Chapter 7 - The Jeffersonian Era
All white male citizens (the nation’s prospective voters) should, they argued, receive free education
A Massachusetts law of 1789 reaffirmed the colonial laws by which each town was obligated to support a school, but there was little enforcement.
In Virginia, the state legislature ignored Jefferson’s call for universal elementary education and for advanced education for the gifted.
As late as 1815, not a single state had a comprehensive public school system.
Instead, schooling became primarily the responsibility of private institutions, most of which were open only to those who could afford to pay for them.
Private secondary schools such as those in New England, and even many public schools, accepted only male students. Yet the early nineteenth century did see some important advances in female education.
In the eighteenth century, women received very little education of any kind, and the female illiteracy rate at the time of the Revolution was very high—at least 50 percent.
Most white men, at least, assumed that female education should serve only to make women better wives and mothers.
Women therefore had no need for advanced or professional training; there was no reason for colleges and universities to make space for female students.
Reformers who believed in the power of education to reform and redeem ignorantly and “backward” people spurred a growing interest in Indian education
Although white governments did little to promote Indian education, missionaries and mission schools proliferated among the tribes
Almost no white people in the early nineteenth century believed that there was a need to educate African Americans, almost all of whom were still slaves
In a few northern states, some free black children attended segregated schools
In the South, slave owners generally tried to prevent their black workers from learning to read or write, fearful that knowledge would make them unhappy with their condition
The education that the colleges provided was exceedingly limited—narrow training in the classics and a few other areas and intensive work in theology
The University of Pennsylvania created the first American medical school in the eighteenth century.
In the early nineteenth century, however, most doctors studied medicine by working with an established practitioner.
George Washington’s death in 1799 was probably less a result of the minor throat infection that had afflicted him than of his physicians’ efforts to cure him by bleeding and purging.
Among the results of that change was a narrowing of opportunities for women (midwifery was an important female occupation) and a restriction of access to childbirth care for poor mothers (who could have afforded midwives, but who could not pay the higher physicians’ fees).
Indeed, efforts to promote education and increase professionalism often had the effect of strengthening existing elites rather than eroding them
The United States, another eighteenth-century writer had proclaimed, would serve as “the last and greatest theatre for the improvement of mankind.”
To encourage a distinctive American culture and help unify the new nation, Webster insisted on a simplified and Americanized system of spelling—“honor” instead of “honour,”
Perhaps the most influential works by American authors in the early republic were not poems, novels, or stories, but works of history that glorified the nation’s past.
Mercy Otis Warren, who had been an influential playwright and agitator during the 1770s, continued her literary efforts with a three-volume History of the Revolution, published in 1805 and emphasizing the heroism of the American struggle.
Mason Weems, an Anglican clergyman, published a eulogistic Life of Washington in 1806, which became one of the best-selling books of the era.
History, like literature, was serving as a vehicle for instilling a sense of nationalism in the American people.
The American Revolution weakened traditional forms of religious practice by detaching churches from government and by elevating ideas of individual liberty and reason
Some Americans, including Jefferson and Franklin, embraced “deism,” which had originated among Enlightenment philosophers in France.
Deists accepted the existence of God but considered God a remote being who, after having created the universe, had withdrawn from direct involvement with the human race and its sins.
Most Americans continued to hold strong religious beliefs. What had declined was their commitment to organized churches and denominations, which many considered too formal and traditional for their own zealous religious faith
The origins of the Second Great Awakening lay in the efforts of conservative theologians of the 1790s to fight the spread of religious rationalism, and to encourage church establishments to revitalize their organizations.
Beginning among Presbyterians in several eastern colleges the new awakening soon spread rapidly throughout the country, reaching its greatest heights in the western regions.
In only a few years, a large proportion of the American people were mobilized by the movement, and membership in those churches embracing the revival—most prominently the Methodists, the Baptists, and the Presbyterians—was mushrooming
Methodists in particular came to rely on them as a way to “harvest” new members.
The Methodist circuit-riding preacher Peter Cartwright won national fame as he traveled from region to region exhorting his listeners to embrace the church.
Even Cartwright, however, was often unprepared for the results of his efforts—a religious frenzy that at times produced convulsions, fits, rolling in the dirt, and twitching “holy jerks.”
The message of the Second Great Awakening was not entirely consistent, but its basic thrust was clear: individuals must readmit God and Christ into their daily lives
The Second Great Awakening also accelerated the growth of different sects and denominations.
It helped create a broad popular acceptance of the idea that men and women could belong to different Protestant churches and still be committed to essentially the same Christian faith.
Finally, the new evangelicalism—by spreading religious fervor into every area of the nation— provided a vehicle for establishing a sense of order and social stability in communities still searching for an identity.
One of the most striking features of the Second Great Awakening was the preponderance of women (particularly young women) within it.
Although revivalism was most widespread within white society, it penetrated other cultures as well.
In some areas of the country, revivals were open to people of all races, and many African Americans not only attended but eagerly embraced the new religious fervor as well.
Out of these revivals, in fact, emerged a substantial group of black preachers, who became important figures within the slave community.
The spirit of revivalism was also particularly strong in these years among Native Americans, although very different from revivalism in white or black society
The Second Great Awakening also had important effects on those Americans who did not accept its teachings.
The rational “freethinkers,” whose skeptical philosophies had helped produce the revivals, were in many ways victims of the new religious fervor
Americans imported some of these technological advances from England.
The British government attempted to protect the nation’s manufacturing preeminence by preventing the export of textile machinery or the emigration of skilled mechanics.
Despite such efforts, immigrants arrived in the United States with advanced knowledge of English technology, eager to introduce the new machines to America.
Samuel Slater, for example, used the knowledge he had acquired before leaving England to build a spinning mill for the Quaker merchant Moses Brown in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1790.
America in the early nineteenth century also produced several important inventors of its own
The cotton gin not only changed the economy of the South, it also helped transform the North.
The large supply of domestically produced fi ber was a strong incentive to entrepreneurs in New England and elsewhere to develop an American textile industry
One of the prerequisites for industrialization is an efficient system for transporting raw materials to factories and finished goods to markets.
The United States had no such system in the early years of the republic.
But work was underway that would ultimately remove the transportation obstacle.
There were several ways to solve the problem of the small American market.
One was to look for customers overseas, and American merchants continued their efforts to do that.
Among the first acts of the new Congress when it met in 1789 were two tariff bills giving preference to American ships in American ports, helping to stimulate an expansion of domestic shipping.
The inventor Robert Fulton and the promoter Robert R. Livingston were principally responsible for perfecting the steamboat and bringing it to the attention of the nation
Despite all the changes and all the advances, America in the early nineteenth century remained an overwhelmingly rural and agrarian nation
People living in towns and cities lived differently than the vast majority of Americans who continued to work as farmers.
Much remained to be done before this small and still half-formed nation would become a complex modern society
The newly founded national capital was the city of Washington
He was a brilliant conversationalist, a gifted writer, and one of the nation’s most intelligent and creative men, with perhaps a wider range of interests and accomplishments than any public figure in American history.
In addition to politics and diplomacy, he was an active architect, educator, inventor, scientific farmer, and philosopher-scientist.
Jefferson was, above all, a shrewd and practical politician.
Under Washington and Adams, the Republicans believed the government had been needlessly extravagant.
Yearly federal expenditures had almost tripled between 1793 and 1800.
Hamilton had, as he had intended, increased the public debt and created an extensive system of internal taxation, including the hated whiskey excise tax
The Jefferson administration moved deliberately to reverse the trend. In 1802, it persuaded Congress to abolish all internal taxes, leaving customs duties and the sale of western lands as the only sources of revenue for the government
Jefferson also scaled down the armed forces. He reduced the army of 4,000 men to 2,500.
Having won control of the executive and legislative branches of government, the Republicans looked with suspicion on the judiciary, which remained largely in the hands of Federalist judges.
Soon after Jefferson’s first inauguration, his followers in Congress launched an attack on this last preserve of the opposition.
The debate over the courts led to one of the most important judicial decisions in the history of the nation.
Federalists had long maintained that the Supreme Court had the authority to nullify acts of Congress
In 1803, in the case of Marbury v. Madison, it did so. William Marbury, one of Adams’s “midnight appointments,” had been named a justice of the peace in the District of Columbia
Once Jefferson became president, the new secretary of state, James Madison, was responsible for transmitting appointment
The chief justice of the United States at the time of the ruling was John Marshall, one of the towering figures in the history of American law
And the judiciary survived as a powerful force within the government—more often than not ruling on behalf of the centralizing, expansionary policies that the Republicans had hoped to reverse.
In the same year that Jefferson became president of the United States, Napoleon Bonaparte made himself ruler of France with the title of first consul.
In the year that Jefferson was reelected, Napoleon named himself emperor
Having failed in a grandiose plan to seize India from the British Empire, Napoleon turned his imperial ambitions in a new direction: he began to dream of restoring French power in the New World.
Under the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1800 between the French and the Spanish, France regained title to Louisiana, which included almost the whole of the Mississippi Valley to the west of the river, plus New Orleans near its mouth.
The Louisiana Territory would, Napoleon hoped, become the heart of a great French empire in America.
American ships sailing the Mississippi River had for many years been accustomed to depositing their cargoes in New Orleans for transfer to oceangoing vessels. The intendant now forbade the practice—even though Spain had guaranteed Americans that right in the Pinckney Treaty of 1795—thus effectively closing the lower Mississippi to American shippers.
Jefferson instructed Robert Livingston, the American ambassador in Paris, to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans.
Livingston, on his own authority, proposed that the French sell the United States the vast western part of Louisiana as well.
In the meantime, Jefferson persuaded Congress to appropriate funds for an expansion of the army and the construction of a river fleet, and he deliberately gave the impression that American forces might soon descend on New Orleans and that the United States might form an alliance with Great Britain if the problems with France were not resolved.
Perhaps that was why Napoleon suddenly decided to accept Livingston’s proposal and offer the United States the entire Louisiana Territory.
Napoleon had good reasons for the decision. His plans for an American empire had already gone seriously awry.
That was partly because a yellow fever epidemic had wiped out much of the French army in the New World.
But it was also because the expeditionary force Napoleon sent to take possession of Louisiana had been frozen into a Dutch harbor through the winter of 1802–1803.
By the time the harbor thawed in the spring of 1803, Napoleon was preparing for a renewed war in Europe.
He would not, he realized, have the resources now to secure an American empire.
By the terms of the treaty, the United States was to pay a total of 80 million francs ($15 million) to the French government.
Finally, late in 1803, the French assumed formal control of Louisiana from Spain just long enough to turn the territory over to General James Wilkinson, the commissioner of the United States.
The government organized the Louisiana Territory much as it had organized the Northwest Territory, with the assumption that its various territories would eventually become states.
The first of these was admitted to the Union as the state of Louisiana in 1812.
Meanwhile, several ambitious explorations were revealing the geography of the far-flung new territory to white Americans, few of whom had ever ventured much beyond the Mississippi River.
In 1803, even before Napoleon’s offer to sell Louisiana, Jefferson helped plan an expedition that was to cross the continent to the Pacific Ocean, gather geographic facts, and investigate prospects for trade with the Indians.
He named as its leader his private secretary and Virginia neighbor, the thirty-three-year-old Meriwether Lewis, a veteran of Indian wars skilled in the ways of the wilderness.
Lewis chose as a colleague the twenty-nine-year-old William Clark, who—like George Rogers Clark, his older brother—was an experienced frontiersman and Indian fighter.
In the spring of 1804, Lewis and Clark, with a company of four dozen men, started up the Missouri River from St. Louis.
With a Shoshone woman, Sacajawea, as their guide, they eventually crossed the Rocky Mountains, descended the Snake and Columbia Rivers, and in the late autumn of 1805 camped on the Pacific coast.
In September 1806, they were back in St. Louis with elaborate records of the geography and the Indian civilizations they had observed along the way, and a lengthy diary recounting their experiences.
Jefferson’s triumphant reelection in 1804 suggested that most of the nation approved the new territorial acquisition.
But some New England Federalists raged against it. They realized that the more the West grew and the more new states joined the Union, the less power the Federalists and their region would retain.
In Massachusetts, a group of the most extreme Federalists, known as the “Essex Junto,” concluded that the only recourse for New England was to secede from the Union and form a separate “Northern Confederacy.”
The Burr “conspiracy” was in part the story of a single man’s soaring ambitions and flamboyant personality. But it was also a symbol of the larger perils still facing the new nation
The early nineteenth century saw a dramatic expansion of American shipping in the Atlantic.
Britain retained significant naval superiority, but the British merchant marine was preoccupied with commerce in Europe and Asia and devoted little energy to trade with America.
In 1805, at the Battle of Trafalgar, a British fleet virtually destroyed what was left of the French navy.
Because France could no longer challenge the British at sea, Napoleon now chose to pressure England through economic rather than naval means.
He announced the creation of what he called the “Continental System.” It was designed to close the European continent to British trade.
American ships were caught between Napoleon’s decrees and Britain’s orders in council. If they sailed directly for the European continent, they risked being captured by the British navy; if they sailed by way of a British port, they risked seizure by the French
The British navy—with its floggings, low pay, and terrible shipboard conditions—was known as a “floating hell” to its sailors.
British claimed the right to stop and search American merchant ships
They did not claim the right to take native-born Americans, but they did claim the right to seize naturalized Americans born on British soil.
In practice, the British navy often made no such distinctions, impressing British deserters and native-born Americans alike into service
When news of the Chesapeake-Leopard incident reached the United States, there was a great popular clamor for revenge.
If Congress had been in session, it might have declared war. But Jefferson and Madison tried to maintain the peace.
Jefferson expelled all British warships from American waters to lessen the likelihood of future incidents.
Then he sent instructions to his minister in England, James Monroe, to demand that the British government renounce impressment.
The British government disavowed the action of the officer responsible for the Chesapeake-Leopard incident and recalled him; it offered compensation for those killed and wounded in the incident; and it promised to return three of the captured sailors (one of the original four had been hanged).
But the British refused to renounce impressment
In an effort to prevent future incidents that might bring the nation again to the brink of war, Congress enacted a drastic measure known as “the Embargo.”
It became one of the most controversial political issues of its time.
The Embargo prohibited American ships from leaving the United States for any foreign port anywhere in the world.
The law was widely evaded, but it was effective enough to create a serious depression throughout most of the nation.
Hardest hit were the merchants and shipowners of the Northeast, most of them Federalists.
The election of 1808 came in the midst of the Embargo-(1807) induced depression.
The Embargo was clearly a growing political liability, and Jefferson decided to back down.
A few days before leaving office, he approved a bill ending his experiment with what he called “peaceable coercion.”
To replace the Embargo, Congress passed the NonIntercourse Act just before Madison took office.
The new law reopened trade with all nations but Great Britain and France.
A year later, in 1810, Congress allowed the NonIntercourse Act to expire and replaced it with Macon’s Bill No. 2, which conditionally reopened free commercial relations with Britain and France.
Napoleon announced that France would no longer interfere with American shipping
The 1807 war crisis following the Chesapeake-Leopard incident revived the conflict between Indians and white American
In 1801, Jefferson appointed Harrison governor of the Indiana Territory to administer the president’s proposed solution to the “Indian problem.
In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the number of western Americans who had settled east of the Appalachians had grown to more than 500,000—a population far larger than that of the Native Americans. It was becoming almost inevitable, as a result, that the tribes would face ever-growing pressure to move out of the way of the rapidly growing white settlements.
Tenskwatawa, a charismatic religious leader and orator known as “the Prophet.” He had experienced a mystical awakening in the process of recovering from alcoholism. Having freed himself from what he considered the evil effects of white culture, he began to speak to his people of the superior virtues of Indian civilization and the sinfulness and corruption of the white world.
While white “frontiersmen” in the North demanded the conquest of Canada, those in the South wanted the United States to acquire Spanish Florida, a territory that included the present state of Florida and the southern areas of what is now Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana
The desire for Florida became yet another motivation for war with Britain.
Spain was Britain’s ally, and a war with Britain might provide a pretext for taking Spanish territory.
By 1812, war fever was growing on both the northern and southern borders of the United States.
In the congressional elections of 1810, voters from these regions elected a large number of representatives of both parties eager for war with Britain.
They became known as the “war hawks.”
On June 18, 1812, he gave in to the pressure and approved a declaration of war against Britain.
Americans entered the War of 1812 with great enthusiasm, but events on the battlefield soon cooled their ardor.
In the summer of 1812, American forces invaded Canada through Detroit
At first, American frigates won some spectacular victories over British warships, and American privateers destroyed or captured many British merchant ships, occasionally braving the coastal waters of the British Isles themselves and burning vessels within sight of the shore
The United States did, however, achieve significant early military successes on the Great Lakes
The battle also won Jackson a commission as a major general in the United States Army.
In that capacity, he led his men farther south into Florida and, on November 7, 1814, seized the Spanish fort at Pensacola.
The victories over the tribes were not enough for the United States to win the war.
After the surrender of Napoleon in 1814, England prepared to invade the United States.
British troops entered Washington and set fire to several public buildings, including the White House, in retaliation for the earlier American burning of the Canadian capital at York.
This was the low point of American fortunes in the war.
Through the night of September 13, Francis Scott Key, a Washington lawyer who was on board one of the British ships trying to secure the release of an American prisoner, watched the bombardment.
The next morning, “by the dawn’s early light,” he could see the flag on the fort still flying; he recorded his pride in the moment by scribbling a poem—“The Star-Spangled Banner”—on the back of an envelope.
The British withdrew from Baltimore, and Key’s words were soon set to the tune of an old English drinking song.
In 1931, “The Star-Spangled Banner” became the official national anthem.
Only later did news reach North America that the United States and Britain had signed a peace treaty several weeks before the Battle of New Orleans.
With a few notable exceptions, such as the Battles of Put-inlay and New Orleans, the military operations of the United States between 1812 and 1815 consisted of a series of humiliating failures
By now the Federalists were a minority in the country as a whole, but they were still the majority party in New England.
Some of them began to dream again of creating a separate nation in that region, which they could dominate and in which they could escape what they saw as the tyranny of slaveholders and backwoodsmen.
Talk of secession revived and reached a climax in the winter of 1814–1815.
On December 15, 1814, delegates from the New England states met in Hartford, Connecticut, to discuss their grievances.
Those who favored secession at the Hartford Convention were outnumbered by a comparatively moderate majority
Because the war was going badly and the government was becoming desperate, the New Englanders assumed that the Republicans would have to agree to their demands.
Soon after the convention adjourned, however, the news of Jackson’s smashing victory at New Orleans reached the cities of the Northeast.
A day or two later, reports arrived from abroad of a negotiated peace
Peace talks between the United States and Britain had begun even before fighting in the War of 1812 began
In the negotiations, the Americans gave up their demand for a British renunciation of impressment and for the cession of Canada to the United States.
All white male citizens (the nation’s prospective voters) should, they argued, receive free education
A Massachusetts law of 1789 reaffirmed the colonial laws by which each town was obligated to support a school, but there was little enforcement.
In Virginia, the state legislature ignored Jefferson’s call for universal elementary education and for advanced education for the gifted.
As late as 1815, not a single state had a comprehensive public school system.
Instead, schooling became primarily the responsibility of private institutions, most of which were open only to those who could afford to pay for them.
Private secondary schools such as those in New England, and even many public schools, accepted only male students. Yet the early nineteenth century did see some important advances in female education.
In the eighteenth century, women received very little education of any kind, and the female illiteracy rate at the time of the Revolution was very high—at least 50 percent.
Most white men, at least, assumed that female education should serve only to make women better wives and mothers.
Women therefore had no need for advanced or professional training; there was no reason for colleges and universities to make space for female students.
Reformers who believed in the power of education to reform and redeem ignorantly and “backward” people spurred a growing interest in Indian education
Although white governments did little to promote Indian education, missionaries and mission schools proliferated among the tribes
Almost no white people in the early nineteenth century believed that there was a need to educate African Americans, almost all of whom were still slaves
In a few northern states, some free black children attended segregated schools
In the South, slave owners generally tried to prevent their black workers from learning to read or write, fearful that knowledge would make them unhappy with their condition
The education that the colleges provided was exceedingly limited—narrow training in the classics and a few other areas and intensive work in theology
The University of Pennsylvania created the first American medical school in the eighteenth century.
In the early nineteenth century, however, most doctors studied medicine by working with an established practitioner.
George Washington’s death in 1799 was probably less a result of the minor throat infection that had afflicted him than of his physicians’ efforts to cure him by bleeding and purging.
Among the results of that change was a narrowing of opportunities for women (midwifery was an important female occupation) and a restriction of access to childbirth care for poor mothers (who could have afforded midwives, but who could not pay the higher physicians’ fees).
Indeed, efforts to promote education and increase professionalism often had the effect of strengthening existing elites rather than eroding them
The United States, another eighteenth-century writer had proclaimed, would serve as “the last and greatest theatre for the improvement of mankind.”
To encourage a distinctive American culture and help unify the new nation, Webster insisted on a simplified and Americanized system of spelling—“honor” instead of “honour,”
Perhaps the most influential works by American authors in the early republic were not poems, novels, or stories, but works of history that glorified the nation’s past.
Mercy Otis Warren, who had been an influential playwright and agitator during the 1770s, continued her literary efforts with a three-volume History of the Revolution, published in 1805 and emphasizing the heroism of the American struggle.
Mason Weems, an Anglican clergyman, published a eulogistic Life of Washington in 1806, which became one of the best-selling books of the era.
History, like literature, was serving as a vehicle for instilling a sense of nationalism in the American people.
The American Revolution weakened traditional forms of religious practice by detaching churches from government and by elevating ideas of individual liberty and reason
Some Americans, including Jefferson and Franklin, embraced “deism,” which had originated among Enlightenment philosophers in France.
Deists accepted the existence of God but considered God a remote being who, after having created the universe, had withdrawn from direct involvement with the human race and its sins.
Most Americans continued to hold strong religious beliefs. What had declined was their commitment to organized churches and denominations, which many considered too formal and traditional for their own zealous religious faith
The origins of the Second Great Awakening lay in the efforts of conservative theologians of the 1790s to fight the spread of religious rationalism, and to encourage church establishments to revitalize their organizations.
Beginning among Presbyterians in several eastern colleges the new awakening soon spread rapidly throughout the country, reaching its greatest heights in the western regions.
In only a few years, a large proportion of the American people were mobilized by the movement, and membership in those churches embracing the revival—most prominently the Methodists, the Baptists, and the Presbyterians—was mushrooming
Methodists in particular came to rely on them as a way to “harvest” new members.
The Methodist circuit-riding preacher Peter Cartwright won national fame as he traveled from region to region exhorting his listeners to embrace the church.
Even Cartwright, however, was often unprepared for the results of his efforts—a religious frenzy that at times produced convulsions, fits, rolling in the dirt, and twitching “holy jerks.”
The message of the Second Great Awakening was not entirely consistent, but its basic thrust was clear: individuals must readmit God and Christ into their daily lives
The Second Great Awakening also accelerated the growth of different sects and denominations.
It helped create a broad popular acceptance of the idea that men and women could belong to different Protestant churches and still be committed to essentially the same Christian faith.
Finally, the new evangelicalism—by spreading religious fervor into every area of the nation— provided a vehicle for establishing a sense of order and social stability in communities still searching for an identity.
One of the most striking features of the Second Great Awakening was the preponderance of women (particularly young women) within it.
Although revivalism was most widespread within white society, it penetrated other cultures as well.
In some areas of the country, revivals were open to people of all races, and many African Americans not only attended but eagerly embraced the new religious fervor as well.
Out of these revivals, in fact, emerged a substantial group of black preachers, who became important figures within the slave community.
The spirit of revivalism was also particularly strong in these years among Native Americans, although very different from revivalism in white or black society
The Second Great Awakening also had important effects on those Americans who did not accept its teachings.
The rational “freethinkers,” whose skeptical philosophies had helped produce the revivals, were in many ways victims of the new religious fervor
Americans imported some of these technological advances from England.
The British government attempted to protect the nation’s manufacturing preeminence by preventing the export of textile machinery or the emigration of skilled mechanics.
Despite such efforts, immigrants arrived in the United States with advanced knowledge of English technology, eager to introduce the new machines to America.
Samuel Slater, for example, used the knowledge he had acquired before leaving England to build a spinning mill for the Quaker merchant Moses Brown in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1790.
America in the early nineteenth century also produced several important inventors of its own
The cotton gin not only changed the economy of the South, it also helped transform the North.
The large supply of domestically produced fi ber was a strong incentive to entrepreneurs in New England and elsewhere to develop an American textile industry
One of the prerequisites for industrialization is an efficient system for transporting raw materials to factories and finished goods to markets.
The United States had no such system in the early years of the republic.
But work was underway that would ultimately remove the transportation obstacle.
There were several ways to solve the problem of the small American market.
One was to look for customers overseas, and American merchants continued their efforts to do that.
Among the first acts of the new Congress when it met in 1789 were two tariff bills giving preference to American ships in American ports, helping to stimulate an expansion of domestic shipping.
The inventor Robert Fulton and the promoter Robert R. Livingston were principally responsible for perfecting the steamboat and bringing it to the attention of the nation
Despite all the changes and all the advances, America in the early nineteenth century remained an overwhelmingly rural and agrarian nation
People living in towns and cities lived differently than the vast majority of Americans who continued to work as farmers.
Much remained to be done before this small and still half-formed nation would become a complex modern society
The newly founded national capital was the city of Washington
He was a brilliant conversationalist, a gifted writer, and one of the nation’s most intelligent and creative men, with perhaps a wider range of interests and accomplishments than any public figure in American history.
In addition to politics and diplomacy, he was an active architect, educator, inventor, scientific farmer, and philosopher-scientist.
Jefferson was, above all, a shrewd and practical politician.
Under Washington and Adams, the Republicans believed the government had been needlessly extravagant.
Yearly federal expenditures had almost tripled between 1793 and 1800.
Hamilton had, as he had intended, increased the public debt and created an extensive system of internal taxation, including the hated whiskey excise tax
The Jefferson administration moved deliberately to reverse the trend. In 1802, it persuaded Congress to abolish all internal taxes, leaving customs duties and the sale of western lands as the only sources of revenue for the government
Jefferson also scaled down the armed forces. He reduced the army of 4,000 men to 2,500.
Having won control of the executive and legislative branches of government, the Republicans looked with suspicion on the judiciary, which remained largely in the hands of Federalist judges.
Soon after Jefferson’s first inauguration, his followers in Congress launched an attack on this last preserve of the opposition.
The debate over the courts led to one of the most important judicial decisions in the history of the nation.
Federalists had long maintained that the Supreme Court had the authority to nullify acts of Congress
In 1803, in the case of Marbury v. Madison, it did so. William Marbury, one of Adams’s “midnight appointments,” had been named a justice of the peace in the District of Columbia
Once Jefferson became president, the new secretary of state, James Madison, was responsible for transmitting appointment
The chief justice of the United States at the time of the ruling was John Marshall, one of the towering figures in the history of American law
And the judiciary survived as a powerful force within the government—more often than not ruling on behalf of the centralizing, expansionary policies that the Republicans had hoped to reverse.
In the same year that Jefferson became president of the United States, Napoleon Bonaparte made himself ruler of France with the title of first consul.
In the year that Jefferson was reelected, Napoleon named himself emperor
Having failed in a grandiose plan to seize India from the British Empire, Napoleon turned his imperial ambitions in a new direction: he began to dream of restoring French power in the New World.
Under the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1800 between the French and the Spanish, France regained title to Louisiana, which included almost the whole of the Mississippi Valley to the west of the river, plus New Orleans near its mouth.
The Louisiana Territory would, Napoleon hoped, become the heart of a great French empire in America.
American ships sailing the Mississippi River had for many years been accustomed to depositing their cargoes in New Orleans for transfer to oceangoing vessels. The intendant now forbade the practice—even though Spain had guaranteed Americans that right in the Pinckney Treaty of 1795—thus effectively closing the lower Mississippi to American shippers.
Jefferson instructed Robert Livingston, the American ambassador in Paris, to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans.
Livingston, on his own authority, proposed that the French sell the United States the vast western part of Louisiana as well.
In the meantime, Jefferson persuaded Congress to appropriate funds for an expansion of the army and the construction of a river fleet, and he deliberately gave the impression that American forces might soon descend on New Orleans and that the United States might form an alliance with Great Britain if the problems with France were not resolved.
Perhaps that was why Napoleon suddenly decided to accept Livingston’s proposal and offer the United States the entire Louisiana Territory.
Napoleon had good reasons for the decision. His plans for an American empire had already gone seriously awry.
That was partly because a yellow fever epidemic had wiped out much of the French army in the New World.
But it was also because the expeditionary force Napoleon sent to take possession of Louisiana had been frozen into a Dutch harbor through the winter of 1802–1803.
By the time the harbor thawed in the spring of 1803, Napoleon was preparing for a renewed war in Europe.
He would not, he realized, have the resources now to secure an American empire.
By the terms of the treaty, the United States was to pay a total of 80 million francs ($15 million) to the French government.
Finally, late in 1803, the French assumed formal control of Louisiana from Spain just long enough to turn the territory over to General James Wilkinson, the commissioner of the United States.
The government organized the Louisiana Territory much as it had organized the Northwest Territory, with the assumption that its various territories would eventually become states.
The first of these was admitted to the Union as the state of Louisiana in 1812.
Meanwhile, several ambitious explorations were revealing the geography of the far-flung new territory to white Americans, few of whom had ever ventured much beyond the Mississippi River.
In 1803, even before Napoleon’s offer to sell Louisiana, Jefferson helped plan an expedition that was to cross the continent to the Pacific Ocean, gather geographic facts, and investigate prospects for trade with the Indians.
He named as its leader his private secretary and Virginia neighbor, the thirty-three-year-old Meriwether Lewis, a veteran of Indian wars skilled in the ways of the wilderness.
Lewis chose as a colleague the twenty-nine-year-old William Clark, who—like George Rogers Clark, his older brother—was an experienced frontiersman and Indian fighter.
In the spring of 1804, Lewis and Clark, with a company of four dozen men, started up the Missouri River from St. Louis.
With a Shoshone woman, Sacajawea, as their guide, they eventually crossed the Rocky Mountains, descended the Snake and Columbia Rivers, and in the late autumn of 1805 camped on the Pacific coast.
In September 1806, they were back in St. Louis with elaborate records of the geography and the Indian civilizations they had observed along the way, and a lengthy diary recounting their experiences.
Jefferson’s triumphant reelection in 1804 suggested that most of the nation approved the new territorial acquisition.
But some New England Federalists raged against it. They realized that the more the West grew and the more new states joined the Union, the less power the Federalists and their region would retain.
In Massachusetts, a group of the most extreme Federalists, known as the “Essex Junto,” concluded that the only recourse for New England was to secede from the Union and form a separate “Northern Confederacy.”
The Burr “conspiracy” was in part the story of a single man’s soaring ambitions and flamboyant personality. But it was also a symbol of the larger perils still facing the new nation
The early nineteenth century saw a dramatic expansion of American shipping in the Atlantic.
Britain retained significant naval superiority, but the British merchant marine was preoccupied with commerce in Europe and Asia and devoted little energy to trade with America.
In 1805, at the Battle of Trafalgar, a British fleet virtually destroyed what was left of the French navy.
Because France could no longer challenge the British at sea, Napoleon now chose to pressure England through economic rather than naval means.
He announced the creation of what he called the “Continental System.” It was designed to close the European continent to British trade.
American ships were caught between Napoleon’s decrees and Britain’s orders in council. If they sailed directly for the European continent, they risked being captured by the British navy; if they sailed by way of a British port, they risked seizure by the French
The British navy—with its floggings, low pay, and terrible shipboard conditions—was known as a “floating hell” to its sailors.
British claimed the right to stop and search American merchant ships
They did not claim the right to take native-born Americans, but they did claim the right to seize naturalized Americans born on British soil.
In practice, the British navy often made no such distinctions, impressing British deserters and native-born Americans alike into service
When news of the Chesapeake-Leopard incident reached the United States, there was a great popular clamor for revenge.
If Congress had been in session, it might have declared war. But Jefferson and Madison tried to maintain the peace.
Jefferson expelled all British warships from American waters to lessen the likelihood of future incidents.
Then he sent instructions to his minister in England, James Monroe, to demand that the British government renounce impressment.
The British government disavowed the action of the officer responsible for the Chesapeake-Leopard incident and recalled him; it offered compensation for those killed and wounded in the incident; and it promised to return three of the captured sailors (one of the original four had been hanged).
But the British refused to renounce impressment
In an effort to prevent future incidents that might bring the nation again to the brink of war, Congress enacted a drastic measure known as “the Embargo.”
It became one of the most controversial political issues of its time.
The Embargo prohibited American ships from leaving the United States for any foreign port anywhere in the world.
The law was widely evaded, but it was effective enough to create a serious depression throughout most of the nation.
Hardest hit were the merchants and shipowners of the Northeast, most of them Federalists.
The election of 1808 came in the midst of the Embargo-(1807) induced depression.
The Embargo was clearly a growing political liability, and Jefferson decided to back down.
A few days before leaving office, he approved a bill ending his experiment with what he called “peaceable coercion.”
To replace the Embargo, Congress passed the NonIntercourse Act just before Madison took office.
The new law reopened trade with all nations but Great Britain and France.
A year later, in 1810, Congress allowed the NonIntercourse Act to expire and replaced it with Macon’s Bill No. 2, which conditionally reopened free commercial relations with Britain and France.
Napoleon announced that France would no longer interfere with American shipping
The 1807 war crisis following the Chesapeake-Leopard incident revived the conflict between Indians and white American
In 1801, Jefferson appointed Harrison governor of the Indiana Territory to administer the president’s proposed solution to the “Indian problem.
In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the number of western Americans who had settled east of the Appalachians had grown to more than 500,000—a population far larger than that of the Native Americans. It was becoming almost inevitable, as a result, that the tribes would face ever-growing pressure to move out of the way of the rapidly growing white settlements.
Tenskwatawa, a charismatic religious leader and orator known as “the Prophet.” He had experienced a mystical awakening in the process of recovering from alcoholism. Having freed himself from what he considered the evil effects of white culture, he began to speak to his people of the superior virtues of Indian civilization and the sinfulness and corruption of the white world.
While white “frontiersmen” in the North demanded the conquest of Canada, those in the South wanted the United States to acquire Spanish Florida, a territory that included the present state of Florida and the southern areas of what is now Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana
The desire for Florida became yet another motivation for war with Britain.
Spain was Britain’s ally, and a war with Britain might provide a pretext for taking Spanish territory.
By 1812, war fever was growing on both the northern and southern borders of the United States.
In the congressional elections of 1810, voters from these regions elected a large number of representatives of both parties eager for war with Britain.
They became known as the “war hawks.”
On June 18, 1812, he gave in to the pressure and approved a declaration of war against Britain.
Americans entered the War of 1812 with great enthusiasm, but events on the battlefield soon cooled their ardor.
In the summer of 1812, American forces invaded Canada through Detroit
At first, American frigates won some spectacular victories over British warships, and American privateers destroyed or captured many British merchant ships, occasionally braving the coastal waters of the British Isles themselves and burning vessels within sight of the shore
The United States did, however, achieve significant early military successes on the Great Lakes
The battle also won Jackson a commission as a major general in the United States Army.
In that capacity, he led his men farther south into Florida and, on November 7, 1814, seized the Spanish fort at Pensacola.
The victories over the tribes were not enough for the United States to win the war.
After the surrender of Napoleon in 1814, England prepared to invade the United States.
British troops entered Washington and set fire to several public buildings, including the White House, in retaliation for the earlier American burning of the Canadian capital at York.
This was the low point of American fortunes in the war.
Through the night of September 13, Francis Scott Key, a Washington lawyer who was on board one of the British ships trying to secure the release of an American prisoner, watched the bombardment.
The next morning, “by the dawn’s early light,” he could see the flag on the fort still flying; he recorded his pride in the moment by scribbling a poem—“The Star-Spangled Banner”—on the back of an envelope.
The British withdrew from Baltimore, and Key’s words were soon set to the tune of an old English drinking song.
In 1931, “The Star-Spangled Banner” became the official national anthem.
Only later did news reach North America that the United States and Britain had signed a peace treaty several weeks before the Battle of New Orleans.
With a few notable exceptions, such as the Battles of Put-inlay and New Orleans, the military operations of the United States between 1812 and 1815 consisted of a series of humiliating failures
By now the Federalists were a minority in the country as a whole, but they were still the majority party in New England.
Some of them began to dream again of creating a separate nation in that region, which they could dominate and in which they could escape what they saw as the tyranny of slaveholders and backwoodsmen.
Talk of secession revived and reached a climax in the winter of 1814–1815.
On December 15, 1814, delegates from the New England states met in Hartford, Connecticut, to discuss their grievances.
Those who favored secession at the Hartford Convention were outnumbered by a comparatively moderate majority
Because the war was going badly and the government was becoming desperate, the New Englanders assumed that the Republicans would have to agree to their demands.
Soon after the convention adjourned, however, the news of Jackson’s smashing victory at New Orleans reached the cities of the Northeast.
A day or two later, reports arrived from abroad of a negotiated peace
Peace talks between the United States and Britain had begun even before fighting in the War of 1812 began
In the negotiations, the Americans gave up their demand for a British renunciation of impressment and for the cession of Canada to the United States.
