- The American Revolution and the early federal republic
- The transformation of American society, 1865–1900
- Imperialism, the Progressive era, and the rise to world power, 1896–1920
The United States from 1816 to 1850
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The Era of Mixed Feelings
The years between the election to the presidency of James Monroe in 1816 and of John Quincy Adams in 1824 have long been known in American history as the Era of Good Feelings. The phrase was conceived by a Boston editor during Monroe’s visit to New England early in his first term. That a representative of the heartland of Federalism could speak in such positive terms of the visit by a Southern president whose decisive election had marked not only a sweeping Republican victory but also the demise of the national Federalist Party was dramatic testimony that former foes were inclined to put aside the sectional and political differences of the past.
Effects of the War of 1812
Later scholars have questioned the strategy and tactics of the United States in the War of 1812, the war’s tangible results, and even the wisdom of commencing it in the first place. To contemporary Americans, however, the striking naval victories and Jackson’s victory over the British at New Orleans created a reservoir of “good feeling” on which Monroe was able to draw.
Abetting the mood of nationalism was the foreign policy of the United States after the war. Florida was acquired from Spain (1819) in negotiations, the success of which owed more to Jackson’s indifference to such niceties as the inviolability of foreign borders and to the country’s evident readiness to back him up than it did to diplomatic finesse. The Monroe Doctrine (1823), actually a few phrases inserted in a long presidential message, declared that the United States would not become involved in European affairs and would not accept European interference in the Americas; its immediate effect on other nations was slight, and that on its own citizenry was impossible to gauge, yet its self-assured tone in warning off the Old World from the New reflected well the nationalist mood that swept the country.
Internally, the decisions of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Marshall in such cases as McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) promoted nationalism by strengthening Congress and national power at the expense of the states. The congressional decision to charter the second Bank of the United States (1816) was explained in part by the country’s financial weaknesses, exposed by the War of 1812, and in part by the intrigues of financial interests. The readiness of Southern Jeffersonians—former strict constructionists—to support such a measure indicates, too, an amazing degree of nationalist feeling. Perhaps the clearest sign of a new sense of national unity was the victorious Republican Party, standing in solitary splendour on the national political horizon, its long-time foes the Federalists vanished without a trace (on the national level) and Monroe, the Republican standard-bearer, reelected so overwhelmingly in 1820 that it was long believed that the one electoral vote denied him had been held back only in order to preserve Washington’s record of unanimous selection.
National disunity
For all the signs of national unity and feelings of oneness, equally convincing evidence points in the opposite direction. The very Supreme Court decisions that delighted friends of strong national government infuriated its opponents, while Marshall’s defense of the rights of private property was construed by critics as betraying a predilection for one kind of property over another. The growth of the West, encouraged by the conquest of Indian lands during the War of 1812, was by no means regarded as an unmixed blessing. Eastern conservatives sought to keep land prices high; speculative interests opposed a policy that would be advantageous to poor squatters; politicians feared a change in the sectional balance of power; and businessmen were wary of a new section with interests unlike their own. European visitors testified that, even during the so-called Era of Good Feelings, Americans characteristically expressed scorn for their countrymen in sections other than their own.
Economic hardship, especially the financial panic of 1819, also created disunity. The causes of the panic were complex, but its greatest effect was clearly the tendency of its victims to blame it on one or another hostile or malevolent interest—whether the second Bank of the United States, Eastern capitalists, selfish speculators, or perfidious politicians—each charge expressing the bad feeling that existed side by side with the good.
If harmony seemed to reign on the level of national political parties, disharmony prevailed within the states. In the early 19th-century United States, local and state politics were typically waged less on behalf of great issues than for petty gain. That the goals of politics were often sordid did not mean that political contests were bland. In every section, state factions led by shrewd men waged bitter political warfare to attain or entrench themselves in power.
The most dramatic manifestation of national division was the political struggle over slavery, particularly over its spread into new territories. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 eased the threat of further disunity, at least for the time being. The sectional balance between the states was preserved: in the Louisiana Purchase, with the exception of the Missouri Territory, slavery was to be confined to the area south of the 36°30′ line. Yet this compromise did not end the crisis but only postponed it. The determination by Northern and Southern senators not to be outnumbered by one another suggests that the people continued to believe in the conflicting interests of the various great geographic sections. The weight of evidence indicates that the decade after the Battle of New Orleans was not an era of good feelings so much as one of mixed feelings.
The economy
The American economy expanded and matured at a remarkable rate in the decades after the War of 1812. The rapid growth of the West created a great new center for the production of grains and pork, permitting the country’s older sections to specialize in other crops. New processes of manufacture, particularly in textiles, not only accelerated an “industrial revolution” in the Northeast but also, by drastically enlarging the Northern market for raw materials, helped account for a boom in Southern cotton production. If by midcentury Southerners of European descent had come to regard slavery—on which the cotton economy relied—as a “positive good” rather than the “necessary evil” that they had earlier held the system to be, it was largely because of the increasingly central role played by cotton in earning profits for the region. Industrial workers organized the country’s first trade unions and even workingmen’s political parties early in the period. The corporate form thrived in an era of booming capital requirements, and older and simpler forms of attracting investment capital were rendered obsolete. Commerce became increasingly specialized, the division of labor in the disposal of goods for sale matching the increasingly sophisticated division of labor that had come to characterize production.
Edward PessenThe management of the growing economy was inseparable from political conflict in the emerging United States. At the start the issue was between agrarians (represented by Jeffersonian Republicans) wanting a decentralized system of easy credit and an investing community looking for stability and profit in financial markets. This latter group, championed by Hamilton and the Federalists, won the first round with the establishment of the first Bank of the United States (1791), jointly owned by the government and private stockholders. It was the government’s fiscal agent, and it put the center of gravity of the credit system in Philadelphia, its headquarters. Its charter expired in 1811, and the financial chaos that hindered procurement and mobilization during the ensuing War of 1812 demonstrated the importance of such centralization. Hence, even Jeffersonian Republicans were converted to acceptance of a second Bank of the United States, chartered in 1816.
The second Bank of the United States faced constant political fire, but the conflict now was not merely between farming and mercantile interests but also between local bankers who wanted access to the profits of an expanding credit system and those who, like the president of the Bank of the United States, Nicholas Biddle, wanted more regularity and predictability in banking through top-down control. The Constitution gave the United States exclusive power to coin money but allowed for the chartering of banks by individual states, and these banks were permitted to issue notes that also served as currency. The state banks, whose charters were often political plums, lacked coordinated inspection and safeguards against risky loans usually collateralized by land, whose value fluctuated wildly, as did the value of the banknotes. Overspeculation, bankruptcies, contraction, and panics were the inevitable result.
Biddle’s hope was that the large deposits of government funds in the Bank of the United States would allow it to become the major lender to local banks, and from that position of strength it could squeeze the unsound ones into either responsibility or extinction. But this notion ran afoul of the growing democratic spirit that insisted that the right to extend credit and choose its recipients was too precious to be confined to a wealthy elite. This difference of views produced the classic battle between Biddle and Jackson, culminating in Biddle’s attempt to win recharter for the Bank of the United States, Jackson’s veto and transfer of the government funds to pet banks, and the Panic of 1837. Not until the 1840s did the federal government place its funds in an independent treasury, and not until the Civil War was there legislation creating a national banking system. The country was strong enough to survive, but the politicization of fiscal policy making continued to be a major theme of American economic history.
Transportation revolution
Improvements in transportation, a key to the advance of industrialization everywhere, were especially vital in the United States. A fundamental problem of the developing American economy was the great geographic extent of the country and the appallingly poor state of its roads. The broad challenge to weave the Great Lakes, Mississippi Valley, and Gulf and Atlantic coasts into a single national market was first met by putting steam to work on the rich network of navigable rivers. As early as 1787, John Fitch had demonstrated a workable steamboat to onlookers in Philadelphia; some years later, he repeated the feat in New York City. But it is characteristic of American history that, in the absence of governmental encouragement, private backing was needed to bring an invention into full play. As a result, popular credit for the first steamboat goes to Robert Fulton, who found the financing to make his initial Hudson River run of the Clermont in 1807 more than a onetime feat. From that point forward, on inland waters, steam was king, and its most spectacular manifestation was the Mississippi River paddle wheeler, a unique creation of unsung marine engineers challenged to make a craft that could “work” in shallow swift-running waters. Their solution was to put cargo, engines, and passengers on a flat open deck above the waterline, which was possible in the mild climate of large parts of the drainage basin of the Father of Waters. The Mississippi River steamboat not only became an instantly recognizable American icon but also had an impact on the law. In the case of Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Chief Justice Marshall affirmed the exclusive right of the federal government to regulate traffic on rivers flowing between states.
Canals and railroads were not as distinctively American in origin as the paddle wheeler, but, whereas 18th-century canals in England and continental Europe were simple conveniences for moving bulky loads cheaply at low speed, Americans integrated the country’s water transport system by connecting rivers flowing toward the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes and the Ohio-Mississippi River valleys. The best-known conduit, the Erie Canal, connected the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, linking the West to the port of New York City. Other major canals in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Ohio joined Philadelphia and Baltimore to the West via the Ohio River and its tributaries. Canal building was increasingly popular throughout the 1820s and ’30s, sometimes financed by states or by a combination of state and private effort. But many overbuilt or unwisely begun canal projects collapsed, and states that were “burned” in the process became more wary of such ventures.
Canal development was overtaken by the growth of the railroads, which were far more efficient in covering the great distances underserved by the road system and indispensable in the trans-Mississippi West. Work on the Baltimore and Ohio line, the first railroad in the United States, was begun in 1828, and a great burst of construction boosted the country’s rail network from zero to 30,000 miles (50,000 km) by 1860. The financing alone, no less than the operation of the burgeoning system, had a huge political and economic impact. Adams was a decided champion of “national internal improvements”—the federally assisted development of turnpikes, lighthouses, and dredging and channel-clearing operations (that is, whatever it took to assist commerce). That term, however, was more closely associated with Henry Clay, like Adams a strong nationalist. Clay proposed an American System, which would, through internal improvements and the imposition of tariffs, encourage the growth of an industrial sector that exchanged manufactured goods for the products of U.S. agriculture, thus benefiting each section of the country. But the passionate opposition of many agrarians to the costs and expanded federal control inherent in the program created one battlefield in the long contest between the Democratic and Whig parties that did not end until the triumph of Whig economic ideas in the Republican party during the Civil War.