7-10

Chapter 10: Democracy in America, 1815-1840 The career of Andrew Jackson, whose unprecedented inauguration drew a raucous crowd of 20,000 that crashed through the White House, represented major developments of his era. His life and presidency reflected the power of the market revolution, westward expansion, the spread of slavery, and the growth of democracy. He symbolized the self-made man, having risen from a humble frontier background in South Carolina and Tennessee and practiced law and served in the state's legislature and courts, all before winning fame through triumph at the Battle of New Orleans. Most important, Jackson represented the rise of political democracy. One basis of political democracy in this period was the challenge to property qualifications for voting. It began in the American Revolution but culminated in the early nineteenth century. After the Revolution, no new state required property ownership to vote, and in older states, constitutional conventions in the 1820s and 1830s abolished property qualifications, partly because the growing number of wage earners who did not own much property demanded the vote. In the South, however, where large slaveowners dominated politics and distrusted mass democracy, property requirements were eliminated only gradually and disappeared quite late, by 1860. The personal independence required of the citizen was henceforth located not in owning property but in owning one's self, a reflection of this period's individualism. The single exception to this democratizing trend was Rhode Island, which required voters to own considerable real estate or rental property. The state was a center of factory production, and many wage-earners could not vote. In 1841, reformers met at a People's Convention and drafted a new state constitution that gave the vote to all adult men and stripped it from blacks. When the convention illegally ratified the constitution and inaugurated lawyer Thomas Dorr as governor, president John Tyler dispatched federal troops to the state, and the movement collapsed. By 1840, more than 90 percent of adult white men could vote. By then, America had a vibrant democratic system that engaged massive numbers of citizens. Lacking traditional bases of nationality such as ethnicity or religion, democratic political institutions imparted a sense of identity to Americans. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French writer who visited the United States in the early 1830s, wrote of this political culture in his classic book, Democracy in America. As an aristocrat, Tocqueville disliked democracy, but his key insight was that democracy was more than just voting or political institutions. Democracy, to Tocqueville, was a culture that encouraged individual initiative, affirmed equality, and a public sphere full of voluntary organizations that wanted to improve society. Democracy was new. The idea that sovereignty resided in the mass of ordinary citizens was a departure in Western thought, which traditionally had viewed democracy as the road to anarchy. But in the United States, pressure from those originally excluded from political participation created a democracy for white men that triumphed in the Age of Jackson. In America, the right to vote and participation in politics offered a sense of national identity. The market revolution and political democracy expanded the public sphere and the world of print. This "information revolution" was facilitated in part by the invention of the steam-powered printing press, which printed much more matter at far less cost. A new style of sensational journalism catered to a mass readership, which was soon created in newspapers with a total circulation higher than that of all Europe. Low postal rates and the growth of political parties also sparked the expansion of print. Labor organizations, reformers, and even Native American tribes printed newspapers for the first time in American history, and the growth of print offered a new generation of women writers a venue for expression.

As democratization expanded the number of people who participated in politics, it was necessary to define the boundaries of the political nation and define freedom and who could enjoy it. Antebellum American political life was both expansive and exclusive. Democracy absorbed native-born white men and white immigrants, but established barriers to women's and non-white men's participation. As democracy triumphed, the grounds for political exclusion shifted from economic dependency to natural incapacity. Gender and racial differences were seen as part of a single, natural hierarchy of innate endowments. A natural boundary was not at all exclusive, many argued, and women and non-whites were deemed lacking in qualities necessary for democracy and self-government. While freedom for white men involved a process of personal transformation, of developing their potential to the fullest extent, democracy's limits rested on the idea that the character and abilities of non-whites and women were fixed by nature. And the world of politics was partly defined against the feminine sphere of the home. Freedom in the public sphere in no way required freedom in the private sphere. In a nation obsessed with equality, democracy was more and more associated with whiteness. While white Americans of all social classes dressed similarly and mixed in public, blacks were increasingly excluded from public life. Racist depictions of blacks in the culture became widespread. An ideology of racial superiority and inferiority, with an allegedly scientific basis, took root where it had never before existed. After 1800, every state admitted to the United States, except Maine, limited voting rights to white males. In 1821, the New York state constitutional convention that removed property qualifications for white voters raised requirements for blacks to $250, effectively disenfranchising nearly all New York blacks. By 1860, blacks could vote on the same basis as whites in only five New England states, which had only 4 percent of the nation's free black population. Whites of the Revolutionary era had considered blacks as potential members of the body politic, but in the nineteenth century, membership in the political nation was increasingly demarcated by race. No blacks had full equality before the law, and they were barred from schools, militia, and other public institutions. In effect, race replaced class as the boundary between American men with political freedom and those without, a process that incorporated many white immigrants into American democracy. The War of 1812 showed how far the United States was from being an integrated nation. The Bank of the United States had expired, transportation was poor, and manufacturing had been required to counter the British embargo. Even though they wanted the United States to remain Jefferson's agrarian republic, Republicans led by Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun believed manufacturers needed protection if the United States was to become independent from Britain. In 1815, President James Madison proposed a plan for government-promoted economic development that became known as the "American System." This system would rest on a new national bank, a tariff on imports to protect and foster manufacturing, and federal financing of road and canal construction, called "internal improvements." Although the tariff and national bank became law in 1816, Madison, afraid that the national government, if given powers not expressed in the constitution, would interfere with individual liberty and slavery in southern states, vetoed an internal improvements bill. The Second Bank of the United States (BUS), a private, profit-making corporation that served as the government's financial agent, soon became resented by many Americans. The BUS was also tasked with regulating the volume of paper money printed by private banks to prevent fluctuations and inflation (at this point the federal government did not print money). Rather than regulating the currency and loans issued by local banks, the Bank of the United States contributed to widespread speculation, mostly in land, after the War of 1812. When European demand for American farm goods decreased in 1819, this speculative bubble burst. Dropping land prices ruined farmers and businessmen who could no longer pay their loans, banks failed, and unemployment spread in eastern cities. The short-lived Panic of 1819 disrupted the political harmony established after the war's end. Some states controversially provided relief to debtors, much to the chagrin of creditors. Most important, the panic reinforced many American's longstanding distrust of banks, and it undermined the reputation of the BUS, which was blamed for the panic. When states retaliated against the BUS by taxing its local branches, the Supreme Court under John Marshall ruled in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) that the BUS was a legitimate exercise of congressional authority under the Constitution. This directly contradicted the "strict constructionist" view that Congress could use only those powers expressly in the Constitution. In 1816, James Monroe became president, inaugurating a period of one-party Republican rule, an "Era of Good Feelings," in which almost no Federalists won federal or state offices. In 1820, Monroe was re-elected almost unanimously. With no party opposition, however, politics was organized around competing sectional interests. Slavery was a sectional issue that threatened to disrupt national unity. In 1819, when Missouri applied for statehood, a New York Republican proposed that Congress force the new state constitution to ban the further importation of slaves and free slave children upon reaching age twenty-five. The Republican Party split along sectional lines on the Missouri question. Most northern Republicans supported the restrictions, while southern Republicans opposed them. In 1820, a compromise was reached which allowed Missouri to adopt a constitution without the anti-slavery restrictions, and allowed Maine, which prohibited slavery, to become a free state, in order to maintain sectional balance between free and slave states in the Congress. And slavery would be prohibited in all remaining territory of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36'309'.

America at first seemed to offer a civic identity to all who dedicated themselves to America's political principles. But only certain groups of people were deemed citizens in the new nation. The way the early republic related to Indians and African-Americans shows the contradictory principles shaping American national identity. American leaders agreed that western Indian lands should go to white Americans, but disagreed about which option was best for dealing with the Indian population: removal, disappearance, or assimilation into white "civilization." Many Americans thought Indians unfit for citizenship. Indian tribes were not represented in the new government. The treaty system gave them the unique status of independent, sovereign nations, but treaties, often signed by only a few, unrepresentative members of a tribe, were essentially a means of transferring Indian land to the state or federal governments. Military conflict in the old northwest continued until 1794, when a U.S. victory led to the Treaty of Greenville the next year, which gave most of Ohio and Indiana to the U.S. government and established a system whereby tribes received annual grants of money, at the cost of government interference in tribal affairs. Not all Americans believed that Indians were innately inferior to white Americans. Some, like Thomas Jefferson, believed they lived at a less advanced stage of civilization. In the 1790s, the federal government distributed agricultural tools and livestock to Indians to encourage them to adopt American ways of life. The status of free blacks in the early republic was ambiguous. The Constitution did not initially define who are citizens of the United States, so individual states defined the boundaries of freedom. In some states, North and South, free blacks had some rights, including the right to vote. But the vast majority of blacks were enslaved, and slaves were not considered members of the nation or fully eligible for citizenship if free. Early immigration policy shows that Americans excluded blacks from their conception of who was an American. The Naturalization Act, passed by Congress in 1790, first defined American nationality by allowing only "free white persons" to emigrate and become citizens. Although some believe that this law initiated an "open immigration" policy, the word "white" in the law excluded the majority of mankind from coming to America and becoming citizens. John Locke had argued that liberty flowed from a man having the power of reason, and it did not seem a contradiction at this time to deny liberty to irrational beings. Increasingly, white Americans saw blacks as lacking the qualities that enabled freedom—self-control, reason, and allegiance to the larger community. Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785, claimed that blacks, because of their nature and experience of slavery, were disloyal to America, and he speculated that blacks were inherently inferior to whites. While he believed that Indians might have the capacity to become as civilized as whites, he did not believe blacks naturally had this capacity. While hoping for the end of slavery and opposing the slave trade, he also supported colonization, or the idea that blacks, once freed from slavery, could never fully be part of America, and should be colonized in Africa or other parts of the Western Hemisphere. In his ambivalent approach to race and slavery, Jefferson reflected the thinking of his generation. While the decline of apprenticeship and indentured servitude expanded freedom for whites, the Revolution widened the divide between free Americans and enslaved Americans. Race now became a convenient justification for slavery in a nation dedicated to liberty. "We the people" more and more meant only white Americans.

Chapter 8: Securing the Republic, 1790-1815

When George Washington became the first president of the United States in April 1789, in New York City, the nation's temporary capital, America's political leaders believed the republican experiment's success depended on political harmony. They wanted to avoid organized political parties, which were seen as divisive and disruptive. Yet parties quickly formed, first in Congress, and then spread throughout the nation. The 1790s was a decade of intense partisanship, an "age of passion" in which the survival of the republic, the revolution's legacy, and American liberty seemed at stake. President Washington embodied national unity and the virtue of republican self-sacrifice, having retired from public life after the war. His vice-president, John Adams, was an important political leader of the Revolution. His cabinet included Thomas Jefferson as secretary of state and Alexander Hamilton as head of the Treasury Department. He formed a Supreme Court, with John Jay as its chief justice. But a financial plan proposed by Hamilton frayed national unity. Taking Great Britain as his model, Hamilton wanted to stabilize the nation's finances, garner the support of powerful financiers, and foster economic development. He hoped to make the United States a world military and commercial power. To establish the government's creditworthiness, Hamilton proposed that it pay off at full face value all national and state debts from the Revolution. He wanted to create a new national debt, issued as interest-bearing bonds to government creditors, that would tie wealthy investors to the national government. He wanted to establish a Bank of the United States, modeled on the Bank of England, that would act as the nation's financial agent—a private corporation that would hold government funds, make loans to the government, and make profits for stockholders. To raise revenue, he proposed a tax on whiskey. And in a Report on Manufactures, Hamilton called for a tariff and government subsidies to develop factories that would produce in the U.S. goods then imported from abroad. Though American financiers, manufacturers, and merchants supported Hamilton's vision of the nation as a powerful commercial republic, many had a different vision. His plans for close ties with Britain alarmed James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who looked not to Europe but westward expansion as assuring a prosperous, republican future. They disliked urban growth and manufacturing and did not want economic policy that catered to bankers and business leaders. They hoped America would be a republic of independent farmers who sold their goods to the world through free trade. Jefferson and Madison feared that a powerful central government, if allied with a growing class of commercial capitalists, would endanger American freedom. Initial opposition to Hamilton's program came from the South, which lacked investors and owners of government bonds, where support for manufacturing and a diversified economy was weak, and whose states had paid off much of their war debt. Hamilton argued that the Constitution's clause giving Congress the power to enact laws for the "general welfare" authorized his plans, but opponents, known as "strict constructionists," argued that the federal government could only use powers that were explicitly in the Constitution—which, they charged, did not authorize a national bank. A compromise secured Hamilton's fiscal program, minus subsidies for factories, in exchange for locating the nation's capital between Virginia and Maryland. This became Washington, D.C. The French Revolution of 1789 deepened political divisions in America. At first almost all Americans celebrated the Revolution, as it seemed inspired by their own revolution and republic. But the turn in France in 1793 to a more radical revolution, marked by the execution of King Louis XVI and aristocrats and war between France and Great Britain, polarized Americans. Jefferson and his followers thought the French Revolution, despite its extremism, was a victory for self-government everywhere. To Washington and Hamilton and their followers, the Revolution invited anarchy, and they believed America should befriend Britain. But since the Revolution, the United States had been a permanent ally of France. In 1793, Washington declared that the United States would be neutral in the war between France and Britain. But he also moved to expel a French envoy, Edmond Genet, for trying to recruit American ships to attack British vessels. At the same time, Britain seized American ships and sailors. John Jay negotiated a controversial treaty in 1794 that effectively cancelled the American-French alliance and recognized British commercial and naval supremacy. By the mid-1790s, two parties appeared in Congress, calling themselves Federalists and Republicans. Both parties claimed the language of American liberty, and each accused the other of conspiring to destroy that liberty. The Federalists supported the Washington administration, favored Hamilton's economic program, and wanted ties with Britain. Well-to-do merchants, farmers, lawyers, and established political leaders, especially in the North, tended to support the Federalists. They were generally elitist, and saw society as a fixed hierarchy in which political office should go to wealthy men, who expected deference from lesser men. They feared that the spirit of liberty generated by the Revolution was degenerating into anarchy. When armed frontier farmers in Pennsylvania tried to prevent the collection of the whiskey tax in 1794, invoking the Revolution and liberty, Washington dispatched troops to the region to suppress them. The rebels offered no resistance, and the rebellion reinforced Federalists' fear of popular democracy. The Republicans, led by Madison and Jefferson, seemed to embrace popular politics. They supported France and had more faith in democratic self-government. Southern planters, ordinary farmers around the country, and urban artisans who sympathized with the French Revolution supported this party. They were far more critical of social and economic inequality, and more congenial to broad democratic participation by ordinary Americans, than the Federalists.

Each party believed that only itself was legitimate and representative of all the nation's interests. The other party was deemed an illegitimate "faction" and enemy of American liberty and the Revolution's principles. The partisanship of the 1790s expanded the public sphere and the democratic content of American freedom. It increased the number of citizens who attended political events and read newspapers. Ordinary men never before active in politics wrote pamphlets and organized political meetings. These men included members of the Democratic-Republican societies, inspired by the Jacobin clubs of Paris. They openly supported the French Revolution and praised American and French liberty. Federalists viewed them as illegitimately usurping the representative authority of the government; Washington dismissed them as "self-created societies." They justified their existence by claiming that the people had a right to debate political questions and organize to influence government policy. They believed political liberty involved more than just voting, and included popular organizing and pressure tactics, too. Although the societies soon disappeared, they were absorbed by the emerging Republican party, which also found support among radical British immigrants who defended the French Revolution, such as Thomas Paine. The democratic spirit of the 1790s also invigorated discussion of women's rights. In England in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in which she argued that rights should be extended to women. While not challenging traditional gender roles, she argued that women should have greater access to education and a role and representation in government. The expanding public sphere of the 1790s offered opportunities for American women to participate in politics, and a small but growing number of women published political and literary writings in American newspapers. One of these, Judith Sargent Murray, insisted that women should have equal access to education. If women seemed intellectually inferior to men, she argued, it was because they were denied an opportunity to learn. Women were still not part of the body politic. Although women were counted in determining representation in Congress and nothing in the Constitution explicitly limited rights to men, the document and almost all Americans assumed that politics was an exclusively male sphere. George Washington was re-elected unanimously in 1792, but he decided to retire from public life in 1796 and set a precedent that the presidency should not be a life-long office. In his Farewell Address, Washington warned against parties and partisanship and urged Americans to avoid Europe's power politics by refusing to embrace "permanent alliances" with other nations. The election of 1796 was the first contested presidential election. John Adams with Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina ran for the Federalists, and Thomas Jefferson, with Aaron Burr of New York, ran for the Republicans. Although Adams won the presidency with the most electoral votes, Jefferson received more votes than Pinckney, so he became Adams's vice-president. Adams was brilliant but disliked by nearly everyone, even his supporters, and his administration faced constant crisis. Although the United States was neutral in the war between France and Britain, it defended its right to trade with both nations. In 1797, before negotiating the renewal of France's treaty with the United States, French officials demanded bribes. Outraged, Adams publicized the affair, and soon U.S. and French ships were engaged in a "quasi-war" at sea. America had effectively became an ally of Great Britain in the European war. In 1800, Adams negotiated a peace with France. The most controversial act of the Adams administration was the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed by a Federalist-dominated Congress in 1798. The acts made it harder for immigrants to become naturalized citizens and allowed the deportation of immigrants deemed "dangerous" by federal authorities, moves meant to silence immigrant radicals who supported the Republicans and the French. They also authorized the prosecution of any assembly or publication critical of the government. This was meant to allow federal authorities to suppress Republican newspapers attacking the Adams administration and its policies. Jefferson, referring to the Salem witch trials, believed these acts inaugurated a "reign of witches." More than a dozen individuals were charged with sedition, many of whom were convicted, including Matthew Lyons, a Republican member of Congress. Instead of squelching the opposition, the Alien and Sedition Acts provoked more of it by making an issue out of free speech. Madison and Jefferson drafted resolutions to be passed by the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures. Both criticized the acts as violations of the First Amendment. The original draft of Jefferson's resolution asserted that states could unilaterally stop the enforcement of such laws within their borders—but the Kentucky legislature deleted this passage before passing its resolution. While many Americans were repelled by the idea that states could refuse to follow federal laws, more Americans believed the Alien and Sedition Acts violated protections for free speech enshrined in the Constitution. The most controversial act of the Adams administration was the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed by a Federalist-dominated Congress in 1798. The acts made it harder for immigrants to become naturalized citizens and allowed the deportation of immigrants deemed "dangerous" by federal authorities, moves meant to silence immigrant radicals who supported the Republicans and the French. They also authorized the prosecution of any assembly or publication critical of the government. This was meant to allow federal authorities to suppress Republican newspapers attacking the Adams administration and its policies. Jefferson, referring to the Salem witch trials, believed these acts inaugurated a "reign of witches." More than a dozen individuals were charged with sedition, many of whom were convicted, including Matthew Lyons, a Republican member of Congress. Instead of squelching the opposition, the Alien and Sedition Acts provoked more of it by making an issue out of free speech. Madison and Jefferson drafted resolutions to be passed by the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures. Both criticized the acts as violations of the First Amendment. The original draft of Jefferson's resolution asserted that states could unilaterally stop the enforcement of such laws within their borders—but the Kentucky legislature deleted this passage before passing its resolution. While many Americans were repelled by the idea that states could refuse to follow federal laws, more Americans believed the Alien and Sedition Acts violated protections for free speech enshrined in the Constitution. Slavery lurked in the background of debates in the 1790s. Jefferson was elected only because he received all of the South's electoral college votes. Jeffersonian liberty rested on the fact that three-fifths of the slaves were counted in apportionment. If it had been otherwise, Adams would have been re-elected in 1800. The first Congress received petitions for the abolition of slavery, including one signed by Benjamin Franklin. Madison and other political leaders, even though they found slavery distasteful, believed that it was too divisive to be made in issue in national politics, and they ignored the petitions. The Haitian Revolution demonstrated how slavery shaped and warped American freedom. Jeffersonians who celebrated the French Revolution as an advance for liberty were horrified by the slave revolt in 1791 in St.. Domingue, France's most treasured colonial possession, an island of sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The slaves defeated British and French forces sent to suppress the rebellion, and they declared an independent nation in 1804. The revolt affirmed the universal appeal of freedom in this age of revolutions, and fostered hopes of freedom among America's slaves. Whites were generally terrified by the specter of armed slave insurrection, and they interpreted the turmoil in Haiti as a sign that blacks could not govern themselves. Jefferson's administration hoped to isolate and destroy the hemisphere's second independent republic.

The Irish were rapidly integrated into the Democratic Party's urban political machines, which dispensed jobs and poor relief to immigrants. Nativists believed the Irish in particular were a lazy, childlike, and irrational people unfamiliar with American ideas of liberty and subservient to the Catholic Church, thus threatening democratic institutions, social reform, and public education. Riots targeted immigrants and their institutions, and nativist politicians were elected in the 1840s and 1850s. American law in this period increasingly supported the efforts of entrepreneurs to participate in the market revolution, while protecting them from local governments and liability that might interfere with their activities. The corporate form of business organization, in which a corporate firm receives a charter from the government and stockholders are not individually liable for company debts, became central to economic life in this period. Corporations found reinforcement in Supreme Courts decisions that validated their legal status. Local courts found businesses blameless for property damage and held that employers had full authority in the workplace, even convicting workers who joined unions or went on strike based on old conspiracy laws. By the 1830s and 1840s, the market revolution and westward expansion had profoundly affected all Americans' lives, reinforcing older ideas of freedom and creating new ones. American freedom had long been linked with available land in the West. In this period was coined the phrase "manifest destiny," referring to the divine mission of the United States to occupy all of North America and extend freedom, despite any costs to peoples and nations already there. But an old idea connecting freedom and a divine mission to move west and settle land had its origins in colonial times. In national myth and ideology, the West would long remain a sanctuary for the free American. To many, the settlement and exploitation of the West offered America a chance to avoid becoming like Europe, where society was marked by fixed social classes and large numbers of wage-earning poor. In the West, free or cheap land was abundant and factory labor less common. The West seemed to offer men facing wage labor and rising land prices in the east an opportunity to gain economic independence—the social condition of freedom. The energetic, competitive world of the market revolution led many Americans to identify freedom with the absence of restraints on self-directed individuals who sought economic advancement and personal development. Opportunities for personal growth presented a new definition of Jefferson's pursuit of happiness that well fitted a new America in which westward expansion and market relations shattered old spatial and social boundaries. A group of New England intellectuals, called the transcendentalists, reflected this national mood in their writings and activities. Together they insisted that individual judgment should take precedence over existing social traditions and institutions. Ralph Waldo Emerson defined freedom as an open-ended process of self-realization, in which individuals could remake themselves and their own lives. Henry David Thoreau called for individuals to rely on themselves. In this era the term individualism was first used. Unlike in the colonial period, many Americans now believed individuals should pursue their own self-interest, no matter what the cost to the public good, and that they should and could depend only on themselves. Americans more and more saw the realm of the private self as one in which other individuals and government should not interfere. The popular religious revivals that swept over the nation during the Second Great Awakening added a religious dimension to the celebration of self-improvement, self-reliance, and self-determination. These revivals were first organized by established religious leaders worried about low levels of church attendance, but reached their height in the 1820s and 1830s, when the Reverend Charles Grandison Finney held revivals in New York. Like evangelists in the eighteenth century, Finney enthusiastically warned his audience of hell, and promised them salvation if they would end their sinful habits. Evangelical preachers rejected the idea that man was naturally sinful and preordained to heaven or hell, and instead argued that humans had free will to live in sin or reach heaven by doing "good works." The Second Great Awakening democratized American Christianity and made it a mass enterprise. Religious devotion and attendance boomed, and smaller evangelical sects such as the Methodists and Baptists grew rapidly. Christianity became central to American culture. The evangelicals stressed the right of private judgment in spiritual affairs and the possibility of universal salvation through faith and good deeds. Evangelicals used the opportunities to travel and spread their message which had been made available by the market revolution, and their mass religion and idea that ordinary Americans could forge their own spiritual destinies resonated with the spread of market values. While evangelicals criticized selfishness, greed, and indifference to the welfare of others, the revivals flourished in areas transformed by the market revolution. Evangelical ministers promoted a controlled individualism, marked by industry, sobriety, and self-discipline as the essence of freedom. With the market revolution, the right to compete for economic advancement became essential to American freedom. Symbols of liberty were bound up with symbols of prosperity. The stories of men like John Jacob Astor, the son of a poor German immigrant who became the richest man in America by using money earned from shipping to invest in Manhattan real estate, seemed to embody opportunities open to the "self-made man." This success was achieved not through hereditary privilege or government favoritism, as in Europe, but through hard work and intelligence. The market revolution and expanding commercial life enriched bankers, merchants, industrialists, and planters and produced a new middle class of clerks, accountants, and other professionals, such as teachers, doctors, and lawyers. Not everyone benefited from the market revolution. Most African-Americans were slaves, but even free blacks were excluded from economic opportunities. Free blacks in northern states experienced discrimination in every sphere of life. They were segregated into the poorest and most unhealthy areas of cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati, and were subjected to assaults in riots by white mobs. They were barred from schools and other public facilities, and created their own institutional life of schools and churches, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Many blacks experienced downward economic mobility, being unable to practice their craft skills because of discrimination by white employers and workers, and were relegated to the most unskilled and menial low-paid labor. Blacks also could not take advantage of the opening of the West, either, since federal law barred blacks from accessing public land, and some western states prohibited them from even entering their territory.

Many opportunities created by the market revolution were also closed to women. As the household declined as a site of economic production, women's traditional roles were undermined by mass produced goods once made at home. Some women entered factories, while others embraced a new definition of femininity centered in women's ability to create a private sphere in the home removed from the competitive tensions of the market economy. Here her role was not to produce things but to sustain non-market values such as love, friendship, and mutual obligation, providing men with a shelter from the rigors of the market. Earlier ideas of "republican motherhood" were replaced by this "cult of domesticity." Virtue came to be defined as a personal quality associated with women, who were expected to be sexually innocent, beautiful, frail, and dependent on men. The cult of domesticity minimized even women's indirect participation in public life, viewing women as nurturing, selfless, and ruled by emotions, while seeing men as rational, aggressive, and domineering. While men could move freely between the public and private spheres, women were to remain confined within the private family. But the cult of domesticity did not capture the realities of life for the many women who worked for wages at least part of their lives. Women who worked outside of the home could not compete freely for jobs, since only low-paid jobs were open to them, and married women could not sign their own contracts or, until after the Civil War, keep their wages, which went to their husbands. Many poor women worked as domestic servants, factory workers, and seamstresses. For the middle class, however, respectability was earned in part by keeping wives and children at home and hiring women to do household work in middle-class homes, which were segregated in neighborhoods distant from other classes. Even working-class men adopted these values and protested that capitalism was ripping women from the home and subjecting them to exploitation and abuse in the marketplace. Many Americans experienced the market revolution as a loss of freedom. The economy suffered a sharp recession in 1819, a depression starting in 1837, and several downturns in between, all of which caused high levels of unemployment and reductions in wages. While the economic transformations of the market revolution greatly expanded America's output and trade and increased living standards, it also widened the gap in wealth and income between wealthy merchants and industrialists and workers and the poor, especially in the urban Northeast. Worried by the erosion of their traditional skills and the danger of being reduced to dependent wage earners, skilled craftsmen in the late 1820s created the world's first Workingmen's Parties. These were short-lived political organizations that sought to mobilize lower-class support for candidates who demanded free public education, an end to imprisonment for debt, and laws limiting work to ten hours per day. In the 1830s, unions were organized and strikes were common. Wage-earners protesting social conditions and pressing for political demands invoked ideas of freedom and independence from the Revolutionary era to justify their claims. They even compared their status to slaves, using the term wage-slavery. Thus even while the market revolution offered opportunities to many Americans, it also generated anxieties and protests that came to be reflected in politics.

Chapter 9: The Market Revolution, 1800-1840 Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century described liberty as the defining quality of the new nation and its institutions. Americans celebrated freedom in their political speeches and writings, newspapers, and their sermons, and freedom was said to make American institutions unique. Yet, in this period, Americans' understandings of freedom changed. The Revolution stimulated three historical processes that quickened after the War of 1812: the spread of market relations, westward migration, and the development of a robust political democracy. These forces reshaped American society and led Americans to associate freedom with economic opportunity, geographic mobility, and democratic political participation. But slavery also shaped American freedom. Slavery moved west and expanded along with a growing nation. Innovations in transportation helped spread slaves and slavery, too. And slavery created a racial boundary around American democracy that made voting, office holding, and participation in the public sphere a privilege for whites only. In the first half of the nineteenth century, economic changes called by historians "the market revolution" transformed the United States. Innovations in transportation and communication sparked these changes. In the colonial era, technology had barely advanced—ships did not become faster, no canals were built, and manufacturing was done by hand. Roads were scarce and slow. In 1800, most farm families were not tied to the marketplace, use little cash, and produced much of what they needed at home. It was nearly impossible for farmers far from cities or waterways to get their produce to market. The first advance in overland transportation was the construction of toll roads, called turnpikes, by private companies and state and local governments. But improved water transportation more effectively sped up and lowered the costs of commerce. In 1807, on the Hudson River in New York, the first steamboat, built by Robert Fulton, went into operation. Steamboats made possible upstream navigation and rapid transport across the Great Lakes, and eventually the Atlantic Ocean. In 1825, the Erie Canal in upstate New York was completed. The canal facilitated the settlement of upstate New York and the Old Northwest, and helped foster trade between farmers in the west and manufacturers in the east. The Erie Canal also inspired a craze of canal building by state and local governments, many of which became bankrupt when the canals were unprofitable. While canals only connected existing waterways, railroads opened vast new areas of the interior, while stimulating coal mining, for fuel, and iron manufacturing, for locomotives and rail. Work on the first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, began in 1828. By 1860, the nation's rail network was 30,000 miles long, more than the total in the rest of the world combined. At the same time, the invention of the telegraph in the 1830s by Samuel F. B. Morse allowed for instantaneous communication. First used commercially in 1844, the telegraph served businesses and newspapers by helping speed information flow and bringing uniformity to prices Transportation and communication improvements fostered the growth of the West as a new region. Between 1790 and 1840, around 4.5 million people crossed the Appalachian Mountains—much of it after the War of 1812, when land-hungry easterners moved west. Between 1815 and 1821, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi and Maine became states. Three different streams of settlers moved west: small farmers and planters with slaves in the south, who created the Cotton Kingdom of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas; farm families from the upper South who moved to southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; and New Englanders who moved across New York to northern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. National boundaries did not prevent American settlement. In Florida, and later in Texas and Oregon, American settlers claimed land ruled by foreign countries (Spain, Mexico, and Britain) or Indian tribes. They were confident that American sovereignty would follow. American settlers and military incursions, some led by Andrew Jackson, led to the acquisition of Spanish Florida by 1819. By 1840, 7 million Americans—about two-fifths of the total population—lived west of the Appalachian Mountains. The market revolution and westward expansion, which occurred simultaneously in the North and South, increased divisions between these sections. Perhaps the most dynamic characteristic of America's economy in the early nineteenth century was the birth of the Cotton Kingdom. The early Industrial Revolution in England was based in cotton textile factories, which demanded a huge amount of cotton. The Deep South was suited to growing cotton, and once Eli Whitney, in 1793, invented the cotton gin, which quickly separated cotton from seeds, cotton production quickened, became very profitable, and spread. Whitney's invention, along with new western lands and factory demand for cotton, revolutionized American slavery. Once expected to die out with tobacco, slavery was expanded by cotton. When Congress outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, a massive internal trade in slaves grew in the United States, in which slaves in the older slave states of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina were sold to the newer slave areas of the Deep South. Between 1800 and 1860, about 1 million slaves were sold and forcibly moved west in the internal slave trade. Though Jefferson imagined the West would secure the future of an American republic populated by independent small farmers, slave plantations producing cotton for export became the basis of the empire of liberty. Even though cotton agriculture in some sense commercialized the South, it did not create a dynamic and diversified economy. Cotton plantation slavery simply spread the agrarian, slave-based social order of the eastern states westward. The Cotton Kingdom remained rural, and the south's transportation and banking systems were underdeveloped arms of the plantation economy. Manufacturing and technological development here lagged, compared to the North. In the North, the market revolution and westward expansion spurred changes that transformed the region into an integrated economy of commercial farms and manufacturing cities. Once isolated farmers, now connected to distant markets by new transportation routes and credit, sold more goods and acquired more cash, which they used to purchase more goods they once made at home. Western farmers sold their goods and found credit in growing eastern cities. Credit allowed them to purchase land, fertilizers, and new agricultural machines, such as the steel plow and the reaper, which greatly increased agricultural productivity in goods such as wheat.

Cities were part of the West from its beginning. Cities that stood at the intersection of interregional trade, such as Cincinnati, a center of pig slaughterhouses, and St. Louis, grew enormously and quickly. Chicago was the West's greatest city. Thanks to the railroad and its location on the Great Lakes, Chicago by 1860 was the fourth-largest city in the nation, serving as a center where western farm products were collected and shipped east. Urban centers in the west and east experienced great changes wrought by the market revolution. The number of people in cities increased dramatically. Urban merchants, bankers, and master craftsmen exploited the expanding market among commercial farmers. Their efforts to increase production and reduce labor costs transformed work. Skilled artisans who once made an entire product at home, where they controlled their own work, were now gathered in large workshops, where entrepreneurs supervised them, subdivided their tasks, and paid them a wage to perform only one process in production. These workers faced relentless pressure from employers to make more goods faster and at lower wages. In some industries, particularly textiles, factories entirely replaced traditional craft production. Factories gathered large groups of workers under central supervision and replaced hand tools with power-driven machinery. The first factory in America was established in 1790 at Pawtucket, Rhode Island by Samuel Slater, an English immigrant, who built from memory a spinning-jenny in order to evade laws making it illegal to export plans for industrial machines. These early spinning factories produced yarn which, through the "outwork" system, was sent out to rural farm families, who wove it into cloth. The same outwork system characterized early shoe production, in which parts were sent out to families, who assembled them and gave them back to merchants, who finally sold the shoe. But shoemaking and textiles was eventually brought under one factory roof. The first large American factory that used power looms to weave cotton cloth was built in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814. Beginning in the 1820s, other manufacturers established factories in Lowell and other small towns, creating small industrial towns and cities across New England. The first factories, powered by waterfalls and river rapids, were matched by the 1840s by factories using steam power, which could be located anywhere. In 1850, factories made not just textiles and shoes but a wide variety of goods, including tools, firearms, clocks, and agricultural machinery. The "American system" of manufactures relied on the mass production of interchangeable parts that could be quickly assembled into standardized finished products. The market revolution changed Americans' sense of time. Farm life was still regulated by seasonal rhythms, while clocks in cities and factories came to sharply regulate life and distinguished work from leisure time. Artisans in traditional craft production had worked slowly and erratically, sometimes drinking or talking politics, but work in industrial factories was much longer, supervised and controlled, and drink, play, and conversation were not allowed in this highly disciplined environment. Pay for the artisan had been based on the price of his product, but the industrial worker received an hourly or daily wage. Railroads, which operated on fixed schedules, also spread "clock time." Many Americans saw working in a factory as degrading their sense of independence, and most native-born men refused to work in them. Employers thus turned to women and immigrants for labor. Most early New England factories first used female and child labor. In Lowell, the most well-known center of early textile manufacturing, employers built an entire town with churches, lecture halls, and boarding halls, allowing farm families to send their daughters to a moral mill village in good conscience. This was the first time that women were sent into the public world in large numbers. But these "mill girls" were a transient labor force, since most sought to marry after only a few years of factory work. They were replaced by immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s. Economic growth fueled a demand for labor, which was partly filled by immigrants. Immigration swelled between 1840 and 1860, when over 4 million people came to the United States, mostly from Ireland and Germany. Modernization of agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, and steamship and rail transportation spurred many of these migrants to America. Most went to the North, where jobs were plenty and slaves were few and would not compete with them. Very few immigrants went to southern states, except for peripheral cities such as New Orleans, St. Louis, or Baltimore. Immigrants in northern cities and rural areas were quite visible. America offered political and religious freedom to Europeans living under repressive governments and rigid social hierarchies. But the largest number of immigrants fled catastrophe—the Irish men and women who escaped from the Great Famine of 1845-1851, when a potato blight starved 1 million Irish to death and caused another million to migrate, mostly to America These migrants, mostly having worked in agricultural labor, moved into unskilled or low-skilled jobs—men into common labor, rail and canal construction, longshore and factory work, and women into domestic service. The Germans were the second-largest group of immigrants. They had more skilled workers, tended to be artisans, craftsmen, and shopkeepers, and formed tight-knit immigrant communities in the East and West. While English immigrants were easily absorbed in American culture, the Irish faced bitter hostility. They were Roman Catholics in a mostly Protestant society with deep anti-Catholic traditions, and they increased the visibility and power of the Catholic Church. Irish immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s alarmed many native-born Americans, and "nativists," who feared the impact of immigration on American political and social life, blamed immigrants for crime, political corruption, heavy drinking, and job competition that undercut wages for native-born skilled workers.

1800 also saw a slave revolt in America, led by Gabriel Prosser, a Virginia slave. Plotting to kill whites on the way to Richmond, where they would hold government officials hostage and demand the abolition of slavery, the slave rebels were discovered, arrested, and many of them executed. They were inspired by the language and symbols of the American Revolution, invoked their right to liberty, and compared themselves to George Washington. In response, Virginia passed laws that tightened control over the state's blacks, made it more difficult for owners to free their slaves, and forced freed slaves to leave the state or return to slavery. At Jefferson's inauguration in March 1801, he tried to conciliate his Federalist opponents by claiming that both parties shared the same principles, even if they disagreed in their opinions. Jefferson vowed to reduce government, free trade, ensure freedom of religion and the press, and avoid "entangling alliances" with other nations. He sought to dismantle much of the Federalist edifice and prevent the kind of centralized state Federalists promoted. He pardoned those jailed under the Sedition Act, reduced the army and navy and the number of government employees, abolished all taxes except for the tariff, and paid off part of the nation's debt. Despite Jefferson's wishes, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall, a Federalist and Adams appointee, increased its power during his administration. In Marbury v. Madison (1803), the Marshall Court established the right of the Supreme Count to determine whether an act of Congress violates the Constitution—the power known as "judicial review." The Marshall Court also soon established the right of the nation's highest court to determine the constitutionality of state laws. Jefferson saw the Louisiana Purchase as his greatest achievement, and yet his view was highly ironic given its origins and character. Acquired by France in 1800, the vast Louisiana territory, stretching from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, was purchased by Jefferson for the very small sum of $15 million. But it was sold only because the Haitian Revolution, which Jefferson detested, had defeated an overtaxed French military and Napoleon needed funds for campaigns in Europe. Americans were happy to secure the port of New Orleans, thus ensuring a previously precarious right to freely trade on the Mississippi. Though Jefferson doubled the nation's size and ended France's presence in North America, the Federalists opposed the purchase as wasteful. Jefferson believed Louisiana ensured the survival of the agrarian republic of small and independent, virtuous farmers. Jefferson, a strict constructionist, also acknowledged that the Constitution nowhere gave the president the right to take this kind of action without approval from Congress. Soon after purchasing Louisiana, Jefferson dispatched two fellow Virginians, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to explore it. They were to conduct scientific and commercial surveys in order to find ways to exploit the region's resources, develop trade with Indians, and find a commercial route to the Pacific Ocean that could foster trade with Asia. In two years Lewis and Clark traveled all the way to the Pacific (reaching it in the area of today's Oregon) and back. Though they did not find a commercial route to Asia, their success reinforced the belief that America's territory would one day extend to the Pacific Ocean. Incorporating Louisiana, especially the city of New Orleans, was not easy. It had multiple legal and cultural traditions begun there by the Spanish and French. Slaves in New Orleans under these regimes had some limited rights. But even though the treaty said the United States would recognize all previous rights and legal customs, the rights of slaves and blacks were severely circumscribed once the United States took over. The Louisiana Purchase showed that, despite being far removed from Europe, events across the Atlantic world deeply affected the United States. Because the United States depended on many goods, especially manufactured goods, from Europe, the wars there directly influenced Americans' livelihoods. Jefferson hoped to avoid becoming entangled in Europe's wars, but ultimately he could not ignore these struggles. Jefferson, who wanted a diminished central state, used the military to fight the nation's first war, a war to protect commerce in the Mediterranean. In North Africa, the Barbary states had long preyed on European and U.S. shipping, although they refrained from attacking ships if a nation paid a hefty tribute. When Jefferson refused demands that the United States increase its tribute, a war between the Barbary states and the United States started, lasting until 1804. The treaty ending the war ensured the freedom to ship freely in the Mediterranean and nearby Atlantic oceans. When war between France and Britain resumed in 1803, each nation imposed a blockade to deny the other's trade with the United States, which was officially neutral. The British also engaged in the impressment of American sailors, essentially kidnapping them for service in the Royal Navy. Jefferson, believing America's economy required free trade, enacted the Embargo, which prohibited all American vessels from sailing to foreign ports, to force an end to the blockades. The Embargo stopped almost all American exports, and devastated the nation's ports, but did not persuade France or Great Britain to end their blockades. In 1809, Jefferson signed the Non-Intercourse Act, which banned trade only with Britain and France, and promised a resumption of trade with either nation if it ended its ban on American shipping. In 1808, Jefferson's successor James Madison easily won election as president. With the Embargo a failure and deeply unpopular, in 1810 Madison forged a new policy in which trade was resumed with both powers, but provided that if either France or Britain stopped interfering with American shipping, the United States could reimpose an embargo on the other nation. France ended its blockade, and the British increased their attacks on American ships and sailors. In 1812, Madison resumed the embargo against Britain. Young Congressmen from the West known as War Hawks, such as Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Calhoun of South Carolina, called for war, in part because it would be an opportunity to conquer Florida and Canada. Others wanted a war to defend the principles of free trade and end Europe's power over America.

Deteriorating relations with Indians in the West also precipitated war. Under Jefferson, the government continued efforts to "civilize" the Indians, even while it made efforts to remove them from their lands to open space for white settlers. Indians in the western territories acquired through the Louisiana Purchase by now were greatly outnumbered by whites, and some tribes, particularly the Creek and Cherokee, began to adopt white ways, such as agriculture and slavery. Others, called "nativists," wanted to end European influences and resist white settlement of their lands. In the dozen years before 1812, movements of prophecy and cultural revitalization swept western and southern tribes, calling on Indians to stop the white's destructive practices, such as gambling and drinking. A more militant position was taken by two Shawnee brothers, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. They refused to sign treaties with whites and advocated resistance to the federal government, and Tenskwatawa, a prophet, argued that whites were the source of all evil and that Indians should completely separate from everything European. In 1810, Tecumseh organized attacks on frontier settlements. In 1811, William Henry Harrison destroyed the militants' village at the Battle of Tippecanoe. When Madison asked Congress to declare war on Britain in 1812, the vote reflected a divided nation. Federalists and Republicans representing northern states, where mercantile and financial interests were concentrated, voted against the war. Southern and western representatives voted overwhelmingly for it. Deeply divided, the U.S. lacked a large navy or army, lacked a central bank (since the Bank of the United States' charter expired in 1811), and northern merchants and bankers refused to loan money to the government. Britain, even though focused on the war in Europe, initially repelled American invasions in Canada and imposed an effective blockade on the nation's shipping. In 1814, the British invaded and captured Washington, D.C., burned the White House, and forced the government to flee. The United States had a few victories, including the defense of Baltimore at Fort McHenry, an event that inspired the song that became the national anthem, the "Star-Spangled Banner." The United States decisively vanquished Indian forces in the West and South, killing Tecumseh and many other militants. Most notably, forces led by Andrew Jackson forced Indians to cede much of the southeastern lands that became Alabama and Mississippi, and then famously repulsed British forces at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815. This battle was fought before news reached America that American and British negotiators had signed the Treaty of Ghent which had ended the war the previous month. The treaty changed nothing, giving the United States no territory or rights regarding U.S. ships or impressment. At the time, some Americans called the War of 1812 the Second War of Independence. The war affirmed the ability of the republic to defend itself and wage war without sacrificing its republican institutions. It made Andrew Jackson a national hero. And it sealed the doom of Indians who occupied lands east of the Mississippi River, thus finally securing this vast area for whites, many of whom in the south would bring slaves and slavery with them. The war strengthened Americans' nationalism and their sense of isolation and separation from Europe. The war sealed the demise of the Federalist Party, which had been briefly revitalized by widespread opposition to the war in the north. Madison only narrowly won re-election as president in 1812. But an ill-timed convention of New England Federalists at Hartford, Connecticut in December 1814, badly injured the party. Convention delegates criticized the domination of the presidency by Virginians, lamented the diminishing influence of the northeast as new southern and western states joined the union, and called for an end to the three-fifths clause. They demanded two-thirds votes in Congress for declaring war, admitting new states, and laws restricting trade. But Jackson's electrifying victory at New Orleans made the Federalists seem unpatriotic. Within a few years the Federalist Party disappeared. The urban and commercial interests the party represented were small in an expanding agrarian nation, and their elitism and distrust of democracy was increasingly out of touch with an increasingly democratic culture. But the Federalists had raised an issue that would not go away in the future—the domination of the national government by the slaveholding south—and the kind of commercial development they championed would soon inaugurate a social and economic transformation of the nation.

The Missouri Compromise showed that sectional divisions over slavery's westward expansion seriously endangered the federal union. The domination of the presidency by Virginians since the founding, except for the term of John Adams of Massachusetts, reinforced northerners' sense that southern slaveowners dominated national politics, and they knew that more slave states would mean more political power for the South in Congress. The issue eventually sparked the Civil War. Between 1810 and 1822, Spain's Latin American colonies rebelled and established independent nations, including Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru. By 1825, Spain's empire in the Western Hemisphere contained only Cuba and Puerto Rico. Americans sympathized with these republican revolutions, and the United States was the first to recognize these new governments. John Quincy Adams, Monroe's secretary of state, feared that Spain might try to regain its former colonies, and in 1823 he drafted a speech for the president which became known as the Monroe Doctrine. This doctrine stated that the United States would oppose any future efforts by European powers to colonize the Americas, abstain from involvement in Europe's wars, and prevent European nations from interfering in the new Latin American nations. This doctrine assumed that the Old and New World were separate political and diplomatic systems, and claimed for the United States the role of the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere. Adams also meant to secure the commerce of the region for U.S., as opposed to British, interests. In the 1824 presidential election, only candidate Andrew Jackson, known for his military victories, had nationwide support. The other candidates—John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, William Crawford of Georgia, and Henry Clay of Kentucky—found support mostly in their regions. Though Jackson received the largest tally of the popular vote and carried all regions except for New England, none of the candidates received a majority of electoral college votes. Running last and eliminated, Henry Clay used his influence to lead the House of Representatives into electing John Quincy Adams as president, whom Clay believed would promote the American System. Clay was soon appointed secretary of state. This appointment led to charges that a "corrupt bargain" between Clay and Adams had secured the presidency for Adams, and laid the basis for the emergence of a Democratic Party behind Andrew Jackson's candidacy in the 1828 election. The alliance around Adams and Clay came to form the opposition Whig Party in the 1830s. John Quincy Adams came from a privileged background as the son of former President John Adams and had experience as a diplomat and senator in the U.S. Congress. Despite his uncharismatic nature, John Quincy Adams was strongly nationalist. He supported the American System of government-sponsored economic development. Author of the Monroe Doctrine, he wanted to increase American commerce and power in the Western Hemisphere, and hoped that the United States would eventually incorporate Canada, Cuba, and part of Mexico. Adams had a much larger view of federal power than many at the time. He thought the federal government should direct and sponsor internal improvements such as road and canals, pass laws to promote agriculture, manufacturing, and the arts, and he wanted to establish a national university and naval academy. When many Americans believed government power threatened freedom, Adams argued that "liberty is power." His ideas horrified believers in strict construction who wanted a limited role for the federal government, and Congress approved few of his programs. Adams rallied an opposition around Andrew Jackson dedicated to individual liberty, states' rights, and limited government. Jackson's campaign, organized by Martin Van Buren, a New York senator, started immediately after Adams took office. While Adams typified an old politics in which elites ruled, Van Buren, the son of a tavern keeper, represented a new era in American politics, in which ordinary men could become party managers and professionals and wield great power. Van Buren believed political parties and party competition were legitimate and good for the republic, by checking the power of administrations and offering voters choice. He also believed parties would suppress sectionalism by brining together supporters and candidates from all across the country. Van Buren was alarmed by the sectionalism inspired by the slavery question in the Missouri debates, and he hoped to resurrect the Jeffersonian alliance between southern planters and northern farmers and urban workers. By 1828, Van Buren had created a vibrant Democratic Party embodying this alliance, and by using new techniques to mobilize mass voter turnout, helped elect Jackson president in a huge majority over Adams. Andrew Jackson was a man of contradictions. He was not well educated but he was eloquent; he championed the common man but excluded Indians and African-Americans from democracy; he rose from modest origins to become a rich man and slaveowner in Tennessee, he disliked banks, paper money, and some of the results of the market revolution; he was a strong nationalist who believed that states, not the federal government, should govern, and he opposed federal intervention in the economy or interference in private life. By Jackson's presidency, politics was a mass activity, engaging masses of Americans constantly and penetrating all spheres of life. It was a mass spectacle, with enormous meetings, party newspapers, parades, and celebrated politician orator. Large national conventions replaced congressional caucuses in nominating candidates. Political parties and urban political machines dispensed patronage in the form of jobs, assistance, and other benefits. Jackson himself introduced the "spoils system," in which a new administration replaced previously appointed officials with its own party's appointees. Politics in the age of Jackson concerned issues associated with the market revolution and tensions between national and sectional loyalties. Political debate centered on banks, tariffs, currency, internal improvements, and the balance of power between national and local authority. The market revolution shaped many party positions. Democrats tended to be alarmed by the growing gap between social classes, and warned that "nonproducers," such as bankers, merchants, and speculators, were using connections with government to enhance their wealth to the disadvantage of "producers," such as farmers, artisans, and laborers. They wanted government to avoid interfering with the economy and giving special favors to economic interests. Without government interference in the market, ordinary Americans would fairly compete in a self-regulating market, and the most meritorious would succeed. Democrats tended to be upcoming businessmen, farmers, and urban workers.

Whigs supported the American system, believing the protective tariff, internal improvements, and a national bank could develop the economy and spread prosperity for all classes. They were strongest in the Northeast, the most modernized region. Many bankers and businessmen supported their program, as did farmers near rivers, canals, and other waterways. While many slaveholders supported the Democrats, who believed states' rights protected slavery, the largest southern planters voted Whig. Party battles of the Jacksonian era reflected conflict between "public" and "private" definitions of American freedom and their relationship to government power. To Democrats, liberty was a private entitlement best protected by local governments and threatened by a powerful national state. With Jackson, the national government's power decreased. Weak federal power ensured private freedom and states' rights, so Democrats under Jackson reduced spending, lowered the tariff, killed the national bank, and refused federal aid for internal improvements. States thus replaced the federal government as main economic actors, planning road and canal systems and chartering banks and other corporations. Democrats also thought individual morality was a private concern, and opposed attempts to impose a uniform moral vision on society, such as temperance laws restricting or banning the production and sale of liquor, or Sabbath laws banning business on Sundays. This was one reason why Irish and German immigrants tended to vote Democratic. Democrats supported policies that enhanced the "free agency" of individuals, leaving them free to make their own decision and pursue their own interests. Whigs believed that liberty and power reinforced each other. They thought an energetic federal government enhanced freedom, and liberty required a prosperous and moral America. Government would create the conditions for economic development, producing prosperity for all classes and regions. Like the Federalists, wealthy Whigs saw society as a hierarchy of social classes, but unlike the Federalists, they believed class status was not fixed; individuals through hard work could rise in society. Whig also believed the government should intervene in individual life to ensure that they acted as free moral agents, and thus supported schools, temperance laws, and Sabbath laws. Dedicated to states' rights, Jackson's first term saw his efforts to uphold federal supremacy over states. The 1828 tariff, which raised taxes on imported goods, aroused opposition in the South, particularly in South Carolina, where it was called the "tariff of abominations." Believing that the tariff punished southern consumers in order to benefit northern industry, South Carolina's legislature threatened to nullify it, that is, to declare it null and void in South Carolina. South Carolina had a higher percentage of slaves than any other state and was ruled by an oligarchic elite of large plantation owners alarmed by the Missouri controversy and growing federal power. Jackson's vice-president, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, developed a theory of nullification. In it he argued that states had created the national government, and each state retained the right to prevent the enforcement of Congress's laws within its border that seemed to exceed powers written in the Constitution. Opponents such as Daniel Webster argued that the people, not the states, had created the Constitution and the federal government, and that nullification was illegal, unconstitutional, and treasonous. While no other southern state threatened nullification, Calhoun's theory offered the South a political philosophy to use when sectionalism intensified. Calhoun argued the theory did not threaten disunion but preserved it, allowing unique and diverse states to preserve their interests while remaining part of the federal union. To President Jackson, however, nullification was disunion. In 1832, when a new tariff was enacted, South Carolina declared it would be null and void the next year. In response, Jackson persuaded Congress to authorize him to use the military to collect the tariff in South Carolina. To avoid war, Henry Clay, along with Calhoun, created a compromise tariff in 1833 that reduced duties. South Carolina rescinded the nullification law, and Calhoun abandoned his Democratic Party and Jackson for the Whigs and Clay and Webster, where they were united only by their hatred for Jackson. Andrew Jackson, dedicated to states' rights and limited government, had defended the power of the federal government and the idea of the union against states' rights. Jackson's nationalism and commitment to national sovereignty also showed in his Indian policy. The last Indian resistance in the old Northwest ended in American victory in the Black Hawk War in 1832. In the South, cotton's spread introduced land-hungry white settlers into areas where "civilized" tribes such as the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek had long practiced white ways, including slavery. But in 1830 Jackson secured passage of the Indian Removal Act, which allowed for the removal of tens of thousands of Indians from the Southwest. The law repudiated Jeffersonian notions that Indians could be assimilated and eventually incorporated into white America. The Cherokee in Georgia, threatened with expulsion by that state's government, had their own constitution, schools, and English newspaper. They appealed to the Supreme Court to protect their land rights, which had been guaranteed in treaties with the federal government. In 1832, the Court decided that Indians did not in fact own their land, but rather were nomads who only had a "right of occupancy." Another Supreme Court decision defined Indians as "wards" of the federal government who did not have full rights as citizens, and were not independent nations sovereign from state governments. A subsequent decision seemed to reverse this judgment, giving Indian nations a separate political identity to be dealt with by the federal government, not the states. But Jackson refused to enforce this last decision and let Georgia expel the Cherokee, with help from the federal government, which sent troops to forcibly remove them and other tribes in the 1830s. The Indians were forced to move to territories in the West with inferior land;

thousands died on the way. In Florida, the Seminoles resisted removal for seven years by fighting a costly guerrilla war against American troops, but they too succumbed. By the 1840s, Indians had all but disappeared as a visible presence in the eastern states of America. The most significant political fight of the Jacksonian era was Jackson's campaign against the Bank of the United States, which to many represented the hopes and anxieties caused by the market revolution. While banking's growth had spurred economic development, many distrusted bankers as "non-producers" who gave nothing to the nation's real wealth, and profited from the labor of others. Banks also tended to over-issue paper money, whose deterioration in value reduced the real income of wage-earners. Jackson and others now thought that "hard money"—gold and silver—was the only honest currency. The aristocratic Nicholas Biddle directed the BUS, and he celebrated the bank's power to control America's financial system. This alarmed Democrats. In 1832, Biddle's allies persuaded Congress to extend the BUS's charter for another twenty years, even though it was set to expire in 1836. Jackson saw this as blackmail, since he believed the BUS would use its resources to defeat him in the 1832 election if he vetoed the bill. He did veto it, and his veto message resonated with popular values. He stated that Congress could not create an institution with such power and economic privilege unaccountable to voters. Exclusive privileges like the BUS charter widened the gap between the wealthy and humble farmers, mechanics, and laborers, whom Jackson claimed to defend. The Bank War allowed Jackson to enhance the power of the presidency. He was the first president to use the veto as a major weapon and directly address voters over the heads of Congress. Jackson's re-election in 1832 over Whig candidate Henry Clay assured the demise of the BUS. But what would replace the BUS? Jackson's veto was supported by two groups: state bankers who wanted to free themselves from Biddle's regulations and issue more paper currency (called "soft money"), and "hard money" advocates who opposed all banks, whether chartered by states or the federal government, and thought gold and sliver was the only reliable currency. Jackson, wanting to dissolve the BUS before 1836, removed federal funds from the BUS and deposited them in local, state banks. Political and personal connections often determined the choice of which "pet banks" got federal funds. Without government deposits, the BUS lost its ability to regulate the state banks' activities. State banks issued more and more paper money to finance economic development; the value of bank notes in circulation skyrocketed from $10 million in 1833 to $149 million in 1837. Prices rose, real wages declined, and speculators prospered. The speculative bubble inevitably burst. The federal government sold 20 million acres of land in 1836, ten times the 1830 amount, and almost all of it paid for in paper money, which had questionable value. In July 1836, Jackson issued the Specie Circular, mandating land payments to the federal government to be made in hard currency. Simultaneously, British banks demanded that their creditors pay them in hard currency, and a recession in Britain dropped demand for American cotton. Together these events caused an economic crisis, the Panic of 1837, which was followed by a depression that lasted until 1843. Businesses failed, workers lost their jobs, farmers and others lost their lands. States that had taken up economic development projects defaulted on their debts. The new president in 1836 and Jackson's lieutenant, Martin Van Buren, represented the hard money, anti-bank wing of the Democratic Party. In 1837, Van Buren announced that he hoped to remove federal funds from pet banks and keep them in the Treasury Department, directly under federal control. Only in 1840 did Congress approve this policy, known as the Independent Treasury, which completely separated the national government from banking. It was repealed in 1841 but restored in 1846. Van Buren was not as popular as Jackson, and by 1840, the Whigs had mastered the political techniques Democrats had used to mobilize voters. The Whigs nominated that year for president William Henry Harrison, a military hero from the War of 1812. He had no platform, but was portrayed as a common man who grew up in a "log cabin" and drank cider. His running mate was John Tyler, a states' rights Democrat from Virginia who had joined the Whigs after the nullification crisis. The Whigs sold their candidate much better than the Democrats did Van Buren, and with a record voter turnout of 80 percent of eligible voters, Harrison won a sweeping victory. But Harrison soon contracted pneumonia and died, making John Tyler an accidental president. When the Whig majority in Congress attempted to enact the American System into law, Tyler returned to his Democratic principles and vetoed every measure, including a new national bank and higher tariff. His cabinet resigned and the Whigs repudiated him. In the new age of Jacksonian democracy, presidents could not rule without parties, and Tyler accomplished little in his four years in office.

done. yay yes woo!

In the Revolutionary era, Americans described their nation as a "rising empire" that would eventually control all of North America. America's empire would not be ruled by force, as were the empires of Europe. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, America would be an "empire of liberty" cemented by a commitment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The United States was already larger than Great Britain, Spain, and France combined, and it benefited from its isolation from war-torn Europe, its young population, and a broad distribution of property and literacy among whites. Yet America did not control its vast western territories, which was populated by Indians and bordered by the British and Spanish, and who posed a military and commercial threat. The nation was also rural and its population divided among varying ethnic and religious groups. No republic had ever been established in such a large area, with such a diverse people. The success and unity of the nation was far from assured. The nation's first written constitution was the Articles of Confederation, drafted by Congress in 1777 and approved by the states in 1781. The articles were an attempt to balance the national coordination needed to win the war against fears that centralized power threatened liberty. With the articles, the thirteen states retained their own sovereignty. The national government was a one-house Congress, in which each state had only one vote. No president existed to enforce laws, and no judiciary existed to interpret the laws. Major decisions required the approval of nine states, rather than a simple majority. The national government only had powers related to war—the powers to declare war and conduct foreign relations. Congress could make money but not impose taxes or regulate commerce, and its revenue came from the voluntary contributions of state governments. Amendments to the articles never received enough votes to pass. Although the articles made a strong central government impossible, they did enable the states to surrender their disputed claims to western lands and give them to the federal government—a major achievement. The national government established rules for settling the enormous new national domain in the west. While Americans considered it empty, it was inhabited by 100,000 Indians. When Congress declared independence from Britain, it argued that Indians had forfeited their rights to the land when they sided with the British, despite the fact that only certain tribes had done so. The government secured from the Indians much of the land north of the Ohio River, but in the south left small parts of lands there to be held permanently by the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw tribes. Though many national leaders believed that the nation's prosperity depended on farmers gaining western lands, others saw government land sales as a source of revenue, and some worried that it would cause perennial conflict with the Indians. Private land companies hoped to buy up the land and sell it to settlers at a huge profit. The war's end caused a huge number of Americans to migrate westward into upstate New York and what became Kentucky and Tennessee. They believed their right to take western lands was essential to American freedom. They ignored Indian land titles, demanded the government sell or give away the land, and often settled land to which they had no legal title. Many national leaders worried that these settlers were unruly and disorderly and would incite war with Indians, and they sought to regulate western settlement. In the 1780s, Congress regulated the way western land was sold and settled. The Ordinance of 1784, written by Thomas Jefferson, established the steps by which these areas would be governed. This measure divided the region into districts first governed by Congress, and eventually admitted to the Union as states. Congress rejected by a single vote a clause in the bill that would have prohibited slavery in the entire west. A 1785 ordinance regulated land sales in the region north of the Ohio River, which became known as the Old Northwest. This land was to be surveyed by the government and sold in sections for $1 per acre. This system was meant to control and concentrate settlement and raise revenue for Congress, but settlers violated the rules by moving into areas where surveys had not been done. Initially, the minimum purchase required by the government was too large for individual farmers to pay. Much of the land was sold to large land companies and speculators, who then divided the land and sold it to settlers at a huge profit. This caused many Americans in coming decades to demand that the government provide free or cheap land. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 called for the eventual establishment of three to five states north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. This ensured Jefferson's "empire of liberty." The U.S. would not rule its territories as a colonial power, but allow these lands to become equal parts of the political system as self-governing states. Territorial expansion and self-government would grow together. This ordinance also recognized that Indians had a claim to lands in this area and promised not to take their land without consent. Yet national land policy assumed that Indians would disappear as a result of purchase, treaties, or voluntary removal. The ordinance also prohibited slavery in the Old Northwest. Many prominent Americans believed the Articles of Confederation were irredeemably flawed. First in their minds was the nation's economic crisis in the 1780s. To finance the revolutionary war, Congress had borrowed large sums of money by selling interest-bearing bonds and paying soldiers and suppliers in notes to be redeemed at a later date. But without revenue, Congress was unable to pay the interest and the debts themselves. The British had barred American ships from trading with the West Indies, and European goods flooded the market, ruining the business of many artisans, driving down wages, and removing money from the country. States adopted their own relief measures, printing more money and postponing debt collection. Creditors saw these laws as infringements of their property rights. In late 1786 and early 1787, debt-ridden farmers closed courts in western Massachusetts to prevent seizure of their lands for failure to pay taxes. The revolt came to be known as Shays's Rebellion, after one of their leaders, Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolutionary War. The rebels, in demanding relief and the printing of paper money, thought they were continuing the revolution's traditions. An army organized by Massachusetts' government quelled the rebellion with little violence. The revolt convinced some influential Americans that a stronger national government was needed to encourage economic growth, protect property, and secure law and order. One man afraid of democratic excess, James Madison, a Virginian and disciple of Thomas Jefferson, led the movement to strengthen national government. He was joined by Alexander Hamilton, of New York, the most vocal advocate of a robust national government, who wanted to make the nation into a world military and commercial power. These nationalists found allies with others to whom the Revolution had given a consciousness of the nation, such as army officers, members of Congress, and diplomats. Influential economic interests such as bondholders, who wanted Congress to be able to generate revenue (in order to pay them back), and urban artisans, who wanted tariff protection, joined with those afraid that states were violating property rights to demand a stronger national government. In September 1786, delegates from six states met at Annapolis, Maryland, to explore new ways to regulate interstate and foreign commerce. They proposed another gathering in Philadelphia to amend the Articles of Confederation, and Shays's Rebellion stimulated support for this plan. Many of the 55 men who met at the Constitutional Convention were very prominent individuals, including George Washington, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. Men of education and great wealth, they were in their social status highly unrepresentative of most Americans. They all shared a commitment to a stronger national government and believed that democracy had gone too far. They deliberated in private to ensure free and honest debate, and records of the proceedings were not published until 1840, when all the delegates were deceased. All delegates agreed there must be a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary in a new national government. The new constitution would allow Congress to raise money through direct taxes, without relying on the state governments for revenue. The federal government would represent the people, too. Even delegates who thought democracy had gone too far rejected Hamilton's proposal for a king and House of Lords. Debate centered on how to balance federal and state governments and the interests of small and large states. Madison's Virginia Plan proposed the creation of a two-house legislature with a state's population determining its representation in each house. Smaller states who feared domination by the more populous states countered with the New Jersey Plan, calling for a single-house Congress in which each state cast one vote. A compromise formed a two-house Congress, with a Senate in which each state had two members, and a House of Representatives, where members were apportioned according to a state's population. Senators would be chosen by state legislatures every six years, insulating them from shifts in public opinion. Representatives were elected every two years directly by the people. The direct election of members of the House of Representatives was an expansion of democracy. But the government structure created by the Constitution represented overall a limitation on democracy. Delegates hoped to isolate the nation's government from popular sentiments that had alarmed elites in the 1780s. They wanted to ensure that the right kind of men were elected to office.

While the people would remain sovereign, they would choose those who governed them from among the elite. They assumed the Senate would be composed of each state's most prominent citizens, and made the House of Representatives quite small, assuming that only very prominent men could win elections in large districts. Neither the president nor federal judges would be elected directly. The president was to be chose by the electoral college or the House, and electors were not voted upon directly, either. The electoral college was an indirect means to elect the president, because the delegates did not trust ordinary voters to choose the president and vice president directly. The Constitution is actually quite brief and barely outlines the structure of the national government. It embodies two basic political principles: federalism, sometimes called "the division of powers," and the system of "checks and balances" between different branches of the national government, also called the "separation of powers." Federalism is the relationship between the national government and the states. The Constitution, compared to the Articles, strengthened national authority. It gave the president power to enforce the law and command the military. It gave Congress powers to impose taxes, borrow money, regulate commerce, declare war, deal with Indians and foreign nations, and promote the "general welfare." States were barred from printing their own money or relieving debtors, as they had done under the articles. But the daily responsibilities of government, such as law enforcement and education, were left to the states. The "separation of powers" is the way the Constitution is designed to prevent any single branch of the national government from dominating the other two branches. Congress enacts laws, but the president can veto them, and a two-thirds majority is needed to pass a law over his veto. Federal judges are nominated by the president and approved by Congress, but they have life-long terms to ensure their independence. The president can be impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate. Slavery also sparked debate at the Constitutional Convention. Though the words "slavery" and "slave" did not appear in the Constitution, the Constitution affected slavery as an institution. It prohibited Congress from banning the Atlantic slave trade for twenty years, it required states to return fugitive slaves to their owners, and it stipulated that three-fifths of the slave population would be counted in determining each states' representation in the House of Representatives and the electoral college. Many of these measures were proposed by delegates from South Carolina, who were fiercely pro-slavery. These compromises about slavery made it more central to American politics and life than it ever had been before. The Constitution allowed the importation of slaves to continue until 1808, when Congress prohibited it. But by then 170,000 more slaves had been brought to the United States, more than one-quarter of all slaves carried to the country since 1700. The fugitive slave clause gave slavery "extraterritoriality": slavery as a legal condition remained the status of an individual slave, even if that individual entered a "free" state where slavery had been abolished. The Constitution did not gave the national government any authority to interfere with slavery in the states. And the three-fifths clause gave the white South far more power in national affairs than its free population warranted, allowing it to dominate the House of Representatives and ensure that every president but four elected between 1788 and 1848 was a southern slaveholder. Once the delegates approved the document, it was sent to the states to be ratified. The Constitution established a new framework for American development. It enabled a national market to develop by giving Congress power over tariffs, interstate commerce, the coinage of money, patents, bankruptcy rules, and prohibiting interference with property rights. Even though the Constitution provided that it would go into effect when nine states had approved it—not all thirteen states, as the Articles of Confederation required—ratification was not certain. Each state held an election for delegates to a special statewide ratifying convention, and these elections generated intense activity. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay authored a series of eighty-five essays that appeared as The Federalist in 1788. These three argued that the Constitution did not endanger, but protected, Americans' liberties. Madison, especially in essays Number 10 and 51, developed a new vision of the relationship between government and society in the United States. Madison identified the basic dilemma of the new republic: government must be based on the will of the people, but the people were susceptible to dangerous opinions, especially those that might threaten property rights. He worried that a growing number of poor in the future might use their political power to secure "a more equal distribution of wealth." The solution, for Madison, was to be found in the republic's size and diversity. Previous republics had always been small in size, but the size of America, he argued, would stabilize, not weaken, its government. In a nation so large, so many distinct interests would develop that no single interest would ever be able to take over the government and dominate the others. Every majority would be a coalition of minorities, securing the rights of individuals. Madison reassured Americans that they had only to "extend the sphere" to ensure the republic's perpetuation under the Constitution. Madison thus strengthened the idea that westward expansion was essential to American freedom, made the structure of government and its size, not virtue, the basis of republicanism, and advanced the "liberal" notion that men are motivated by self-interest, and that social good emerges from conflict between private interests. Those opposing ratification, called Anti-Federalists, believed the Constitution favored power more than liberty. They were poorly organized, and included many of the farmers who sought economic relief in the 1780s. The Anti-Federalists predicted that the new government would be controlled by merchants, creditors, and others hostile to the interests of ordinary Americans. The believed that only a small republic could succeed, not an expansive republic, as Madison argued. Liberty was the watchword of the Anti-Federalists, and they charged that the Constitution did not protect individual rights such as trial by jury, or freedom of speech and the press, as did the state constitutions. Pro-Constitution politics prevailed in cities and rural areas integrated into the commercial marketplace. Its strongest supporters were men of great wealth. But the promise of prosperity also appealed to urban artisans, laborers, and sailors, who thought a stronger central government would revive a lagging economy. Anti-Federalism found most of its support in rural and frontier areas populated by struggling farmers. Ultimately the pro-Constitutionalists' energy, organization, and command of the press, prevailed. Madison won support for the Constitution by promising that the first Congress would enact a Bill of Rights. Although many people in Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia opposed the document, only Rhode Island and North Carolina voted against ratification. The individual rights that are today protected by the Constitution and celebrated by Americans were not actually in the original document ratified in 1788. Madison had promised that Congress would pass a Bill of Rights in order to gain support for ratification, but he believed such a bill was redundant, and would not prevent majorities from violating constitutional rights in the future. But each new state constitution had a bill of rights. Madison presented a series of amendments that became the basis for the Bill of Rights ratified by the states in 1791. They included the First Amendment, prohibiting Congress from legislating about religion and protecting freedom of the press and assembly, the Second, upholding the right to bear arms and organize militias, and other amendments affirming right to trial by jury and prohibiting abuses such as arrests without warrants and forcing a person accused of a crime to testify against himself. The Ninth declared that rights not specifically mentioned in the Constitution were "retained by the people," opening the door to establish new rights not articulated in the text. The Tenth Amendment affirmed that powers not delegated to the national government or prohibited to the states were reserved for the states, protecting states against encroaching federal power. The Bill of Rights showed how the Revolution had changed America. Most remarkably, the Constitution recognized religious freedom. The Constitution, unlike the Declaration of Independence, is entirely secular. It does not refer to God and it bars religious tests for federal officeholders. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from legislating on religious matters, a departure from colonial and British precedent. Colonial Americans had been divided by ethnicity, religion, class, and status and united only by their allegiance to Great Britain. The Revolution created a new collective body, the American people, whose members were to enjoy freedom as members of a new political community. Since government in the United States rested on the will of the people, establishing the identity of the people was important. The Constitution began with "We the People," but this "people" did not include all living within the United States. The Constitution identified three groups in the United States: Indians, who were treated as members of independent tribes, and not part of the America nation; "other persons," or slaves; and "the people," the only group entitled to freedom in America.