Andrew Jackson, Manifest Destiny, and the Market Revolution 1800-1848

This unit covers one of the most transformative periods in American history, spanning nearly five decades of explosive territorial growth, democratic expansion, economic revolution, and profound social conflict. Between 1800 and 1848, the United States doubled and then nearly doubled again in territorial size, shifted from an agrarian republic to an emerging industrial economy, extended political participation to virtually all white men while simultaneously deepening the institution of slavery, and confronted fundamental questions about the nature of the Union, the rights of indigenous peoples, the status of women, and the morality of human bondage. Understanding this era requires grappling with contradictions that defined American life: a democracy that excluded the majority of its inhabitants, a republic that proclaimed liberty while practicing enslavement, a nation that celebrated progress while destroying indigenous civilizations, and an economy that promised opportunity while creating new forms of dependency and exploitation.

Jefferson and the Era of Good Feelings 1800-1824

Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution of 1800

The presidential election of 1800 represented a genuinely dramatic moment in world history. For the first time in modern political experience, a government transferred power peacefully from one political party to a rival party through electoral means. The Federalists, led by incumbent President John Adams, lost to Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party in an election that contemporaries called a revolution. Jefferson himself promoted this characterization, arguing that the election had rescued the republic from the monarchical tendencies of Federalist governance and restored the true principles of 1776.

What actually changed with Jefferson's election was more complicated and in some ways less revolutionary than the rhetoric suggested. The fundamental architecture of American government remained intact. The Constitution, the courts, the military establishment, the federal bureaucracy all continued functioning. Alexander Hamilton's financial system, including the national debt and the First Bank of the United States, survived Jefferson's presidency largely unmolested despite his theoretical objections. The most significant practical change was in political culture: Jefferson deliberately cultivated a more republican informality, walking to his inauguration rather than riding in a carriage, receiving foreign diplomats in his dressing gown, and opening the White House to ordinary citizens.

Jefferson's presidency did produce genuinely consequential changes in federal policy. He reduced the size of the military, cut government expenditures, and eliminated most internal taxes, particularly the hated whiskey tax. He allowed the Alien and Sedition Acts to expire and pardoned those convicted under them. He shifted the orientation of federal land policy to favor rapid settlement by small farmers rather than large speculators. And he prosecuted Aaron Burr for treason after Burr's mysterious western conspiracy, though Burr was ultimately acquitted.

The deeper contradiction of Jefferson's presidency was his inability to reconcile his strict constructionist constitutional philosophy with the practical demands of governance. Jefferson believed that the federal government possessed only those powers explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, and he had attacked Federalist programs on precisely these grounds. Yet when the greatest opportunity of his presidency presented itself, Jefferson exercised federal power in ways that had no clear constitutional basis whatsoever.

The Louisiana Purchase 1803

In 1803, the United States purchased from France an enormous tract of land extending from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border. The Louisiana Purchase, as it became known, doubled the territorial extent of the United States overnight, adding approximately 828,000 square miles of territory at a cost of roughly fifteen million dollars. Calculated per acre, this was one of the great real estate bargains in history, costing approximately three cents per acre for land that would eventually encompass or partially encompass fifteen American states.

The purchase came about through a fortunate convergence of circumstances. Napoleon Bonaparte had acquired Louisiana from Spain in 1800 with grandiose plans to build a French empire in the Americas centered on the sugar-producing island of Saint-Domingue, what is now Haiti. But the Haitian Revolution, in which enslaved people rose against French colonial rule under leaders including Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, destroyed the French army sent to suppress the rebellion. With Saint-Domingue lost, Louisiana became strategically pointless to Napoleon, who was also preparing to resume war in Europe and needed money. When American diplomats James Monroe and Robert Livingston went to Paris intending to purchase only New Orleans and the right of deposit for American commerce, they were stunned when French foreign minister Talleyrand offered them the entire territory.

Jefferson faced a genuine constitutional dilemma. His strict constructionism held that the federal government could only exercise powers explicitly granted by the Constitution. The Constitution said nothing about the federal government's power to acquire new territory, let alone to incorporate it into the Union. Jefferson himself drafted a constitutional amendment that would have authorized the purchase after the fact, but his advisors warned that Napoleon might change his mind if ratification were delayed, and congressional Republicans urged Jefferson to simply proceed. Jefferson ultimately swallowed his constitutional scruples and submitted the treaty to the Senate, which ratified it. The episode demonstrated that even the most principled constitutional theorist would adapt when confronted with transformative opportunity.

The Louisiana Purchase had consequences that extended far beyond the immediate acquisition of territory. It secured American control of the Mississippi River and the port of New Orleans, which were essential to the economic development of the trans-Appalachian West. It removed France as a potential rival power in North America. It opened vast western lands to American expansion, fueling the settler colonialism that would drive indigenous peoples from their homelands across the continent. And it created the sectional crisis over the expansion of slavery into new territories that would eventually destroy the Union.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition 1804-1806

To explore his new acquisition and to find a practical route to the Pacific, Jefferson commissioned the Corps of Discovery, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The expedition departed from Camp Dubois near St. Louis in May 1804 and returned to that same city in September 1806, having traveled approximately eight thousand miles and produced an invaluable record of the geography, ecology, indigenous peoples, and natural resources of the trans-Mississippi West.

The expedition succeeded largely because of the assistance of indigenous peoples whom Lewis and Clark encountered along the way. Most significantly, a young Shoshone woman named Sacagawea joined the expedition at the Mandan villages in what is now North Dakota, serving as interpreter, guide, and guarantor of peaceful intentions. The presence of a woman and infant with the Corps of Discovery signaled to many indigenous nations that the expedition was not a war party, facilitating the diplomatic contacts that allowed Lewis and Clark to traverse territories controlled by dozens of different peoples. The expedition also benefited enormously from the geographical knowledge and navigational expertise of indigenous informants, without whom the Corps would likely have perished in the Rocky Mountains.

Lewis and Clark returned with detailed journals, maps, and scientific specimens, as well as extensive information about the peoples they had encountered. Their work established American claims to the Oregon Country, opened the fur trade in the Rocky Mountains, and provided the first systematic scientific survey of the western interior of the continent. For subsequent generations of American settlers and the ideology of Manifest Destiny, the expedition served as proof that the continent could be traversed and thus possessed.

The Embargo Act and American Neutrality

Throughout Jefferson's presidency, the United States struggled to maintain neutrality in the titanic struggle between Napoleonic France and Great Britain. Both powers violated American neutral rights, seizing American ships, confiscating cargoes, and impressing American sailors into their respective navies. The British were particularly aggressive, given their naval supremacy following the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, which destroyed the combined French and Spanish fleet and left the Royal Navy master of the world's oceans.

The issue of impressment was especially infuriating to Americans. British naval officers claimed the right to stop American merchant ships and remove any sailors they identified as British subjects, and in practice they frequently pressed naturalized American citizens and even native-born Americans into service. The Chesapeake-Leopard affair of 1807, in which a British warship fired on an American naval vessel and forcibly removed four sailors, brought the two countries to the brink of war. Jefferson chose a different course.

The Embargo Act of 1807 prohibited American ships from trading with any foreign nation, effectively shutting down American commerce with both Britain and France. Jefferson hoped that American economic leverage would force both powers to respect American neutral rights, on the theory that both Britain and France depended on American trade. The theory was sound in principle but catastrophically wrong in practice. American exports, which had reached roughly 108 million dollars in 1807, fell to just 22 million dollars by 1808. New England merchants and shippers, whose livelihoods depended entirely on overseas trade, were devastated. Smuggling became rampant along the Canadian border. The embargo enriched British manufacturers by eliminating American competition in Latin American markets, and it demonstrated America's economic vulnerability rather than its leverage.

The Embargo Act was a failure by almost every measure. It was repealed in March 1809, days before Jefferson left office, replaced by the Non-Intercourse Act, which reopened trade with all nations except Britain and France. The episode revealed the limits of economic coercion as a substitute for military force, and it planted the seeds of sectionalist resentment as New England Federalists accused Jefferson and his southern-dominated party of sacrificing their region's prosperity for ideological purposes.

The War of 1812

The causes of the War of 1812 were multiple and complex. British impressment of American sailors continued under Jefferson's successor, James Madison, and British interference with American shipping infuriated merchants and shipowners throughout the country. American expansionists, particularly in the South and West, blamed the British for inciting indigenous resistance to American settlement, providing weapons and diplomatic support to confederacies of indigenous peoples who sought to halt the advance of American settlers. Many Americans also coveted Canada, believing that a war with Britain would provide the opportunity to annex Britain's North American colonies and complete the continental dominance of the United States.

The War Hawks, a group of young congressional Republicans led by Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, pushed Madison toward war, arguing that American honor demanded a military response to British provocations. Congress declared war on Britain in June 1812, though the vote was far from unanimous. New England, whose trade had been harmed by the embargo and who depended on British commercial connections, largely opposed the war. The vote was the closest declaration of war in American history, passing 79 to 49 in the House and 19 to 13 in the Senate.

The war itself went badly for the Americans in its early stages. The planned invasions of Canada failed ignominiously. American attempts to capture Montreal and Toronto, both weak in British regulars, were repulsed by a combination of British regulars, Canadian militia, and indigenous warriors. The most humiliating moment came in August 1814, when a British force landed on the Chesapeake Bay, defeated a hastily assembled American force at the Battle of Bladensburg, and marched into Washington, burning the Capitol, the White House, and other public buildings. President Madison and his wife Dolley, who famously saved Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington before fleeing, were forced to take refuge in Virginia.

The war also saw significant American naval successes in early engagements on the Great Lakes and in ship-to-ship duels on the high seas, where American frigates like the Constitution repeatedly defeated their British counterparts. These victories, though strategically insignificant, provided an enormous boost to American morale and contributed to the mythology of naval prowess that would shape American national identity.

The decisive American military success of the war came after peace had already been negotiated. The Battle of New Orleans was fought on January 8, 1815, two weeks after American and British negotiators had signed the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, 1814. A British force of approximately eight thousand veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, among the finest soldiers in the world, attacked a fortified American position defended by General Andrew Jackson with a mixed force of regulars, militia, Tennessee and Kentucky volunteers, free Black soldiers, and Choctaw warriors. The battle was a devastating British defeat. In less than an hour of fighting, the British suffered over two thousand casualties, including their commanding general, Sir Edward Pakenham, who was killed leading the assault. American losses were thirteen killed and fifty-eight wounded.

The victory at New Orleans, though militarily irrelevant to the outcome of the war, made Andrew Jackson a national hero. In a war characterized more by incompetence and failure than by military glory, the Battle of New Orleans provided the dramatic triumph that Americans desperately wanted. Jackson's image as the hero of New Orleans, the frontiersman who had defeated the might of the British Empire with a force of citizen soldiers, would define his political career for the next two decades and ultimately propel him to the presidency.

The Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war, restored the pre-war territorial status quo, settling none of the substantive issues that had caused the conflict. Impressment was not mentioned because Napoleon had been defeated and the Royal Navy no longer needed to press men into service. The boundary between the United States and Canada was left unchanged. Indigenous land claims in the Northwest were left unresolved, and in practice the treaty marked the end of British support for indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi, leaving the tribes without a major ally against American expansion.

The Era of Good Feelings

The period following the War of 1812, covering roughly the two terms of James Monroe's presidency from 1817 to 1825, acquired the name the Era of Good Feelings from a Boston newspaper that used the phrase to describe Monroe's 1817 tour of New England, where the president received a warm welcome even in the stronghold of the Federalist opposition. The name captured something real about the period's surface appearance: the Federalist Party had collapsed following the Hartford Convention of 1814-1815, in which New England Federalists had met to discuss their grievances against the war and had contemplated secession, an act that appeared treasonous once the war ended in victory. With the Federalists discredited, the Democratic-Republicans had no organized opposition, and for a brief period American politics appeared to exist in a state of one-party consensus.

The reality beneath this surface was quite different. The apparent harmony masked deep and growing sectionalist tensions that would explode into open crisis within a decade. The economic interests of the industrial-commercial Northeast, the slave-based agricultural South, and the rapidly expanding West were pulling in increasingly incompatible directions. Tariff policy, banking, internal improvements, and above all the expansion of slavery into new territories were creating fault lines that the genteel rhetoric of national unity could not paper over indefinitely.

Monroe himself was a transitional figure, a Virginia planter of the old Jeffersonian school who had served in the Revolutionary War and had known the founding generation personally. His presidency produced one genuinely significant foreign policy achievement, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared that the Western Hemisphere was closed to future European colonization and warned European powers against intervening in the affairs of the newly independent Latin American republics. In practice, the Monroe Doctrine was enforced not by American power, which was negligible, but by the British navy, which had its own economic interests in preventing European monarchies from recolonizing Latin America. Nevertheless, the doctrine established the principle of American hemispheric primacy that would shape foreign policy for generations.

John Marshall and the Supreme Court

While the elected branches of government were occupied with territorial expansion and sectional politics, Chief Justice John Marshall was quietly transforming the Supreme Court into a powerful institution capable of shaping American constitutional development for generations. Marshall served as Chief Justice from 1801 to 1835, and in that time he wrote a series of landmark opinions that established the fundamental principles of American constitutional law.

The most important of these decisions was Marbury v. Madison in 1803, the case that established the doctrine of judicial review. The circumstances were somewhat ironic: Marshall himself had been responsible for the confusion that led to the case when he served as Secretary of State under John Adams and failed to deliver commissions to a group of last-minute judicial appointees before Jefferson took office. The new Jefferson administration refused to deliver the commissions, and one of the disappointed appointees, William Marbury, asked the Supreme Court to issue a writ of mandamus ordering Secretary of State James Madison to deliver his commission.

Marshall's opinion was a masterstroke of constitutional reasoning. He ruled that Marbury did have a right to his commission, putting Jefferson and Madison on the defensive, but then ruled that the Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction to issue the requested writ because the section of the Judiciary Act of 1789 that purported to grant that jurisdiction was unconstitutional. By giving up a relatively minor power, the ability to issue writs of mandamus as an original jurisdiction matter, Marshall claimed for the Court the vastly greater power to strike down Acts of Congress that conflicted with the Constitution. The Jefferson administration, delighted by the outcome if not the reasoning, could not easily challenge the decision without appearing to endorse the very judicial overreach they claimed to oppose.

McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819 addressed the constitutionality of the Second Bank of the United States, which Maryland had attempted to tax out of existence. Marshall's opinion upheld the bank's constitutionality and denied Maryland's power to tax it. The opinion's reasoning was sweeping: Marshall adopted a broad nationalist interpretation of federal power, arguing that the Constitution should be read to give Congress all powers reasonably related to its enumerated functions, and that federal law was supreme over state law in any area of potential conflict. His famous formulation, "the power to tax involves the power to destroy," captured the principle that states could not use their taxing power to undermine federal institutions.

Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824 established the broad reach of the commerce clause. New York had granted Aaron Ogden an exclusive license to operate steam-powered ferries in New York waters, but Thomas Gibbons operated a competing ferry service under a federal license. The Court ruled for Gibbons, holding that the federal commerce power extended to all commerce among the states, not merely to the transportation of goods across state lines. The ruling prevented states from creating economic fiefdoms through exclusive monopoly grants and laid the constitutional foundation for the expansion of federal regulatory power that would come in later centuries.

Together, Marshall's decisions transformed the Supreme Court from a relatively weak institution into the supreme arbiter of constitutional questions. They established the primacy of federal over state law, the broad scope of federal power, and the Court's authority to review and invalidate acts of both Congress and state legislatures. These principles remain the foundation of American constitutional law.

The Missouri Compromise 1820

The question of slavery's expansion into new territories had been present since the beginning of the republic, but it had been managed through a combination of compromise, evasion, and the implicit assumption that slavery would naturally die out as the republic grew more enlightened. The Missouri Crisis of 1819-1821 shattered this comfortable assumption.

Missouri Territory, carved from the Louisiana Purchase, applied for admission to the Union in 1819 with a proposed state constitution that permitted slavery. The territory already had approximately ten thousand enslaved people, and admitting Missouri as a slave state would give the slave states a majority in the Senate, where the free and slave states had been balanced at eleven each since 1812. Representative James Tallmadge of New York proposed an amendment to the Missouri admission bill that would have prohibited the further introduction of slaves into Missouri and required the gradual emancipation of those already there. The amendment passed the House along heavily sectional lines but failed in the Senate.

The debate that followed was extraordinarily bitter and revealed, for the first time in American public life, the depth of the passions that slavery aroused on both sides. Northern representatives argued that Congress had the power and duty to restrict slavery's expansion. Southern representatives argued that attempts to limit slavery in new states were unconstitutional, a violation of the equal rights of slaveholding citizens to bring their property into territories open to all Americans, and a threat to the social order of the entire South.

The compromise that emerged in 1820 was engineered largely by Henry Clay of Kentucky, the first of several great compromises that would earn him the sobriquet the Great Compromiser. Missouri was admitted as a slave state. Maine, which had been part of Massachusetts, was simultaneously admitted as a free state, maintaining the balance between slave and free states in the Senate at twelve each. And slavery was prohibited in all remaining Louisiana Territory north of 36 degrees 30 minutes north latitude, the southern boundary of Missouri, with the exception of Missouri itself.

The Missouri Compromise temporarily defused the crisis, but it did not resolve the underlying question. Thomas Jefferson, now an old man at Monticello, received the news with dread. In a letter to a friend, he wrote that the dispute had awakened and filled him with terror, comparing it to a fire bell in the night. He feared, correctly, that the sectional conflict over slavery would eventually destroy the Union, and he saw the Missouri Compromise not as a solution but as a reprieve. The issue of slavery's expansion into new territories would resurface with every new acquisition of territory, and each time it did so it would tear at the fabric of the Union a little more.

Andrew Jackson and Jacksonian Democracy

The Making of Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson was unlike any previous president of the United States. The first seven presidents had all been either Virginia plantation aristocrats or Massachusetts lawyers and diplomats. They had attended college, read classical literature, and belonged to the established gentry of the Atlantic seaboard. Jackson, by contrast, was born in 1767 in the backcountry of the Carolinas, possibly in North Carolina or possibly in South Carolina, in a region so rough that the boundary had never been properly surveyed. His father died before his birth, his mother died of cholera contracted while nursing prisoners during the Revolution, and his two brothers also died during the war. By the age of fourteen, Andrew Jackson was an orphan who had been captured by the British, struck by a British officer's sword when he refused to clean the officer's boots, and left with a scar on his face and a lifelong hatred of the British.

Jackson's rise was a testament to the opportunities available in the rapidly developing American West. He moved to the Tennessee frontier as a young man, read law, and was admitted to the bar. He acquired land, slaves, and social standing through a combination of legal work, land speculation, and the kind of ruthless competitiveness that characterized frontier society. He fought numerous duels, killing at least one man, and carried two pistol balls in his body for most of his adult life. He became a successful planter and built the Hermitage, a substantial plantation near Nashville, worked by enslaved people whose labor made his prosperity possible.

Jackson's military career made him famous. As a general in the Tennessee militia, he fought brutal campaigns against the Creek Nation in Alabama, culminating in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, where his forces killed approximately eight hundred Creek warriors and effectively destroyed the Creek Confederacy's military power. Jackson forced the defeated Creeks to cede twenty-three million acres of land to the United States, the largest single land cession in the history of the Southeast. His subsequent campaign against the Spanish in Florida, conducted without explicit authorization from Washington, demonstrated a willingness to act unilaterally that alarmed constitutionalists but delighted expansionists. And of course his victory at New Orleans in January 1815 made him the greatest hero in American public life.

The Election of 1824 and the Corrupt Bargain

The presidential election of 1824 was the last conducted entirely within the framework of the old politics, the world of congressional caucuses and Founding Father-style deference, before the explosion of democratic participation that Jackson's candidacy would produce. With the collapse of the Federalists, the Democratic-Republican Party contained every shade of political opinion from conservative nationalism to agrarian radicalism, and in 1824 four major candidates all ran as Democratic-Republicans: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and Henry Clay.

Jackson received a plurality of both the popular vote and the electoral vote, with approximately 43 percent of the popular vote and 99 electoral votes. Adams finished second in the popular vote with about 31 percent and 84 electoral votes. Crawford, incapacitated by a stroke, won 41 electoral votes, and Clay won 37. Since no candidate had an electoral majority, the election went to the House of Representatives under the terms of the Twelfth Amendment, with the House choosing among the top three vote-getters, meaning Clay was eliminated.

Clay, as Speaker of the House, wielded enormous influence over the outcome. He detested Jackson personally and feared his democratic tendencies, and he disliked Crawford, who represented the old Virginia dynasty that Clay believed had monopolized national leadership for too long. He threw his support to John Quincy Adams, whom he saw as a statesman of the highest caliber and whose program of national development, the American System of tariffs, internal improvements, and a national bank, aligned closely with Clay's own views. With Clay's support, Adams won on the first ballot.

When Adams subsequently appointed Clay as Secretary of State, which was then considered the stepping-stone to the presidency, Jackson and his supporters erupted in outrage, denouncing the arrangement as a corrupt bargain. Whether or not there had been an explicit quid pro quo between Adams and Clay, the political optics were devastating. Jackson had won the popular vote and been denied the presidency by what appeared to be backroom dealing among the political elite. He spent the next four years organizing his political forces for revenge.

The Election of 1828 and Mass Democracy

The election of 1828 was a watershed in American political history. The expansion of white male suffrage that had been underway since the Revolution reached something close to completion during this period, as most states eliminated property qualifications for voting. Voter turnout surged dramatically, from about 27 percent of eligible voters in 1824 to 58 percent in 1828. For the first time, presidential electors were chosen by popular vote in nearly all states rather than by state legislatures. The sheer mass of voters participating in politics transformed the nature of political organization, requiring candidates to build popular coalitions rather than simply cultivate elite support.

The 1828 campaign was also among the most vicious in American history. Jackson's opponents, the Adams men who were coalescing into what would become the Whig Party, attacked Jackson's personal character relentlessly. They published pamphlets calling him a murderer for his execution of mutinous militia soldiers and his dueling record. They circulated the accusation that Jackson had lived with his wife Rachel in adultery before her first marriage was legally dissolved, making her a bigamist and Jackson a seducer of another man's wife. The story was complicated: Jackson and Rachel had married in 1791 believing that her first husband had already obtained a divorce, but the divorce had not actually been finalized. The couple married again in 1794 once the legal situation was clarified, but the mud stuck. Rachel Jackson, a devout and gentle woman who had heard the accusations during the campaign, died of a heart attack in December 1828, just weeks before her husband was to take office. Jackson, who was devoted to her, blamed his political enemies for her death and never forgave them.

Jackson introduced the spoils system to national politics, replacing large numbers of federal officeholders with his own supporters under the philosophy that rotation in office was democratic, preventing the emergence of a permanent officeholder class, and rewarding political loyalty. In practice, the spoils system replaced experienced civil servants with political hacks of varying competence, but it reflected Jackson's genuine belief that government positions should not become the hereditary preserve of the elite.

The Bank War

No episode of Jackson's presidency better illustrates both his strengths and his limitations than his war against the Second Bank of the United States. The Bank had been re-chartered in 1816 for a twenty-year term and had become an important financial institution, stabilizing the currency, regulating credit, and financing international trade. Nicholas Biddle, the Bank's sophisticated and capable president, managed it with considerable skill. But the Bank was also deeply unpopular in many quarters. Western farmers and eastern working people resented its power over credit and blamed it for the financial panics and credit contractions that periodically devastated agricultural and working-class communities. State banks resented its regulatory influence. And Jackson himself, a product of the frontier economy who had witnessed at first hand the devastation caused by financial manipulation, regarded the Bank as an instrument of Eastern elite power hostile to the interests of ordinary Americans.

In 1832, Congress passed a bill to re-charter the Bank four years ahead of schedule, hoping to force Jackson to either sign it or veto it in an election year. Jackson vetoed it with a message that was a masterpiece of populist rhetoric. He denounced the Bank as an institution that made the rich richer and the potent more powerful, a monopoly chartered by Congress that allowed foreign investors and domestic elites to profit at the expense of American farmers, mechanics, and laborers. The veto message was read aloud at political rallies and circulated as a campaign document. Jackson won re-election easily.

After his re-election, Jackson moved to destroy the Bank before its charter expired in 1836, withdrawing federal deposits and distributing them among state banks, which critics called pet banks. Nicholas Biddle responded by contracting credit sharply, trying to create financial pressure that would force Congress and the public to demand the Bank's recharter. The credit contraction caused economic hardship, particularly in the commercial cities, and for a time it appeared that Biddle might succeed. But Jackson refused to yield. When senators came to the White House to complain about the economic pressure, Jackson reportedly told them: I have it chained; I am ready with the screws to give another turn.

The Bank's charter expired in 1836 without recharter. The removal of federal deposits into unregulated state banks and the removal of the Bank's restraining influence on credit creation led to a speculative boom, particularly in western land. Jackson, alarmed by the speculation, issued the Specie Circular in 1836, requiring payment for government lands in gold or silver rather than paper money. The Specie Circular, combined with other factors including a tightening of credit by the Bank of England, triggered a severe financial panic in 1837. The Panic of 1837, which struck after Jackson had left office and his chosen successor Martin Van Buren had taken over, produced a devastating depression that lasted into the early 1840s, destroying businesses, throwing workers out of employment, and wiping out the savings of countless Americans. The Bank War thus produced consequences precisely opposite to what Jackson had intended.

The Nullification Crisis

The nullification crisis of 1832-1833 brought the United States to the edge of civil war a generation before the actual conflict. The crisis arose from the intersection of tariff policy and states' rights doctrine. Congress had passed protective tariffs in 1828 and 1832 that benefited Northern manufacturers by taxing imported manufactured goods but that raised the prices paid by Southern planters for the manufactured goods they bought. South Carolina, in particular, felt victimized by what its politicians called the Tariff of Abominations.

South Carolina's political leadership, dominated by John C. Calhoun, had developed an elaborate constitutional theory to combat federal tariff policy. In a series of documents culminating in the South Carolina Exposition and Protest of 1828, Calhoun argued that the states were the ultimate arbiters of constitutional meaning, and that any state could declare a federal law null and void within its borders if the state judged the law to be unconstitutional. This doctrine of nullification went far beyond anything Jefferson and Madison had suggested in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which had been written in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts.

In November 1832, South Carolina's legislature passed an Ordinance of Nullification declaring the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and void within South Carolina and threatening to secede from the Union if the federal government attempted to collect the tariffs by force. Jackson's response was forceful and unambiguous. He issued a Proclamation to the People of South Carolina, declaring nullification an absurdity incompatible with the Constitution and the existence of the Union, and threatening military force to ensure the tariffs were collected. He requested and received from Congress a Force Act authorizing him to use the military to enforce federal law.

At the same time, Jackson worked through Henry Clay to craft a compromise tariff that would gradually reduce rates over the next decade. South Carolina ultimately accepted the compromise and repealed its Ordinance of Nullification, while simultaneously nullifying the Force Act as a face-saving gesture. The crisis ended without violence, but it had demonstrated both the potentially explosive character of states' rights doctrine and Jackson's willingness to use federal power to preserve the Union, even as he simultaneously championed states' rights in other contexts. The nullification crisis was a dress rehearsal for secession, and the issues it raised, the primacy of the federal government over states, the extent of state sovereignty, the legality of secession, would be settled only by the Civil War.

Indian Removal

The Five Civilized Tribes and the Southeastern Homeland

The southeastern United States was home to hundreds of thousands of indigenous people organized into several major confederacies and nations when European colonization began in the sixteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, the five largest and most politically organized of these groups, the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole, had adapted in various ways to the pressures of European-American expansion and were often described by white Americans as the Five Civilized Tribes, a condescending term that revealed the assumptions embedded in the colonial project: civilization was defined as resemblance to Euro-American norms, and indigenous peoples who did not conform to this definition were implicitly uncivilized.

The Cherokee in particular had undertaken a remarkable transformation during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Sequoyah, a Cherokee craftsman who had never learned to read or write in any European language, created a syllabary for the Cherokee language between 1809 and 1821, a system of eighty-six symbols representing the syllables of Cherokee speech. Within a few years, thousands of Cherokees had become literate in their own language, and by 1828 the Cherokee were publishing a bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, in both Cherokee and English. The Cherokee Nation adopted a written constitution in 1827, modeled in part on the United States Constitution, establishing a bicameral legislature, an executive, and a judiciary. They established schools, churches, and farms that would have been recognizable to any New England observer.

Chief John Ross, who led the Cherokee Nation through the crisis of removal, was himself the product of Cherokee-white intermarriage: his father was a Scottish trader, his mother was part Cherokee, and he had been educated in English schools. Ross embodied the bicultural sophistication of the Cherokee leadership, using every legal and political tool available, petitioning Congress, hiring lawyers, building alliances with sympathetic white Americans, to resist the forces that sought to dispossess his people.

The Creeks, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole had similarly adapted to the world of early nineteenth-century North America, adopting European agricultural practices, raising livestock, trading with American merchants, and in some cases acquiring African American slaves in emulation of their white neighbors, a deeply troubling aspect of the complicated relationships between indigenous nations and the institution of slavery.

The Indian Removal Act 1830

Andrew Jackson had built his military reputation fighting indigenous peoples, and he brought to the presidency a straightforward conviction that indigenous peoples had no place in the American republic east of the Mississippi. He believed, or claimed to believe, that removal west of the Mississippi was actually beneficial to indigenous peoples, saving them from the conflicts that would inevitably arise when they tried to maintain their sovereignty within states that refused to recognize it. This self-serving rationalization allowed Jackson to present removal as humanitarian policy while ignoring the overwhelming evidence that indigenous peoples did not want to be removed.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 passed Congress after a fierce debate. The bill authorized the president to negotiate treaties with indigenous nations east of the Mississippi that would exchange their eastern homelands for territory west of the river in what is now Oklahoma and Kansas. Critically, the act did not explicitly authorize forced removal, but it created the conditions and the authorization for removal, with the implicit understanding that if indigenous peoples refused to negotiate, coercion would follow. Opposition to the bill was substantial and included some of the most prominent figures in American public life. Davy Crockett, then a congressman from Tennessee, voted against the bill at the cost of his congressional career. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts argued passionately against it. Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey delivered a six-hour speech on the Senate floor denouncing the injustice of the legislation.

The Act passed anyway, with nearly unanimous Southern support and substantial Northern opposition, along lines that presaged the sectional voting patterns of the coming decades.

Worcester V. Georgia and Jackson's Defiance

In 1832, the Supreme Court issued one of the most morally clear-cut decisions in its history in Worcester v. Georgia. The case arose from Georgia's attempts to extend its laws over Cherokee territory, requiring all whites living in Cherokee lands to obtain a license from the state. Samuel Worcester, a New England missionary living among the Cherokee, was arrested and convicted for violating this law. Chief Justice Marshall, writing for the Court, ruled that the Cherokee Nation was a distinct political community with territorial sovereignty, that Georgia's laws had no force within Cherokee territory, and that Worcester's conviction must be reversed.

The decision was a complete legal vindication for the Cherokee. But Jackson refused to enforce it. The precise words of Jackson's alleged response, the story that he said John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it, may be apocryphal, but the substance is accurate: Jackson had no intention of using federal power to protect the Cherokee from Georgia, and without that protection the decision was meaningless. This was perhaps the most direct example in American history of a president simply refusing to enforce a Supreme Court ruling, a constitutional crisis whose implications were never fully worked out because Jackson faced no effective political opposition.

With legal protection stripped away, the Cherokee had no recourse against the state of Georgia, which proceeded to seize Cherokee lands, harass Cherokee communities, and imprison Cherokee leaders. The discovery of gold on Cherokee lands in 1829 added economic incentive to the political pressure, as Georgia whites rushed onto Cherokee territory to mine for gold. The federal government, far from protecting the Cherokee, was complicit in their dispossession.

The Trail of Tears 1838-1839

The forced removal of the Cherokee became the Trail of Tears, one of the most devastating episodes of ethnic cleansing in American history. In 1835, a faction of the Cherokee who did not represent the Nation's government signed the Treaty of New Echota, ceding all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi in exchange for land in present-day Oklahoma and a payment of five million dollars. The Treaty was repudiated by Principal Chief John Ross and the vast majority of the Cherokee people, who collected petitions signed by thousands of Cherokees protesting that the Treaty had been signed without authorization. Congress ratified it anyway, by a margin of one vote in the Senate.

The deadline for voluntary removal was May 1838. When it passed with most Cherokee still in their homeland, President Martin Van Buren, Jackson's successor, ordered the military to enforce removal. General Winfield Scott led approximately seven thousand soldiers who rounded up Cherokee men, women, and children at bayonet point and confined them in stockades while their homes were looted and burned behind them. In the late summer and fall of 1838, the Cherokee were forced to march westward to Oklahoma under military escort, in three waves, over a journey of approximately eight hundred miles.

The conditions were appalling. Inadequate food, exposure to extreme weather, contaminated water supplies, and epidemic disease created catastrophic mortality. Estimates of the death toll among the sixteen thousand or so Cherokee who made the march range from four thousand to six thousand people, roughly a quarter of the Nation. Hundreds of others died in the internment camps before the march even began. The winter of 1838-1839 was particularly brutal, and the survivors of the march arrived in Oklahoma to find inadequate provisions and shelters awaiting them.

Similar forced marches had already removed the Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw from their southeastern homelands. The Choctaw removal of 1831-1833, the first major removal carried out under the Indian Removal Act, had also produced catastrophic suffering. The Choctaw chief described the removal to an American official as a trail of tears and death, providing the name that history has attached to the Cherokee removal as well. Altogether, perhaps one hundred thousand indigenous people were removed from the Southeast between 1830 and 1840, and thousands died in the process.

The Seminole Resistance

The Seminole of Florida were not so easily removed. A mixed nation of indigenous peoples, Creek refugees, and free and escaped African Americans, the Seminole had occupied the Florida peninsula since before it was American territory, and many had no intention of surrendering their homeland. When American forces attempted to enforce the removal treaty signed by a small faction of the Seminole in 1832, the Nation's leadership, including the charismatic war leader Osceola, refused to recognize it.

The Second Seminole War began in December 1835 and would continue until 1842, making it the longest Indian war in American history and the most expensive, costing the federal government approximately forty million dollars and fifteen hundred military dead. The Seminoles, who knew every creek, swamp, and hammock of the Florida landscape, conducted a brilliant guerrilla campaign against the American military, striking and then disappearing into the Everglades, where the Army simply could not follow. Osceola was eventually captured during a flag-of-truce meeting in 1837, an act of treachery that shocked even many white Americans, and he died in captivity in 1838. But the war continued under other leaders.

The United States eventually achieved a kind of hollow victory by agreeing to allow a small number of Seminoles to remain in a reservation in the Everglades, a tacit recognition that complete removal was impossible. Several hundred Seminoles remained in Florida, never surrendering, and their descendants continue to live there today, the only indigenous nation in the eastern United States that was never defeated or removed. The Seminole Nation of Florida maintains to this day that it has never signed a peace treaty with the United States.

The Market Revolution 1800-1850

The Transformation of the American Economy

The half-century between 1800 and 1850 witnessed a transformation of the American economy so profound that historians have compared it to the social disruptions of the original British Industrial Revolution. The transformation is often called the Market Revolution, a term that captures both its economic dimension, the shift from subsistence agriculture and household production to commercial farming and wage labor, and its social dimension, the radical reorganization of family life, community relations, and cultural values that accompanied it. At the beginning of this period, most Americans lived and worked on farms, producing much of what they consumed and consuming much of what they produced, connected to markets but not dependent on them for survival. By the end of the period, a growing proportion of Americans were dependent on wages, prices, and credit in ways that made them vulnerable to economic forces far beyond their control or comprehension.

The Transportation Revolution

The first prerequisite of a market economy is the ability to move goods and people cheaply and reliably. Before the Market Revolution, transportation in America was extraordinarily expensive and slow. Moving goods by road cost roughly twelve times more per mile than moving them by water, and the roads themselves were often impassable. The agricultural surplus of the interior could not reach coastal markets except via the river systems, which limited commercial agriculture to the valleys of major rivers and their tributaries.

The transportation revolution began with roads. The National Road, the first highway built with federal funds, began construction at Cumberland, Maryland in 1811 and reached Wheeling, on the Ohio River in what is now West Virginia, by 1818. Eventually extended to Vandalia, Illinois, the National Road opened the trans-Appalachian West to wheeled traffic and reduced the cost of moving goods from the interior to the coast. Turnpikes, privately built toll roads, proliferated throughout the settled regions of the country, improving local transportation if not always making it cheap.

The canal era, which lasted from roughly 1817 to the 1840s, produced the most dramatic improvement in transportation in American history up to that point. The Erie Canal, constructed between 1817 and 1825, was the greatest engineering and commercial achievement of the early republic. Running 363 miles from Albany on the Hudson River to Buffalo on Lake Erie, the canal connected the agricultural heartland of the Great Lakes basin to the port of New York City. The cost of transporting a ton of goods from Buffalo to New York City fell from roughly a hundred dollars before the canal to less than ten dollars after its completion. Travel time fell from three weeks to eight days. The commercial and demographic consequences were staggering: New York City, already the largest American city, became the commercial metropolis of the continent, drawing trade from a vast hinterland stretching from the Ohio Valley to the upper Midwest. Western New York, previously a sparsely settled frontier, filled rapidly with farmers who could now profitably produce wheat, corn, and other commodities for eastern markets. Buffalo grew from a village to a major commercial city. And the success of the Erie Canal triggered a canal-building boom across the country, as every state sought to replicate its economic miracle.

The railroad revolution, which began in earnest in the 1830s, eventually superseded the canals. Steam-powered locomotives could travel faster than canal boats, could operate year-round rather than being limited by ice, and could be built across terrain that canals could not traverse. By 1840, the United States had approximately three thousand miles of railroad track; by 1860, this figure had grown to thirty thousand miles, more than the entire rest of the world combined. The railroad annihilated distance in ways that even the canal builders had not imagined, binding together the disparate regions of the country into a single national market and making possible the industrial economy of the Gilded Age.

The telegraph, developed by Samuel Morse and first demonstrated in 1844 with the famous message What hath God wrought sent from Washington to Baltimore, added the dimension of instantaneous communication to the transportation network. For the first time in human history, information could travel faster than the people carrying it. Merchants could receive news of prices in distant markets before goods could arrive, enabling more efficient trading. The telegraph transformed banking, commerce, journalism, and eventually warfare, and it laid the conceptual groundwork for all subsequent information technologies.

The Factory System

The factory system came to America through a combination of technology transfer, entrepreneurial innovation, and the exploitation of a particular labor force. Francis Cabot Lowell, a Boston merchant, visited British textile mills in the early 1810s and memorized the design of the power loom, which was the key technology of the British Industrial Revolution that Britain had tried to keep secret by prohibiting the emigration of skilled mechanics and the export of machinery. Returning to America, Lowell worked with the mechanic Paul Moody to reconstruct the power loom from memory. In 1813, Lowell and his associates of the Boston Manufacturing Company established a textile mill at Waltham, Massachusetts, the first factory in America to integrate all processes of cloth production under one roof, from raw cotton to finished cloth.

The Waltham model was spectacularly successful. After Lowell's death in 1817, his associates expanded the enterprise, building an entirely new industrial city on the Merrimack River in Massachusetts, which they named Lowell in his honor. The Lowell mills became the showcase of American industrial development, attracting visitors from across the country and abroad, including Charles Dickens, who visited in 1842 and was favorably impressed by what he saw, in contrast to the wretched conditions of the British factories he had chronicled in his novels.

The Lowell system solved the problem of industrial labor in a particularly American way. The New England countryside contained a large population of young women, daughters of farming families, who had few economic opportunities beyond domestic service or piece-work sewing. The Boston Associates recruited these young women, typically between the ages of fifteen and thirty, with a promise of wages, supervised boarding houses, and cultural improvement. The mill girls, as they came to be called, typically worked in the factories for three to five years before returning to their home communities or marrying. The system was paternalistic and controlling, with house mothers enforcing strict rules about curfews, church attendance, and appropriate behavior, but it also gave young women an unprecedented degree of economic independence and exposure to urban life.

The Lowell mill girls were not passive objects of this system but active agents within it. They organized lending libraries and literary societies, published their own literary magazine, the Lowell Offering, and eventually organized labor actions to protest wage cuts and deteriorating working conditions. The turnout of 1836, in which hundreds of mill operatives left their looms to protest a reduction in wages, was one of the first labor strikes by women workers in American history. As the economic depression of the late 1830s and 1840s squeezed mill profits, working conditions deteriorated, hours lengthened, and the paternalistic promises of the early Lowell system gave way to the harder realities of industrial capitalism. By the 1840s and 1850s, the Yankee farm daughters who had initially staffed the mills were increasingly replaced by Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine, workers with fewer economic alternatives and less social capital to resist exploitation.

The Putting-Out System and Artisan Decline

The factory system was only the most dramatic manifestation of a broader transformation in the organization of production. Before industrialization, most goods were produced either in the home or by skilled artisans working in small shops. Shoemakers, tailors, cabinetmakers, and other craftsmen controlled their own tools, materials, and work pace, and they combined the conceptual design and the manual execution of their products in ways that gave them both economic independence and social status. Master craftsmen employed journeymen and apprentices, with the expectation that journeymen would eventually become masters themselves.

The putting-out system, which preceded factory production in many industries, began to undermine artisan independence by separating the merchant who supplied materials and coordinated distribution from the craftsman who performed the actual labor. A shoe merchant would purchase leather, distribute it to workers in their homes, and collect the finished shoes, paying workers by the piece. This system allowed merchants to undercut the prices of traditional artisan shops by paying lower wages and by dividing skilled trades into components that could be performed by unskilled or semi-skilled workers. In Lynn, Massachusetts, which became the center of the American shoe industry in the early nineteenth century, the putting-out system transformed what had been a community of independent craftsmen into a workforce of dependent wage laborers within the span of two generations.

The factory system completed this transformation. When machinery could replace human skill, the knowledge and experience that had given artisans their economic independence became worthless. Skilled craftsmen who had worked a lifetime learning their trades found themselves unable to compete with machines operated by unskilled workers. The destruction of artisan independence was one of the most socially disruptive consequences of the Market Revolution, creating a working class that was permanently dependent on wages and permanently vulnerable to the decisions of employers over whom they had no control.

Social Consequences of the Market Revolution

The Market Revolution transformed social relations in ways that went far beyond the economy. Perhaps the most profound change was the separation of home and work. In the pre-market household economy, work and family life were intermingled: farming families worked together on the farm; artisan families lived above the shop or in rooms adjacent to the workshop. Children grew up immersed in the work of the family enterprise. This arrangement had its own forms of exploitation and hierarchy, but it integrated production into the fabric of family and community life in ways that market capitalism did not.

The factory system and the commercialization of agriculture separated work from home. Factory workers and office workers left their residences to spend their working hours in a space controlled by an employer. The household, no longer a site of production, became exclusively a site of consumption and reproduction, and women's labor within it was increasingly invisible, uncompensated, and culturally devalued even as it became culturally celebrated.

This separation gave rise to what historians call the cult of domesticity, or the doctrine of separate spheres. In this ideology, the world was divided into two domains: the public sphere of commerce, politics, and competition, appropriate for men, and the private sphere of the home, appropriate for women. Middle-class women were assigned the role of moral guardians of the home, responsible for raising virtuous children, maintaining a refuge from the competitive world, and embodying the Christian values that the market economy seemed to threaten. This ideology had genuine appeal because it offered women a certain dignity and importance within their assigned domain, but it also justified their exclusion from public life, denied them legal and economic rights, and made their labor invisible.

The Market Revolution also transformed the experience of time. Farming life was governed by the rhythms of seasons, weather, and biological processes. There was a right time to plant, a right time to harvest, and in between there were stretches of relative quiet. Factory work imposed a radically different time discipline: the clock governed everything. Workers were expected to be at their machines at specific hours and to maintain continuous productive effort throughout the working day. Tardiness and absenteeism were punished by wage deductions or dismissal. The shift from task-oriented to time-oriented work was one of the most psychologically disorienting aspects of industrial life, and it generated resistance, as workers tried to maintain older patterns of work and leisure against the demands of employers.

Manifest Destiny and Westward Expansion

The Ideology of Manifest Destiny

In the summer of 1845, a Democratic journalist named John L. O'Sullivan published two essays in different publications arguing that it was the manifest destiny of the American republic to overspread the continent. O'Sullivan believed that the United States had a providential mission, given by God, to extend the institutions of free government from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This mission was manifest, meaning obvious and self-evident, and it was destined, meaning it would inevitably be fulfilled. The phrase captured a sentiment that was already widespread in American culture, giving it a memorable formulation that quickly became part of the political vocabulary.

Manifest Destiny was not merely an ideology of expansion; it was an ideology of racial and cultural superiority. The belief that American expansion was destined and divinely sanctioned rested on the assumption that the lands to be acquired were available for American settlement because their current inhabitants were too backward, too savage, or too weak to deserve permanent possession. Indigenous peoples were characterized as obstacles to be removed. The Mexican government and population were characterized as an inferior racial mixture, incapable of self-government, whose legitimate claims to sovereignty were overridden by the higher destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race. The ideology of Manifest Destiny provided a moral framework, however dishonest, for the conquest and dispossession of non-white peoples.

The Texas Question

The story of Texas began in the early 1820s, when Mexico, newly independent from Spain, invited American settlers into its northern province of Texas, then sparsely populated. Empresarios, or land agents, including Stephen F. Austin, recruited American settlers with grants of cheap land on the condition that they become Mexican citizens, convert to Catholicism, and obey Mexican law. Thousands of Americans, many of them slaveholders from the American South, poured into Texas, and by 1830 Americans outnumbered Mexicans in the province by roughly ten to one.

The Mexican government grew increasingly alarmed by this development. In 1829, Mexico abolished slavery throughout the republic. Texas slaveholders evaded the law by converting their slaves to indentured servants. In 1830, Mexico closed the border to further American immigration, but enforcement was lax and settlement continued. Tensions between the American settlers and the Mexican government increased throughout the early 1830s, as the settlers chafed against Mexican governance and sought the kind of self-government they had known in the United States.

The Texas Revolution broke out in 1835 and was decided in a matter of months. The most famous episode was the siege of the Alamo, a former Spanish mission in San Antonio, where a small force of Texas defenders including James Bowie and Davy Crockett was besieged and killed by the Mexican army under General Santa Anna in February 1836. The Alamo's fall became a rallying cry for the Texas cause: Remember the Alamo! Sam Houston, commanding the main Texas army, retreated eastward for six weeks, drawing Santa Anna deeper into Texas, before turning and attacking the Mexican force at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836. The battle lasted eighteen minutes and resulted in a decisive Texas victory. Santa Anna was captured and signed documents recognizing Texas independence, though the Mexican government repudiated the agreement.

The Republic of Texas existed as an independent nation from 1836 to 1845, seeking annexation by the United States but encountering political obstacles. Annexation was politically toxic because Texas would enter as a slave state, disrupting the sectional balance and potentially opening the way for the annexation of additional slave territory to the south and west. Presidents Jackson and Van Buren both declined to push for annexation. The issue became central in the presidential election of 1844, when Democrat James K. Polk ran on a platform of annexation and defeated the Whig Henry Clay, who tried to straddle the issue. Congress annexed Texas by joint resolution in February 1845, and it became the twenty-eighth state in December of that year.

The Oregon Territory

The Oregon Territory, encompassing what is now Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming, was claimed by both the United States and Britain under a joint occupation agreement of 1818. American missionaries and settlers had begun moving to Oregon along the Oregon Trail in the early 1840s, and by the mid-1840s several thousand Americans had made the two-thousand-mile journey overland from Missouri to the Willamette Valley. The influx of American settlers strengthened American claims to the territory and created political pressure for a definitive resolution of the joint occupation.

American expansionists, particularly in the Democratic Party, took an aggressive stance on Oregon, demanding that the United States claim the entire territory up to 54 degrees 40 minutes north latitude, the southern boundary of Russian Alaska. The slogan Fifty-four Forty or Fight captured this expansionist spirit. President Polk initially seemed to endorse this position, but he was simultaneously pursuing a war with Mexico and could not afford a confrontation with Britain as well. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 divided the territory at the 49th parallel, the current boundary between the United States and Canada west of the Great Lakes, giving the United States the fertile Willamette Valley and Puget Sound while Britain retained Vancouver Island and what is now British Columbia.

The Mexican-American War 1846-1848

The annexation of Texas brought the United States into direct conflict with Mexico, which had never recognized Texas independence and regarded annexation as an act of war. President Polk was determined to acquire not only Texas but also the vast Mexican territories of California and New Mexico, which he believed were necessary to complete American continental expansion and to secure Pacific ports for the growing American commercial interest in Asian trade.

To provoke a war that would justify the territorial acquisitions he sought, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to move American forces from the Nueces River, which Mexico regarded as the southern boundary of Texas, to the Rio Grande, seventy miles to the south, in disputed territory. When Mexican forces crossed the Rio Grande and attacked an American patrol in April 1846, Polk went to Congress claiming that Mexico had shed American blood on American soil and requesting a declaration of war. Congress obliged, though the declaration was not unanimous: John Quincy Adams, now a congressman from Massachusetts, voted against it, as did many other Whigs.

One young Whig congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, introduced his famous Spot Resolutions, demanding that Polk identify the exact spot where American blood had been shed on American soil, implicitly questioning whether the incident had occurred on American soil at all. Lincoln's political courage did him no immediate good; he was not re-elected from his safely Whig district, which did not appreciate his opposition to a popular war. But the resolutions revealed an insight into the fraudulent character of the war's pretext that history has vindicated.

The Mexican-American War was militarily one-sided. American forces were better equipped, better led at the tactical level, and supported by professional artillery and engineering. General Taylor won decisive victories in northern Mexico, and General Winfield Scott led an amphibious invasion, landing at Veracruz and advancing inland to Mexico City in one of the great military campaigns in American history, following roughly the same route that Hernan Cortes had taken three centuries earlier. Mexico City fell in September 1847, and resistance collapsed.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in February 1848, ended the war on terms that gave the United States approximately half of Mexico's territory. The Mexican Cession included the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming, an area of roughly 525,000 square miles, acquired at a cost of eighteen million dollars paid to Mexico and the assumption of American claims against Mexico of approximately three and a quarter million dollars.

The war's political consequences proved as significant as its territorial ones. The Wilmot Proviso, introduced by Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot in 1846, would have prohibited slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico. The Proviso passed the House twice but failed in the Senate. The debate over the Proviso reanimated the sectional conflict over slavery's expansion that the Missouri Compromise had temporarily suppressed, and it introduced a new and more dangerous phase of the slavery controversy that would culminate in the Civil War.

The California Gold Rush

The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill on the American River in California on January 24, 1848, nine days before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, transformed the significance of the Mexican Cession beyond anything that even Polk had imagined. John Sutter, a Swiss immigrant who had built an agricultural empire in the Sacramento Valley, had hired a carpenter named James Marshall to build a sawmill on the American River. Marshall noticed flakes of yellow metal in the millrace, and after testing confirmed it was gold, the news that leaked out despite Sutter's attempts to suppress it triggered one of the greatest mass migrations in American history.

The forty-niners, so called for the year when the rush reached its peak, came by sea around Cape Horn, across the Isthmus of Panama, and overland on the California Trail from Missouri. They came from every state in the union, from Europe, from Latin America, from Australia and China. By the end of 1849, the non-indigenous population of California had grown from roughly fourteen thousand to nearly a hundred thousand. By 1855, three hundred thousand gold seekers had arrived, transforming California from a sleepy former Mexican province into a complex, cosmopolitan, and deeply fractious society.

The Gold Rush had enormous economic effects, injecting hundreds of millions of dollars of new gold into the American and global economies and financing the development of California's agricultural, commercial, and eventually industrial infrastructure. It also had devastating effects on the indigenous population of California, which was reduced through violence, disease, starvation, and displacement from perhaps one hundred fifty thousand people in 1848 to thirty thousand by 1870, a catastrophic decline that some scholars describe as a genocide.

California's admission to the Union as a free state in 1850 reignited the sectional conflict over slavery. The admission of a free California, without a corresponding slave state to balance it, threatened Southern dominance of the Senate, which had rested on the balance between free and slave states maintained since the Missouri Compromise. The crisis was temporarily resolved by the Compromise of 1850, but the underlying tensions continued to build toward the eventual rupture.

Reform Movements of the Antebellum Era

The Second Great Awakening

The reform movements of the antebellum era were rooted in a religious revival that swept the country in the early nineteenth century. The Second Great Awakening, which began in the late 1790s and continued through the 1830s, was a series of evangelical Protestant revivals that transformed the religious landscape of the United States. Unlike the Calvinist theology of the Puritans, which had emphasized human sinfulness and the predetermination of salvation, the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening emphasized human agency, the possibility of repentance and conversion, and the perfectibility of both individuals and society.

Charles Grandison Finney, a lawyer turned evangelist who became the most influential revivalist of the era, developed new methods of evangelical preaching that he called new measures. These included extended meetings lasting multiple evenings, the anxious bench where sinners sat waiting for conversion, the encouragement of emotional expression, and most controversially the inclusion of women in public prayer and exhortation. Finney preached in the burned-over district of upstate New York, so called because the fires of revivalism had swept through it so many times, and his meetings produced dramatic mass conversions.

The theological implications of Second Great Awakening revivalism were profoundly radical. If sin could be overcome through conversion, and if converted individuals could live according to divine law, then society itself could be perfected. The perfectionist theology that emerged from the revivals drove reformers to attack every form of sin and social evil they could identify: alcohol, slavery, the mistreatment of the insane, the imprisonment of debtors, the exclusion of women from public life. The reform movements of the antebellum era were, in this sense, an expression of religious energy as much as political philosophy.

The Temperance Movement

The temperance movement was the largest and most broadly supported reform movement of the antebellum era. Alcohol consumption in early nineteenth-century America was staggering by modern standards: the average American adult consumed approximately seven gallons of pure alcohol per year in the 1820s, more than triple the current American average. Alcohol was cheap, ubiquitous, and culturally embedded in virtually every social activity, from barn raisings to business dealings to political campaigns. The consequences were visible everywhere: family violence, poverty, workplace accidents, and what reformers called the degradation of the American character.

The American Temperance Society, founded in 1826, initially promoted voluntary abstinence through moral persuasion, arguing that drinkers could and should choose sobriety. The temperance movement recruited millions of members and produced a flood of pamphlets, speeches, novels, and other cultural productions promoting its message. The movement was particularly strong in evangelical Protestant communities, where the connection between personal piety and social reform was most strongly felt.

By the 1840s, a wing of the temperance movement had concluded that moral suasion alone was insufficient and that legal prohibition was necessary. Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland, Maine, became the champion of this approach, engineering the passage of the Maine Law in 1851, the first statewide prohibition law in American history. Within four years, a dozen other states had passed similar laws. The debate between moral suasionists and prohibitionists within the temperance movement prefigured similar debates within other reform movements about the appropriate relationship between moral persuasion and political action.

The Women's Rights Movement

The women's rights movement grew directly out of the broader reform culture of the antebellum era. Women had been active participants in virtually every reform movement, from temperance to abolitionism, and their participation in public life had led them to confront the legal and social barriers that excluded them from formal political participation. Women could not vote, could not hold office, could not serve on juries, had no legal existence independent of their husbands under coverture law, and were largely excluded from higher education and the professions.

The Seneca Falls Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York in July 1848, was the founding event of the American women's rights movement. Organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, with assistance from Frederick Douglass and others, the convention brought together approximately three hundred participants to discuss the condition and rights of women. The convention adopted the Declaration of Sentiments, a document that deliberately echoed the Declaration of Independence in its structure and rhetoric: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.

The Declaration of Sentiments listed eighteen grievances against men, paralleling the eighteen grievances against the king in the Declaration of Independence, covering the denial of the vote, property rights, educational opportunities, professional access, and the subjugation of women within marriage. The demand for women's suffrage, the right to vote, was the most controversial demand made at Seneca Falls, and it was nearly removed from the Declaration before Douglass's passionate support convinced the convention to retain it.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton would devote the next fifty years of her life to the cause of women's rights, becoming the movement's most brilliant theorist and most prolific writer. Her partnership with Susan B. Anthony, who was not at Seneca Falls but who joined the movement shortly afterward and became its greatest organizer, would define the American women's suffrage movement for decades. The rights demanded at Seneca Falls would not be achieved in full until the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, seventy-two years after the convention.

The Abolitionist Movement

Abolitionism, the demand for the immediate and complete abolition of slavery, was the most controversial reform movement of the antebellum era, and the one with the most profound long-term consequences for American history. Slavery had been a source of moral discomfort for some Americans since the founding generation, but before the 1830s even most opponents of slavery had favored gradual emancipation or colonization of freed people to Africa, rather than demanding immediate and unconditional freedom.

William Lloyd Garrison transformed the politics of antislavery with the founding of his newspaper The Liberator in Boston on January 1, 1831. Garrison rejected gradualism and colonization as complicity with slavery. He demanded immediate emancipation without compensation to slaveholders, and he was willing to say, in print and in public, things about slavery and slaveholders that no one had said before. He called the Constitution a covenant with death and an agreement with hell because of its accommodations to slavery. He burned a copy of the Constitution in public. He was reviled, threatened, and once dragged through the streets of Boston by a mob seeking to tar and feather him. He refused to be silenced.

Garrison and his allies founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, which became the organizational center of radical abolitionism. The society published pamphlets, organized lectures, and trained speakers, including a remarkable cohort of formerly enslaved people who could bear personal witness to slavery's horrors. The most important of these was Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838 and whose Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845, became one of the most widely read books in America. Douglass's combination of personal testimony and rhetorical brilliance made him the most effective antislavery speaker of the era and eventually one of the most influential Americans of the nineteenth century.

Harriet Tubman, who escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1849, returned south thirteen times over the next decade to lead approximately seventy enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad, a network of safe houses, sympathetic individuals, and secret routes that helped freedom-seekers make their way from the slave states to the free states and Canada. Tubman's courage was extraordinary; she worked under the constant threat of recapture and carried a pistol that she reportedly used to threaten freedom-seekers who lost their nerve, warning that dead folks tell no tales. She was never caught and never lost a passenger.

The abolitionist movement provoked a ferocious backlash. In the South, the movement was suppressed with increasing severity after the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831, a slave uprising in Virginia that killed fifty-five white people and led Southern states to impose severe restrictions on the movement, education, and assembly of enslaved people. The Southern defense of slavery became increasingly aggressive and ideologically elaborate, moving from the apologetic claim that slavery was a necessary evil to the assertive claim that it was a positive good, a benevolent institution beneficial to enslaved people who were, in the proslavery argument, racially incapable of caring for themselves.

In the North, the abolitionist movement also faced violent resistance. Northern workers feared competition from freed Black workers. Northern merchants depended on Southern cotton. And many white Northerners, whatever their personal feelings about slavery, were unwilling to support social and racial equality for African Americans. Abolitionist offices were attacked, abolitionist speakers were mobbed, and in 1837 an abolitionist newspaper editor named Elijah Lovejoy was murdered by a mob in Alton, Illinois while defending his press, becoming the movement's first martyr.

Congress itself tried to suppress antislavery agitation by passing the Gag Rule in 1836, which automatically tabled any antislavery petition without discussion or vote. John Quincy Adams, the former president now serving as a congressman, fought the Gag Rule for eight years, introducing antislavery petitions session after session and insisting on his constituents' right of petition. He finally succeeded in having the rule repealed in 1844, but the attempt to prevent Congress from even discussing slavery revealed how deeply the institution had become embedded in American political life and how far Southern congressmen were prepared to go to protect it.

By 1848, the conflicts over slavery, territorial expansion, states' rights, and the nature of American democracy that this unit has traced were approaching a crisis that no series of compromises could indefinitely postpone. The Mexican Cession had reopened the question of slavery's expansion with new urgency. The Wilmot Proviso debate had demonstrated that the sectional conflict was now structuring every major political question. The Gold Rush and the admission of California were about to disrupt the senatorial balance that the Missouri Compromise had maintained. And the abolitionist movement had succeeded, over two decades of agitation, in making slavery a moral question that increasing numbers of Northerners felt they could not simply ignore for the sake of national unity.

The United States of 1848 was a vastly different country from the United States of 1800. It was larger, richer, more populous, more industrialized, and more internally divided than it had been when Jefferson walked to his inaugural. It had transformed its economy, reshaped its society, expelled its indigenous peoples from their homelands, fought two major foreign wars, and confronted the contradiction at its core, the slavery question, repeatedly without resolving it. The resolution would come, but it would require the greatest catastrophe in American history to achieve it.

Sources

library.loc.gov (Library of Congress primary source collections)

archives.gov (National Archives and Records Administration)

nps.gov (National Park Service historical resources)

jstor.org (academic journal articles on Jacksonian America)

oah.org (Organization of American Historians publications)

millercenter.org (Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia)

teachingamericanhistory.org (primary source documents in American history)

commonplace.online (Journal of Early American Life)

earlyrepublic.net (Society for Historians of the Early American Republic)

history.state.gov (Office of the Historian, US Department of State)

www.countryreports.org

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