What was the Era of the common man

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Growth, expansion and social change rapidly followed the end of the War of 1812. Many an enterprising American pushed westward. In the new western states, there was a greater level of equality among the masses than in the former English colonies. Land was readily available. Frontier life required hard work. There was little tolerance for aristocrats afraid to get their hands dirty.

The west led the path by having no property requirements for voting, which the eastern states soon adopted, as well.

The Common Man always held a special place in America, but with Jackson, he rose to the top of the American political power system.

In the campaign of 1828, Jackson, known as "Old Hickory," triumphed over the aristocratic, reclusive and unpopular incumbent President John Quincy Adams.

George WashingtonJohn AdamsThomas JeffersonJames MadisonJames Monroe

John Quincy Adams

The first six Presidents were from the same mold: wealthy, educated, and from the east. Jackson was a self-made man who declared education an unnecessary requirement for political leadership. Indeed, Jackson launched the era when politicians would desperately try to show how poor they had been.

The election of 1828 was a rematch of the election of 1824 between John Quincy Adams and Jackson. In the earlier election, Jackson received more votes, but with no candidate having a majority, the House of Representatives chose Adams. Four years later the voices of the people were finally heard.

Jackson's inauguration in 1828 seemed to many the embodiment of "mob rule" by uneducated ruffians. Jackson rode to the White House followed by a swarm of well-wishers who were invited in. Muddy hob-nailed boots trod over new carpets, glassware and crockery were smashed, and chaos generally reigned. After a time, Jackson ordered the punch bowls moved outside to the White House lawn, and the crowd followed. Naturally, Jackson's critics were quick to point to the party as the beginning of the "reign of King Mob."

	No one who was at Washington at the time of General Jackson's inauguration is likely to forget that period to the day of his death. To us, who had witnessed the quiet and orderly period of the Adams administration, it seemed as if half the nation had rushed at once into the capital. It was like the inundation of the northern barbarians into Rome, save that the tumultuous tide came in from a different point of the compass. The West and the South seemed to have precipitated themselves upon the North and overwhelmed it. On that memorable occasion you might tell a 'Jackson man' almost as far as you could see him. Their every motion seemed to cry out 'Victory!' – Arthur J. Stansbury, Jacksonian contemporary

As a military hero, a frontiersman, and a populist, Jackson enchanted the common people and alarmed the political, social and economic elite. A Man of the People would now govern the nation — America did not disintegrate into anarchy.

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At Andrew Jackson's 1828 inauguration, hundreds of bearded, buckskin-clad frontiersmen trashed the White House while celebrating the election of one of their own to the Presidency. Though born in South Carolina, Jackson, like many others, had moved to the frontier. Indeed, America was a country on the move west.

On July 4, 1826, less than two years before "King Andrew" ascended to the "throne," the Yankee John Adams and the aristocratic Virginian Thomas Jefferson both passed away. America's Revolutionary generation was gone. With them went the last vestiges of the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties. This helped to bring about a new balance of political power, and with it two new political parties. The 1828 election was portrayed by Jackson's Democrats as proof of the "common people's right" to pick a President. No longer were Virginia Presidents and northern money-men calling the shots. Class systems were breaking down. To that end, some states had recently abolished property requirements for voting. These poorer folk supported General Jackson.

Jackson's strong personality and controversial ways incited the development of an opposition party, the Whigs. Their name echoes British history. In Great Britain, the Whigs were the party opposed to a strong monarch. By calling themselves Whigs, Jackson's enemies labeled him a king. And they held firm in their opposition to "King Andrew" and his hated policies.

Sectional rivalries bubbled to the surface as the Era of Good Feelings slipped into history. The South began feeling more and more resentful of the influential manufacturers of the North. The South's resentment came to an ugly head in the nullification battle of the early 1830s in which South Carolina considered leaving the Union because it disagreed with a federal law. The Second Bank of the United States was seen by westerners and southerners as a tool to make northerners and easterners rich at the expense of the rest of the country. Through force of personality, Jackson got his way in the nullification battle and triumphed again when he vetoed the charter of the national bank. These regional rifts would only get worse over time.

Finally, the westward movement was not only reserved for pioneers. Native Americans were moving west as well — and not because they wanted to. Andrew Jackson had initiated an Indian removal policy that forced all natives to relocate west of the Mississippi River. Indian lands were open to settlers and land speculators. Thus began another sad chapter in the federal government's dealings with Native Americans.

The Jacksonian Era was nothing short of another American Revolution. By 1850, the "common man" demanded his place in politics, the office of the president was invigorated, and the frontier exerted its ever more powerful impact on the American scene. Hated by many, but loved by many more, Andrew Jackson embodied this new American character.

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The presidential election of 1828 brought a great victory for Andrew Jackson. Not only did he get almost 70 percent of the votes cast in the electoral college, popular participation in the election soared to an unheard of 60 percent. This more than doubled the turnout in 1824; Jackson clearly headed a sweeping political movement. His central message remained largely the same from the previous election, but had grown in intensity. Jackson warned that the nation had been corrupted by "special privilege," characterized especially by the policies of the Second Bank of the United States. The proper road to reform, according to Jackson, lay in an absolute acceptance of majority rule as expressed through the democratic process. Beyond these general principles, however, Jackson's campaign was notably vague about specific policies. Instead, it stressed Jackson's life story as a man who had risen from modest origins to become a successful Tennessee planter. Jackson's claim to distinction lay in a military career that included service as a young man in the Revolutionary War, several anti-Indian campaigns, and, of course, his crowning moment in the Battle of New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812.

Jackson's election marked a new direction in American politics. He was the first westerner elected president, indeed, the first president from a state other than Virginia or Massachusetts. He boldly proclaimed himself to be the "champion of the common man" and believed that their interests were ignored by the aggressive national economic plans of Clay and Adams. More than this, however, when Martin Van Buren followed Jackson as president, it indicated that the Jacksonian movement had long-term significance that would outlast his own charismatic leadership.

Van Buren, perhaps even more than Jackson, helped to create the new Democratic party that centered upon three chief qualities closely linked to Jacksonian Democracy. First, it declared itself to be the party of ordinary farmers and workers. Second, it opposed the special privileges of economic elites. Third, to offer affordable western land to ordinary white Americans, Indians needed to be forced further westward. The Whig party soon arose to challenge the Democrats with a different policy platform and vision for the nation. Whigs' favored active government support for economic improvement as the best route to sustained prosperity. Thus, the Whig-Democrat political contest was in large part a disagreement about the early Industrial Revolution. Whigs defended economic development's broad benefits, while Democrats stressed the new forms of dependence that it created. The fiercely partisan campaigns waged between these parties lasted into the 1850s and are known as the Second Party System, an assuredly modern framework of political competition that reached ordinary voters as never before with both sides organizing tirelessly to carry their message directly to the American people.

A new era of American politics began with Jackson's election in 1828, but it also completed a grand social experiment begun by the American Revolution. Although the Founding Fathers would have been astounded by the new shape of the nation during Jackson's presidency, just as Jackson himself had served in the American Revolution, its values helped form his sense of the world. The ideals of the Revolution had, of course, been altered by the new conditions of the early nineteenth century and would continue to be reworked over time. Economic, religious, and geographic changes had all reshaped the nation in fundamental ways and pointed toward still greater opportunities and pitfalls in the future. Nevertheless, Jacksonian Democracy represented a provocative blending of the best and worst qualities of American society. On the one hand it was an authentic democratic movement that contained a principled egalitarian thrust, but this powerful social critique was always cast for the benefit of white men. This tragic mix of egalitarianism, masculine privilege, and racial prejudice remains a central quality of American life and to explore their relationship in the past may help suggest ways of overcoming their haunting limitations in the future.

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Like his father who was also a one-term president, John Quincy Adams was an intelligent statesman whose strong commitment to certain principles proved to be liabilities as president.

For instance, Adams favored a bold economic role for the national government that was far ahead of public opinion. Like the Democratic-Republicans who preceded him in the Era of Good Feelings, Adams supported a federal role in economic development through the American System that was chiefly associated with Henry Clay. Adams' vision of federal leadership was especially creative and included proposals for a publicly-funded national university and government investment in scientific research and exploration.

Few of Adams' ideas were put into action. He hurt his own case by publicly expressing concerns about the potential dangers of democracy. When politicians in Congress refused to act decisively for fear of displeasing the voters, Adams chided them that they seemed to "proclaim to the world that we are palsied by the will of our constituents."

Although he astutely identified a problem faced by leaders in a democracy, to many Americans he seemed to call into question a central tenet of the new nation. In many respects Adams was a figure of an earlier political era.

For example, he steadfastly refused to campaign for his own re-election because he felt that political office should be a matter of service and not a popularity contest. Although his ideals were surely honorable, when he said that, "if the country wants my services, she must ask for them," he appeared to be an elitist who disdained contact with ordinary people.

John Quincy Adams' public dedication to unpopular principles helped assure his defeat in the presidential election of 1828. They also led him to take on causes that today seem impressive. For example, Adams overturned a treaty signed by the Creek nation in 1825 that ceded its remaining land to the state of Georgia because he believed that it had been fraudulently obtained through coercive methods. Georgia's governor was outraged, but Adams believed that the matter clearly fell under federal jurisdiction. Although Adams' support of the Creeks didn't prevent their removal to the west, he lost political backing from Americans who widely believed that whites deserved access to all Indian lands.

Adams continued this course of following principle rather than popularity when he served in the U.S. House of Representatives after his presidency. Although not a radical opponent of slavery himself, he was an early leader against congressional rules that prevented anti-slavery petitions from being presented to Congress. He also successfully defended enslaved Africans before the U.S. Supreme Court in the celebrated Amistad case.

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The 1824 presidential election marked the final collapse of the Republican-Federalist political framework. For the first time no candidate ran as a Federalist, while five significant candidates competed as Democratic-Republicans. Clearly, no party system functioned in 1824. The official candidate of the Democratic-Republicans to replace Monroe was William H. Crawford, the secretary of the treasury. A caucus of Republicans in Congress had selected him, but this backing by party insiders turned out to be a liability as other candidates called for a more open process for selecting candidates.

The outcome of the very close election surprised political leaders. The winner in the all-important Electoral College was Andrew Jackson, the hero of the War of 1812, with ninety-nine votes. He was followed by John Quincy Adams, the son of the second president and Monroe's secretary of state, who secured eighty-four votes. Meanwhile Crawford trailed well behind with just forty-one votes. Although Jackson seemed to have won a narrow victory, receiving 43 percent of the popular vote versus just 30 percent for Adams, he would not be seated as the country's sixth president. Because nobody had received a majority of votes in the electoral college, the House of Representatives had to choose between the top two candidates.

Henry Clay, the speaker of the House of Representatives, now held a decisive position. As a presidential candidate himself in 1824 (he finished fourth in the electoral college), Clay had led some of the strongest attacks against Jackson. Rather than see the nation's top office go to a man he detested, the Kentuckian Clay forged an Ohio Valley-New England coalition that secured the White House for John Quincy Adams. In return Adams named Clay as his secretary of state, a position that had been the stepping-stone to the presidency for the previous four executives.

This arrangement, however, hardly proved beneficial for either Adams or Clay. Denounced immediately as a "corrupt bargain" by supporters of Jackson, the antagonistic presidential race of 1828 began practically before Adams even took office. To Jacksonians the Adams-Clay alliance symbolized a corrupt system where elite insiders pursued their own interests without heeding the will of the people.

The Jacksonians, of course, overstated their case; after all, Jackson fell far short of a majority in the general vote in 1824. Nevertheless, when the Adams administration continued to favor a strong federal role in economic development, Jacksonians denounced their political enemies as using government favors to reward their friends and economic elites. By contrast, Jackson presented himself as a champion of the common man and by doing so furthered the democratization of American politics.

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Most white Americans agreed that western expansion was crucial to the health of the nation. But what should be done about slavery in the West?

The contradictions inherent in the expansion of white male voting rights can also be seen in problems raised by western migration. The new western states were at the forefront of more inclusive voting rights for white men, but their development simultaneously devastated the rights of Native American communities. Native American rights rarely became a controversial public issue. This was not the case for slavery, however, as northern and southern whites differed sharply about its proper role in the west.

The incorporation of new western territories into the United States made slavery an explicit concern of national politics. Balancing the interests of slave and free states had played a role from the very start of designing the federal government at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The crucial compromise there that sacrificed the rights of African Americans in favor of a stronger union among the states exploded once more in 1819 when Missouri petitioned to join the United States as a slave state.

In 1819, the nation contained eleven free and eleven slave states creating a balance in the U.S. senate. Missouri's entrance threatened to throw this parity in favor of slave interests. The debate in Congress over the admission of Missouri was extraordinarily bitter after Congressman James Tallmadge from New York proposed that slavery be prohibited in the new state.

The debate was especially sticky because defenders of slavery relied on a central principle of fairness. How could the Congress deny a new state the right to decide for itself whether or not to allow slavery? If Congress controlled the decision, then the new states would have fewer rights than the original ones.

Henry Clay, a leading congressman, played a crucial role in brokering a two-part solution known as the Missouri Compromise. First, Missouri would be admitted to the union as a slave state, but would be balanced by the admission of Maine, a free state, that had long wanted to be separated from Massachusetts. Second, slavery was to be excluded from all new states in the Louisiana Purchase north of the southern boundary of Missouri. People on both sides of the controversy saw the compromise as deeply flawed. Nevertheless, it lasted for over thirty years until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 determined that new states north of the boundary deserved to be able to exercise their sovereignty in favor of slavery if they so choose.

Democracy and self-determination could clearly be mobilized to extend an unjust institution that contradicted a fundamental American commitment to equality. The Missouri crisis probed an enormously problematic area of American politics that would explode in a civil war. As Thomas Jefferson observed about the Missouri crisis, "This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror."

African Americans obviously opposed slavery and news of some congressional opposition to its expansion circulated widely within slave communities. Denmark Vesey, a free black living in Charleston, South Carolina, made the most dramatic use of the white disagreement about the future of slavery in the west. Vesey quoted the Bible as well as congressional debates over the Missouri issue to denounce slavery from the pulpit of the African Methodist Episcopal church where he was a lay minister. Along with a key ally named Gullah Jack, Vesey organized a slave rebellion in 1822 that planned to capture the Charleston arsenal and seize the city long enough for its black population to escape to the free black republic of Haiti.

The rebellion was betrayed just days before its planned starting date and resulted in the execution of thirty-five organizers as well as the destruction of the black church where Vesey preached. Slaveholders were clearly on the defensive with antislavery sentiment building in the north and undeniable opposition among African Americans in the south. As one white Charlestonian complained, "By the Missouri question, our slaves thought, there was a charter of liberties granted them by Congress."

African Americans knew that they could not rely upon whites to end slavery, but they also recognized that the increasing divide between north and south and their battle over western expansion could open opportunities for blacks to exploit. The most explosive of these future black actions would be Nat Turner's Virginia slave revolt in 1831.

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The rise of political parties as the fundamental organizing unit of the Second (Two) Party System represented a sharp break from the values that had shaped Republican and Federalist political competition. Leaders in the earlier system remained deeply suspicious that parties could corrupt and destroy the young republic. At the heart of the new legitimacy of parties, and their forthright celebration of democracy, was the dramatic expansion of voting rights for white men.

Immediately after the Revolution most states retained some property requirements that prevented poor people from voting. Following republican logic, citizens were believed to need an economic stake in society in order to be trusted to vote wisely. If a voter lacked economic independence, then it seemed that those who controlled his livelihood could easily manipulate his vote.

Ironically, just as industrial wage labor began to create dependent laborers on a large new scale, the older republican commitment to propertied voters fell out of favor. As property requirements for voting were abolished, economic status disappeared as a foundation for citizenship. By 1840 more than 90 percent of adult white men possessed the right to vote.

Not only that, voters could now cast their opinion for more offices. Previously, governors and presidential electors had usually been selected by state legislatures as part of a republican strategy that limited the threat of direct democratic control over the highest political offices. The growing democratic temper of the first decades of the 19th century changed this and increasingly all offices were chosen by direct vote. The United States was the world leader in allowing popular participation in elections. This triumph of American politics built upon, but also expanded, the egalitarian ideals of the American Revolution.

This democratic triumph, however, also had sharp limitations that today seem quite shocking. At the same time that state legislatures opened suffrage (that is, the right to vote) to all white men, they simultaneously closed the door firmly on white women and free African Americans. This movement was especially disappointing since it represented a retreat from a broader sense of political rights that had been included in some early state constitutions.

For example, New Jersey revised its state constitution to abolish property requirements in 1807, but at the same time prevented all women from voting (even wealthy ones who had been allowed to vote there since 1776) as well as all free blacks. New York acted similarly in 1821 when its legislature extended the franchise to almost all white men, but simultaneously created high property requirements for free blacks. As a result, only 68 of the 13,000 free African Americans in New York City could vote in 1825. When Pennsylvania likewise denied free blacks the right to vote in the late 1830s, a state legislator explained that "The people of this state are for continuing this commonwealth, what it has always been, a political community of white persons." While he was correct about the prevailing racist sentiment among white voters, free blacks with property had not been excluded from the franchise by the earlier Revolutionary state constitution.

Tragically, the democratization of American politics to include nearly universal white manhood suffrage also intensified discrimination by race and gender. The idea of total democracy remained too radical for full implementation.

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The War of 1812 closed with the Federalist Party all but destroyed. The 1816 presidential election was the last one when the Federalists' ran a candidate. He lost resoundingly.

The 1818 Congressional election brought another landslide victory for Democratic-Republicans who controlled 85 percent of the seats in the U.S. Congress. James Monroe, yet another Virginian, followed Madison in the Presidency for two terms from 1817 to 1825. Although this period has often been called the Era of Good Feelings due to its one-party dominance, in fact, Democratic-Republicans were deeply divided internally and a new political system was about to be created from the old Republican-Federalist competition that had been known as the First Party System.

Although Democratic-Republicans were now the only active national party, its leaders incorporated major economic policies that had been favored by Federalists since the time of Alexander Hamilton. President Monroe continued the policies begun by Madison at the end of his presidency to build an American System of national economic development. These policies had three basic aspects: a national bank, protective tariffs to support American manufactures, and federally-funded internal improvements.

The first two elements received strong support after the War of 1812. The chartering of the Second Bank of the United States in 1816, once again headquartered in Philadelphia, indicates how much of the old Federalist economic agenda the Democratic-Republicans now supported. Whereas Jefferson had seen a national bank as a threat to ordinary farmers, the leaders of his party in 1816 had come to a new understanding of the need for a strong federal role in creating the basic infrastructure of the nation.

The cooperation among national politicians that marked the one-party Era of Good Feelings lasted less than a decade. A new style of American politics took shape in the 1820s and 1830s whose key qualities have remained central to American politics up to the present. In this more modern system, political parties played the crucial role building broad and lasting coalitions among diverse groups in the American public. Furthermore, these parties represented more than the distinct interests of a single region or economic class. Most importantly, modern parties broke decisively from a political tradition favoring personal loyalty and patronage. Although long-lasting parties were totally unpredicted in the 1780s, by the 1830s they had become central to American politics.

The New York politician Martin Van Buren played a key role in the development of the Second Party System. He rose to lead the new Democratic party by breaking from the more traditional leadership of his own Democratic-Republican party. He achieved this in New York by 1821 and helped create the system on a national scale while serving in Washington D.C. as a senator and later as president.

Van Buren perceptively responded to the growing democratization of American life in the first decades of the 19th century by embracing mass public opinion. As he explained, "Those who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs; but always by exciting the multitude. The first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results, the second is the resort of genius and transforms the face of the universe." Rather than follow a model of elite political leadership like that of the Founding Fathers, Van Buren saw "genius" in reaching out to the "multitude" of the general public.

Like other new party leaders of the period, Van Buren made careful use of newspapers to spread the word about party positions and to ensure close discipline among party members. In fact, the growth of newspapers in the new nation was closely linked to the rise of a competitive party system. In 1775 there had been just 31 newspapers in the colonies, but by 1835 the number of papers in the nation had soared to 1200. Rather than make any claim to objective reporting, newspapers existed as propaganda vehicles for the political parties that they supported. Newspapers were especially important to the new party system because they spread information about the party platform, a carefully crafted list of policy commitments that aimed to appeal to a broad public.

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The social forces that reshaped the United States in its first half century were profound. Western expansion, growing racial conflict, unprecedented economic changes linked to the early Industrial Revolution, and the development of a stronger American Protestantism in the Second Great Awakening all overlapped with one another in ways that were both complementary and contradictory.

Furthermore, these changes all had a direct impact on American political culture that attempted to make sense of how these varied impulses had transformed the country.

The changing character of American politics can be divided into two time periods separated by the War of 1812. In the early republic that preceded the war, "republicanism" had been the guiding political value. Although an unquestioned assault on the aristocratic ideal of the colonial era, republicanism also included a deep fear of the threat to public order posed by the decline of traditional values of hierarchy and inequality.

While it seems surprising today, at the start of the early republic many people, and almost all public leaders, associated democracy with anarchy. In the early national period following the War of 1812, democracy began to be championed as an unqualified key to improving the country. The formerly widespread fear of democracy was now held only by small and increasingly isolated groups in the 1820s.

Although a belief in democratic principles remains at the center of American life today, the growth of democracy in the early national period was not obvious, easy, or without negative consequences. The economic boom of the early Industrial Revolution distributed wealth in shockingly unequal ways that threatened the independence of working-class Americans. Similarly, western expansion drove increased attacks on Native American communities as well as the massive expansion of slavery.

Finally, even within white households, the promise of Jacksonian Democracy could only be fully attained by husbands and sons. The changes American society underwent in the early national period, including many of its troubling problems, created a framework of modern American life that we can still recognize today.

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Surprisingly, cultural independence proved to be the hardest area for Americans to break free from European models and standards.

American intellectuals and artists recognized the need for American cultural independence. In 1780s, Noah Webster declared that "America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics." His own major contribution to American cultural independence came through an immensely influential spelling book to standardize the American language. By the 1830s over 60 million copies had been sold and its descendent, Webster's dictionary, remains a mainstay of American bookshelves.

Despite the significance of Webster's dictionary, other early national authors were far less successful. The most popular writers of the post-Revolutionary era wrote strongly patriotic accounts, like Mercy Otis Warren's "History of the Revolution" (1805) and Mason Weems' fantastically popular (and distorted) account of George Washington's life that sped through countless editions starting in 1800. Although popular in their day, and responding to a central need to celebrate the greatness of the new country and its leaders, their artistic and scholarly quality suffered from a simplistic patriotic impulse.

On the other hand, the Philadelphia writer Charles Brockden Brown, arguably the most sophisticated novelist of the new republic, reached only a very limited audience with six psychologically-troubling novels published from 1798 to 1801. The first American writer to receive both popular and lasting acclaim was the New Yorker Washington Irving. His most famous stories drew on Dutch-American popular culture in his native state, and gave audiences such classic characters as Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman. Interestingly, however, Irving lived much of his life in Europe and enjoyed a very strong reputation outside the United States.

American landscape painting provided the earliest and most distinctively American contribution to the fine arts. Thomas Cole, an English immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1818, began a painting style that celebrated the American wilderness as a powerful and frightening force that distinguished the United States from the corruption of European civilization. Cole helped to found the Hudson Valley school of landscape painting that frequently painted in that region of upstate New York, a tradition built upon later in the century by men like Frederick Church and Albert Bierstadt who painted further west.

Ironically, this celebration of American novelty through the wilderness occurred at a time when massive western migration threatened the natural beauty that these artists sought to capture. In fact, artists' need for wealthy patrons and their need to be near these benefactors meant that painters rarely experienced the actual wilderness that they portrayed on canvas.

The most celebrated American writer of the new nation was James Fenimore Cooper whose best-known work also emphasized the wilderness and its central role creating America. Natty Bumppo, Cooper's most famous character who appeared in several novels including The Last of the Mohicans (1826), was a heroic frontiersman who recognized the nobility of Native Americans even as he participated in their conquest by settling the west. One painter who addressed this crisis more directly than most was George Catlin. He used Indian portraits to try and raise money and political interest to help Native Americans avoid the destruction of their way of life.

American cultural innovation was both original and thoughtful during the early republic and early national periods. Its most influential contributions generally focused on subjects that distinguished the United States from Europe, like the work of the great naturalist painter and engraver John James Audubon. Nevertheless, landmark American contributions to western creative arts were mostly reserved for a later generation when major figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Thomas Eakins, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Singer Sargent would make their marks in the mid- and late-19th century.

At the beginning of the 19th century, All Americans — particularly painters and writers — were struggling with the notion of what it meant to be an America.

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Who would wear the pants in most American families — men or women? The social change dictated by the Second Great Awakening, to some degree, tailored the answer to that question.

The social forces transforming the new nation had an especially strong impact on white women who, of course, could be found in families of all classes throughout the nation. As we have seen, the early Industrial Revolution began in the United States by taking advantage of young farm girls' labor. Meanwhile, the Second Great Awakening was largely driven forward by middle-class women who were its earliest converts and who filled evangelical churches in numbers far beyond their proportion in the general population. Furthermore, the Benevolent Empire included an institutional place for respectable women who formed important women's auxiliaries to almost all of the new Christian reform organizations.

Gender implications intertwined with these religious and economic changes. The republican emphasis on equality and independence as fundamental principles of the United States challenged traditional concepts of family life where the male patriarch ruled commandingly over his wife and children. In place of this dominating father-centered standard, a new notion of more cooperative family life began to spread where husband and wife worked as partners in raising a family through love and kindness rather than sheer discipline. A transition of this magnitude occurred over a long period of time and with an uneven impact throughout the country. Middle-class women in the northeast, however, were at the forefront of this new understanding of family life and women's roles. As with the economic expansion of the Industrial Revolution and the reforms of the Benevolent Empire, the northeast was at the leading edge of major social changes in the new nation.

Assessing the benefits and limitations of these changes for white women has been the source of a great deal of disagreement among historians in recent years, but it is clear that the new developments of the early-19th century helped to establish gender patterns that have remained strong up to the present day. For example, it was only in the 1820s and 1830s that women began to displace men as the overwhelming majority of schoolteachers. This development brought clear advantages to women who increasingly received advanced education to become teachers. Furthermore, teaching brought high moral status and an acknowledged public role in improving American society. On the other hand, the rise of female school teaching also suggests the limited choices available even to middle-class women. They had almost no other options for public employment and were chiefly attractive to employers because they could be paid less than men.

Ultimately, we need to recognize how the rapid changes of this period included both positive and negative qualities. White women came to possess a new social power as moral reformers and were thought to possess more Christian virtue than men, but this idealization simultaneously limited white middle-class women to a restricted domestic sphere. Furthermore, this new standard of womanhood could be achieved neither by working-class women nor by enslaved African Americans.

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The breadth and success of the Second Great Awakening meant that it had multiple dimensions. Its origins in the 1790s had been especially radical and included strong commitments to anti-slavery among Methodists and Baptists. This radicalism quickly passed and even its populist elements tended to fade, or was most fully expressed in more egalitarian western locations. In urban areas the social movement also had a major impact, but here it tended to have a more conservative and institutional character that grew from the increasing distance between rich and poor created by the rapid economic growth of the early Industrial Revolution.

At the heart of this aspect of the Second Great Awakening was a religious commitment to social reform by elite and middle-class urban dwellers. Motivated by a concept of religious benevolence that encouraged them to try and improve the condition of spiritually impoverished people, these religious reformers created a national network of religious institutions in the decade after 1815. Although typically headquartered in the major cities of the northeast, groups like the American Bible Society, American Sunday School Union, and the American Tract Society, were among the very first institutions to organize on a national scale.

These institutions cooperated on an interdenominational basis to form what is often called the Benevolent Empire. Leaders of these organizations hoped to overcome the great pluralism within American Protestantism by downplaying denominational differences in favor of promoting a general Christian vision that would support national greatness and individual moral reform, causes which they believed to be deeply intertwined.

Among the most famous leaders of the Second Great Awakening was a Presbyterian minister named Charles Grandison Finney who led a series of revivals in the newly developed areas along the Erie Canal in upstate New York. His work climaxed with a six-month campaign in Rochester in 1830 where he preached daily and developed important new techniques such as group prayer meetings within family homes. He also relied centrally on women, including his wife Lydia, as key forces in drawing others to convert.

Finney's efforts in Rochester, like the work of the Benevolent Empire more generally, had its greatest impact among business leaders and middle-class people who had benefited from the increased standard of living brought about by the early Industrial Revolution. These groups recognized the rewards to be secured from hard work and self-discipline which they combined with a commitment to Christian morality that often included strong opposition to drinking alcohol.

On the other hand, for unskilled workers, who were largely excluded from the benefits of the Industrial Revolution, the new call for moral reform seemed to intrude on private family matters. Instead of seeing religion as the answer to social problems, some opponents of the Benevolent Empire began to call for workingmen's associations that could secure higher wages for ordinary laborers. The gulf between Protestant reformers and common laborers was especially great when those workers were Irish Catholics who entered the United States in large numbers starting in the 1830s.

Religious clashes were not far off.

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The American Revolution had largely been a secular affair. The Founding Fathers clearly demonstrated their opposition to the intermingling of politics and religion by establishing the separation of church and state in the first amendment to the Constitution.

In part because religion was separated from the control of political leaders, a series of religious revivals swept the United States from the 1790s and into the 1830s that transformed the religious landscape of the country. Known today as the Second Great Awakening, this spiritual resurgence fundamentally altered the character of American religion. At the start of the Revolution the largest denominations were Congregationalists (the 18th-century descendants of Puritan churches), Anglicans (known after the Revolution as Episcopalians), and Quakers. But by 1800, Evangelical Methodism and Baptists, were becoming the fasting-growing religions in the nation.

The Second Great Awakening is best known for its large camp meetings that led extraordinary numbers of people to convert through an enthusiastic style of preaching and audience participation. A young man who attended the famous 20,000-person revival at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1802, captures the spirit of these camp meetings activity:

The noise was like the roar of Niagara. The vast sea of human beings seemed to be agitated as if by a storm. I counted seven ministers, all preaching at one time, some on stumps, others on wagons ... Some of the people were singing, others praying, some crying for mercy. A peculiarly strange sensation came over me. My heart beat tumultuously, my knees trembled, my lips quivered, and I felt as though I must fall to the ground.

This young man was so moved that he went on to become a Methodist minister. As this quotation suggests, evangelical ministers reached their audience at an emotional level that powerfully moved large crowds.

The evangelical impulse at the heart of the Second Great Awakening shared some of the egalitarian thrust of Revolutionary ideals. Evangelical churches generally had a populist orientation that favored ordinary people over elites. For instance, individual piety was seen as more important for salvation than the formal university training required for ministers in traditional Christian churches.

The immense success of the Second Great Awakening was also furthered by evangelical churches innovative organizational techniques. These were well suited to the frontier conditions of newly settled territories. Most evangelical churches relied on itinerant preachers to reach large areas without an established minister and also included important places for lay people who took on major religious and administrative roles within evangelical congregations.

The Second Great Awakening marked a fundamental transition in American religious life. Many early American religious groups in the Calvinist tradition had emphasized the deep depravity of human beings and believed they could only be saved through the grace of God. The new evangelical movement, however, placed greater emphasis on humans' ability to change their situation for the better. By stressing that individuals could assert their "free will" in choosing to be saved and by suggesting that salvation was open to all human beings, the Second Great Awakening embraced a more optimistic view of the human condition. The repeated and varied revivals of these several decades helped make the United States a much more deeply Protestant nation than it had been before.

Finally, the Second Great Awakening also included greater public roles for white women and much higher African-American participation in Christianity than ever before.

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The American Industrial Revolution, concentrated in the northeast, would ultimately prove to be the most significant force in the development of the modern United States. This economic innovation sprung primarily from necessity. New England's agricultural economy was the poorest in the country and that helped to spur experimentation there. Meanwhile, the far more fertile southern states remained fully committed to agriculture as the central source of its wealth, here, too, dramatic changes created a wholly new economy that would have been unrecognizable to late-18th century Americans.

The slave-based tobacco economy that sustained the Chesapeake region was in deep crisis in the late-18th century and some Virginia leaders even talked about ending slavery. But technological innovations to process cotton soon gave new life to slavery, which would flourish in the new nation as never before.

Eli Whitney was among the first to develop a cotton gin (short for "engine") that separated seeds from short-staple cotton. This hardier cotton variety thrived in the new land of the Old Southwest, and could now be processed far more efficiently than had been possible by hand. Indeed, the gin increased by fifty times what a single person could process in a day. This new cotton production, in turn, provided the raw material for the booming industrial textile mills of the American northeast and Great Britain. Technological innovation and geographic expansion made the south the world's largest producer and exporter of cotton in the 19th century.

This economic triumph, however, was accompanied by an immeasurable human tragedy. By 1820 all of the northern states had outlawed slavery, but the rise of cotton made the enormous profits of the slave system irresistible to most white southerners. Distinctive northern and southern sections of the United States were emerging with the former more urban and industrial and the latter more agricultural, but the new economies of each section were deeply intertwined. Not only did southern cotton feed northern textile mills, but northern insurers and transporters played a major part in the growth of the modern slave economy of the cotton south.

The rise of "King Cotton" as the defining feature of southern life revitalized slavery. The promise of cotton profits encouraged a spectacular rise in the direct importation of African slaves in the years before the trans-Atlantic trade was made illegal in 1808. 250,000 new slaves arrived in the United States from 1787 to 1808, a number equal to the entire slave importation of the colonial period. After 1808, the internal slave trade forced African Americans from the border states and Chesapeake into the new cotton belt, which ultimately stretched from upcountry Georgia to eastern Texas. In fact, more than half of the Americans who moved to the Southwest after 1815 were enslaved blacks.

With a growing free black population in northern and border states, 95 percent of the country's African American population was enslaved in 1820. Generalizing about African American experience under slavery is especially difficult because the oppressive slave system all but entirely eliminated the avenues for slaves to honestly express themselves in public. There can be absolutely no doubt, however, that enslaved people rejected their status and that their constant resistance in small ways and large made white masters resort to terrifying violence in order to make the slave system work.

Enslaved people's greatest act of collective resistance lay in the constant ways that they demonstrated their humanity and challenged the legitimacy of slavery. In the face of abominable conditions, enslaved African Americans created communities that gave meaning and purpose to their lives. At the heart of black communities lay two central institutions: family and religion. Slave marriages were not legally recognized in slave societies and as many as a third of all slave marriages were broken up by masters. In spite of this, enslaved African Americans formed long-term marital bonds.

Furthermore, the severity of slave life encouraged the development of extended kin relations. Since young adults were especially likely to be sold, parents and children were frequently separated leading most slave communities to act collectively by respecting all elders and nurturing all children like one large family.

Religion also provided a major source of support to enslaved African Americans. It was only in the early 19th century that significant numbers of slaves became Christians. Partly this represents an increasing Americanization among African Americans, many of whom had now lived in the New World for several generations.

But to be a black Christian was not necessarily to have the same values as a white Christian. Slaves undoubtedly adjusted Christianity to fit their own life experiences and there is little doubt that Moses' leading the enslaved Israelites to the Promised Land had special resonance among American slaves. Black spirituals like "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel ... and why not every man" had similar subversive messages.

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The transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy took more than a century in the United States, but that long development entered its first phase from the 1790s through the 1830s. The Industrial Revolution had begun in Britain during the mid-18th century, but the American colonies lagged far behind the mother country in part because the abundance of land and scarcity of labor in the New World reduced interest in expensive investments in machine production. Nevertheless, with the shift from hand-made to machine-made products a new era of human experience began where increased productivity created a much higher standard of living than had ever been known in the pre-industrial world.

The start of the American Industrial Revolution is often attributed to Samuel Slater who opened the first industrial mill in the United States in 1790 with a design that borrowed heavily from a British model. Slater's pirated technology greatly increased the speed with which cotton thread could be spun into yarn. While he introduced a vital new technology to the United States, the economic takeoff of the Industrial Revolution required several other elements before it would transform American life.

Another key to the rapidly changing economy of the early Industrial Revolution were new organizational strategies to increase productivity. This had begun with the "outwork system" whereby small parts of a larger production process were carried out in numerous individual homes. This organizational reform was especially important for shoe and boot making. However, the chief organizational breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution was the "factory system" where work was performed on a large scale in a single centralized location. Among the early innovators of this approach were a group of businessmen known as the Boston Associates who recruited thousands of New England farm girls to operate the machines in their new factories.

The most famous of their tightly controlled mill towns was Lowell, Massachusetts, which opened in 1823. The use of female factory workers brought advantages to both employer and employee. The Boston Associates preferred female labor because they paid the young girls less than men. These female workers, often called "Lowell girls," benefited by experiencing a new kind of independence outside the traditional male-dominated family farm.

The rise of wage labor at the heart of the Industrial Revolution also exploited working people in new ways. The first strike among textile workers protesting wage and factory conditions occurred in 1824 and even the model mills of Lowell faced large strikes in the 1830s.

Dramatically increased production, like that in the New England's textile mills, were key parts of the Industrial Revolution, but required at least two more elements for widespread impact. First, an expanded system of credit was necessary to help entrepreneurs secure the capital needed for large-scale and risky new ventures. Second, an improved transportation system was crucial for raw materials to reach the factories and manufactured goods to reach consumers. State governments played a key role encouraging both new banking institutions and a vastly increased transportation network. This latter development is often termed the Market Revolution because of the central importance of creating more efficient ways to transport people, raw materials, and finished goods.

Alexander Hamilton's Bank of the United States received a special national charter from the U.S. Congress in 1791. It enjoyed great success, which led to the opening of branch offices in eight major cities by 1805. Although economically successful, a government-chartered national bank remained politically controversial. As a result, President Madison did not submit the bank's charter for renewal in 1811. The key legal and governmental support for economic development in the early 19th century ultimately came at the state, rather than the national, level. When the national bank closed, state governments responded by creating over 200 state-chartered banks within five years. Indeed, this rapid expansion of credit and the banks' often unregulated activities helped to exacerbate an economic collapse in 1819 that resulted in a six-year depression. The dynamism of a capitalist economy creates rapid expansion that also comes with high risks that include regular periods of sharp economic downturns.

The use of a state charter to provide special benefits for a private corporation was a crucial and controversial innovation in republican America. The idea of granting special privileges to certain individuals seemed to contradict the republican ideal of equality before the law. Even more than through rapidly expanded banking institutions, state support for internal transportation improvements lay at the heart of the nation's new political economy. Road, bridge, and especially canal building was an expensive venture, but most state politicians supported using government-granted legal privileges and funds to help create the infrastructure that would stimulate economic development.

The most famous state-led creation of the Market Revolution was undoubtedly New York's Erie Canal. Begun in 1817, the 364-mile man-made waterway flowed between Albany on the Hudson River and Buffalo on Lake Erie. The canal connected the eastern seaboard and the Old Northwest. The great success of the Erie Canal set off a canal frenzy that, along with the development of the steamboat, created a new and complete national water transportation network by 1840.

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The United States changed dramatically in its first half century. In 1776 the U.S. consisted of thirteen colonies clustered together on the eastern seaboard. By 1821 eleven new states had been added from Maine to Louisiana. This geographic growth and especially the political incorporation of the new states demonstrated that the United States had resolved a fundamental question about how to expand. This growth not only built upon the Louisiana Purchase, but included military intervention in Spanish Florida which the United States then claimed by treaty in 1819.

The new shape of the nation required thinking about the United States in new ways. For instance, a classic text on American geography in 1793 taught that the United States was composed of three basic divisions: northern, middle, and southern. But the 1819 edition of that same book included a new region because western states and territories needed recognition as well. By 1820, over two million Americans lived west of the Appalachian Mountains.

The growing regional distinctiveness of American life was complex. Four basic regions with distinct ways of life had developed along the eastern seaboard in the colonial period. Starting in the north, they were New England (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut); the Mid-Atlantic (New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania); the Chesapeake (Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia); and the Lower South (the Carolinas and Georgia). As people from these regions joined new immigrants to the United States in settling the west, they established additional distinctive regions that combined frontier conditions with ways of doing things from their previous places of origin.

The newly settled western lands of this period can be grouped in several ways, but four basic divisions were most evident: the border area (Kentucky and Tennessee, the first trans-Appalachian states to join the nation), the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois), the Old Southwest (Alabama and Mississippi), and the trans-Mississippi River west (Louisiana and Missouri).

The new shape of the nation reflected much more than just physical expansion. This period also witnessed dramatic economic and religious changes. A new capitalist economy enormously expanded wealth and laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution that flourished later in the 19th century. The great opportunities of economic development also brought new hardships for many people, especially those who toiled as slaves under the startlingly new system of cotton slavery that boomed in the early 19th century.

A dynamic religious movement known as the Second Great Awakening also transformed the nation in this period. Although springing from internal spiritual convictions, the new character of American Protestantism in the early 19th century reinforced the modern economic and political developments that created the new nation by the end of the 1820s.

The United States had claimed political independence in 1776, but its ability to make that claim a reality required at least another fifty years to be fully settled. The War of 1812, however fitfully, had demonstrated American military independence, but breaking free of the economic and cultural dominance of Great Britain would prove to be longer and more complicated struggles. In 1823 when President Monroe declared that the entire western hemisphere is "henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers," it was a claim made without the power to back it up. Although his Monroe Doctrine became a central plank of U.S. foreign policy only at the end of the century, Americans had clearly fashioned a bold new national identity by the 1820s.

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The Americans were angry with the British for many reasons.

• The British didn't withdraw from American territory in the Great Lakes region as they agreed to in the 1783 Treaty of Paris.
• Britain kept aiding Native Americans.
• Britain would not sign favorable commercial agreements with the U.S.
• Impressment: Britain claimed the right to take any British sailors serving on American merchant ships. In practice, the British took many American sailors and forced them to serve on British ships. This was nothing short of kidnapping.
• In 1807, The British ship Leopard fired on the American frigate Chesapeake. Other American merchant ships came under harassment from the British navy.
• War Hawks in Congress pushed for the conflict.

But the United States was not really ready for war. The Americans hoped to get a jump on the British by conquering Canada in the campaigns of 1812 and 1813. Initial plans called for a three-pronged offensive: from Lake Champlain to Montreal; across the Niagara frontier; and into Upper Canada from Detroit.

The first American attacks were disjointed and failed. Detroit was surrendered to the British in August 1812. The Americans also lost the Battle of Queenston Heights in October. Nothing much happened along Lake Champlain and the American forces withdrew in late November.

In 1813, the Americans tried an intricate attack on Montreal by a combined land and sea operation. That failed.

One bright spot for the Americans was Oliver Hazard Perry's destruction of the British fleet on Lake Erie in September 1813 that forced the British to flee from Detroit. The British were overtaken in October defeated at the battle of the Thames by Americans led by William Henry Harrison, the future President It was here that the Shawnee chief, and British ally, Tecumseh fell.

Minor victories aside, things looked bleak for the Americans in 1814. The British were able to devote more men and ships to the American arena after having defeated Napoleon.

England conceived of a three-pronged attack focusing on controlling major waterways. Control of the Hudson River in New York would seal off New England; seizing New Orleans would seal up the Mississippi River and seriously disrupt the farmers and traders of the Midwest; and by attacking the Chesapeake Bay, the British hoped to threaten Washington, D.C. and put an end to the war and pressure the U.S. into ceding territory in a peace treaty.

All the while, support for the war waned in America. Associated costs skyrocketed. New England talked of succeeding from the Union. At the Hartford Convention, delegates proposed constitutional amendments that would limit the power of the executive branch of government.

So weak was American military opposition that the British sashayed into Washington D.C. after winning the Battle of Bladensburg and burned most of the public buildings including the White House. President Madison had to flee the city. His wife Dolley gathered invaluable national objects and escaped with them at the last minute. It was the nadir of the war.

But the Americans put up a strong opposition in Baltimore and the British were forced to pull back from that city. In the north, about 10,000 British army veterans advanced into the United States via Montreal: their goal was New York City. With American fortunes looking their bleakest, American Captain Thomas MacDonough won the naval battle of Lake Champlain destroying the British fleet. The British army, fearful of not being supplied by the British navy, retreated into Canada.

The War of 1812 came to an end largely because the British public had grown tired of the sacrifice and expense of their twenty-year war against France. Now that Napoleon was all but finally defeated, the minor war against the United States in North America lost popular support. Negotiations began in August 1814 and on Christmas Eve the Treaty of Ghent was signed in Belgium. The treaty called for the mutual restoration of territory based on pre-war boundaries and with the European war now over, the issue of American neutrality had no significance.

In effect, the treaty didn't change anything and hardly justified three years of war and the deep divide in American politics that it exacerbated.

Popular memory of the War of 1812 might have been quite so dour had it not been for a major victory won by American forces at New Orleans on January 8, 1815. Although the peace treaty had already been signed, news of it had not yet arrived on the battlefront where General Andrew Jackson led a decisive victory resulting in 700 British casualties versus only 13 American deaths. Of course, the Battle of New Orleans had no military or diplomatic significance, but it did allow Americans to swagger with the claim of a great win.

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In the War of 1812 the United States once again fought against the British and their Indian allies. Some historians see the conflict as a Second War for American Independence.

Furthermore, the three-year war marks a traditional boundary between the early republic and early national periods. The former period had strong ties to the more hierarchical colonial world of the 18th century, while post-war developments would move in dynamic new directions that contributed to a more autonomous American society and culture. Although the War of 1812 serves as an important turning point in the development of an independent United States, the war itself was mostly a political and military disaster for the country.

The U.S. Congress was far from unanimous in its declaration of war. America's initial invasion of Canada (then ruled by England) in the summer of 1812 was repulsed by Tecumseh and the British. Although Tecumseh would be killed in battle the following fall, the U.S. was unable to mount a major invasion of Canada because of significant domestic discord over war policy. Most importantly, the governors of most New England states refused to allow their state militias to join a campaign beyond state boundaries. Similarly, a promising young Congressman from New Hampshire, Daniel Webster, actually discouraged enlistment in the U.S. army.

British military dominance was even clearer in the Atlantic and this naval superiority allowed it to deliver a shaming blow to the fragile United States in the summer of 1814. With Napoleon's French forces failing in Europe, Britain committed more of its resources to the American war and in August sailed up the Potomac River to occupy Washington D.C. and burn the White House. On the edge of national bankruptcy and with the capital largely in ashes, total American disaster was averted when the British failed to capture Ft. McHenry that protected nearby Baltimore.

Watching the failed attack on Ft. McHenry as a prisoner of the British, Francis Scott Key wrote a poem later called "The Star-Spangled Banner" which was set to the tune of an English drinking song. It became the official national anthem of the United States of America in 1931.

The most critical moment of the War of 1812, however, may not have been a battle, but rather a political meeting called by the Massachusetts legislature. Beginning in December 1814, 26 Federalists representing New England states met at the Hartford Convention to discuss how to reverse the decline of their party and the region. Although manufacturing was booming and contraband trade brought riches to the region, "Mr. Madison's War" and its expenses proved hard to swallow for New Englanders.

Holding this meeting during the war was deeply controversial. Although more moderate leaders voted down extremists who called for New England to secede from the United States, most Republicans believed that the Hartford Convention was an act of treason.

Federalist New England's opposition to national policies had been demonstrated in numerous ways from circumventing trade restrictions as early as 1807, to voting against the initial declaration of war in 1812, refusing to contribute state militia to the national army, and now its representatives were moving on a dangerous course of semi-autonomy during war time.

If a peace treaty ending the War of 1812 had not been signed while the Hartford Convention was still meeting, New England may have seriously debated seceeding from the Union.

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In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, the first white settlers in America inhabited the eastern seaboard. There the whites either made treaties with the Native American groups to buy land or they forcibly took Indian land. By the Revolution's end and on into the early 19th century, Native Americans were being displaced across the Appalachians and toward what is today the Midwest. For these exiled groups, there were few places left to go.

Outright military conflict with native groups in the northwest preceded the formal declaration of war in 1812. In fact, the "western war" in many ways represented a continuation of the American Revolution with many autonomous Indian nations again choosing to ally with the British against Americans who fundamentally threatened their survival.

The American invasion from the east deeply disrupted native groups and generally caused a sharp division within Indian nations between "accommodationists," who chose to adopt some Euro-American ways versus "traditionalists," who called for native purity by rejecting contact with whites. Both sides were authentically Native American, but they each chose different routes to deal with a terrible situation.

Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, Shawnee brothers, were leading Indian traditionalists, and together they crafted a novel resurgence among native peoples in the west. Tecumseh, a political and military leader, is the better known of the two, but it was their combined skills that made them especially powerful. Tecumseh had fought at Fallen Timbers in 1794, but refused to participate in the peace negotiations that produced the Treaty of Grenville the following year. Instead, he removed to east-central Indiana where he led a band of militant young warriors.

His younger brother Tenskwatawa provided the essential vision to launch a much broader Indian social movement. Also known as the Prophet, Tenskwatawa combined traditional native beliefs with some aspects of Christianity to call for a pan-Indian resistance against American intruders from the east. He explained that when native peoples joined together and rejected all contact with Americans and their ways (from alcohol to private property), God would restore Indian power by "overturning the land so that all the white people will be covered and you alone shall inhabit the land."

Tecumseh gradually converted to the Prophet's vision and together they built a broad movement that revived the Western Confederacy of the 1790s and even reached out to southern tribes with stronger accommodationist factions. In 1808 they founded Prophetstown at the sacred junction of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers, from which they built a strong Indian alliance that directly challenged the U.S. government.

This growing Indian force threatened American plans to move west and seemed especially dangerous since it received economic and military support from the British in Canada. In November 1811 the U.S. destroyed Prophetstown during the Battle of Tippecanoe, under the leadership of future president William Henry Harrison. Tecumseh was away at the time recruiting southern Creeks to the confederacy.

Tecumseh's successful military resistance continued and threatened white settlements throughout the northwest. Tecumseh had so profoundly challenged U.S. plans in the northwest that when he was finally killed at the Battle of the Thames in October 1813 it was seen as a major American victory even though it meant quite little strategically.

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While western movement and policies were reshaping the republic, European wars also presented a major challenge to the new country. The Napoleonic Wars (1802-1815) were a continuation of the conflict begun in the 1790s when Great Britain lead a coalition of European powers against Revolutionary France, though France was now led by the brilliant military strategist Napoleon Bonaparte. As had also been true in the 1790s, neither European superpower respected the neutrality of the United States. Instead, both tried to prevent U.S. ships from carrying goods to their enemy. Both Britain and France imposed blockades to limit American merchants, though the dominant British navy was clearly more successful.

In response to this denial of American sovereignty, President Jefferson and his secretary of state James Madison crafted an imaginative, but fundamentally flawed, policy of economic coercion. Their Embargo of 1807 prevented U.S. ships from any trade with Europe in the belief that dependence on American goods would soon force France and England to honor American neutrality. The plan backfired, however, as the Republican leaders failed to understand how deeply committed the superpowers were to carrying on their war despite its high costs.

The Embargo not only failed diplomatically, but also caused enormous domestic dissent. American shippers, who were primarily concentrated in Federalist New England, generally circumvented the unpopular law. Its toll was clearly marked in the sharp decline of American imports from 108 million dollars worth of goods in 1806 to just 22 million in 1808. This unsuccessful diplomatic strategy that mostly punished Americans helped to spur a Federalist revival in the elections of 1808 and 1812. Nevertheless, Republicans from Virginia continued to hold the presidency as James Madison replaced Jefferson in 1808.

Madison faced difficult circumstances in office with increasing Indian violence in the west and war-like conditions on the Atlantic. These combined to push him away from his policy of economic coercion toward an outright declaration of war. This intensification was favored by a group of westerners and southerners in Congress called "War Hawks," who were led by Henry Clay of Kentucky.

Most historians now agree that the War of 1812 was "a western war with eastern labels." By this they mean that the real causes of the war stemmed from desire for control of western Indian lands and clear access to trade through New Orleans. Further, the issue of national sovereignty, so clearly denied by British rejection of American free trade on the Atlantic, provided a more honorable rationale for war. Even with the intense pressure of the War Hawks, the United States entered the war hesitantly and with especially strong opposition from Federalist New England. When Congress declared war in June 1812, its heavily divided votes (19 to 13 in the Senate and 79 to 49 in the House) suggest that the republic entered the war as a divided nation.

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Even before Jefferson had completed the Louisiana Purchase, he had begun to make plans for a bold journey to explore the vast interior of North America that remained completely unknown to American citizens. That plan took on new importance once the United States had acquired the huge new territory from France.

In May 1804, a group of 50 Americans led by Meriwether Lewis, Jefferson's personal secretary, and William Clark, an army officer, headed northwest along the Missouri River from St. Louis. Their varied instructions reveal the multiple goals that Jefferson hoped the expedition could accomplish. While trying to find a route across the continent, they were also expected to make detailed observations of the natural resources and geography of the west. Furthermore, they were to establish good relations with native groups in an attempt to disrupt British dominance of the lucrative Indian fur trade of the continental interior.

By mid-October 1804, the Lewis and Clark expedition reached the Mandan villages on the banks of the upper Missouri River in present-day North Dakota. Here they found several large, successful settlements with an overall population of about 5,000 people. The Mandan villages were an important trade center that brought together many different native groups as well as a handful of multilingual Frenchmen. The expedition chose to spend the winter in this attractive location and it proved to be a crucial decision for the success of their journey.

During the winter they established good relations with the Mandans and received a great deal of information about the best route for heading west to the Pacific Ocean. The expedition also hired several of the Frenchmen who lived among the Mandans to serve as guides and translators. Along with them came a fifteen-year-old Shoshone named Sacajawea who was married to one of the Frenchmen. Her knowledge of the west and language skills played an important role in the success of the expedition. Additionally, the presence of Sacajawea and her baby helped assure other Indian groups encountered further west that this could not be a war party.

From the Mandan villages the now enlarged expedition headed west to cross the Rockies, the highest mountain range in North America. By the winter of 1805 they had reached the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia River, becoming the first U.S. citizens to succeed in a trans-continental crossing north of Mexico. They were not, however, the first whites to accomplish this feat since Alexander Mackenzie had done so for a British-Canadian fur-trading company in 1793. Nevertheless, the Columbia River proved a much easier route than the one Mackenzie had taken a decade earlier. When the long overdue expedition finally returned to St. Louis in September 1806, they were celebrated as heroes who had accomplished an extraordinary feat.

The expedition combined several qualities from scientific and military to trade and diplomatic, but the underlying motivation was prompted by Thomas Jefferson's widely shared belief that the future prosperity of the republic required the expansion of yeoman farmers in the west. This noble dream for what Jefferson called an "empire of liberty" also had harsh consequences. For instance, Fort Clark was soon established at the Mandan villages. At first it provided the Mandans with a useful alternative to trading with the British and also offered military support from their traditional native enemies the Sioux.

However, Americans at the fort unwittingly brought new diseases to the area that decimated the local native population. Where the Mandans had a thriving and sophisticated trading center when Lewis and Clark arrived in 1804, by the late 1830s their total population had been reduced to less than 150.

The nation's growth combined tragedy and triumph at every turn.

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Sculpture by Rusty Talbot

Land. Lots of land.

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 intensified American migration to the west that was already well underway. Anglo-American settlement in the 18th century had largely been confined to the eastern seaboard. It made its boldest inroads where rivers allowed easy internal transportation. As a result the chief population centers of early North America were clustered on the coast or along its major inland waterways.

In 1790 the fast-growing population of the United States was 3.9 million, but only 5% of Americans lived west of the Appalachian Mountains that run from Maine to Georgia. By 1820, however, the total U.S. population had already reached 9.6 million and fully 25 percent of them lived west of the Appalachians in nine new states and three territories.

Cincinnati, in present-day southwest Ohio, provides a good example of the speed of western expansion during the early republic. Founded in 1788 as a fort to repel Shawnee and Miami Indian attacks, it served a chiefly military purpose until the major Indian defeat at Fallen Timbers in 1794. Soon thereafter, however, its location 450 miles downriver from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, made it a strategic trade location for agricultural products from newly settled farm lands. Although its population was a modest 750 in 1800, by 1810 that figure had tripled and vastly larger numbers passed through Cincinnati on their way to settle the "Old Northwest" of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

Western migration had become central to the American way of life and as much as two-thirds of all western families moved every decade. Interestingly, Cincinnati's most important trade connection was not with relatively nearby (but upriver) Pittsburgh, but instead lay 1500 miles south along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers at the great port of New Orleans. The most efficient route to market remained along waterways and access to New Orleans remained crucial for the western economy and its settlement.

This rapid population growth and geographic expansion caused a great deal of conflict. Native Americans in the west resisted American intrusion and fought renewed wars in the early 19th century. Furthermore, the expansion of plantation slavery beyond the coastal southeast meant that huge numbers of slaves were forcibly moved to new territories. In spite of these enormous human costs, the overwhelming majority of white Americans saw western expansion as a major opportunity. To them, access to western land offered the promise of independence and prosperity to anyone willing to meet the hardships of frontier life.

Most politicians of the era believed that the health of the republic depended upon providing affordable land to ordinary white Americans. Among Jeffersonian Republicans most popular policies was an expansionist agenda that encouraged western development. This played an important part in cementing the Democratic-Republican party's strength in the south and west.

Even among white settlers who benefited most from western migration, the expansion of the nation caused major alterations in American life. For instance, getting crops to market required improved transportation. States responded by giving charters to private companies to build roads (called turnpikes since they charged a fee), bridges, canals, or to operate ferry services. The state gave these companies special legal privileges because they provided a service that could benefit a wide segment of the population.

Nevertheless, many people opposed these special benefits as contradicting republican notions of equal opportunity for all. These new transportation projects reshaped the American landscape, but the larger economic promise for most of the new western lands lay in the massive inland rivers of the Ohio, Tennessee, and Mississippi, all of which ultimately flowed south to New Orleans.

Long before newspaper editors such as John Soule and Horace Greeley were urging readers to "Go West, young man," Americans were doing exactly that.

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Expansion. Battles with Indian nations. The War of 1812. Welcome to America under Republican rule at the onset of the 19th century.

The United States underwent dramatic changes during the period of Democratic-Republican (also called Jeffersonian Republican, or simply Republican) political leadership in the first decades of the 19th century. The republic's expansion to the west and renewed military conflict with Indian nations and Great Britain each posed a fundamental challenge to the fragile new republic. All three of these factors played a role in the coming of the War of 1812.

Although the war itself had no decisive outcome, it did serve as a turning point in the history of the young republic. The United States survived a second war with its former colonial ruler and in the process called forth a national effort that helped Americans from distinct regions pull closer together. The war years also led to the final disintegration of the Federalists, whose strength in New England, which, to many, indicated a regional loyalty in conflict with national sentiments given new importance by the war.

The United States developed in a more distinctly American fashion after the War of 1812. The years of the early republic, from the end of the Revolutionary war in 1783 to the end of what is sometimes called the Second War for American Independence in 1815, had itself been a period of enormous change that included dramatic political innovations of state and federal constitutions as well as the surge of western settlement.

America was growing up.

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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty..."

The activities of a literate slave named Gabriel in Richmond, Virginia, present a final critical view of Jeffersonian America. At the same time Gabriel also shows how fully African Americans embraced central currents of American politics and culture. Gabriel remains a difficult figure to fully reconstruct from surviving historical evidence. In fact, his last name is not definitively known, though he is usually referred to as Gabriel Prosser, after the name of the man who owned him.

Gabriel was a skilled artisan with several advantages over most field-working slaves of his day. Partly due to his skill as a blacksmith, Gabriel was "hired out" to work in many different places and enjoyed more autonomy and mobility than most plantation slaves. As an artisan, Gabriel was among the broad group of urban workers whose actions played a crucial role causing the American Revolution. As an occupational group, they were among the Revolution's biggest winners.

However, as an African American and a slave the benefits of the Revolution were not extended to Gabriel. Nevertheless, the republican ideology of the Revolution and the anti-elitist thrust of the Democratic-Republicans helped shape Gabriel's vision in leading a slave revolt.

The organizational requirements of a conspiracy to overthrow slavery necessarily shrouded the movement in secrecy. Apparently, however, Gabriel, and a small group of artisan leaders, expected about 1,000 slaves to follow them in a well-coordinated attack upon Richmond that targeted Federalists and merchants who were the most prominent residents of the city.

Gabriel expected "the poor white people" as well as "the most redoubtable republicans" to join his cause to create a more democratic republic in Virginia . He especially identified Quakers, Methodists, and Frenchmen as those whites who were most "friendly to liberty." The purpose of the rebels was clearly expressed in a banner under which they planned to march, which eloquently stated "Death or Liberty." The assault planned for August 30, 1800, however, never came together. Torrential rain caused confusion and a traitor from within the group warned white authorities of the impending attack.

Gabriel's careful planning demonstrates that some enslaved people actively resisted slavery and were well informed about the world beyond their own harsh circumstances. Given the heightened political violence of the 1790s, Gabriel believed that he could forge an alliance with some Democratic-Republicans against a common Federalist enemy. The timing of the revolt, just before the 1800 election, makes it a radical expression of anti-Federalism. Gabriel also secretly met with two Frenchmen who seemed to have promised him international assistance. Gabriel was well aware that the French Revolution had helped trigger the great slave revolt in Haiti in 1791. Perhaps the charismatic and talented Gabriel could have become a successful black political leader like Toussaint L'Ouverture.

Instead, Gabriel's slave conspiracy ended in severe repression. While no whites were killed in the revolt that never really got started, the state of Virginia executed 27 blacks, including Gabriel, by public hanging. Whites responded to the planned revolt, and another one linked to it in 1802, by tightening legal restrictions on slaves. For a brief period in the late 18th century white Virginians had modified certain elements of slavery.

Now many whites began to think that making the system slightly more humane had encouraged black resistance. As a result some of the advantages that slaves like Gabriel possessed were made illegal. For instance, literacy and allowing slaves to "hire out" for work in varied settings became illegal. Similarly, the Virginia legislature attempted to prevent enslaved people from piloting boats, a position from which they could travel too freely and learn about changes in the outside world that threatened white masters.

This newly repressive slave system was a tragic outcome for African-American collective action that had intended to liberate slaves. The reinvigorated slave societies of the south thrived in the 19th century and only ended with the massive violence of the Civil War. Nevertheless, the hypocrisy of slavery in a new nation dedicated to democracy was more obvious than ever before in American history. Though the brutal slave regime would continue to try and dehumanize the people it enslaved, it never fully succeeded.

As one member of Gabriel's Rebellion explained during the trial that would ultimately sentence him to death, "I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause."

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The Democratic-Republican victory in the 1800 election began a long run of Republican political success. In spite of Federalists' departure from most elective offices, they remained a powerful force in American life especially through their leading position among federal judges. In the final months of Adams' administration he enlarged the federal judiciary and appointed many new judges.

In the view of Gouverneur Morris, a Federalist senator from New York, this created an independent judiciary necessary "to save the people from their most dangerous enemy, themselves."

In sharp contrast, Democratic-Republicans were appalled by the "midnight appointments" that tried to continue Federalist influence despite their election loss. In Jefferson's view, the Federalists "retired into the judiciary as a stronghold . . . and from that battery all the works of Republicanism are to be beaten down and destroyed." As in so many areas, the two political parties fundamentally disagreed.

The most influential of Adams' final judicial appointments in 1801 was naming John Marshall as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He held that position until his death in 1835 and shaped the court's decisions and dramatically raised its stature. He also defined the basic relationship of the judiciary to the rest of the federal government. His forceful actions as Chief Justice set the Supreme Court on a course it has continued to follow for the next two centuries. Marshall was guided by a strong commitment to judicial power and by a belief in the supremacy of national over state legislatures. His judicial vision was very much in keeping with the Federalist political program.

John Marshall's earliest landmark decision as Chief Justice came in Marbury v. Madison (1803) and demonstrates his sophisticated leadership of the Court. The issue at stake was the validity of the Federalists' last-minute expansion of the judiciary in 1801, but Marshall used the case to make a much broader statement about the relationship between the distinct branches of the federal government.

When James Madison, Jefferson's secretary of state, refused to deliver several commissions for new justices, they petitioned the Supreme Court to compel the executive to act. Marshall's written decision on behalf of the unanimous Court found that the petitioners were entitled to their commissions, but refused to take the legal action that they wanted. Rather, the court declared that the Judiciary Act of 1789, which had given the court such power, was inconsistent with the Constitution and therefore invalid.

This was a complex decision. In the specific matter before the Court, the decision limited judicial power. However, the more fundamental issue that it decided was to insist on the court's authority to declare an act of Congress void if found to be in conflict with the Constitution. As Marshall explained, "it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." Since Marbury v. Madison the Supreme Court has been the final decision maker regarding the Constitutionality of Congressional legislation.

The Marshall Court, and this decision in particular, established the principle of "judicial review" whereby Congressional laws and executive actions may be judged by the Supreme Court to be within the bounds of the Constitution. In keeping with John Marshall's Federalist views, he generally favored strong government action and especially supported the supremacy of the federal government over state authorities.

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The Louisiana Purchase and rapid western expansion were crucial developments during the early republic. But attention there can misleadingly suggest that the United States rapidly assumed the shape we know today. Focusing on how the capital city of the federal government changed in the early years of the nation reminds us of the limited nature of the early central government. Like so many other elements of the new nation, even the most basic features of the capital city were unsettled. President Washington first took office in New York City, but, when reelected in 1792, the capital had already moved to Philadelphia where it would remain for a decade. Fittingly, Jefferson was the first president to be inaugurated in the new and lasting capital of Washington, D.C. in March 1801.

The site of the new capital was the product of political compromise. As part of the struggle over Hamilton's financial policy, Congress supported the Bank of the United States which would be headquartered in Philadelphia. In exchange the special District of Columbia, to be under Congressional control, would be built on the Potomac River. The compromise represented a symbolic politics of the very highest order. While Hamilton's policies encouraged the consolidation of economic power in the hands of bankers, financiers, and merchants who predominated in the urban northeast, the political capital was to be in a more southerly and agricultural region apart from those economic elites.

Once the site for the new capital was selected in 1790, President Washington retained Pierre Charles L'Enfant, a French engineer and former officer in the Continental Army, to design and lay out the new capital city. His grand plan gave pride of place to the capitol building which would stand on a hill overlooking the flatlands around the Potomac. A long open mall connected the legislative building to the river and was to be bordered by varied stately buildings. Radiating out from the capital were a number of broad avenues one of which would connect with the president's house. Much of L'Enfant's grand vision was ignored during the nineteenth century, but starting in 1901 the plan was vigorously reborn.

Today, Washington, D.C., is an impressive capital city that physically expresses many central values of the modern United States. It gloriously honors the nation's commitment to democracy and political life in impressive government buildings. The capital also maintains the nation's historical memory in monuments along the mall that commemorate key events and people. Finally, the city also announces the nation's commitment to knowledge and human achievement in the spectacular Smithsonian museums. At the same time the capital also symbolizes less celebrated aspects of modern America. Washington, D.C.'s impressive center around the mall is surrounded by urban poverty, a crisis facing most large American cities. The gulf separating American success and failure is on display nowhere more sharply.

Today's Washington, D.C., however, is a far cry from the humble place that Jefferson entered in 1801. Then just beginning to emerge from a swampy location along the Potomac, the city claimed only 5,000 inhabitants, many of them temporary residents to serve the incoming politicians. The Senate building had been completed, but the building for the House of Representatives was still incomplete as was the president's house. Jefferson took office while living in a boardinghouse! The limited physical stature of the capital city matched the modest scope of the federal government in the early republic which only included 130 officials. In fact, with the exception of the postal service, the national government provided almost no services that reached ordinary people in their everyday lives. For most people in the early republic the most meaningful political decisions were made at the state and local level.