Time Period #4 [1800-1848]
The new republic struggled to define and extend democratic ideals in the face of rapid economic, territorial, and demographic changes.
After a decade of intense partisan conflict, exacerbated by strong differences of opinion over maintaining our neutrality with regard to the Anglo-French wars, Jefferson, Madison and their supporters prevailed in the Election of 1800 and tried to put an end to both "faction" and Hamilton's policies. Ironically, Madison and his supporters not only found it necessary to go to war in 1812 to defend our neutral rights, in the after-math of that war they abandoned their previous scruples about strengthening the power of the central government and embraced many of the measures they had so strongly opposed in 1790 and 1791. In 1816 they approved the nation’s first protective tariff and the rechartering of the Bank of the United States.
National feeling increased markedly as a result of the War of 1812, especially after Andrew Jack-son's decisive victory at the Battle of New Orleans. However, sectional tensions also increased significantly as resentment at the policies of the Second Bank of the United States during the Panic of 1819 grew stronger, divisions over slavery as both a moral and a political issue grew wider and Southern objections to the protective tariff led to the revival of the states right doctrine of nullification, first proposed in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-1799. The Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice John Marshall, asserted its authority as a co-equal branch of the federal government with primary responsibility for interpreting the Constitution. In a long series of often unanimous decisions, beginning with Marbury v. Madison (1803) and continuing through Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816), McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), the Mar-shall Court repeatedly asserted the superiority of federal power over state laws and the federal over the state courts, while reaffirming the primacy of the judiciary in determining the meaning of the Constitution.
After a brief respite from partisan politics during the "Era of Good Feelings," political conflict intensified as Andrew Jackson and his supporters built a new and stronger political organization in an effort to de-fend democracy and the interests of the "common man" against those who were allegedly using the federal government to secure monopolistic privileges. Popular participation in politics reached new heights as new campaign tactics, stronger, more widespread organization led by professional politicians and increasing involvement in a money economy combined to give birth to a second, better organized national party system.
Because the major parties did not address many of the issues most important to ordinary Americans, a variety of reform movements in the form of voluntary associations were organized during the generation after the War of 1812. Women, inspired to improve society by the teachings of evangelical Protestant ministers during the Second Great Awakening, were among the most dedicated and determined reformers, taking part in organizations that worked to feed the poor, care for the mentally ill, abolish slavery, institute moral re-form, encourage temperance and promote equal rights for women. The lives of many women were also significantly altered by the market revolution, which caused an increasing separation between home and workplace, and helped foster dramatic transformations in gender and family roles and expectations.
Westward expansion in the aftermath of the War of 1812 accelerated the nascent "Transportation Revolution." Roads and turnpikes were succeeded after 1815 by the increased use of steamboats on the nation's rivers and an era of canal building inspired by the success of New York's Erie Canal, completed in 1825. Railroad building increased significantly after 1840, but only after 1850 did railroads surpass canals and steamboats as the primary means of transporting goods and passengers in the United States.
Market Revolution:
Regional economic specialization, especially the cultivation of cotton in the South, shaped settlement patterns and the national and international economy. Southern cotton furnished the raw material for manufacturing in the Northeast, while the growth in cotton production and trade promoted the development of national economic ties, shaped the international economy, and fueled the internal slave trade. Despite some governmental and private efforts to create a unified national economy, most notably the American System, the shift to market production linked the North and the Midwest more closely than either was linked to the South. Regional interests continued to trump national concerns as the basis for many political leaders’ positions on economic issues including slavery, the national bank, tariffs, and internal improvements.
Slavery and the Southern People
While some Americans celebrated their nation’s progress toward a new, unified national culture, a number of groups of the nation’s inhabitants developed distinctive cultures of their own. Many white Americans in the South asserted their regional identity through pride in the institution of slavery, insisting that the federal government should defend that institution. Enslaved and free African Americans, isolated at the bottom of the social hierarchy, created communities and strategies to protect their dignity and their family structures, even as some launched abolitionist and reform movements aimed at changing their status. Moreover, despite the outlawing of the international slave trade, the rise in the number of free African Americans in both the North and the South, and widespread discussion of various emancipation plans, the U.S. and many state governments continued to restrict African Americans’ citizenship possibilities, heightening the feeling among African Americans that they constituted a separate and distinct subculture.
The American acquisition of new lands in the West, beginning with the Louisiana Purchase, gave rise to a contest over the extension of slavery into the western territories as well as a series of attempts at nation-al compromise. The 1820 Missouri Compromise created a truce over the issue of slavery that gradually broke down after 1846, when confrontations over the expansion of slavery became increasingly bitter. In the meantime, over cultivation had already depleted arable land in the Southeast, spurring slaveholders to relocate their agricultural enterprises to the new Southwest, increasing sectional tensions over the institution of slavery and sparking a broad scale debate about how to set national goals, priorities, and strategies.
The revival and reform movements of the antebellum period made an indelible mark on the American landscape. The Second Great Awakening ignited Protestant spirits by connecting evangelical Christians in national networks of faith. Social reform spurred members of the middle class to promote national morality and the public good. Not all reform projects were equally successful, however. While the temperance movement made substantial inroads against the excesses of alcohol consumption, the abolitionist movement proved so divisive that it paved the way for sectional crisis. Yet participation in reform movements, regardless of their ultimate success, encouraged many Americans to see themselves in new ways. Black activists became a powerful voice in antislavery societies, for example, developing domestic and transnational connections to pursue the cause of liberty. Middle-class women’s dominant presence in the benevolent empire encouraged them to pursue a full-fledged women’s right movement that has lasted in various forms up through the present day. In their efforts to make the United States a more virtuous and moral nation, nineteenth-century reform activists developed cultural and institutional foundations for social change that have continued to reverberate through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.