A Few Lessons from American History. Reader for Students of English

The Young Republic (1789–1816)

ultimately passed 12 amendments to the Constitution. Ten of these were ratified by the states and became the Bill of Rights.

The First Amendment protected the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and religion from federal legislation. The Second and Third amendments guaranteed the right to bear arms and made it difficult for the government to house soldiers in private homes. The Fourth Amendment protected citizens from unreasonable search and seizure by law enforcement. The Fifth Amendment required that a grand jury decide if there was enough evidence to charge a person with a serious crime. It also protected a person from being tried twice for the same crime and from self-incrimination. The Sixth and Seventh amendments guaranteed the right to have a speedy trial and the right to a jury trial for civil cases in which citizens sue for damages. The Eighth Amendment forbade excessive bail, fines and cruel punishment. The Ninth Amendment stated that the enumeration of these rights did not endanger other rights, and the Tenth Amendment said that powers not granted the national government by the Constitution remained with the states and citizens.

Despite Washington’s efforts to preserve a political truce the first party system emerged. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were members of the Republican Party. Alexander Hamilton and John Adams were members of the Federalist Party. Truthfully, it was Jefferson who felt the greatest need to perpetuate an ‘opposition’ party, because he believed that the Federalists represented aristocratic forces hostile to the true will of the people. He believed that without a Republican party, the Federalists would turn the nation into an oligarchy, and steal freedom from the people. His dedication to his beliefs is the reason why political parties play such an enormous role in American politics today.

The Federalists believed in a highly centralized government as a means of keeping order. They advocated a strong executive department and strong courts to maintain order and insure justice. They also favoured a standing army and wanted to imitate British aristocracy (rule by the rich) without a king.

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The Republicans in their turn believed in a minimum of government to safeguard the rights of the people. They favoured local government over national because it was closer to the people and they also favoured Congress over the other branches of government because it best reflected the popular will. The Republicans however opposed standing armies because a military leader might seize control of the government.

In 1793, President Washington proclaimed the neutrality of the United States in the French Revolution, despite the alliance with France. This was consistent with Washington’s view that the United States should not entangle itself in foreign matters. In 1794 and 1795, President Washington averted a second war with Britain over conflicts concerning shipping and the Northwest Territory. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay persuaded the British to leave the Northwest posts, but Jay accepted continuing humiliation of United States shipping due to British naval supremacy. This weak treaty (‘Jay’s Treaty’) angered many Americans.

George Washington voluntarily gave up power in 1797 and John Adams was elected. Washington set an unwritten tradition of a maximum of two terms for presidents, which was followed by every president until the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt. After Roosevelt broke the rule by being elected four times to president, the two-term tradition was enshrined in the Constitution as an amendment in 1951.

When Adams became President, the war between the French and British was causing great difficulties for the United States on the high seas and intense partisanship among contending factions within the Nation. His administration focused on France, where the Directory had suspended commercial relations. President Adams did not call for a declaration of war, but hostilities began at sea. Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, intended to frighten foreign agents out of the country and to stifle the attacks of Republican editors.

Sending a peace mission to France made Adams unpopular. In the campaign of 1800 the Republicans were united and the

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The Young Republic (1789–1816)

Federalists were badly divided. Thus, Thomas Jefferson became President.

Marbury v. Madison

In the weeks after John Adams lost his bid for reelection to Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the Federalist Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1801 which increased the number of circuit courts. On his last day in office, President John Adams named forty-two justices of the peace and sixteen new circuit court justices for the District of Columbia under. This was an attempt by the Federalists to take control of the federal judiciary before Thomas Jefferson took office. The commissions were signed by President Adams but they were not delivered before the expiration of Adams’s term as president. Thomas Jefferson refused to honor the commissions, claiming that they were invalid because they had not been delivered by the end of Adams’s term.

William Marbury was an intended recipient of an appointment as justice of the peace. Marbury sued to obtain it. He applied directly to the Supreme Court of the United States for a writ of mandamus to compel Jefferson’s Secretary of State, James Madison, to deliver the commissions. The Judiciary Act of 1789 had granted the Supreme Court original jurisdiction to issue writs of mandamus ‘…to any courts appointed, or persons holding office, under the authority of the United States’.

The Supreme Court denied the request citing part of the Judiciary Act of 1789 as unconstitutional. With his decision in Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall established the principle of judicial review, an important addition to the system of ‘checks and balances’ created to prevent any one branch of the Federal Government from becoming too powerful.

During most of Jefferson’s first term, Europe was at peace during a break in the Napoleonic Wars. The one major foreign policy issue was a huge success: Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803. The purchase removed the French presence from the western border of the United States, and provided American farmers with vast new lands on which to

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expand their rural republic. Ignoring the fact that independent Native American peoples occupied the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson proclaimed his new land a great ‘empire of liberty’.

Britain and France again went to war a few weeks after the Louisiana Purchase. Americans once again tried to sell food and plantation crops and to carry goods between the warring European powers and their Caribbean colonies. In 1805 the British became dominant on the ocean. Britain outlawed American trade with France and maintained a loose blockade of the American coast, seizing American ships and often kidnapping American sailors into the Royal Navy. This happened to as many as 6,000 Americans between 1803 and 1812.

The United States declared war on Britain in 1812. The first cause of the war was British interference with American shipping. The second was military assistance that the British in Canada were providing to the Native American peoples of the United States interior. The United States entered the War of 1812 to defend its sovereignty, its western settlements, and its maritime rights. American leaders knew that they could not fight the British navy. They decided instead to fight a land war, with Canada as the prize. Americans reasoned that they could get to the British settlements in Canada more easily than the British could.

General William Hull, governor of the Michigan Territory, led an American invasion of Canada in 1812. The British and Native Americans threw him back, besieged him at Detroit, and forced him to surrender his whole army. A second invasion of Canada from western New York failed when New York militiamen refused to cross into Canada to back up American regulars who had captured Queenston Heights below Niagara Falls.

The war went better for the Americans in 1813. The Americans gained control of Lake Erie, sailed across Lake Ontario and raided and burned York (now Toronto). In 1814 the Royal Navy began raiding American cities. In the summer, the British raided Washington, D.C., and burned down the Capitol and the White House. After Napoleon was defeated in 1814, neither the Americans

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Sectional Conflict (1816–1860)

The American government in these years was expansionist. With the end of the second war between Britain and the United States, the heated foreign policy debate that had divided Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans since the 1790s quieted down. In the years after 1815 most American politicians agreed on an aggressively nationalist and expansionist foreign policy. John Quincy Adams, who served as secretary of state under James Monroe, did the most to articulate that policy. In 1817 he worked out agreements with Britain to reduce naval forces on the Great Lakes and establish the U.S.-Canadian border from Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains along the 49th parallel. For the first time in their history, Americans did not have to worry about an unfriendly Canada.

Americans turned their attention south and west, and to Spain’s crumbling empire in the New World. In 1819 Spain ceded Florida to the United States. In part, the Spanish were willing to give up territory because they had bigger things to worry about: their South American colonies were in revolt, establishing themselves as independent republics. The United States sympathised with these new republics. US leaders however were afraid Spain might try to recapture its lost colonies.

When Spain asked the European powers known as the Holy Alliance to help it stop revolutionary republicanism in Spanish America the USA answered with what became known as the Monroe Doctrine. The United States independently declared that further European colonization in the Americas would be considered an unfriendly act. At the same time, the United States extended diplomatic recognition to the new Latin American

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Sectional Conflict (1816–1860)

republics. In short, the Monroe Doctrine declared the western hemisphere closed to European colonization while leaving open the possibility of United States expansion.

After the War of 1812, the nation reverted to a period of one-party government in national politics. The decline of the Federalist Party created the illusion of national political unity, but appearances were deceptive. Without the discipline imposed by competition with a strong opposition party, the Republican Party began to fragment into cliques and factions.

Over time, local and personal factions began to coalesce into a new political party system. In 1824 Andrew Jackson renamed his branch of the Democratic-Republicans to Democrats. Although it took a number of years for Jackson’s opponents to coalesce into an effective national political organization, by the mid-1830s the Whig party, as the opposition came to be known, was able to battle the Democratic party on almost equal terms throughout the country. The Whig party was formed in 1834 as a coalition of smaller parties united by their hatred of ‘King Andrew’ Jackson and his ‘usurpations’ of congressional and judicial authority. The party took its name from the 17th century British Whig group that had defended English liberties against the usurpations of proCatholic Stuart Kings.

Whereas the Democrats stressed class conflict, Whigs emphasized the harmony of interests between labor and capital, the need for humanitarian reform, and leadership by men of talent. The Whigs also idealized the ‘self-made man’. Finally, the Whigs viewed technology and factory enterprise as forces for increasing national wealth and improving living conditions.

Sectional Division

The regions of the United States had grown in divergent ways since agreeing to be a nation in 1788.

The North had experienced a market revolution based on commercial agriculture and the growth of cities and industry. The northern part of the United States was no longer on the colonial periphery of the world market economy. It was taking

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its place as part of the financial and industrial centre. As the North passed gradual emancipation laws, freed slaves moved toward cities. In 1820 African Americans made up about onetenth of the populations of Philadelphia and New York City. They were excluded from white churches and public schools and, increasingly, from the skilled crafts, dock labour, and household service at which they had been employed. Attacks on individual blacks were routine. African Americans responded by building their own institutions: Methodist and Baptist churches, Masonic lodges, schools, charitable and social organizations, and newspapers. It was from within this web of institutions that they protected themselves and eventually demanded freedom for Southern slaves.

The South experienced a market revolution of a different kind. It remained tied to a plantation system that depended on slave labour and international markets. The plantation system enslaved the one-third of all Southerners who were black and excluded more and more poor whites. Plantation agriculture led to an undemocratic distribution of wealth among whites. Big farms were more profitable than small ones. The slave-based plantation economy of the South was economically successful: Planters were making a lot of money. But in the long term, the South’s commitment to plantation agriculture stunted other areas of its economy, opened the region to intense international criticism over slavery, and led ultimately to political and economic disaster.

Around the 1830s, people known as abolitionists began to speak out against slavery. Like other social reforms, abolitionism took root among the most radical Northern Whigs. Condemning slavery on moral grounds, abolitionists pursued immediate emancipation through moral suasion tactics. Sometimes working with white abolitionists, sometimes working independently, Northern free blacks also demanded freedom for the slaves. The abolitionists helped rescue thousands of slaves. Hundreds of anonymous women and men operated an Underground Railroad, a network of homes and farms where escaped slaves could go for

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Sectional Conflict (1816–1860)

help and shelter. Conductors on the Underground Railroad hid escaped slaves, often smuggling them to Canada.

Abolitionists knew that they were a minority. They organized a postal campaign in 1835, sending massive amounts of antislavery literature through the mails. In the next year, abolitionists began sending hundreds of petitions to Congress. Some of the petitions were against annexation of slaveholding Texas; others demanded the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia or the end of the interstate slave trade. Each of these issues was within the constitutional sphere assigned to Congress. In the process of building these campaigns, abolitionists turned themselves into an organized movement.

Slavery and Expansion

The incorporation of new western territories into the United States made slavery an explicit concern of national politics. Balancing the interests of slave and free states had played a role from the very start of designing the federal government at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. In 1819, when the nation contained eleven free and eleven slave states creating a balance in the U.S. senate, Missouri petitioned to join the United States as a slave state. Missouri’s entrance threatened to break the balance. The debate in Congress over the admission of Missouri was extraordinarily bitter. Finally, the Missouri Compromise (1820) was passed as a solution. Missouri was admitted to the union as a slave state, but was balanced by the admission of Maine, a free state, that had long wanted to be separated from Massachusetts. Slavery was excluded from all new states in the Louisiana Purchase north of the southern boundary of Missouri. People on both sides of the controversy saw the compromise as deeply flawed. Nevertheless, it lasted for over thirty years until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 determined that new states north of the boundary deserved to be able to exercise their sovereignty in favor of slavery if they so choose.

Debate over the balance of slave and free states rose again in 1837 when the new Republic of Texas asked to be annexed to

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the United States. The governments of Presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren took no action for two reasons. First, the question of Texas annexation again divided the North and South as Texas would be another slave state. The second reason for avoiding annexation was that Mexico still considered Texas its own territory. Annexation would create a diplomatic crisis, and perhaps lead to war.

In the presidential election of 1844 the Democrats nominated James K. Polk of Tennessee. Polk ran on a pro-annexation platform: he wanted to annex Texas. Mexico warned that it would consider the annexation of Texas by the United States a declaration of war. A Texas convention voted to join the Union on July 4, 1845. Polk and a Congress strongly favouring annexation not only offered to take Texas into the Union, they also set the southern boundary of the new state at the Rio Grande – 150 miles south of what most people had agreed was the Texas-Mexico border. The new boundary gave Texas far more Mexican land (including much of present-day New Mexico and Colorado) than the Texas Revolution had given it. Polk knew that the additional territory would provide a gateway to New Mexico and California, territories of northern Mexico that he and other expansionists coveted along with Texas. While annexing Texas, Polk offered to buy New Mexico and California from Mexico for $30 million in late 1845 – an offer that the Mexicans angrily refused. Polk then provoked a war with Mexico in which he would win all that he had offered to buy.

As happened in much of the war, the Mexican army was larger and fought bravely, but the Mexican government and high command were divided and often incompetent, and the Americans were better armed and better led. After a series of bloody battles in September 1847, the war was over. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 ceded Texas (with the Rio Grande boundary), California, and New Mexico to the United States, which agreed to pay Mexico $15 million. The Mexican Cession gave the United States present-day west Texas, New Mexico,

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