfast.

A photograph of John Quincy Adams in his study in 1843. He sits by a fireplace with
his legs crossed and his clasped hands resting on his knee. He looks directly at
the viewer.
John Quincy Adams A brilliant man but an ineffective leader, he appears here in his
study in 1843. He was the first U.S. president to be photographed.
Yet for all his accomplishments, John Quincy Adams proved to be an ineffective
president, undercut from the beginning by the controversy surrounding his deal with
Henry Clay. In his inaugural address, Adams promised to govern with “talents and
virtue” but admitted to voters that he was “less possessed of your confidence . . .
than any of my predecessors.”

Self-righteous to a fault and “cold as an iceberg,” Adams lacked the common touch
and the politician’s gift for compromise. “I am,” he confessed, “a man of reserved,
cold, austere, and forbidding manners.” His sour personality was shaped in part by
family tragedies: he saw two brothers and two sons die from alcoholism. Adams
himself suffered from chronic bouts of depression that reinforced his grim outlook
and tendency toward self-pity, qualities that did not endear him to fellow
politicians or the public. The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said Adams was so stern and
irritable that he must be taking sulfuric acid with his tea. Even Adams’s son
Charles Francis admitted that his father “makes enemies by perpetually wearing the
iron mask.”

Adams also detested the democratic politicking that Andrew Jackson represented. He
worried, as his father had, that republicanism was rapidly turning into democracy,
and that government of the people was degenerating into government by the people,
many of whom, in his view, were uneducated and incompetent. He wanted politics to
be a “sacred” arena for the “best men,” a profession limited to the “most able and
worthy” leaders motivated by a sense of civic duty rather than a selfish quest for
power and stature. Poet Walt Whitman wrote that although Adams was “a virtuous man—
a learned man . . . he was not a man of the People.”

AN ACTIVIST GOVERNMENT John Quincy Adams was determined to create an activist

federal government with expansive goals. His first State of the Union message, in
December 1825, included a grand blueprint for national development, set forth so
bluntly that it became a political disaster.
The federal government, Adams stressed, should finance vast internal improvements
(new roads, canals, harbors, and bridges), create a great national university in
Washington, D.C., support scientific explorations of the Far West, build
astronomical observatories, and establish a Department of the Interior to manage
government-owned lands. He challenged Congress to approve his proposals and not be
paralyzed “by the will of our constituents.”

Reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Newspapers charged that Adams was behaving
like an aristocratic tyrant, and Congress approved none of his proposals. The
disastrous start shattered Adams’s confidence. He wrote in his diary that he was in
a “protracted agony of character and reputation.”

Adams’s effort to expand the powers of the federal government was so divisive that
the Democratic Republican party split, creating a new party system. Those who
agreed with the economic nationalism of Adams and Clay began calling themselves
National Republicans. Those Democratic Republicans supporting Andrew Jackson and
states’ rights would eventually drop the name Republican and become simply
Democrats.

President Adams proved to be a great statesman at the wrong time, an arrogant and
stubborn visionary unable to excite voters by his ideas. America was not ready for
a dominant federal government. But it was ready for a charismatic and domineering
president.

THE ELECTION OF ANDREW JACKSON The defiant congressional opposition to the Adams
presidency launched the savage campaign of 1828 between the National Republicans
and the Jacksonian Democrats. Both sides engaged in vicious personal attacks. As a
Jackson supporter observed, “The floodgates of falsehood, slander, and abuse have
been hoisted” by the Adams campaign, “and the most nauseating filth is [being]
poured” on Jackson’s head.
Adams’s supporters denounced Jackson as a hot-tempered, ignorant barbarian. They
dismissed the Tennessean as a cock-fighting gambler and slave trader who had
participated in numerous duels and frontier brawls, a man whose fame rested upon
his reputation as a killer.

Such charges were not inaccurate. The iron-willed Jackson had always displayed an
explosive temper. He loved a good fight. “When danger rears its head,” he once told
his wife, “I can never shrink from it.” In 1806, he challenged attorney and rival
racehorse breeder Charles Dickinson to a duel, claiming that the arrogant young
attorney had not paid off a racing bet and had insulted his wife.

A drawing depicting the duel between Andrew Jackson and Charles Dickinson. Two men
are standing in the foreground facing each other. One is holding a gun at is side.
The other is holding a gun up and aiming at the other man. They are both wearing
top hats and old fashioned jackets. Two men are in the background, one standing on
each side. They are in the countryside with a fence, hills, and trees behind them.
Jackson and Dickinson Duel The future president Andrew Jackson demonstrated both
his fiery temper and the pertinacity that his supporters found so admirable in his
duel with Charles Dickinson. Dickinson shot Jackson square in the chest, but
Jackson stood his ground, fired, and fatally shot his opponent.
The two proud men and their supporters agreed to meet just across the border in
Kentucky, where dueling was not yet illegal. Although Dickinson was considered the
best shot in Tennessee and was said to have already killed twenty-six men in duels,
Jackson let him fire first from twenty-four feet away. For his gallantry, Jackson
received a bullet in his chest that fractured ribs and lodged so close to his heart
that it could not be removed. “My God! Have I missed him?” Dickinson asked, not
knowing that his bullet had indeed wounded Jackson.

The dueling code of honor had been satisfied, since Jackson had stood his ground.
At that point, he could have generously spared his opponent, but the wounded
Jackson clenched his teeth from the pain, straightened himself, patiently took aim,
and coolly killed his foe. The doctor at the scene told Jackson, “I don’t see how
you stayed on your feet after that wound.” Jackson replied, “I should have hit him
if he had shot me through the brain.”

The most scurrilous political attack on Jackson was that he had lived in adultery
with his wife, Rachel, a deeply pious woman. In fact, they had lived together as
husband and wife for two years in the mistaken belief that her divorce from her
abusive first husband was complete. As soon as the divorce became official, Andrew
and Rachel had remarried to end all doubts about their status. A furious Jackson
blamed Henry Clay for the slurs against his wife, calling the Kentuckian “the
basest, meanest scoundrel that ever disgraced the image of his god.” Thereafter,
the two proud men developed a consuming hatred for each other and a bitter
political rivalry.

The Jacksonians, for their part, condemned Adams as an aristocrat and monarchist, a
professional politician who had never had a real job and had been corrupted by
foreigners in the courts of Europe. The most outlandish charge was that Adams had
delivered up an American girl to Czar Alexander I while serving as ambassador to
Russia. Adams was left to gripe about the many “forgeries now swarming in the
newspapers against me.”

Jackson held most of the advantages. As a fabled Indian fighter, he was beloved in
the western and southern states, and as a plantation owner, lawyer, and
slaveholder, he had the trust of the southern elite. Jackson promoted small federal
government, individual liberty, an expanded military, and White supremacy. Above
all, he was a nationalist committed to preserving the Union in the face of rising
sectional tensions.

Candidate Jackson benefited from a growing spirit of democracy in which many voters
viewed Adams as an elitist. When Adams’s supporters began referring to the rough-
hewn Jackson as a “jackass,” the Tennessean embraced the name, using the animal as
a symbol for his “tough” campaign. The jackass eventually became the enduring
symbol of the Democratic party.

THE “COMMON MAN” IN POLITICS Jackson’s campaign explicitly appealed to the “common”
voters, many of whom were able to vote in a presidential election for the first
time. New Jersey in 1807 and Maryland and South Carolina in 1810 had abolished
property and taxpaying requirements for voting, and after 1815 the new states of
Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, and Mississippi gave voting rights (suffrage) to all
White men regardless of how much property they owned. Other states followed, and by
1824, twenty-one of the twenty-four states had dropped property-owning requirements
for voting. Only Virginia and the Carolinas, still dominated by the planter elite,
continued to resist the democratizing trend.
This “democratization” of politics also affected many free Black males in northern
states, half of which allowed African Americans to vote. Rufus King, the former
presidential candidate, declared that in New York, “a citizen of color was entitled
to all the privileges of a citizen . . . [and] entitled to vote.” The extension of
voting rights to people with little or no wealth led to the election of politicians
sprung from the people rather than the social elite. Jackson, a frontiersman of
humble origin who had made a fortune and scrambled up the political ladder by will
and tenacity, fit this more democratic ideal. “Adams can write,” went one of the
campaign slogans, “but Jackson can fight.”

LABOR POLITICS With the widespread removal of property qualifications for voting,
the working class (laborers who were paid hourly wages) became an important
political force in the form of the Workingmen’s parties, first organized in 1828 in
Philadelphia, the nation’s largest manufacturing center. The Workingmen’s parties
were reformist groups in the nation’s largest cities devoted to promoting the
interests of laborers, including shorter working hours and allowing all males to
vote regardless of the amount of property owned.
The Workingmen’s parties faded quickly, however. The inexperience of labor
politicians left them prey to manipulation by political professionals. In addition,
major national parties, especially the Jacksonian Democrats, co-opted some of their
issues. Yet the working-class parties succeeded in drawing attention to their
demands, many of which attracted the support of middle-class reformers. They
promoted free public education for all children, called for an end to imprisoning
people for indebtedness, and supported a ten-hour workday to prevent employers from
abusing workers. In large part because of his background as a common man, union
members loved Andrew Jackson.

PRESIDENT JACKSON When the 1828 election returns came in, Jackson had won handily,
taking every state west and south of Pennsylvania. Equally important was the surge
in voter turnout that brought more than twice as many men to vote as in the 1824
election.
Adams was stunned by his defeat. He was only the second president to be denied a
second term (his father was the first), and his loss dragged him into “the deepest
gloom.” But he was elated to leave the White House. “The four most miserable years
of my life,” he later noted, “were my four years in the presidency.”

THE ELECTION OF 1828

An electoral map entitled, “The Election of 1828.” Andrew Jackson received a total
of 178 electoral votes and 647,000 popular votes. John Quincy Adams received 83
electoral votes and 509,000 popular votes. States that voted for Jackson include
Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina,
Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the
western half of New York. States that voted for Adams include Maryland, Delaware,
New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, the eastern half of New York,
Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
How did the two presidential candidates, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson,
portray each other?
Why did Jackson seem to have the advantage in the election of 1828?
How did the broadening of voting rights affect the presidential campaign?
Jackson, the first president from a western state, entered office still seething
with resentment at the way his opponents had smeared his wife, who had died a few
days after learning of the political attacks on her and her “tarnished” marriage.

Now the president-elect relished the chance to take revenge on those whose “vile
falsehoods” had caused Rachel’s heart attack and death in December 1828, just weeks
before his inauguration. “My heart is nearly broke,” he confessed to a friend. At
the funeral, Jackson declared that those “vile wretches who have slandered her must
look to God for mercy,” for he would offer none.

Jackson was determined to launch a new “democratic” era that would silence his
critics, restore government to “the people,” and bring more political power to
western states such as Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee. In doing so, he would
transform the nation’s political landscape—for good and for ill, as it turned out.
SUMMARY
Nationalism After the War of 1812, the federal government pursued many policies to
strengthen the national economy. The Tariff of 1816 protected American
manufacturers from foreign competition, and the Second Bank of the United States
provided a stronger national currency. Madison, Monroe, and Adams all promoted an
active role for the federal government in promoting economic growth. Led by John
Marshall, the Supreme Court limited the powers of states and strengthened the power
of the federal government in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) and McCulloch v.
Maryland (1819). The Marshall court interpreted the Constitution as giving Congress
the right to take any action not forbidden by the Constitution as long as the
purpose of such laws was within the “scope of the Constitution.” In Gibbons v.
Ogden (1824), the Marshall court established the federal government’s authority
over interstate commerce.
Sectionalism Henry Clay’s American System supported economic nationalism by
endorsing a national bank, a protective tariff, and federally funded internal
improvements, such as roads and canals. Many Americans, however, remained more tied
to the needs of their particular sections of the country. People in the different
regions—North, South, and West—disagreed about which economic policies best served
their interests. As settlers streamed west, the extension of slavery into the new
territories became the predominant political concern, eventually requiring both
sides to compromise repeatedly to avoid civil war.
Era of Good Feelings James Monroe’s term in office began with peace and prosperity.
Two major events, however, spelled the end of the Era of Good Feelings: the
financial Panic of 1819 and the controversial Missouri Compromise (1820). The
explosive growth of the cotton culture transformed life in the South, in part by
encouraging the expansion of slavery, which moved west with migrating southern
planters. In 1819, however, the sudden collapse of world cotton prices devastated
the southern economy. The Missouri Compromise, a short-term solution to the issue
of allowing slavery in the western territories, exposed the emotions and turmoil
that the tragic system generated.
National Diplomacy The main diplomatic achievements of the period after the War of
1812 extended America’s contested boundaries and enabled the resumption of trade
with Great Britain. To the north, U.S. diplomatic achievements established northern
borders with Canada. To the south, the Transcontinental Treaty (1819) with Spain
extended the boundaries of the United States. The Monroe Doctrine (1823) declared
that the Americas were no longer open to European colonization.
The Election of 1828 The demise of the Federalists ended the first party system in
America, leaving the Republicans as the only national party. The Republicans’
seeming unity was shattered by the election of 1824, which Andrew Jackson lost as a
result of what he believed was a corrupt bargain between John Quincy Adams and
Henry Clay. Jackson won the presidency with the campaign of 1828 by rallying
southern and western voters with his promise to serve the interests of common
people. His election opened a new era in national politics that reflected the
democratization of voting in most states (at least for White men).
CHRONOLOGY
1811
Construction of the National Road begins

1816
Second Bank of the United States is established

First protective tariff goes into effect

1817
Rush-Bagot Agreement between the United States and Great Britain creates an
unfortified border between the United States and Canada

1818
The Convention of 1818 establishes the northern border of the Louisiana Purchase at
the 49th parallel and the joint occupation of Oregon by the United States and Great
Britain

1819
Supreme Court issues McCulloch v. Maryland decision

United States and Spain agree to the Transcontinental Treaty

Tallmadge Amendment

1820
Congress accepts the Missouri Compromise

1823
President Monroe enunciates the principles of the Monroe Doctrine

1824
Supreme Court issues Gibbons v. Ogden decision

John Quincy Adams wins the presidential election by what some critics claim is a
corrupt bargain with Henry Clay

1828
Andrew Jackson wins presidential contest

KEY TERMS
Second Bank of the United States p. 404

Tariff of 1816 p. 405

internal improvements p. 406

Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) p. 407

McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) p. 407

Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) p. 407

American System p. 409

Panic of 1819 p. 412

Missouri Compromise (1820) p. 414

Transcontinental Treaty (1819) p. 418

Monroe Doctrine (1823) p. 419

corrupt bargain p. 423

campaign of 1828 p. 425