Expansion to the Mississippi (1801–1861)

How They Were Governed

The Electoral College

The electoral college, which casts the actual votes that elect the president of the United States, has been in place since the beginning of the republic. It was last modified in 1804. Each state possesses as many votes in the electoral college as it has representatives in the House and Senate, and a candidate must win a majority of electoral votes to be elected. However, the electoral college no longer functions the way the nation’s founders intended. Democratic reforms and the rise of the two-party system have turned it into a mere formality. Nevertheless, the electoral college has a major impact on how presidential campaigns are conducted.

A Nominating Device

When voters go to the polls today, they may think they are choosing among the tickets with candidates for president and vice president. Officially, however, they are voting for electors, individuals pledged to support a specific party’s ticket. The ticket that wins the popular vote in each state wins all of that state’s electoral votes (except in Maine and Nebraska, where the votes may be split between candidates proportionally). The winning slate of electors assembles in December in each state capital and votes for the ticket to which they are pledged. The votes are sent in a sealed envelope to Congress. In early January the incumbent vice president opens the envelopes before a joint session of Congress, officially naming the next president- and vice president-elect.

The nation’s founders would hardly recognize this protocol as the one they designed. At the Constitutional Convention, held in Philadelphia in 1787, the delegates ardently debated different methods of choosing a chief executive. Smaller states wanted an equal say in the election, as they had in the Senate, where each state has two representatives, while larger states wanted voting to be based on population, as in the House. Some favored direct election by the voters; others wanted Congress or the state legislatures to decide. The states had widely different qualifications for suffrage (the right to vote), which made the rules for a national election complicated. The founders also thought that, in a vast country, with relatively little communication between the states, ordinary voters would find it difficult to understand all the differences between candidates for president.

The result of these debates was a grand and rather awkward compromise. Each state was allowed to decide how its electors would be chosen, but the emphasis was on an indirect method of election. If one candidate won a clear majority of votes, the winner would be elected president and the runner-up would become vice president. However, if no candidate won a majority of electoral votes, the House would choose the president from the five who received the most votes. Each state’s delegation received one vote, as the small states demanded. The Senate would choose the vice president under similar rules. In essence, the electoral college, as outlined by the Constitution, was a means of nominating worthy candidates, with the final choices left in the hands of Congress.

Correcting Some Flaws in the System

In the very first election, in 1788, George Washington (1732–1799) won an overwhelming majority, and John Adams (1735–1826) came in second. While they were in office, however, a new development changed the nation’s complexion: political parties. By 1796 Adams had become the candidate of the Federalist Party. When he won a narrow victory in the electoral college over the Democratic-Republican candidate, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), the two rivals had to serve together in a divided administration.

The election of 1800, which was a Jefferson-Adams rematch, exposed another defect in the machinery: the electoral-college rules had no provision for vice presidential candidates, so Jefferson and his Republican running mate, Aaron Burr (1756–1836) of New York, tied for first place in the electoral-vote count. The House, called upon to break the tie, was controlled by Federalists, who connived to give Burr the presidency; they created a deadlock that was resolved, after thirty-six ballots, in Jefferson’s favor.

These untidy results brought about a call for reform of the electoral-college system—the first of many such calls throughout the nation’s history, but the only one that has produced a structural change. The Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1804, mandates separate balloting for president and vice president. It also lowers, from five to three, the number of finalists from whom the House selects the president when no candidate receives an electoral-vote majority.

Democratizing Presidential Campaigns

The Twelfth Amendment did not rethink the election process, but merely retooled it. However, that small adjustment had a significant impact on the nation’s next controversial presidential race. In the 1824 election four candidates, all from the Republican Party, won electoral votes, but none got a majority, sending the election into the House. Speaker of the House Henry Clay (1777–1852) of Kentucky narrowly missed a third-place finish, leaving him out of the running. If he had come in third, he might have prevailed, given his House leadership and genius for making backroom deals. As it turned out, Clay threw his support—and the states he had won—to second-place finisher John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) of Massachusetts, who emerged the winner. President-elect Adams then offered Clay the position of secretary of state, which led the election’s first-place finisher, Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) of Tennessee, to complain that a “corrupt bargain” had kept him out of the White House. Four years later Jackson was elected president by a large majority in the electoral college.

The 1820s saw other changes in presidential electioneering. At the start of the republic most states had given their legislatures the power to choose presidential electors, but by 1828 all but two states, Delaware and South Carolina, had transferred that power to the voters. In addition presidential campaigns had grown into organized, professional affairs as candidates learned to clamor for popular support and raise the hefty sums required for a national effort. Winner-take-all popular elections, while not constitutionally required, became the norm in almost every state in the 1830s.

Controversies and Criticisms

Only three elections since that time have tested the Constitution’s provisions. In 1876 the Republican-controlled Congress set up a commission to investigate the contested returns in three Southern states. The eight Republicans on the fifteen-member commission voted to accept results that gave the presidency to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) of Ohio, who became derisively known as “Rutherfraud” and “Old 8-to-7.” His Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden (1814–1886) of New York, had won two hundred fifty thousand more popular votes than Hayes. In 1888 Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901), a Republican from Indiana, won sixty-five more electoral votes than his opponent, the incumbent Democratic president, Grover Cleveland (1837–1908), even though Harrison had lost the nationwide popular vote by one hundred thousand votes. Cleveland bounced back and defeated Harrison in the 1892 election. In 2000 a disputed vote count in Florida sent the election into a furious legal scramble, which ended when five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices ruled that Florida had to stop a recount, thus handing the victory to Republican George W. Bush (1946–) of Texas. He had won five hundred forty-three thousand fewer popular votes than his opponent, Democrat Albert Gore Jr. (1948–) of Tennessee.

The electoral college has many opponents and few defenders. Hundreds of reform proposals and constitutional amendments have been introduced in Congress, but no alternative has ever gained enough support to replace the original system. Many historians have pointed out that the electoral college gives the smallest states a disproportionate amount of influence because of the way electoral votes are apportioned. At the same time, the winner-take-all system augments the power of the largest states: a candidate can reach the winning total of 270 electoral votes by winning only the eleven largest states, even by a small margin of victory. Some observers also note that the system pushes candidates to concentrate excessively on small handfuls of voters in the so-called swing states, ignoring millions of voters in the less competitive regions.

Supporters of the existing system argue that it usually forces candidates to assemble geographically and socially diverse coalitions and temper their messages and rhetoric. Instead of inflaming a partisan base, major-party candidates usually strive to capture the political center. That, according to supporters of the electoral college, helps to stabilize the political system and makes it more likely that, once elected, presidents will govern with respect for the rights and views of minorities and majorities alike.

The Monroe Doctrine

The foreign policy principles known as the Monroe Doctrine were first declared in December 1823 by President James Monroe (1758–1831) in his annual message to Congress. They have guided U.S. conduct toward Latin America and the Caribbean for nearly two centuries. The policy pronouncements were made while Latin American colonies were fighting wars for independence from Spain and during the diplomatic intrigues in Europe that followed the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821). Monroe, and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), sought to warn the European powers not to attempt reconquest or recolonization of any part of the Americas. In doing so, Monroe implicitly asserted the nation’s unilateral claim to the Western Hemisphere as its exclusive sphere of influence. The United States of 1823 lacked the military might to enforce such a claim, but as the nation grew into a world power, later presidents would lean on the Monroe Doctrine as justification for overt and clandestine interventions in Latin America.

Reactions to Latin American Independence

Public opinion in the United States strongly supported Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) and the other Latin American revolutionaries in their wars against Spain. However, Monroe and Adams delayed offering diplomatic recognition to the republics that declared their independence. The overall outcome of the struggle was somewhat uncertain, because Spain’s armies continued to hold territory. Furthermore, the United States had an interest in maintaining good relations with the Spanish crown. Adams had negotiated the purchase of Florida from Spain in 1819, but the treaty did not take effect until 1821. By that year Mexico and all the countries of South America had secured their independence. Early in 1822 Monroe recommended granting recognition to the new Latin American republics, and the United States soon exchanged diplomats with Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and other nations.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the great powers were recovering from the Napoleonic Wars and striving to build a stable peace through diplomatic conferences. In addition the Russian czar Alexander I (1777–1825) had called for a Holy Alliance to defend Christian monarchies from the threat of revolution. Britain’s position was ambiguous; it favored a conservative balance of power in Europe, but stood aside while the alliance of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and France put down rebellions in Greece, Naples, Portugal, and Spain.

George Canning (1770–1827), who became Britain’s foreign secretary in 1822, feared that members of the Holy Alliance, especially France, might attempt to recapture Spain’s colonies in the Americas. Such a move would have disrupted Britain’s new commercial opportunities in the former Spanish colonies. In 1823 Canning proposed that Britain and the United States make a joint declaration opposing efforts to recolonize the Americas and renouncing any intention to seize more territory.

“A Combined System of Policy”

President Monroe and his advisers seriously debated Canning’s overture. Monroe also consulted his predecessors, James Madison (1751–1836) and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), who were in favor of cooperating with Britain. Adams, however, opposed any arrangement that would place the United States in a subordinate position and saw no reason to pledge that the United States would not annex additional territories, such as Texas, in the future. While U.S. and British interests coincided on this matter, Adams thought it wiser for the United States to act on its own.

During the same period the czar sought to ban all ships except Russian ships from the Pacific Northwest—apparently he was attempting to expand Russia’s claims to the Pacific region from Alaska south to the Oregon territory. Adams, according to his diary, persuaded the president to respond to the British, the French, and the Russians all at once and tie the messages into “a combined system of policy.”

In announcing the doctrine Monroe made three bold points. The first, with reference to the czar’s land claims, was that “the American continents…are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” Second, the president warned that if any European power tried to control or oppress the newly independent governments in the Western Hemisphere, that action would be taken “as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.” Third, Monroe reiterated the U.S. policy of noninterference in European affairs, which had been consistent since President George Washington (1732–1799) stated the policy in his farewell address. Monroe amplified the point, however, extending the noninterference principle to existing European colonies and dependencies.

It was clear to all that the United States was not capable of implementing this policy with the military it possessed at the time. However, in reality, it did not need to, because Britain, whose fleet dominated the Atlantic, was also committed to preserving Latin American independence. Moreover, the British had received written assurances from the French that they would not try to recolonize the Americas. The real innovation in Monroe’s declarations had to be inferred: that the United States was claiming a special interest and a privileged status in the affairs of the hemisphere. In the political void left by Spain’s departure from the Americas, the United States projected itself as the preeminent power in the region.

Implications and Expansions

Monroe’s message was received favorably within the United States. Some foreign leaders, such as the czar and Austria’s Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich (1773–1859), expressed contempt for what they saw as the president’s arrogance. However, the policy had little immediate effect. It was not debated or ratified by Congress. It had no standing under international law. It met no armed challenge from any foreign power. It did not convey any particular responsibilities or diplomatic initiatives toward Latin America; in fact, the United States rejected several offers of alliance from its new neighbors. The British Navy, not the United States, provided security for the region and its open markets.

The significance of the Monroe Doctrine grew, however, as later presidents invoked its principles and retooled it to serve the nation’s expanding aims and increasing power. The first was President James K. Polk (1795–1849), in his December 1845 message to Congress. At that moment negotiations with Britain over the Oregon border had reached a delicate stage, and the British and the French were apparently maneuvering to prevent the U.S. acquisition of Texas. Polk not only reaffirmed Monroe’s policies but also went beyond them to suggest that the Europeans must not try to thwart U.S. territorial expansion. Referring to the annexation of Texas, Polk proclaimed, “We can never consent that European powers shall interfere to prevent such a union because it might disturb the ‘balance of power’ which they may desire to maintain upon this continent.” In 1848, during a civil war on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, Polk warned the British and French that an effort on their part to assume control in Yucatán would violate Monroe’s principles and could force the United States itself to take over the Yucatán. Neither action occurred, but Polk’s message was the first in which a U.S. leader publicly invoked the Monroe Doctrine as a rationale for military intervention.

During the 1850s disputes with Britain over a Central American canal led U.S. leaders repeatedly to mention the Monroe Doctrine and British statesmen to discount it. During the Civil War Napoleon III (1808–1873) of France defied the doctrine, landed troops in Mexico, and installed the monarchy of Maximilian I (1832–1867) and Carlota (1840–1927). Once the war had ended, however, the Monroe Doctrine was used to pressure the French to withdraw their troops, a move that undermined the puppet regime.

Use of the Monroe Doctrine

By the twentieth century the Monroe Doctrine had become a popular symbol of growing U.S. strength. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) claimed in 1904 that “chronic wrongdoing” by any Latin American nation could compel the United States to apply “an international police power.” Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine would be put to use aggressively over the course of the century to justify dozens of deployments by the U.S. Marines.

After World War II the Organization of American States was established to provide collective security for Latin America and the Caribbean. Nevertheless, the Cold War—the decades-long struggle for hegemony between the United States and the Soviet Union—provided a pretext for continued unilateral U.S. intervention in the region. Sometimes U.S. involvement took overt military form, as in the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), and Haiti (2004). At other times covert operations were organized by the military or the Central Intelligence Agency, as in Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), Chile (1973), and Nicaragua (the Contra War of the 1980s). The Monroe Doctrine has gradually been transformed into a blanket rationale for the unilateral use of U.S. power to achieve national interests.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, is the primary federal agency responsible for programs and policies that involve Native Americans. Established in 1824, it was the lead agency responsible for removal of the eastern Indians to the western territories. Since then the BIA has established reservations, subdivided commonly held lands into individual plots, and administered programs of education and cultural assimilation.

Precursors to the “Indian Office”

In the years following the American Revolution, armed conflict and trade with Native American tribes were central concerns of U.S. government policy. The British and French cultivated relations with Indian nations in their North American possessions and coaxed the tribes into raiding U.S. settlements. Many tribes in Canada allied with the British against the invading Americans in the War of 1812. The U.S. victory in that war, plus the 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory from the French, mitigated the threat from tribes allied with the European powers and removed competition for Indian trade.

Congress established the War Department during the presidency of George Washington (1732–1799) and gave that department responsibility for Indian affairs. The department ran trading houses where Native Americans could buy and sell furs and other goods at regulated prices. A superintendent of Indian trade oversaw the program from 1806 until 1822, by which point Indian trading had largely passed into the private sector.

Indian Removal

Secretary of War John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) created the Bureau of Indian Affairs, known as the “Indian Office,” in 1824, acting without authorization from Congress. Thomas L. McKenney (1785–1859), formerly superintendent of Indian trade, was the first commissioner. Congress approved the office ten years later, granting the commissioner official administrative powers.

During those years U.S. policy toward Native American tribes focused on their forced westward migration and the acquisition of their ancestral territories. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, strongly supported by President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), authorized federal involvement in forced resettlement. BIA agents confined the tribes to reservations and promoted their assimilation into the rest of society. Many of the native communities—even the most compliant—ended up losing their homelands. The Cherokee, for example, were rounded up in Georgia and herded west to Oklahoma in 1838 and 1839. More than four thousand of the fifteen thousand Cherokees died as they made their way along what became known as the Trail of Tears. In other cases, hunger for land prompted settlers to neglect the obligations of treaties that had been signed in good faith. By the 1850s the BIA had helped to remove Native Americans from nearly eight hundred thousand square miles of land so it could be incorporated into the United States.

“Civilizing” the Native Americans

In 1849 the BIA was transferred from the War Department to the newly created Home Department (which was later renamed the Department of the Interior). Military presence on reservations remained robust, however, undermining the civilian agency’s authority. After the Civil War Congress banned military personnel from staffing BIA positions, and BIA agents took over most security functions on reservations.

The agency also took charge of Native American education, for which the federal government had allotted funds since 1820; later in the nineteenth century, the BIA began operating Indian schools on and off reservations. Other initiatives aimed at cultural assimilation, or “civilizing” the Indians, included attacks on tribal unity, customs, and religious practices. BIA agents forced the tribes to convert from hunting to farming. Agency personnel were frequently accused of corruption and abuse of the native population.

An 1854 treaty with the Omaha tribe signaled a new policy, which prevailed well into the twentieth century: subdividing communally held Indian land into lots for individual ownership. This policy, codified by Congress in the General Allotment Act of 1887 and enforced by the BIA, dismantled the communal practices that were the bedrock of Native American social organization. It also stripped the tribes of two-thirds of their remaining reservation land. These policies were largely reversed by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which was intended to restore Indian lands, strengthen tribal government, and preserve their cultural practices. In the twenty-first century BIA policy centers on tribal self-determination: the agency’s main tasks are advising and training Native Americans to manage their own affairs and resources.

The Bank War

President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) battled furiously to destroy the Second Bank of the United States during the 1830s, an episode often referred to as the Bank War. Controversy over the national bank stemmed from the economic Panic of 1819, for which the bank’s policies were sometimes blamed. Jackson thought the concentrated economic power of a national bank was a corrupting influence, so he vetoed a bill to renew the bank’s charter and subsequently withdrew federal funds, effectively crippling the bank. Because of his actions, the nation’s financial system fell into disarray and, shortly after Jackson left office, plunged into the Panic of 1837.

The Bank and the 1832 Election

The U.S. government created the Second Bank of the United States in 1816 to halt inflation and manage debts resulting from the War of 1812. The institution was troubled from the start. The bank’s first president, William Jones (1760–1831), resigned after fraud was discovered at several branches. His successor, Langdon Cheves (1776–1857), restored the bank’s fiscal health by restricting lending and collecting delinquent debt. His policies, while prudent, were mistimed. The deflation they brought on, combined with overheated land speculation and tumbling overseas markets for U.S. commodities, triggered a depression in 1819. Thousands of Americans lost their homes and went bankrupt. Said one commentator, “The bank was saved, but the people were ruined.”

By the late 1820s the nation had largely recovered from the Panic of 1819, and the Bank of the United States, then run by Nicholas Biddle (1786–1844) of Philadelphia, had helped to stabilize the economy. However, banking had become a key issue in state and national politics, especially in the expanding West. Jackson, a U.S. Army general from Tennessee, was a strong presidential contender in 1824, drawing political support from Americans of humble means. He capitalized on their resentment toward the financial institutions of privileged easterners. He won the presidency in 1828, and in his first annual message to Congress in 1829 he asserted that the Second Bank of the United States was unconstitutional.

Jackson pilloried the bank rhetorically, but its charter was not scheduled to run out until 1836, and under Biddle the institution had gained many supporters. One of them, Henry Clay (1777–1852), then a senator from Kentucky, saw the bank as a potentially winning issue when he became Jackson’s opponent in the 1832 election. With Biddle’s approval, Clay and Daniel Webster (1782–1852), a senator from Massachusetts, introduced a bill to renew the bank’s charter four years before it was due to expire. By their logic Jackson would be forced to appear either hypocritical if he signed the bill or reckless if he vetoed it. However, they miscalculated. Jackson’s veto of renewal of the bank’s charter proved popular with voters, who saw it as a blow to wealthy monopolists. “Old Hickory,” as Jackson was known, rode the issue to a decisive victory; he was reelected by 219 electoral votes to Clay’s 49.

Jackson’s Bank War

Jackson interpreted his re-election as a mandate from the people to demolish the Bank of the United States. He decided it was his turn to force the issue—any delay would give Biddle and other supporters of the bank time to assemble a veto-proof majority for renewing its charter. The president decided to withhold federal deposits from the national bank and divert the government’s money to state banks of his choosing—they became known as Jackson’s “pet banks.” Two treasury secretaries gave up the office rather than carry out his order. Finally, a Jackson loyalist, Roger B. Taney (1777–1864), redirected the deposits to twenty-three state banks. The president was censured by the Senate in 1834, which only made him attack the bank more zealously.

Biddle responded to the bank’s loss of funds by calling in outstanding loans and reducing the number of new loans. Usually a cautious banker, in this instance he seemed to be using bank policies to manipulate the political situation. Instead, he caused a small financial crisis (the press called it Biddle’s Panic) and squandered his political support. In 1836 the bank’s national charter expired. It re-opened under a state charter and operated as the United States Bank of Pennsylvania until it collapsed in 1841.

Jackson won his bank war, but his interventions left the nation economically vulnerable. In the absence of a central banking system, the state banks floated credit widely, backed by insufficient reserves of gold and silver, leading to severe inflation. As land sales and speculation rose, Jackson issued his Specie Circular of 1836, which required buyers of government land plots to pay in coin, or specie, rather than in bank notes. Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren (1782–1862), had been in office only a few weeks when the nation was hit by the Panic of 1837. Many historians believe the six-year depression that followed might have been less severe if the government had had at its disposal a national financial institution.

The Gag Rule

A “gag rule” is a law or regulation prohibiting debate or discussion of a certain subject. The most famous gag rule in U.S. history was imposed by the House of Representatives in 1836 to avoid debating the thousands of petitions submitted to Congress advocating the abolition of slavery. The rule was renewed annually for nine years until it was overturned in 1844, in large part because of the persistent protest of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), then a representative from Massachusetts (he had earlier been president of the United States).

Citizens’ Rights and Congressional Harmony

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects “the right of the people…to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” In the nation’s early years such petitions were regularly read aloud before Congress, printed, debated, and usually referred to a committee for further action.

After the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, petitioning increased dramatically and began to focus on abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. The Southern states proclaimed that slavery was a matter for each state to decide, but Congress had direct authority over the nation’s capital and, therefore, had the power to bar slavery within its borders. Southern representatives, led by Senator John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) and Representative Henry L. Pinckney (1794–1863), both of South Carolina, broke precedent by moving to lay all petitions concerning slavery “on the table” with no further action. Even debating the South’s “peculiar institution,” they contended, was an intolerable assault on the region’s established way of life. Some Northern lawmakers agreed, in the interest of preserving a harmonious working climate in Congress.

The House passed the first gag rule by a vote of 117 to 68 in May 1836. The Senate did not pass a gag rule, but instead denied petitions one by one as they were introduced. The House resolution had to be renewed at each session. When it was allowed to expire in December 1837, a flood of new petitions arrived immediately, leading the legislators to adopt a stricter gag rule. In 1840 they voted to make the resolution a permanent House rule.

Adams led the opposition to the gag rule, fighting it vigorously year after year, well into his seventies. He was not an abolitionist, but he argued that regardless of one’s position on slavery, the freedom of petition was a crucial liberty that must not be suppressed. Adams lost repeated votes and was threatened with censure, but little by little more members of Congress joined his side until the gag rule was overturned on December 3, 1844, by a vote of 105 to 80.

The abolitionists ultimately benefited from the exposure that the gag rule brought to their cause. It illustrated one of their key arguments: that the power of slavery, if not resisted, would expand until it threatened the freedoms of all Americans.

See also John Quincy Adams

Important Figures of the Day

John Marshall

John Marshall (1755–1835), the fourth chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was the foremost influence on early American jurisprudence. Marshall pioneered the concept of judicial review, the doctrine that the Supreme Court could invalidate laws enacted by Congress that were contrary to the U.S. Constitution, which has been the basis of most major Supreme Court decisions for the past two hundred years. Prior to leading the Supreme Court, Marshall established himself as one of the foremost legal minds of post-Revolutionary America and a leading member of the Federalist Party. Marshall rose to political prominence when, on a mission to France, he reported on the efforts of three agents of the French foreign ministry to solicit bribes from the U.S. government. Afterward, he served in the House of Representatives and was John Adams’ secretary of state. Marshall used his position as chief justice to shape the Supreme Court’s role within the federal government and to protect the national government’s primacy over the states.

Early Life and Wartime Service

Marshall was born in Fauquier County, Virginia, near the frontier town of Germantown, in 1755. Marshall’s father, Thomas (1730–1802), was a land speculator who was born into humble circumstances. Through his mother, Mary Keith Marshall, John Marshall was related to one of Virginia’s most prominent families, the Randolphs, and was a second cousin to Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), who would eventually become his political nemesis.

When the war of independence began, Marshall answered the call of duty, first joining a Virginia militia, the Culpepper Minute Men, in 1775 and eventually becoming an officer in the Continental Army in June 1776. Marshall served under George Washington (1732–1799) at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777, at the low point of the war. This military experience molded his postwar political beliefs. “I was confirmed in my habit of considering America as my country and Congress as my government,” he would later write to his friend and Supreme Court colleague Joseph Story (1779–1845).

Between military assignments in 1780 he attended law lectures at the College of William and Mary—the only institutional education he would receive in his life—and he was admitted to the Fauquier County bar later that year. When his time with the army ended in 1781, Marshall was determined to make a career as an attorney.

Marshall was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1782 and moved to Richmond, where he established his first law practice. At first, many prospective clients were put off by his appearance—he dressed shabbily and he had the unrefined manner of a frontiersman—but once they saw Marshall in action in a courtroom, these doubts rapidly faded. Although Marshall’s opponents often had much more formal education and knowledge of legal precedents than he did, Marshall’s skills were uniquely suited to the practice of law at that moment in history. Americans, newly freed from England, no longer felt compelled to follow the laws of the mother country, and Marshall had the creativity and eloquence to persuade judges of what the law should be. This creativity, and a tendency to avoid citing legal precedents, would be hallmarks of his later work on the Supreme Court.

Life in Politics and the XYZ Affair

Marshall served in the House of Burgesses until 1788. That year he spoke eloquently at Virginia’s convention on the ratification of the federal Constitution. The thirty-three-year-old Marshall was a fierce proponent of the Constitution, and was sufficiently well regarded by his peers that he was asked to deliver the rebuttal to the anti-Constitution summation by Patrick Henry (1736–1799), who was widely considered the finest orator in America at the time.

After the Constitution’s ratification, Marshall became a prominent supporter of Washington’s leadership and Alexander Hamilton’s (1755–1804) economic policies. His rise to prominence within the Federalist Party was such that in 1795 Washington offered him the post of attorney general, which Marshall refused, as he did an offer to be minister to France the following year. However, when John Adams (1735–1826) succeeded Washington as president in 1797, Marshall was offered, and accepted, a position to serve with Elbridge Gerry (1744–1814) and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1746–1825) on a mission to make peace with France, which had at that time attacked and seized hundreds of American vessels at sea.

Upon arriving in France, Marshall, Gerry, and Pinckney were contacted by three French agents, later dubbed X, Y, and Z, who informed them that the French foreign minister would not receive them unless they paid a substantial cash bribe and secured a massive loan from the American government to the French government. The commissioners refused to pay the tribute, and the French government expelled Marshall and Pinckney from the country.

When news of the XYZ Affair was made public, Marshall was hailed as a hero. Adams offered him a position on the Supreme Court in 1798, which he refused. Washington, however, prevailed upon Marshall to run for Congress, where he served one term before Adams called upon him to join the administration, first nominating Marshall as secretary of war, then as secretary of state.

Marshall became Adams’ secretary of state in June 1800. Within a few months, he and Adams would be reduced to lame duck status (that is, powerless because their term in office would soon end), as the election of 1800 resulted in a wholesale rejection of the Federalist agenda. Thomas Jefferson won the presidency, and his Democratic-Republicans gained control of both chambers of Congress.

Midnight Appointments and Marbury v. Madison

Between the time that Adams lost the election and Jefferson’s inauguration in March 1801, the Federalists scrambled to find ways to remain relevant in the face of the new Jeffersonian government. Their plan centered on exploiting the Judiciary Act of 1801, passed in February, which created a number of new posts for federal judges and justices of the peace. Adams planned to fill these positions with Federalists prior to Jefferson taking office.

In addition to creating and filling these new judicial posts, Adams had to find a new chief justice of the Supreme Court to replace Oliver Ellsworth (1745–1807). Marshall did not himself seek this office; he favored a current member of the Court, William Paterson (1745–1806). However, Adams was not well-disposed toward Paterson, and instead he attempted to bring back the Court’s first chief justice, John Jay (1745–1829), who was then serving out the end of his term as governor of New York. Jay was nominated and confirmed by the Senate, but in January 1801 Adams received the news that Jay had declined the post. In desperate need of a nominee who could be confirmed prior to Jefferson taking office, Adams offered the position to Marshall, who accepted.

The fact that John Jay had refused the appointment as chief justice spoke volumes about the body that Marshall was about to join. An appointment to the Supreme Court in 1801 was not a glamorous proposition. The Court’s role was ill defined and its resources practically nonexistent. The justices of the Supreme Court did not have offices, or even a courthouse—the Court operated out of a nondescript conference room on the first floor of the Capitol. All justices, including the chief, were required to spend time “riding the circuit,” that is, traveling from one federal court to the next in a defined geographic area to preside over cases and assist district court judges. Constant travel by coach over the primitive roads of early nineteenth century America was grueling and tedious work that kept many jurists, particularly older ones, from accepting positions on the Supreme Court.

Marshall was sworn in as chief justice of the United States on February 4, 1801. For the next month, he served as both chief justice and secretary of state. The Federalists’ judicial appointment scheme went down to the wire, with the Senate confirming many appointees on the final day of Adams’s presidency, March 4, 1801. As secretary of state, it was Marshall’s duty to see that the commissions granting the new appointments were signed, sealed, and delivered. President Adams signed the commissions, and Marshall and his brother James worked late into the night preparing them for delivery. John Marshall left to be rested for his first official duty as chief justice—administering the oath of office at the inauguration of a man he despised—and James Marshall left to deliver some of the commissions. In their haste, the Marshalls left several commissions behind in the secretary of state’s office, including one addressed to a newly appointed justice of the peace, William Marbury (1765–?).

After waiting several months for his commission to arrive, Marbury contacted Jefferson’s secretary of state, future president James Madison (1751–1836), and demanded his commission. President Jefferson detested the “midnight appointments” of judges and justices of the peace that Adams had made in the last weeks of his administration, and he instructed Madison that none of the commissions that had been left behind in Marshall’s office would be honored.

Marbury sought to bring the matter directly before the Supreme Court using a procedure, called a Writ of Mandamus, which had been established by Congress in the Judiciary Act of 1789. Usually, a matter reaches the Supreme Court only by means of an appeal after it has been tried by another court. Exceptions to this rule were set out in Article III of the Constitution for situations in which a foreign ambassador or consul, or one of the states, is a party to a legal action, in which case the trial can be held before the Supreme Court. The Writ of Mandamus provided the additional option of taking cases involving government officials directly to the Supreme Court.

Congress’s efforts to repeal the Judiciary Act of 1801 delayed the Marbury trial until 1803. The proceedings were irregular, particularly in the fact that Marshall, who should have been the case’s key witness, was instead presiding over the trial. The case, Marbury v. Madison presented Marshall, and the Supreme Court itself, with a no-win situation: if the Court found in favor of Marbury, it was certain that the Jefferson administration would ignore the order, leaving the judiciary humiliated and its authority diminished. The judiciary depends upon the executive branch to enforce its rulings, so if the administration chose not to enforce a decision of the Supreme Court, the court’s decisions could thereafter be considered simply advisory. On the other hand, if the Court decided that the administration was not obligated to hand over Marbury’s commission, it would set the precedent that the current administration could ignore the acts of previous presidents. The perception would also be that the Supreme Court caved in to pressure from the Democratic-Republicans.

Marshall’s solution was extremely subtle. His decision stated that Marbury was entitled to the commission, and that the Jefferson administration acted illegally in withholding it. The decision then went on to explain that despite this fact, the Supreme Court could not order Madison to produce the commission, because the law that permitted Marbury to seek the Writ of Mandamus—a provision of the 1789 Judiciary Act—was unconstitutional. Marshall argued that the conditions enumerated in Article III for determining the trial jurisdiction of the Supreme Court could not be expanded without a constitutional amendment.

On its face, the decision gave the Jeffersonians everything they wanted—Marbury and the other men in his position did not receive their commissions, and the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court shrank, eliminating one path that could have been used to get the Federalist-dominated Court to interfere with the Jefferson administration’s plans. But at the same time, Marshall had enunciated a far greater power for the Court: the power to override the legislature by deciding which laws were and were not constitutional. By dismissing Marbury’s suit, Marshall made the judiciary branch the equal of the executive and legislative branches, and made himself one of the most powerful men in American history.

The Marshall Court

While Marshall’s coup in Marbury was focused on limiting federal power, the signature decisions of his tenure on the Court greatly expanded the powers of the federal government. In McCulloch v. Maryland, Marshall found that Congress had the power to create a national bank, even though no such power was explicitly set out in the Constitution. In that case, Marshall also declared that the state governments did not have the power to tax any of the federal government’s creations, such as the bank, because the power to tax such institutions was the power to destroy them. In Gibbons v. Ogden, Marshall used an expansive definition of the words “interstate commerce” in Article I of the Constitution to find that a monopoly the state of New York had granted for the operation of steamboats in its territorial waters was unconstitutional, and that Congress had the right to regulate the nation’s waterways.

Each of these landmark cases was based upon Marshall’s core principle that the United States was one nation, not a loose association of states, and that the federal government was that nation’s ultimate power. Even in those cases in which he sided with a state government (as in Cohens v. Virginia, in which the State of Virginia protested the sale of District of Columbia lottery tickets in Virginia), he did so while vigorously protecting and even expanding federal powers.

Marshall’s extraordinary dominance of the Court’s jurisprudence was the result of his strong personal leadership abilities and changes that he painstakingly made to the Supreme Court’s institutional culture. When Marshall joined the Court, the Justices acted more as loosely organized individuals than as a unit. It was often difficult to convene the court with a quorum of its members present, due to the rigors of riding the circuit. More significantly, it was the custom for each justice to render an individual decision in each case.

Marshall believed that the Court would be most effective if it spoke with a single voice. Accordingly, he worked to build unity within the Court, encouraging his fellow justices to take rooms in the boarding house where he stayed while in Washington, so they could take their meals together and discuss cases. This informal socializing gave Marshall the opportunity to focus his winning personality and persuasive powers on his fellow justices. When Jefferson and his successors appointed new justices with the goal of eroding Marshall’s authority, they often saw their appointees quickly converted to his views.

In addition to creating a sense of bonhomie among the justices, Marshall is also credited with establishing the Court’s seniority system, by which the justices vote on a case in inverse order of seniority, with the senior justice (and the chief is always the senior justice, regardless of the actual length of his or her tenure) in the majority deciding who will draft the court’s opinion. This procedure gave Marshall extraordinary control over the Court’s output. Voting last, he could join the majority even in cases in which he disagreed with the majority view, thus granting himself the right to determine who would write the opinion, and he could assign that task to someone—usually himself—who would moderate the decision’s impact. Marshall used this leverage primarily as a negotiating tool to encourage compromise and build consensus within the court.

In his thirty-five years as chief justice, Marshall authored 519 of the Court’s 1,100 decisions, including the decisions in every case in which he participated during his first five years on the Court. He filed only six dissenting opinions in the longest tenure of any chief justice in U.S. history. Marshall died in office on July 6, 1835.

See also The Judiciary

See alsoMarbury v. Madison

See alsoMcCulloch v. Maryland

See also The XYZ Affair

James Monroe

The fifth president of the United States, James Monroe (1758–1831) is best known for the Monroe Doctrine, a presidential declaration outlining the intended relationship of the United States with the nascent states of Latin America that became the guiding principle of American foreign policy in the nineteenth century. Prior to becoming president, Monroe was a legislator, a two-time governor of Virginia, and a statesman, serving as a minister to France in the administrations of George Washington (1732–1799) and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and as secretary of state and secretary of war in the administration of his longtime political rival, James Madison (1751–1836). During his presidency, Monroe guided the nation through the acquisition of Florida from Spain, the Missouri Compromise, and the nation’s first fiscal crisis, the Panic of 1819.

A Soldier and a Patriot

Monroe was born into the gentry of Westmoreland County, Virginia, an area that was also home to George Washington and James Madison. By the time he enrolled in the College of William and Mary in 1774, at the age of sixteen, he was already determined to make a life in politics. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Monroe interrupted his education to enlist with the Third Virginia Infantry, starting his military career with the rank of lieutenant.

Monroe’s regiment became attached to Washington’s army, and Monroe acquitted himself ably in battle, sustaining a shoulder wound at the battle of Trenton and eventually earning the rank of major. Left without a command in 1780, Monroe studied law, and at his family’s encouragement he befriended the governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson took Monroe under his wing, and the two men enjoyed a lifelong friendship.

An Ambitious Politician and Statesman

Monroe was elected to his first term in the Virginia legislature in 1782, and the following year he was elected to Congress under the Articles of Confederation, where he served until 1786. He returned to the Virginia legislature, losing a seat in the first U.S. Congress to James Madison. In 1790 he was selected to fill a vacancy in the Senate, where he served for four years. In 1794 Washington appointed Monroe minister to France. It was not a successful mission, however, as Monroe felt that his attempts to build a strong relationship with France were undermined by the efforts of John Jay (1745–1829), who was minister to Britain, France’s rival. Monroe was recalled in 1796.

Despite this setback, Monroe remained popular, particularly in Virginia. In 1799 he was elected the state’s governor, a position he held until his mentor, President Jefferson, called upon him to undertake another mission to France in 1803. In that role, Monroe helped to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase. This success was followed by an appointment as minister to Britain. Monroe negotiated a treaty with the British, but was undermined by Jefferson’s secretary of state, Madison, and the treaty was never submitted to the Senate for approval. Monroe went on to run for the presidency against Madison in 1808; he was soundly defeated.

Monroe was elected governor of Virginia again in 1811, but he served only a few months before accepting an appointment as Madison’s secretary of state. Monroe’s time as secretary of state was largely undistinguished. After the outbreak of the War of 1812 Monroe longed to have a military command, but none was forthcoming. In 1814, after the British invaded the capital, Monroe convinced Madison to dismiss Secretary of War John Armstrong (1758–1842) and allow Monroe to simultaneously hold both the offices of secretary of state and secretary of war. Monroe reorganized the nation’s armed forces and remained in the post until the war’s successful conclusion after the Battle of New Orleans.

The Federalists’ opposition to the War of 1812 destroyed the party, and Monroe’s only serious opposition in his next run for the presidency came from within his own party—the man who succeeded him as secretary of war, William Crawford (1772–1834). After vanquishing Crawford in the Democratic-Republican caucus, Monroe won a landslide victory in the election of 1816.

President Monroe and the Era of Good Feelings

With the opposition party in ruins, during his first term Monroe attempted to heal partisan divides. He toured New England, stressing the need for unity, and he made sure to give patronage jobs to members of both parties, going so far as to appoint John Quincy Adams (1767‐1848), the son of the last Federalist president, as his secretary of state. This brief period of respite from partisan strife was dubbed the Era of Good Feelings.

Madison’s greatest achievements in office came in the foreign policy arena. Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) invaded the Spanish colony of Florida in 1818, on the pretext of pursuing hostile Seminoles who had attacked Georgia. Although Jackson’s actions were not sanctioned by Monroe, they gave the administration the opportunity to pressure Spain into surrendering Florida to the United States and accepting borders to the Louisiana Territory that were more favorable to the United States.

In domestic affairs, Monroe’s administration was hamstrung by the Panic of 1819, an economic depression caused by the nation’s heavy borrowing during the War of 1812. Monroe’s reaction to the crisis was to cut government spending and services to the bare minimum, which did not give the administration the latitude to invest in transportation or strengthen national defenses.

The Era of Good Feelings also began to dissolve in 1819 as a crisis began to brew over slavery in the Missouri Territory and the shifting balance of power between slave and free states when Missouri was admitted to the Union. Despite the gathering unrest over Missouri, Monroe ran for reelection unopposed in 1920, receiving all but one electoral college vote.

However, even after the Missouri Compromise gave the sectional issue a temporary solution—Maine was admitted as a free state to counterbalance the slave state Missouri, and slavery was banned in the Louisiana Territory above the latitude of 36° 30’—partisanship continued to simmer under the surface, as various candidates attempted to position themselves as Monroe’s successors for the next presidential election. Eventually the Democratic-Republican Party fractured, and partisan infighting again stood in the way of progress.

In December 1823, during his seventh State of the Union address, Monroe made the declaration for which he is best known, delivering a statement that set forth the government’s policy toward interference by the European powers in the Western Hemisphere and about the relationship between the United States and the nascent states of Latin America. The statement, which would later be known as the Monroe Doctrine, was actually the work of John Quincy Adams. Intended as a warning against any colonial intentions France and Russia might have for the Western Hemisphere, the Doctrine declared that any foreign interference in the Americas would be considered an “unfriendly act” against the United States.

Monroe’s statement did not actually convince the European powers to abandon colonial designs on the Western Hemisphere. There were minor encroachments by the British, Spanish, and French in the Caribbean and in Central and South America that met with no retaliation by the United States. But the Monroe Doctrine came to represent the desire of the United States for independence in its foreign affairs and for self-determination within the Americas. Later generations saw the Monroe Doctrine as a rationalization for colonial conduct on the part of the United States itself.

After the presidency, Monroe returned to Virginia, where he still held political influence. He died on July 4, 1831, five years to the day after the death of his mentor and friend, Jefferson.

See also The Monroe Doctrine

See also The Missouri Compromise

See also The War of 1812

John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), the sixth president of the United States, was one of the nation’s finest statesmen and had a long, distinguished career in public service. As secretary of state in the administration of James Monroe (1758–1831), his diplomatic shrewdness led to the nation’s acquisition of Florida from Spain, and his foreign-policy ideas coalesced into the Monroe Doctrine.

Preparation for the Presidency

Adams, whose father was the second president of the United States, had a privileged and worldly upbringing in Braintree (later Quincy), Massachusetts, that put him on the fast track to a career in politics. He studied in France and the Netherlands while his father was on diplomatic missions, and he worked as his father’s secretary during the 1783 peace negotiations in Paris. Afterward he studied at Harvard and practiced law in Boston.

President George Washington (1732–1799) appointed the younger Adams minister to the Netherlands in 1797; his father sent him to Prussia for his next diplomatic post. In 1801 he returned to Boston, became professor of rhetoric at Harvard, and won a seat in the state senate. In 1803 he won election to the U.S. Senate. He entered as a Federalist, his father’s political party, but his support for the trade embargo imposed in 1807—a response by President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and Congress to British and French attacks on neutral U.S. merchant ships during the Napoleonic Wars—put him sharply at odds with the party, wealthy merchants, and his supporters in his home state. He was forced to resign his seat and was cast out by the Federalists.

His political career did not suffer, however, for he joined the Republicans, and President James Madison (1751–1836) named him minister to Russia in 1809; chief peace commissioner at the Ghent negotiations that ended the War of 1812; and then minister to Britain.

A Consummate Diplomat

With all this diplomatic experience, Adams was the obvious choice for secretary of state when Monroe entered the White House in 1817. Adams performed deftly, combining high-minded principles with hardheaded realism. Many historians rate Adams among the most successful secretaries of state in the nation’s history.

His first test came with the incursion by General Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) and his troops into Spanish-held Florida in March 1818. Acting without clear instructions from Monroe, Jackson’s men seized Spanish forts, attacked Seminole Indians, executed two British subjects, ousted the governor, and claimed the land for the United States. Many Americans applauded this daring military venture, but the British and Spanish governments both responded with threats, and prominent men in the government wanted to censure Jackson or even court-martial him.

When Monroe consulted his cabinet, Adams argued against a defensive stance. He saw the U.S. occupation of Florida as an opportunity to negotiate with Spain from a position of strength. Spain had reduced its military forces on the peninsula, but was eager to protect its possessions in the western regions of North America. Monroe chose this assertive course, and in February 1819 Adams delivered a treaty that ceded all of Florida to the United States. It also surrendered any U.S. claims to Texas and set a boundary between U.S. and Spanish territory running to the Pacific Ocean.

In Monroe’s second term, revolutionary agitation in Europe and Latin America rocked the international order. The British foreign minister invited the United States to form a partnership to protect the newly independent states of South America. Monroe and his cabinet considered the offer, but eventually decided that an alliance with Britain would lead the country away from the policy, first stated by President George Washington, of noninvolvement in European affairs. Adams suggested a comprehensive policy against both U.S. interference in Europe and future colonization of Latin America by the European powers—the key planks of the Monroe Doctrine. First declared in 1823, it was adhered to by administrations well into the twentieth century.

The Dramatic Election of 1824

As the election of 1824 approached, it became clear that the next president would be a Republican because the Federalist Party had begun to disintegrate. Still, the contest shaped up to be intensely competitive. Adams, the only Northern contender, was opposed by two political giants of the South, Treasury Secretary William Crawford (1772–1834) of Georgia and Vice President John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) of South Carolina, and one from what was then the West, House Speaker Henry Clay (1777–1852) of Kentucky. A fifth candidate, a dark horse with little political experience, soon gained the momentum: Jackson of Tennessee, whose exploits in Florida, in Indian skirmishes, and in the Battle of New Orleans, the last major battle of the War of 1812, made him popular with the public.

Adams, a stiff and formal man, was not a skilled campaigner and disliked the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics. Despite his qualifications, he failed to gain popular support outside New England. Crawford was the official nominee of the Republican congressional caucus, but he suffered a stroke during the campaign. Calhoun dropped out to concentrate on running for vice president. It was Jackson who led the popular vote. However, none of the candidates had gained a majority in the electoral college, so the decision rested with the House of Representatives.

Clay, who came in fourth in the electoral college and, according to the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, was out of the running, became the election’s kingmaker. Clay distrusted Jackson; his policy views were closest to those of Adams. The two men met privately, and though they later denied any explicit deal, Clay threw his support to Adams. The electors in Clay’s home state, Kentucky, had been assigned to vote for Jackson, yet when the voting took place on February 9, 1825, Kentucky voted for Adams, as did a majority of the state delegations, giving him the presidency.

Jackson and his supporters were outraged—even more so when, two days later, President-elect Adams offered the post of secretary of state to Clay. In a letter, Jackson wrote of Clay: “So you see the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver.” Condemnation of the “corrupt bargain” hounded Adams and Clay for the rest of their careers. Jackson promised vehement opposition to the new president and began spoiling for a rematch. Adams acknowledged in his inaugural message that he had not earned the voters’ confidence.

President Adams and His Opponents

In the years of Adams’s presidency, the United States was prosperous and at peace, undergoing rapid economic expansion and democratic reform. However, in the aftermath of the bitter 1824 election, partisan politics reached a fever pitch. Adams wanted to unite the country by governing without partisanship, so he offered cabinet positions to Jackson and Crawford; both declined. Adams also allowed several political enemies, such as Postmaster General John McLean (1785–1861), to remain in the government, where they worked behind the scenes to undermine the president’s program. Opposed on principle to political patronage, he believed that only poor performance or misconduct were valid reasons for firing federal officials. Largely because of this devotion to principle, Adams failed to develop a base of political support that could help him achieve his objectives.

In his first year in office Adams presented to Congress an ambitious program calling for improvements to the nation’s roads and canal networks and educational system. Aside from some modest appropriations for repairs and canal construction, his proposals went nowhere. Some of the opposition in Congress was principled, reflecting the South’s aversion to the growth of federal power, but much of it reflected the intense hostility to Adams. His proposal to create the first astronomical observatory in the Western Hemisphere, for example, met with caustic derision. Jackson never let up in his portrayal of Adams as an elitist aristocrat. Martin Van Buren (1782–1862), a Republican senator from New York, organized the anti-Adams coalition in Congress.

After the 1826 congressional elections, majorities in both houses opposed the president for the first time in U.S. history. The Twentieth Congress passed a complex, politically driven tariff measure, the Tariff of Abominations, which appeared to be designed to weaken the president’s support in several key states. John Randolph (1773–1833), a representative from Virginia, said the measure was not related to manufactures, except for “the manufacture of a President of the United States.”

In 1827 a dispute arose between the Creek Indians and the state of Georgia over a treaty—fraudulently drawn, according to the Creek—to remove the tribe from their ancestral lands. Adams favored removal of Indians to lands west of the Mississippi River, but received a Creek delegation to renegotiate the agreement; the new version allowed the Creeks to remain on a portion of their original land. When the governor of Georgia objected and sent land surveyors to enforce the disputed treaty, Adams threatened to send in the military. The pro-Jackson Senate undercut the president’s position, however, and when the issue was resolved, the Creeks surrendered their Georgia lands.

“Old Man Eloquent”

When Adams and Jackson ran for the presidency in 1828, the contest was more brutal. Adams’s supporters did not hesitate to throw mud, charging Jackson with adultery after it was discovered that his wife’s divorce had not been finalized before he married her. The Jacksonians called Adams an adulterer, too, and accused him of procuring women for the czar while he was minister to Russia. More important, Jackson and Van Buren organized an efficient campaign network fueled by enthusiastic popular support—a network that would evolve into the Democratic Party. When the votes were counted, Jackson had swept the West and the South and decisively defeated the president. Like his father, John Quincy Adams served only one term.

Adams, a highly self-critical man, admitted the failure of his presidency. His retirement, however, was brief. In 1830 he was elected to the House of Representatives, where he served energetically for seventeen years. The very qualities that hampered his presidency—his moral integrity and indifference to criticism—made him a legendary member of Congress. For speaking with the courage of his convictions, he earned the nickname “Old Man Eloquent.” Increasingly opposed to slavery, he led a tenacious eight-year struggle against the congressional “gag rule,” a tactic used to prevent debate on the thousands of petitions against slavery submitted to the legislature. The gag rule was finally removed in 1844, a victory for the First Amendment right of petition.

Adams suffered a stroke on the floor of Congress in 1848 and died two days later. As his casket traveled along the Eastern seaboard to his home in Massachusetts, citizens stood by the railroad tracks to pay their respects.

See also The Gag Rule

See also The Monroe Doctrine

The Amistad Case

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) played a dramatic role in the nation’s first civil-rights trial, the Amistad case. He was, by then, a former president, but he demonstrated once again the skills he had learned as a lawyer and statesman.

In 1839 slave traders brought a cargo of Africans from what is now Sierra Leone to Cuba, which was then a Spanish colony. Although the United States had banned participation in the Atlantic slave trade, illegal slaving thrived in the Spanish possessions. Two Spaniards purchased the fifty-three Africans in Havana, loaded them aboard the Spanish schooner La Amistad, and headed along the Cuban coast. During the night the Africans slipped their chains and seized the ship.

They demanded return to Africa, to which the Spaniards agreed. However, in the darkness the ship’s course was reversed. For six weeks the ship wandered in the Atlantic until it neared the eastern seaboard of the United States. The crew of the USS Washington discovered and captured the Amistad, jailing the forty-three surviving Africans in Connecticut.

Then began a sensational legal and political battle. The two Spaniards, José Ruiz and Pedro Montes, claimed the Africans as their property. Spanish authorities demanded their return. The U.S. attorney filed charges of murder and piracy. Abolitionists rallied to support the Africans, contending that they had been illegally captured and acted only in self-defense. An Amistad committee enlisted lawyers to represent the Africans and found a free black man who could translate their Mende dialect.

U.S. District Judge Andrew Judson (1784–1853) heard the case in New Haven. Ruiz and Montes presented passports bearing Spanish surnames for each of the captives to show that they were subjects of the Spanish crown. However, Richard R. Madden, a British official serving in Havana, Cuba, testified that the documents were forged. The Africans were not really slaves, Madden argued, but illegal immigrants who had to be returned to their homes. The trial exposed the horrors of the slave ships and of slavery itself. One of the Africans, Sengbe Pieh—he was called Joseph Cinqué by the Spaniards—took the stand himself, stunning onlookers when he rose and shouted, in English, “Give us free!”

Judson ruled for the Africans, determining that they had legitimately fought to regain their freedom. His ruling surprised everyone, including President Martin Van Buren (1782–1862), who had stationed a navy ship offshore to speed the prisoners back to Cuba. Van Buren worried that an acquittal would damage his prospects for re-election. His administration appealed Judson’s ruling, first to the circuit court, which affirmed the ruling, and then to the Supreme Court. Van Buren was confident in the outcome because five of the nine justices were Southerners.

The abolitionists, however, had another card to play: they added Adams, who was by then known as “Old Man Eloquent,” to the defense team. Adams was not an abolitionist, but in his closing remarks before the court—he spoke for some eight hours—he argued that the case was a fundamental test of the rights to life and liberty proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. The court upheld the acquittal by a vote of 8 to 1. The Africans returned to their homeland in 1842.

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) served as the seventh president of the United States. A military man, Jackson gained popularity for his heroic service in the War of 1812, and his invasion of Florida in 1818 prompted the sale of that territory by Spain to the United States. As president, Jackson was a staunch proponent of territorial expansion and limited government spending; he was also an opponent of the Bank of the United States. After his term in office expired, he remained a respected and influential leader of the Democratic Party.

A Child Soldier

A child of Irish immigrants, Jackson was the first president who was not born into aristocratic society. His father died shortly before he was born, and his mother struggled to provide for Andrew and his brothers, Hugh and Robert, in the tiny village of Waxhaw, South Carolina. During the Revolutionary War Hugh was killed in the Battle of Stono Ferry. The British imprisoned Robert and Andrew, who at the age of thirteen was serving as a courier for the Continental Army. Robert contracted smallpox while imprisoned and died almost immediately upon his release, and not long after, the boys’ mother died of cholera. The bitterness Andrew felt toward the British for his ill treatment in jail and the loss of his brothers remained with him throughout his life.

After the war Jackson served as an apprentice to a saddle maker and taught briefly before moving to North Carolina to study law at the age of seventeen. Jackson eventually settled in the small village of Nashville, Tennessee, where he met and married Rachel Robards (1767–1828), a woman who had been raised on the frontier but came from a family of good social standing. The couple learned only later that Robards’s divorce from her first husband had not been legally granted until two years after her marriage to Jackson, causing a scandal that was frequently reignited by Jackson’s political enemies throughout his career.

Early Political Career

Jackson grew prosperous through his legal practice and buying and selling property. As his stature increased he was appointed to a succession of public positions including district prosecutor and judge-advocate of the Davidson County militia regiment. When Tennessee was granted statehood in 1796, Jackson served as a delegate to the state’s constitutional convention; afterward he was elected to Tennessee’s single seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and then to the U.S. Senate. He served only briefly in both positions before returning to Tennessee, where he became judge of the Superior Court. In 1802 he was elected major-general of the Tennessee militia.

Military Success

Jackson first came to national prominence during the War of 1812, leading the Tennessee militia to victory over the Creek Indians in the 1814 Battle of Horseshoe Bend. As a reward for his service, he was granted a commission as major general in the U.S. Army, and he was soon called upon to defend New Orleans from British attack in one of the last battles of the War of 1812. Jackson’s decisive victory in the Battle of New Orleans made him a national hero and earned him the nickname “Old Hickory” for his toughness.

Dispatched in 1818 to defend Georgia from raids by the Seminole and Creek Indians, Jackson caused an international incident by exceeding his authority and invading and occupying Florida, which was still a Spanish colony at that time. Beyond the problems this caused with Spain, while in Florida Jackson captured and executed two British nationals who he claimed were supplying the Native Americans with weapons.

While President James Monroe and other officials did not sanction Jackson’s actions, they used the invasion to help convince Spain that its hold on its North American colonies was weakening and that Spain should cede the Florida colony to the United States. Jackson was named the first governor of the new U.S. territory.

Presidential Campaigns

At the instigation of Jackson’s political friends, in 1822 the Tennessee and Pennsylvania legislatures both passed resolutions nominating him for the 1824 presidential election. In 1823 Jackson ran for the U.S. Senate in order to prevent an opponent from securing the position, but held the seat only until he could arrange to be succeeded by a supporter, as his aim was fixed on a higher office.

In the presidential election of 1824 Jackson ran against Henry Clay (1777–1852), William H. Crawford (1772–1834), and John Quincy Adams (1767–1848). With strong support from voters on the frontier, Jackson won the popular vote but failed to secure enough electoral votes to clinch the election, which forced the House of Representatives to make the final choice. Adams and Clay both portrayed Jackson as a naive country boy who had no business in such a high office, and after Adams promised to name Clay his secretary of state—a deal Jackson’s supporters decried as “a corrupt bargain”—the House voted to make Adams president.

An angry Jackson quickly announced his candidacy for the 1828 election, and he built a powerful political machine to protect himself from similar back-room dealing in the future. The campaign on both sides immediately slipped into the gutter. Jackson’s opponents characterized him as an adulterer and his wife as a bigamist. Jackson called Adams as a womanizer and Clay an embezzler. Carried by voters who felt he had been wronged in the previous election, Jackson won in a landslide, earning 68 percent of the electoral vote and 56 percent of the popular vote.

Fiscal Policies

Determined to limit government spending, Jackson curbed federal funding for roads and other improvements that could be considered of a “purely local” character. He first exercised this policy in 1830 by vetoing a bill that proposed funding for a Kentucky road, despite the fact that it was widely seen as a key link in the interstate road system. Jackson favored using federal funds only for national defense, expansion, or other issues of a clearly national nature. Jackson’s frugality, along with a land speculation boom in the 1830s, allowed the government to pay off the national debt and created a considerable surplus.

Indian Removal

A strong advocate of the expansion and development of the United States, Jackson proposed that Native Americans be relocated from their tribal lands in the East and Southeast and segregated in areas west of the Mississippi. His Indian Removal Act, passed in 1830, authorized the U.S. government to negotiate treaties in which Native Americans lands would be exchanged for property of equal value in “Indian Territory.” While the relocations were intended to be voluntary, in practice the administration placed extreme pressure on Indian leaders to sign, and approximately seventy treaties negotiated during the Jackson presidency effected the relocation of tens of thousands of Native Americans.

Bank War

Another of Jackson’s populist causes was his battle for the destruction of the Bank of the United States. Jackson, a plantation owner whose early legal practice had focused on debt collection, distrusted debt and banks and considered the Bank of the United States a tool to concentrate the power of the federal government’s money in the hands of the elite.

The Second Bank of the United States had been chartered in 1816 to help stabilize American currency after the heavy borrowing that followed the War of 1812. At that time, federal government did not issue paper currency, so a bank was the only instrument the government could use to regulate the currency supply. Although the Bank’s charter would not be up until 1836, its directors applied for charter extension four years early. In 1832, Congress passed a re-charter bill, which Jackson vetoed with great publicity. The statement Jackson issued with his veto was essentially a prosecutorial brief against the Bank, accusing the institution of corruption for the benefit of wealthy northeasterners and foreigners (about one-quarter of the Bank’s shares were owned by foreign nationals). With heavy support from agrarian states in the South and West, Jackson won the election of 1832 handily.

In his second term, Jackson was determined to destroy the Bank utterly, so he systematically withdrew the government’s funds, depositing them with smaller state banks, later known as Jackson’s “pet banks”. These banks issued notes wildly, causing a devaluation of paper money and a sharp increase in land speculation. To combat the instability this influx of paper money caused, in 1836 Jackson issued the Specie Circular, which stated that the federal government would only sell land if it received specie—“hard” currency, in the form of gold or silver coins—in return. As a result of this specie edict, many small banks collapsed, leading directly to the Panic of 1837.

Nullification Crisis

In 1832 Jackson also faced a crisis originating in the state of South Carolina. Many in the South favored a reduction or elimination of tariffs—taxes on foreign imports—which they felt placed an undue burden on southern states, which relied on foreign imports for manufactured goods. Many expected that Jackson would champion such tariff reduction, but an 1832 tariff bill only provided for a slight reduction in these taxes.

In response to the 1832 tariff bill, South Carolina, with the support of Jackson’s South Carolinian vice-president, John C. Calhoun (1782–1850), espoused the doctrine of nullification—a legal theory that a state could “nullify” federal laws that it considered unconstitutional. Despite generally supporting states’ rights and a smaller federal government, Jackson considered nullification “incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.”

Jackson replaced Calhoun on his reelection ticket with Martin Van Buren (1782–1862). After Jackson won reelection, the South Carolina state legislature passed a bill forbidding the collection of federal tariffs in its territory. In response, Jackson dispatched the navy to Charleston and threatened to personally lead U.S. troops against the renegade state. A confrontation was averted early in 1833, when a compromise tariff bill was passed. However, less than thirty years later, South Carolina would be the first state to choose secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865).

Legacy

Jackson re-shaped the Democratic Party through vigorous use of the spoils system, distributing government jobs to his political supporters as a reward for their service. He also helped to usher in the Second Party System, as his opponents joined together to form the Whig Party in 1834. In 1835 Jackson became the first president to face an assassination attempt, when a mentally unstable man unsuccessfully attempted to shoot him in the Capitol Rotunda.

Jackson served out his second term, and following the custom of the day, did not seek a third. However, he continued to influence national politics even after his official retirement from government service. His support was vital to both the presidential elections of Martin Van Buren in 1836 and to James K. Polk (1795–1849) in 1844. Jackson died in 1845.

See also The Bank War

See also The Democratic Party

See also The War of 1812

Andrew Jackson’s Duels

In the nineteenth century dueling was common among American politicians and other gentry, especially in the Southern states. While the most famous political duel was that between Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) and Aaron Burr (1756–1836), which resulted in Hamilton’s death, Andrew Jackson was also well known for his willingness to engage in personal combat. He engaged in more than one hundred duels from early adulthood to his retirement and was the only president to duel while in office.

Duels were usually instigated by personal insults. According to tradition, if an apology was offered, the duel would be suspended without violence. Each duelist was attended by a “second” who would attempt to mediate and monitor the duelists’ conduct. If no apology was offered, the duelists would each fire a single shot. If both duelists missed or failed to kill their opponents, the duel would be concluded and considered a draw. More than 90 percent of duels ended without shooting. In cases that did involve shooting, less than five percent ended in death, as firearms of the period were exceedingly inaccurate and prone to premature discharge.

Jackson’s most famous duel was against the well-known marksman Charles Dickinson (1780–1806), after Dickinson had insulted Jackson and his wife on several occasions and published a statement referring to Jackson as “a poltroon and a coward.” While Dickinson’s insults were of a personal nature, the duel was instigated by political opponents who hoped that he would kill Jackson.

Accounts of the May 1806 Jackson-Dickinson duel vary, but the results are well documented. It is reported that Dickinson fired first, because Jackson acknowledged that Dickinson was a better shot and that he had no hope of beating the marksman off the draw. His only hope was to let Dickinson shoot first and hope that he survived to retaliate. Dickinson’s shot hit Jackson in the chest. The bullet broke two of Jackson’s ribs and lodged near his heart, but the future president remained standing. Jackson then pulled the trigger of his own gun, but nothing happened. Some feel that the duel should have ended at that point, because each man had had a chance to shoot, but Jackson simply drew back the hammer of his gun and pulled the trigger again. This time the pistol fired, and Dickinson was fatally wounded. Some of Jackson’s opponents accused him of murder for violating the rules of engagement.

Dickinson was the only man Jackson ever killed in a duel. Although Jackson survived being shot, Dickinson’s bullet could never be removed from Jackson’s body, and the wound tormented him for the rest of his life. Jackson was wounded again during a personal dispute in 1813, sustaining multiple gunshots to his left arm and disregarding the unanimous advice of his doctors that the arm be amputated. Jackson bore his wounds with pride, and they did not prevent him from taking up arms in battle, both in personal disputes and in his life as a professional soldier.

John C. Calhoun

John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) was for forty years the most prominent Southern politician in the United States. Over those years he abandoned the nationalist views of his youth and became a renowned theorist and spokesman for states’ rights and the institution of slavery. He served in both houses of Congress, as secretary of war and secretary of state, and as vice president, plotting tirelessly but in vain to win the presidency.

Calhoun, the fourth son of a prosperous Scottish-Irish immigrant in South Carolina, ran the family’s twelve-hundred-acre plantation, managing about thirty slaves, until his eldest brother agreed to support his education. His academic prowess shone immediately; he progressed from his brother-in-law’s backcountry academy to Yale, where he gave the commencement speech for his class in 1804. He studied law, was admitted to the bar, and returned home to become a notably cosmopolitan country lawyer.

The “War Hawk”

When Calhoun was elected to the legislature in 1808, South Carolina was enjoying a period of prosperity. The invention of the cotton gin had boosted cotton production, and government investment in roads, bridges and ferries had helped spread the plantation economy throughout the state. Calhoun, who supported these internal improvements, sought to extend them to the national level. When he was elected to the U.S. House in 1810, his views placed him in an influential bloc of younger Republicans, along with Henry Clay (1777–1852) of Kentucky, who became known as “War Hawks.”

After a British ship attacked the USS Chesapeake in 1807—its captain was looking for deserters from the Royal Navy—Calhoun had clamored for an aggressive response. By the time he entered Congress British warships were blocking cotton shipments to Europe, causing cotton prices to drop. As members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Calhoun and other hawks advocated war with Britain and continued to rally to the patriotic cause during the bleak moments of the War of 1812. When the war was over, Calhoun became a leading supporter of peacetime proposals put forward by President James Madison (1751–1836): a national bank; a federally financed transportation network; and a tariff to protect emerging industries. This nationalistic agenda would become central to the platform of the Republican Party. However, Calhoun’s commitment to fostering national unity through the federal government would eventually waver.

Calhoun was by then a rising Republican star. As secretary of war under President James Monroe (1817–1825), Calhoun was noted for his efficient leadership and improvement of military fortifications. He ran for president in 1824, in a crowded field that included Clay, who by then was Speaker of the House; Secretary of State John Quincy Adams (1767–1848); Treasury Secretary William Crawford (1772–1834); and General Andrew Jackson (1767–1845). When it became clear to Calhoun that he could not win, he changed course and ran for vice president. He served in that office under two presidents—Adams and Jackson—and became each leader’s political enemy.

The Nullification Crisis

The feud between Calhoun and Jackson had social as well as political roots. Calhoun’s wife, Floride Colhoun Calhoun (1792–1866)—the second cousins had married in 1811—instigated a scandal in Washington when she and other prominent wives ostracized the wife of John Eaton (1790–1856), who was Jackson’s friend and secretary of war. Jackson used the scandal to purge his administration of Calhoun supporters, making it clear that he favored Secretary of State Martin Van Buren (1782–1862), not Calhoun, to be his successor.

Jackson and Calhoun also disagreed about protective tariffs, a major issue in Calhoun’s home state. In 1828 Congress imposed heavy tariffs on goods being imported from Europe, an act that Southerners derided as the Tariff of Abominations. South Carolina was in economic turmoil by 1828, largely because its arable lands had been overworked. The state’s powerful planters, however, blamed their economic problems on the high protective tariffs that were helping the economy of the industrial Northeast. Calhoun, jettisoning the nationalist views he had espoused in the House, defended the planters in their fight against the tariffs.

Anonymously, Calhoun wrote South Carolina Exposition and Protest (1828), a document that presented a novel interpretation of the Constitution. As Calhoun saw it, each state in the union is a sovereign body and can choose to eliminate, or nullify, any law deemed unconstitutional by that state. Four years later Congress passed a new tariff—lower, but still unacceptable to the Southern planters. Supporters of nullification won a majority in the South Carolina legislature and declared the tariffs null and void. Calhoun came out publicly in support of the radical tactic, but worked behind the scenes with Clay to craft a compromise tariff, which helped avert a constitutional crisis.

Spokesman for the South

The nullification crisis marked the turning point in Calhoun’s career. He resigned the vice presidency in December 1832 and was immediately appointed to the Senate, where he formed a triumvirate of power with Clay and Daniel Webster (1782–1852) of Massachusetts. The three lawmakers worked together to check what they saw as Andrew Jackson’s abuses of executive power, even though their priorities and ideologies differed sharply.

As the most influential Southern leader, Calhoun upheld states’ rights and disdained majority rule; government run by majorities, he held, would invariably lead to despotism. His was an elitist philosophy; he was wary of the egalitarian spirit that animated “Jacksonian democracy.” He opposed both the expansion of federal power and the monied interests of the North, which stood to gain from protective tariffs and industrial development at the South’s expense. Most important, Calhoun sought to unite the South around the institution of slavery, which was under attack from a growing abolitionist movement.

In 1844 Calhoun ran for president as a Democrat, aiming to attract an unlikely coalition of Northern radicals and Southern conservatives, but his campaign failed to arouse public interest. Calhoun retired from the Senate that year, only to be called out of retirement a few weeks later by President John Tyler (1790–1862) to become secretary of state. The South Carolinian took command at the State Department just as the government was finalizing a treaty for the annexation of Texas. He decided to use the situation to his political advantage. As he delivered the annexation treaty to the Senate, he included a letter he had written to the British ambassador in which he asserted that Texas would join the United States as a slave state. The controversy that followed, over Texas in particular and slavery’s expansion in general, upended the politics of the 1844 election. A surprise candidate, James K. Polk (1795–1849) of Tennessee, won the Democratic nomination and the general election. Calhoun’s strategy had won Texas, and the White House, for the South.

Calhoun returned to the Senate in 1845. He opposed the Mexican-American War, but when it ended, he fought to open the newly won southwestern territories to slavery. On March 4, 1850, a deathly ill Calhoun, too weak to speak, sat in his Senate seat as his last major speech was read aloud. The current sectional conflict, the speech declared, had been caused by congressional favoritism toward Northern interests throughout many decades. The time had come, the speech said, to cease the agitation over slavery and make concessions to the South. Otherwise, the Southern states would be forced to secede from the Union. Calhoun died that month, as Congress was evading his challenge and concocting the Compromise of 1850. However, his prophecy would come to pass a decade later.

The Nullification Controversy

In a democratic republic governed by majority rule, how can the minority protect its interests? John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) devoted his life to answering that question. His major work of political theory, Disquisition on Government, advances the notion of a “concurrent majority,” one which would require the consent of all classes and interests. Calhoun also proposed that the United States might elect two presidents, one for the North and one for the South.

Calhoun’s most controversial ideas concerned nullification, or the veto of federal laws by individual states. As he saw it, the Union was an agreement between sovereign states, each of which had the right to protect itself against unconstitutional violations by the federal government. To protect its interests, according to Calhoun, each state could vote to nullify certain federal laws. Three-fourths of the states could vote to override the nullification, at which point the state had to comply or secede from the Union. In Calhoun’s view, nullification was a less radical step than secession and could actually help preserve the Union.

Calhoun’s home state, South Carolina, voted to nullify federal tariffs in 1832. Following the process outlined by Calhoun, the state legislature called a state convention, which declared that the tariffs were null and void and that South Carolina would secede if the federal government insisted on collecting them.

President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) responded to the crisis with a carrot and a stick. While he was willing to negotiate on the tariff, he asked Congress to authorize a show of force by the U.S. army in South Carolina. The president dismissed Calhoun’s theories, proclaiming that “the Constitution of the United States…forms a government, not a league.” To Jackson, nullification amounted to treason. South Carolina watched anxiously, hoping neighboring states would rally to its side, but none did. Meanwhile, Congress was busy working out a compromise tariff; when it was approved, South Carolina repealed its nullification.

For Calhoun the main lesson of the nullification crisis was that one state, by itself, was too weak to resist federal power. Therefore, he became determined to strengthen the spirit of unity throughout the Southern, slave-holding states.

Nat Turner

Nat Turner (1800–1831) led the bloodiest slave rebellion in U.S. history. In one night and one day he and a group of slaves murdered at least fifty-five white men, women, and children before militias broke up the revolt near Jerusalem, Virginia. The uprising shocked the slaveholding South, leading many states to reassess the strength of their slave codes.

Omens of a Bloody Night

Born into bondage in Southampton County, Virginia, Turner was the property of several owners in succession. His mother, born in Africa, instilled in the bright boy a sense of a special destiny. He was taught to read at an early age, developed an intense religious faith, and became a preacher in his slave community, setting himself apart from his fellows. His ideas grew messianic, and he began to see visions that spurred him to prepare for his prophetic calling. A solar eclipse in February 1831 struck him as such a sign. With four friends, he made plans for an uprising on July 4, but postponed the date when he became ill. The sky signaled him again, and on the night of August 21, 1831, his group struck.

A group of eight men butchered the family of Turner’s master, Joseph Travis, in their beds and headed off with stolen arms and ammunition. Through the neighborhood the armed slaves laid waste to one household after another. Some fifty slaves joined them as they moved toward Jerusalem, where they aimed to sack the armory. When they stopped at a farmhouse just outside the town, the militia confronted them, and the marauding group dispersed. By the following day the uprising had been put down, and most of the insurgents captured or killed.

White militias and armed mobs launched a violent response that killed more than one hundred blacks. After hasty trials twenty slaves were executed. Turner eluded the manhunt for more than two months, hiding part of that time in a dugout about two miles from his home, until he was captured on October 30. He stood trial and was hanged on November 11, 1831.

Aftermath

The Nat Turner uprising was the nation’s deadliest domestic event before the Civil War. Its impact on the South was immediate: panicked slaveholders tightened restrictions on the movement, education, and religious life of slaves. In Congress Southerners sought to strengthen the Fugitive Slave Act and other legislation. The Virginia legislature even considered, but rejected, the gradual emancipation of slaves. The uprising spurred on the abolitionist movement, which was still in its early stages; some Southern newspapers accused abolitionists of instigating the rampage, although they provided no evidence for such charges. Most of all, the event made plain the conditions under which slaves lived and the instability of the South’s economic and social structure.

Early Abolitionist Literature

The movement to abolish slavery in the United States was in its infancy when Nat Turner (1800–1831) and other slaves revolted in 1831. Three men were instrumental in bringing attention to the radical arguments for emancipation. One was David Walker (1785–1830), a free black man in Boston, who published a pamphlet in 1829 called Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. Walker called American blacks “the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began.” He urged them to throw off their chains and lead the fight for freedom and social justice, with violence if necessary. Walker attempted to smuggle copies of the pamphlet into the South; white authorities resisted and put a price on Walker’s head. Walker was found dead in 1830, shortly after publishing the third edition of his pamphlet.

In 1821 a white man, Benjamin Lundy (1789–1839), began printing a newspaper called the Genius of Universal Emancipation. Lundy, a Quaker, favored gradual emancipation in slave territories, civil rights for freed blacks, and aid for blacks who wished to seek refuge abroad. He traveled across the country extensively, giving speeches and forming organizations against slavery and its expansion.

Another printer and writer, William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), was influenced by Lundy’s work and began writing antislavery literature in 1828. The following year he moved from Boston to Baltimore to work on Lundy’s Genius; his inflammatory prose earned him a jail sentence. Garrison returned to New England and started his own weekly periodical, the Liberator, in 1831 with support from black activists. He advocated an “immediatist” position on emancipation and circulated long excerpts from Walker’s Appeal. Garrison went on to become the nation’s most famous white abolitionist leader.

It is unlikely that Turner or the other slaves who joined his rebellion read or even knew about this literature. After the uprising, however, Southern newspapers blamed the abolitionists for provoking the bloodshed, calling for Garrison to be put on trial for seditious libel. Garrison expressed horror when he learned of the Virginia killing spree but pointedly refused to condemn the slaves for their actions.

William B. Travis

A hero of the Texas Revolution, William Barret Travis (1809–1836) played a leading role in two confrontations that set the stage for the rebellion against Mexico. He died while commanding Texan forces against the Mexican siege of the Alamo.

The Anahuac Disturbances

Raised in South Carolina and Alabama, Travis studied law, published a newspaper, joined the militia and the Masonic lodge, and taught school. At age nineteen, he married sixteen-year-old Rosanna Cato, who had been his student. They had a son and were expecting a second child when, for reasons unknown, Travis left his family behind and went to the town of Anahuac, near Galveston Bay in the Mexican province of Texas. “Buck” Travis joined thousands of U.S. migrants who overwhelmed the Mexican population there and became known as “GTTs,” which stood for “gone to Texas.”

In 1831 Travis opened a law practice in Anahuac with a partner, Patrick Jack (1808–1844). Travis soon came to despise the conservative Mexican government and joined the militant Anglo settlers opposing Mexican rule. In June 1832 Travis took on the case of an American whose slaves had escaped to a Mexican army post. Arguing for the slaves’ return, Travis was arrested by the Mexican commander at Anahuac, Colonel Juan Davis Bradburn. An armed group of Anglo settlers arrived to fight for the release of Travis, who was later freed without hostilities. This first Anahuac disturbance revealed the rising tensions on the Texan frontier. Travis and his rescuers openly expressed solidarity with the Mexican federalist movement, led by General Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794–1876), who opposed conservative centralists such as Bradburn.

Travis then moved his law practice to San Felipe de Austin, the original base of the U.S. colony in Texas, and became secretary of the ayuntamiento, or local council. He became engaged to Rebecca Cummins before his divorce from his first wife had been completed. In June 1835 he incited a second Anahuac disturbance. A Mexican officer in charge of collecting tariffs had arrested a U.S. boat captain and others. Travis assembled a militia, sailed to Anahuac, forced the Mexicans to surrender their garrison, and freed the prisoners. Even some of his comrades found this venture overly brash.

The Alamo

Events were rapidly heading toward insurrection: in October 1835 a skirmish in the hamlet of Gonzales marked the beginning of open warfare. Travis joined forces led by Stephen F. Austin (1793–1836) and pursued the Mexican army from Gonzales to San Antonio. Travis was dispatched as a scout and chief recruiter as Austin’s men fought General Martín Perfecto de Cos’s troops in the streets of San Antonio. On December 9, 1835, the city fell, and the Texans captured the old Spanish mission where Cos and his men had holed up—the Alamo.

When Travis returned to San Antonio in early February 1836, he had been commissioned a lieutenant colonel of cavalry, with a company of roughly two dozen men. Travis took command of the soldiers in the Alamo when Colonel James C. Neill (c. 1790–1848) took leave. Colonel James “Jim” Bowie (1796–1836), the knife fighter, was also in the complex, with several volunteers loyal to him.

Travis, Bowie and roughly one hundred fifty Texan revolutionaries soon faced an attacking army of five thousand, led by Santa Anna himself. When the general demanded that the rebels surrender, Travis replied by firing a cannon. Travis wrote a stirring appeal for aid, addressed “To the People of Texas and All Americans in the World.” Travis’s letter would bring lasting glory to his image and his cause, but failed to attract reinforcements in his hour of need.

The small Texan force inflicted a toll on Santa Anna’s army while enduring a week of bombardment with no casualties. Santa Anna launched his final offensive in the early morning of March 6, 1836, capturing the fortress, killing all of its defenders, and executing captured prisoners, except for the women and children. Travis and his men never received the news that Texas had declared its independence four days earlier. He and his comrades were the first martyrs of the Lone Star Republic. The slogan “Remember the Alamo” was heard a month later, as the Texans defeated and captured Santa Anna in the Battle of San Jacinto, bringing an end to the armed conflict.

See also The Texas Independence Movement

Leaders at the Alamo

Fighting alongside William “Buck” Travis (1809–1836) in the Battle of the Alamo were two famous figures of the American West: James “Jim” Bowie (1796–1836) and David “Davy” Crockett (1786–1836). Each had a career that encompassed far more than rugged frontier adventure.

Bowie was a hunter, Texas Ranger, sugar-cane planter, Caribbean slave smuggler, land speculator, and devastating knife fighter. While his brother Rezin Bowie (1793–1841) designed the original Bowie knife, it was Jim Bowie who made it famous: he used the fifteen-inch-long hunting blade in a deadly fight in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1827. Bowie acquired huge tracts of land in Texas through speculation. When Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794–1876) criminalized such speculation, Bowie drifted into the pro-independence camp. Bowie was seriously ill with typhoid during the thirteen-day siege at the Alamo. According to some accounts of the battle, he killed several Mexican soldiers from his sickbed before being mortally wounded.

Crockett became a folk hero in his own time and remains an almost mythic figure in the American mind. In real life, however, the Tennessean was an unlikely politician. With the help of his second wife, a wealthy widow, he was elected magistrate, justice of the peace, state legislator, and U.S. representative for three terms. He was an instant sensation in Washington: his country-bumpkin demeanor seemed to symbolize the triumphant vitality of the common man. His 1834 autobiography, modeled on the memoirs of Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), was a best seller.

At first he was a Democrat in the style of President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845). For example, he defended the rights of settlers to gain ownership of the land they cleared—his take on the principle of squatters’ rights. However, after breaking publicly with the president on the issue of forced relocation of Indians, Crockett switched to the Whig Party. Jackson, a fellow Tennessean, became Crockett’s bitter enemy and worked hard to defeat his bid for re-election in 1835. Immediately after serving out his term, Crockett turned his back on politics and traveled to Texas, where he fought and died during the siege at the Alamo.

Antonio López de Santa Anna

Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794–1876), who was known as the Perpetual Dictator and the Redeemer of Mexico, was that nation’s dominant military and political leader in the first decades of its independence from Spain. Charismatic, narcissistic, apolitical, and corrupt, he held the presidency eleven different times between 1833 and 1855, frequently switching parties and loyal only to himself. He led the Mexican military to its defeats in Texas in 1836 and in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848).

The “Hero of Tampico”

The son of a wealthy Spanish official, Santa Anna was born in Veracruz and attended a military academy. He entered the royal army in 1810 and fought for the Spanish crown against the independence movement of Miguel Hidalgo (1753–1811). In 1821, sensing the growing momentum for independence, Santa Anna defected to the rebel force led by the conservative General Agustín de Iturbide y Green. As a commander based in Veracruz he started to acquire a large landholding. He turned against Iturbide, who had proclaimed himself emperor of Mexico, and joined the republican revolt that overthrew Iturbide in 1823.

In 1829 Santa Anna raised an army to confront a Spanish invasion. The Spanish force, which was based in Cuba, became stricken with yellow fever and surrendered to him at Tampico. The “hero of Tampico” became a contender for national power, jockeying for position in the political battles between liberals and conservatives. He had little concern for the substance of politics; his priority was to be on the winning side. Aligning himself with the liberal federalists in 1832, he led a rebellion that overthrew the conservative government of Anastasio Bustamante y Oseguera (1780–1853).

Santa Anna acquired power in cunning fashion. He ran for president in 1833 with a liberal running mate, Valentín Gómez Farías. After his election, he claimed illness and stayed at his hacienda while Gómez Farías took over the government. The vice president’s liberal agenda, which attacked the Catholic Church and the special privileges of the army, developed many enemies. In 1834 Santa Anna returned to the capital, dispatched Gómez Farías and the liberals, and declared a dictatorship. His strong central government ruled in alliance with wealthy landowners, the military, and the leading clerics. He spent a great deal of time at his stronghold in Veracruz while his agents ran the state.

The Texas Campaign

The problems in the Mexican province of Texas, however, occupied Santa Anna’s personal attention. Illegal immigrants from the United States, many of whom had slaves, outnumbered the Mexican population there and openly defied the government. The president led an army of five thousand into Texas in 1836. He attacked and defeated the handful of rebels inside the fortress of the Alamo, although his troops sustained heavy losses. At the Alamo, and a later battle at Goliad, he ordered all prisoners executed; this action bolstered the Texans and their supporters in the United States. Sam Houston (1793–1863), the commander of the Texas Army, and his men defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836. Santa Anna, disguised as a peasant, was captured while he tried to escape.

While a captive, Santa Anna signed the Treaty of Velasco, promising to recognize Texan independence. He was held inside the United States for nearly a year and met once with President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845;) before returning to Mexico in 1837. His humiliating Texas treaty, repudiated by the Mexican Congress, led to Santa Anna’s fall from grace. He was ousted from office by Bustamante.

However, Santa Anna’s career was rehabilitated the following year when French forces shelled and blockaded the port of Veracruz in a commercial dispute known later as the Pastry War. Struck by a cannonball, Santa Anna lost his left leg at the knee. Once more a military hero, he was named interim president for a few months in 1839. Two years later, he overthrew Bustamante again, dissolving Congress and installing a dictatorship. He staged an elaborate funeral parade and burial for his severed limb, but such pageantry was not enough to sustain the popularity of his corrupt regime: rioting crowds shouted, “Death to the cripple!” He was exiled to Cuba in 1845. However, political life in Mexico proved just as unstable without Santa Anna as it had been with him, because the Perpetual Dictator had left the treasury bare.

The Mexican-American War

While Mexico was engrossed in civil conflict, it was goaded into confrontation with its expansion-minded northern neighbor. The United States annexed Texas in 1845, and President James K. Polk (1795–1849), in a deliberate provocation, stationed troops in a disputed area at the Rio Grande. Inevitably, shots were exchanged, and war commenced in April 1846. In Havana, Santa Anna met with U.S. officials, telling them he could resolve the border issues reasonably. Soon afterward, the Mexicans granted him the presidency again, and the United States let him through its naval blockade at Veracruz.

To challenge U.S. forces Santa Anna had to marshal all his own private resources. The army he led north was inferior in equipment, morale, and leadership to the U.S. forces marching south under General Zachary Taylor (1784–1850). At Buena Vista in February 1847, Santa Anna had U.S. troops vastly outnumbered, but forfeited the battle through tactical errors. Two months later, at Cerro Gordo, Santa Anna held the strategic mountaintop positions, but troops commanded by General Winfield Scott (1786–1866) outmaneuvered him. Finally, as the U.S. forces approached Mexico City on September 14, 1847, Santa Anna and his men absconded. The general resigned the presidency and took refuge in Jamaica, leaving to others the task of negotiating a peace with the United States. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, ceded roughly half of Mexico’s territory to the United States for a payment of fifteen million dollars.

The Eleventh Call

Santa Anna bided his time in Jamaica and Colombia, certain that he would be called upon again to redeem the nation. Indeed, the call did come, as the conservatives took power in 1853. For the eleventh time the Perpetual Dictator assumed the leadership role, this time with neither congress nor constitution. Desperate for revenue to maintain his lavish spending, he made a land deal with the United States in December 1853, selling the Mesilla Valley in what are now southern New Mexico and Arizona for ten million dollars.

That surrender of still more land lost him the support of the elite. The liberals toppled him for the last time in August 1855. Exiled again for two decades, his schemes for a comeback did not materialize. He was allowed to return to Mexico in 1874, but by then his vast estates had been confiscated.

See also The Mexican-American War

See also The Texas Independence Movement

Martin Van Buren

Martin Van Buren (1782–1862), the eighth president of the United States, helped lay the foundation for the modern two-party political system. A master builder of political coalitions, he was instrumental in the formation of the Democratic Party and the election of Andrew Jackson (1767–1845). He served first as Jackson’s secretary of state and then as his vice president; he was the president’s handpicked successor. Van Buren handily won the 1836 election over divided opposition. The Panic of 1837 consumed his presidency, sending the nation’s economy into a terrible depression to which Van Buren could offer no effective response. He lost his bid for re-election in 1840 and ran unsuccessfully to regain the office in 1844 and 1848.

“The Little Magician”

Van Buren, the son of a slave-owning farmer and tavern keeper in New York, rose from modest origins to the heights of power by virtue of his political skills. At age fourteen he became law clerk to a local attorney and was admitted to the bar at the age of twenty-one. Short, plump, well dressed, and affable, he soon displayed a flair for the wheeling and dealing of politics. He was elected to the New York State Senate in 1812 as a Republican. Van Buren became state attorney general in 1816, but was later dismissed from that office by the governor, DeWitt Clinton (1769–1828), his former patron.

Van Buren, who believed that political parties could help advance reform, became the leader of a political faction called the “Bucktails,” which was opposed to Clinton. In 1821 Van Buren and the Bucktails won their fight for a convention to reform New York’s constitution; the convention expanded suffrage for white males and reduced gubernatorial terms from three years to two. The Bucktails developed into a political machine, becoming the dominant force in New York politics. That fall, they sent the “Little Magician” to the U.S. Senate.

A Jackson Man

In the 1824 presidential election, Van Buren organized the Republican nominating caucus in support of William Crawford (1772–1834) of Georgia. When the contest went instead to John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), Van Buren began quietly stitching the anti-Adams opposition into a national coalition, determined to win the next election for Jackson. In 1828 Jackson’s supporters—calling themselves “Democrats”—built the most sophisticated election campaign the nation had yet seen. Van Buren, who was running for governor of New York at the time, was at the center of Jackson’s campaign. Both men were elected; Van Buren soon resigned the governorship to become Jackson’s secretary of state.

In that post Van Buren settled a longstanding dispute with Britain over trade in the West Indies; negotiated a treaty with France under which the French agreed to pay damage claims for cargo confiscated during the Napoleonic Wars; and signed the first ever commercial treaty with Turkey. He became one of Jackson’s most trusted cabinet aides, especially when he joined Jackson in 1831 in defending the honor of Peggy Eaton, the wife of the secretary of war, who was being snubbed by other cabinet wives because of scandalous rumors. Jackson used the occasion to dissolve his cabinet and purge his administration of supporters of Vice President John C. Calhoun (1782–1850), whom he detested and whose wife led the action against Eaton. Van Buren also resigned at the time, yet a year later he was back as Jackson’s running mate on the winning Democratic ticket in the 1832 presidential election.

Van Buren, who was recognized as Jackson’s chosen successor, received the Democrats’ nomination in May 1835, more than a year before the election was to be held. As a candidate his strategy was to take moderate positions on issues and hold the Jacksonian coalition together. To his Southern supporters he emphasized his stance in favor of states’ rights and against the extremist views of the abolitionists. Amid rapid inflation and signs of economic trouble, he quietly supported Jackson’s opposition to the national bank. Fortunately for the Democrats, their opponents were more divided than they were. The Whigs, not yet a full-fledged national party, ran three candidates with regional support, hoping to throw the election into the House of Representatives. Van Buren won with a comfortable majority of electoral votes.

The Panic and the Presidency

Weeks after Van Buren’s inauguration, the nation was struck by a financial disaster—the Panic of 1837. Banks had been loaning liberally and issuing bank notes without enough currency reserves to back them up, causing inflation. Many of these institutions were failing, unable to meet increasing demands for hard currency. Jackson had distrusted the Bank of the United States, which he called a corrupt tool of the privileged few, and he ceased deposits to the bank. In addition, he allowed the federal bank’s charter to expire in 1836; instead, government funds were deposited into various state-chartered banks. Partly as a result of these policies, Van Buren found himself with no efficient way to address the monetary shortage.

Van Buren proposed an independent treasury, which would remove government funds from banks of any kind. The controversial proposal narrowly passed the Senate, but conservative Democrats in the House blocked it, pointing out that the measure would threaten the state banking system and expand, rather than limit, federal power. Van Buren repeatedly reintroduced this proposal until it finally passed in the fourth year of his term—too late to provide much boost either to the economy or to the Democrats. The president was mocked as “Van Ruin” as the Whigs won victories in the strongest Democratic states, Virginia and New York.

The president acted more adroitly when it came to foreign policy. For example, he managed to keep the peace in two separate conflicts with the British in Canada. He also maneuvered through a crisis handed to him by Jackson: a few days before leaving office, Jackson had recognized the Republic of Texas, which had won independence from Mexico. In 1837 the Texans asked to join the Union. Van Buren understood that annexing Texas would force a showdown between the North and South over slavery, so he rejected the Texans’ appeal.

The Democratic Party, which Van Buren had done so much to create, came into the 1840 election bitterly divided. By then the Whigs were united behind candidate William Henry Harrison (1773–1841), a war hero who first gained recognition in 1811 as commander of the forces that defeated allied Native American tribes in the Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana. The turnout for the 1840 presidential election was the highest the nation had seen, and the Whigs won a big victory. Four years later, Van Buren was favored to return as the Democratic presidential nominee. He lost the nomination by again refusing to approve the annexation of Texas, which he believed would lead to war with Mexico and discord over slavery. He ran in 1848, on the insurgent Free Soil ticket, against slavery’s expansion into the territories acquired from Mexico. Despite his political skill, the Little Magician proved unable to hold the Jacksonian Democrats together in the face of economic turmoil and the festering rivalry between the North and the South.

See also The Bank War

See also Andrew Jackson

See also The Eaton Affair

Alexis de Tocqueville

The French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) is principally known for writing Democracy in America (1835–1840), an insightful portrait of American society that remains an influential work of sociology. Tocqueville produced his work after spending less than one year in the United States, a testament to his skills of observation.

A Foreign Visitor

Alexis Charles Henry Maurice Clérel de Tocqueville was born in Paris during the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte. His father, a nobleman, had been jailed during the French Revolution but escaped the guillotine. The young aristocrat studied law and became a magistrate of the French court at Versailles.

In July 1830 an uprising in Paris overthrew King Charles X and established a government favorable to the bourgeoisie, or the middle-class. Tocqueville was suspicious of the new regime, but understood that society was moving toward equality and democracy. He and a colleague, Gustave de Beaumont, decided to visit the young republic across the Atlantic. Their official mission was to study prison reform. However, they were equally keen to observe the U.S. experiment in democracy, so they could tell the French “what we have to fear or to hope from its progress.”

The two Frenchmen traveled in the United States from May 1831 to February 1832, during the spirited first term of President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845). Their two-volume report on the U.S. penitentiary system was published in 1835. Tocqueville then produced his monumental treatise, Democracy in America, in 1840. Both were critically acclaimed best sellers.

“Equality of Condition”

What Tocqueville noticed in Jacksonian America, above all, was “the general equality of condition among the people.” Disparities of wealth exist, he noted, but in a country with no blood-based nobility and no feudal tradition, distinctions of class were minimal compared with those in European society. In U.S. government, Tocqueville found, the people were the sovereign power, and even the poorest citizens had their rights.

A chief advantage of democracy, from Tocqueville’s viewpoint, was that the people were highly engaged in government and civic life. He admiringly noted the number of community groups and associations promoting every conceivable cause. However, he also saw the downside of democracy’s strength: granting power to the people as a whole could leave individuals lost in the crowd, and freedom of opinion could give way to “the tyranny of the majority.”

Tocqueville, who was twenty-five during his American tour, continued to contribute to French public life for nearly thirty years. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, served briefly as foreign minister in 1849, and wrote a historical study of the beginning of the French Revolution.

The Tyranny of the Majority

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was not exactly an advocate of democracy, but he believed the U.S. system of government had some advantages over the European aristocracies he knew. He recognized that democracies strive to benefit the preponderance of the people, not just an elite minority. Also, he saw that U.S. citizens understood their political rights and took an active interest in public affairs. However, the danger he discerned, which he called “the tyranny of the majority,” threatened to undermine Americans’ cherished liberties in ways very few at the time could recognize.

The institutions of U.S. government, then as now, were designed to prevent any one branch of government from acquiring too much power. Each branch, in its own way, was held accountable to the people, specifically to the majority of the voting public. But the power of the majority, Tocqueville argued, was the only power left unchecked. Majority power could be easily abused by officers or government agencies claiming to serve the people’s interests.

The majority could also exert tyrannical power over freedom of opinion. In Tocqueville’s judgment, U.S. politicians lacked the courage to assert independent opinions because they constantly worried about gaining favor with the majority. Furthermore, once the majority had decided on a policy, it could stifle further discussion on the issue. The majority power could be so self-righteous, he wrote, that “the smallest reproach irritates its sensibility, and the slightest joke which has any foundation in truth renders it indignant.” The result is conformity. Tocqueville identified a problem, many years before the age of mass communication, that still plagues political debate in the United States.

John Tyler

John Tyler (1790–1862), the tenth president of the United States, was the first vice president to succeed a president who died in office. He established the precedent that a vice president taking over after the president’s death has the full powers of the presidency, as opposed to being a temporary “acting president.” Tyler’s administration was marked by strife between the leadership of the Whig Party and the man who was, effectively, that party’s first president. The major accomplishment of Tyler’s term in office was the treaty to annex Texas, effecting a major territorial expansion of the United States and precipitating the Mexican-American War.

Background

John Tyler was the son of John Tyler Sr. (1747–1813), a judge, who would later become governor of Virginia. The Tylers were members of the Tidewater plantation aristocracy. Tyler, the son, graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1807 and subsequently studied law. In 1811, at the age of twenty-one, Tyler was elected to the Virginia state legislature, the beginning of a political career that would see him in elected office for most of the next thirty-three years. In addition to serving multiple terms in the Virginia House of Delegates (1811–1816, 1823–1825, and 1838–1840), Tyler also served as governor of Virginia (1825–1827), in the U.S. House of Representatives (1816–1821), and in the U.S. Senate (1927–1936). Until 1834 Tyler was a member of the Democratic Party; he broke with the party over policy differences with the president, Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), while he was in the Senate. For the next ten years Tyler would identify himself as a Whig, but his sympathies and many of his positions were those of a Southern Democrat.

Assuming the Presidency

The Whigs sought to exploit Tyler’s divided loyalties, placing him on the presidential ticket with their candidate, William Henry Harrison (1773–1841), in an effort to appeal to Democrats who might oppose the re-election of the Democratic incumbent, Martin Van Buren (1782–1862). After Harrison and Tyler won the election, this strategy backfired, as Harrison fell ill soon after his inaugural speech and died a month after taking office. Now the Whig leadership—which viewed Harrison more as a figurehead than a true leader—was confronted with a president whose views were distinctly opposed to their own on many issues.

What followed was a contest of wills between Tyler and leading Whig Senator Henry Clay (1777–1852). Tyler opposed legislation sponsored by Clay to re-establish the national bank and impose a new protective tariff. Clay attempted to pressure the new president by repeatedly passing bills with these provisions in them through Congress. Tyler vetoed these bills. Clay then attempted to undermine Tyler’s authority, referring to him as the “acting president” or “His Accidency,” and ultimately orchestrating the mass resignation of Tyler’s entire cabinet in September 1841 (with the exception of Secretary of State Daniel Webster [1782–1852], who was out of the country at the time Clay called for the resignations). When Tyler reacted to the resignations by merely appointing new cabinet officials, Clay arranged Tyler’s expulsion from the Whig Party. Under threat of impeachment, Tyler finally agreed to a less restrictive tariff in 1843. However, he never budged on the issue of the national bank, and accordingly he found himself a man without a party.

Achievements in Foreign Affairs

Facing a hostile Congress and with no support from either party, Tyler focused his attention on the area in which Congress’s influence was weakest: foreign affairs. Tyler extended the Monroe Doctrine—which opposed European influence in the Western Hemisphere—to Hawaii, and in 1842 he oversaw the enactment of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which established the border between Maine and New Brunswick in Canada to secure a lasting peace with Britain. Tyler also attempted to increase the diplomatic influence of the United States by sending a trade expedition to China.

However, the crowning achievement of Tyler’s administration was the treaty to annex Texas. Whigs opposed the annexation, for fear of the sectional conflict that would follow with new territories threatening the balance of power between free and slave states. As the annexation treaty would require the approval of the Whig-controlled Senate, securing Texas’s annexation tested the limits of Tyler’s abilities as a politician. Tyler understood that he could not run for reelection as a Whig and would not be offered the nomination as a Democrat. Tyler made noises toward preparing for an independent run for reelection, on a platform centered on the annexation of Texas. He simultaneously let it be known that he would support a candidate who was dedicated to making annexation a reality. Democratic candidate James Polk (1795–1849) came forward as the pro-annexation candidate Tyler was looking for, enabling the incumbent to have the last laugh over his Whig opponents. With Tyler’s support, Polk won the election of 1844, beating Clay; and with the president-elect’s support, a joint resolution authorizing the annexation of Texas made it through Congress.

Supporter of Confederacy

In his later years, Tyler sponsored a last-ditch peace conference to avoid civil war. When that effort failed, Tyler supported Virginia’s decision to join the Confederacy. It is believed that Tyler supported the Confederacy in the hope that the North would not pursue military action if the South was sufficiently strong and united in resistance. After the war began, Tyler sought and obtained election to the Confederate House of Representatives, but he died before that body could hold its first meeting.

See also The Texas Independence Movement

See also The Monroe Doctrine

William Henry Harrison

The shortest-serving president in U.S. history, William Henry Harrison (1773–1841) was only in office for one month before dying of pneumonia. Prior to becoming the nation’s ninth president, Harrison was a national hero for expanding American settlements in the Northwest Territory and for his leadership as a general during the War of 1812.

Harrison was born into an aristocratic Virginia family, the youngest child of Benjamin Harrison (1726–1791), a prominent politician and signatory of the Declaration of Independence. After seven years of military service, he was appointed secretary of the Northwest Territory by President John Adams (1735–1826). The following year the territorial legislature selected Harrison as their representative to Congress and, when the future state of Ohio was partitioned from the rest of the territory, Adams named Harrison governor of the new Indiana Territory.

As governor, Harrison made treaties with Native American tribes, opening millions of acres of land for settlement at the cost of small annuities paid to each tribe. A confederation of Native American tribes, led by the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh (1768–1813) and Tenkswatawa (c. 1768–1834), formed to resist these settlements. In 1811 Governor Harrison led a force of some eight hundred soldiers and militia to confront the Shawnee near Tippecanoe Creek. Although Harrison’s force sustained heavy losses, the battle earned Harrison national renown.

Harrison’s fame led to his return to the military during the War of 1812. As commander of the Army of the Northwest, Harrison successfully recaptured Detroit from the British, and decisively routed combined British and Native American forces at the Battle of the Thames in southern Ontario. By the time Harrison’s military service ended in 1814, he was a war hero.

Harrison then moved to Ohio, where he was elected to numerous offices, winning terms in the House of Representatives, the Ohio State legislature, and the U.S. Senate. In 1829 Harrison hit a stumbling block when his appointment as Ambassador to Colombia put him at odds with dictator Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), who accused him of fomenting insurrection. President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) quickly recalled Harrison, and it appeared that his political career might be irreparably damaged.

However, in 1836 the new Whig Party was seeking a standard-bearer to run for president, and Harrison was still well known for his military exploits. Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) defeated Harrison in the 1836 election but left him in good position when Van Buren’s administration was blamed for the Panic of 1837. Harrison and the Whigs won the election of 1840, campaigning more on his character and military exploits than on actual issues or policies.

The American people would never learn what kind of president William Henry Harrison intended to be. Harrison caught cold on the day of his inaugural, which worsened to pneumonia in the weeks that followed. On April 4, 1841, the sixty-eight-year-old perished, the first American president to die in office.

James K. Polk

The eleventh president of the United States, James Knox Polk (1795–1849) had perhaps the most successful single-term administration in U.S. history. During his administration, the United States experienced one of its greatest expansions, winning the Mexican-American War and increasing the nation’s territory by about fifty percent. Polk also settled the Oregon border with the British, lowered tariffs, and reestablished the independent federal treasury.

Early Career in Congress

James Polk’s political career began in 1822, when he was elected to the Tennessee state legislature. Three years later, he was elected to Congress, where he championed states’ rights and fought against protective tariffs and the Bank of the United States. Early in his legislative career, Polk was recognized as a skillful debater and an excellent politician.

When Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) won the presidency in 1828, Polk proved to be one of his administration’s greatest supporters. In his second term in office, Jackson decided that the eradication of the Second Bank of the United States was a priority. Polk became Jackson’s principal advocate in the House, becoming a member of the Committee on Ways and Means in 1832 and the Committee’s chairman in 1834, and he often dominated the debate on the Bank’s re-authorization. With Polk’s able assistance, Jackson destroyed the Bank, and Polk was elected Speaker of the House. As Speaker, Polk presided over a rancorous Congress. Polk’s support of Jackson’s chosen successor, Martin Van Buren (1782–1862), in the election of 1836 led to accusations that he was the president’s “lapdog.” Polk withstood this abuse and served as Speaker until 1839, when the Democratic Party’s leaders called on him to run for governor of Tennessee. Polk won the governorship, but was not re-elected in 1841, and he was defeated a second time when he ran for the office again in 1843.

The “Dark Horse” Candidate

For the presidential election of 1844, Polk was put forth as a candidate by his mentor, Jackson. Despite his long and successful legislative career, Polk was considered a dark-horse candidate—that is, one with little likelihood of success—and even with the endorsement of the party’s most prominent member, it took nine ballots for Polk to emerge victorious as the Democratic nominee.

Although Polk was less well known than his Whig opponent, Senator Henry Clay (1777–1852), he enjoyed an advantage on the issue of annexing Texas. Polk properly gauged that public sentiment was behind the western expansion of the United States, a cause that had the support not only of Jackson, but also of incumbent President John Tyler (1790–1862). In contrast, Clay did not commit himself on the Texas issue, knowing that supporting it would cost him the support of Northern Whigs, who opposed the annexation of a territory where slavery was practiced. Clay’s vacillation was costly: it created the impression that he was indecisive, and in the end, Clay lost the antislavery vote anyway. Although Polk’s defeat of Clay in the electoral college was resounding—Polk had 170 electors to the Whigs’ 105—in fact the popular vote was quite close, with Polk holding an advantage of fewer than 40,000 votes. It is possible that Clay could have won if not for the votes drawn by the third-party candidacy of James G. Birney (1792–1857) of the antislavery Liberty Party.

The Polk Presidency

Polk’s platform presented four objectives for his administration once elected: the repeal of protective tariffs, the establishment of an independent treasury, the acquisition of California, and the resolution of the dispute between the United States and Britain over the Oregon Territory. Despite Polk’s narrow victory, he acted as a man with a mandate for change. All four of his major policy goals and more would be accomplished in Polk’s single term as president.

In 1846 the domestic portions of Polk’s platform were passed into law. The Walker Tariff provided significant reductions to the existing protective import duties (taxes placed on items imported from abroad to reduce competition for domestic products). While opponents predicted that reduced tariffs would allow foreign competition to destroy American manufacturing industries, the economy flourished during Polk’s presidency, and domestic manufacturing continued to grow. The Independent Treasury Act of 1846 reestablished the Treasury system, which had existed briefly at the end of Van Buren’s presidency. The purpose of this system was for the government’s funds to be held independent of any bank, and for public debts to be paid by the Treasury in specie (gold or silver coins) rather than paper money. The Treasury system created under Polk remained in place until the establishment of the modern Federal Reserve System in 1913.

In foreign policy Polk proved himself a shrewd negotiator in his dealings with the British over the Oregon Territory. Since 1818 the Oregon Territory—the land north of California and south of Alaska—was under joint occupation by Britain and the United States. Polk’s position was that the United States had sole claim to the entirety of the territory, leading to one of the memorable slogans of the Polk campaign, “Fifty-four forty or fight!” referring to the latitude of Alaska’s southern border. Despite the fears of many in the government that Polk was courting war with the British, an accommodation was ultimately reached establishing the border between Oregon and Vancouver.

The Mexican-American War

Technically, President Tyler completed the annexation of Texas just prior to Polk’s inauguration. However, the formidable tasks of making annexation a reality and of acquiring the California and New Mexico territories were left to Polk. Although Polk attempted to secure these territories by peaceful means—purchase of the territories in exchange for a sum of money and the forgiveness of debts Mexico owed to the U.S. government—he moved his armies into position to protect Texas in the case of a Mexican attack. On May 9, 1846, the Mexican army attacked U.S. troops in Texas, and Polk declared war on Mexico.

The United States won the Mexican-American War in decisive fashion, invading Mexico as far south as Mexico City and securing right to Mexico’s holdings in the Southwest with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Polk was rightly praised for his skill as commander in chief in the winning effort, but there were also criticisms of his prosecution of the war. First, in his attempts to settle matters peacefully with Mexico, Polk’s administration contacted the former Mexican dictator, Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794–1876), whose volatile political career had briefly landed him in exile in Cuba. In exchange for Santa Anna’s promise to end the war and allow the United States to peacefully purchase the contested territory from Mexico, Polk funded Santa Anna’s return to Mexico and granted him safe passage through the U.S. naval blockade. The gambit backfired, and once back in Mexico, the dictator declared himself president of Mexico and proceeded to lead the Mexican army against U.S. forces.

The second criticism is that Polk allowed political issues to interfere with his military decisions. The Army’s top generals in the Mexican campaign, Zachary Taylor (1784–1850) and Winfield Scott (1786–1866), were both prominent Whigs, and there are indications that Polk undercut the authority of each to prevent either man from achieving the prominence that could fuel a presidential run against the Democrats. This strategy also failed: Taylor ran against and defeated Polk’s chosen successor, Lewis Cass (1782–1866), in the election of 1848.

Polk’s Legacy

Aside from these major achievements, Polk also fought pork-barrel legislation—that is, appropriations for local projects that are intended to garner votes for legislators—vetoing funding for internal improvements such as roads. He exercised tight control over every aspect of the executive branch, including changing the way the various departments did their accounting. Polk assembled a talented cabinet in which each secretary was made to pledge that he would not run for presidential office while serving in the cabinet. In turn, Polk himself pledged not to seek reelection.

For all his many successes, Polk was not publicly acclaimed during his lifetime. Despite his early reputation for subordinating his own goals to Jackson’s, Polk’s nature was not accommodating, and he was not a man who cared about being liked. Moreover, the expansion of territory that was Polk’s greatest achievement also proved a painful part of his legacy. The question of whether these new territories would allow slavery created conflicts that plagued his successors until the Civil War. Polk, himself a slave owner, favored an expansion of the Compromise of 1820, which allowed all territories south of a demarcation line to determine for themselves whether slavery would be allowed in their bounds, while in the northern territories, slavery would be forbidden. Polk was unable to generate support for this proposal, and accordingly was blamed for the brewing crisis.

Polk’s extraordinary achievements also bore a personal cost. Throughout his life, Polk was a noted workaholic, putting in long hours and seldom taking any time for relaxation or vacation. Although Polk was only forty-nine years when he assumed the presidency (at the time, the youngest man to have held the office), by the end of his four-year term, Polk’s unrelenting work ethic had compromised his health. Three months after leaving office, Polk died. It was only after his death that historians began to truly appreciate his remarkable time in office.

See also The Mexican-American War

See also Antonio López de Santa Anna

See also Andrew Jackson

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) was a leading feminist author and civil rights advocate and one of the early leaders of the American women’s suffrage movement. Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Convention, a conference dedicated to civil rights for women, and authored the conference’s Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded equal rights and access to education for both sexes. Stanton would later serve as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association and would write and edit several influential works, including the autobiography Eighty Years and More and the multivolume works History of Woman Suffrage and The Woman’s Bible.

Early Life and Influences

Elizabeth Cady was one of eleven children born to an influential family in Johnstown, New York. Elizabeth’s father, Daniel Cady (1773–1859), was a well-known lawyer, judge, and politician. Through her father’s work, Elizabeth became aware at an early age that women lacked certain basic rights and that they often had no recourse under the law if they were mistreated by their husbands.

Befitting her family’s wealth, Elizabeth received the highest quality education available to women at that time, at the Troy Female Seminary. After the completion of her formal education, she became involved in the abolition movement, and in 1840 she married Henry Stanton (1805–1887), a leading antislavery advocate. From the beginning, it was clear that her marriage to Henry would not be a typical one of the era: Elizabeth insisted that the word “obey” be omitted from their marriage vows, and she continued to use her maiden name after marriage.

Henry and Elizabeth’s honeymoon took them to London, where they were both delegates to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention. Although a number of American women had come as delegates, they found that their English hosts refused to seat them with the male delegates or allow them to participate in debate. Instead, Stanton and the other women were seated in a balcony, hidden from the main hall by a curtain. During the convention, Stanton made the acquaintance of Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), and the two resolved to organize a conference focusing on women’s rights.

The Seneca Falls Convention and the Suffrage Movement

In 1848 Stanton and Mott’s concept finally became reality, and the first Women’s Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, where the Stantons then resided. Stanton drafted the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, which she patterned after the 1776 Declaration of Independence. Stanton found, and overcame, considerable opposition to the Declaration’s controversial demand for women’s suffrage. After the convention the suffrage movement began in earnest.

In 1851 Stanton met Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), who would be her lifelong friend and ally in the battle for women’s rights. Anthony was at that time involved in the temperance movement, and the two worked together to form the Woman’s State Temperance Society in 1853. They went on to successfully lobby the New York State legislature for property rights for married women. The partnership between Stanton and Anthony was a natural one: Anthony, who was unmarried and childless, had time and freedom of movement that Stanton—a harried mother of seven—did not. Therefore, Anthony traveled and organized supporters while Stanton wrote articles and speeches for the both of them.

When the South seceded, Stanton and Anthony both supported the Civil War as a measure to end slavery and expand the civil rights of all Americans. They formed the Women’s Loyal National League to lobby Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery. After the war, the duo turned their attention to suffrage, forming the American Equal Rights Association to lobby for a constitutional amendment to guarantee both women and African-Americans the right to vote.

Many abolitionists, however, opposed tying women’s suffrage and racial suffrage together. They felt that public sentiment was in favor of granting the vote to African-American males, and bringing women’s suffrage into the equation would only dilute support for their cause. This issue divided the women’s suffrage movement, since a number of suffrage advocates agreed that racial suffrage should have the priority over comparable rights for women. Eventually, Stanton would be forced to oppose the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which gave African-American males status as citizens and the right to vote, because they discriminated against women.

After the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments passed in 1869, Stanton and Anthony went on to form the militant National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in New York, while the more conservative elements in the suffrage movement, who had supported the amendments, formed a rival organization, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), based in Boston. Stanton served as president of the NWSA for twenty years, during which time she and Anthony attempted to secure the vote for women, first by lobbying state legislatures then by attempting to take the issue to the courts, under the legal theory that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had already granted women suffrage. These efforts were fruitless—even when Anthony was arrested and convicted of casting an illegal vote, it was done in such a way that the NWSA could not take her case to a higher court on appeal.

In 1890 the NWSA and the AWSA merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), with Stanton as the president of the merged group. By this time Stanton was in poor health, and she only served as president until 1892. That same year she delivered her famous “Solitude of Self” speech before Congress. More than simply a call for suffrage, the speech was a meditation on feminism, equality, and the right to self-determination, the themes she would focus on in her post-NAWSA career.

Stanton and the Woman’s Bible

For Stanton, suffrage had always been a single piece of a larger social agenda for women’s equality. During the course of her career, while championing the cause of suffrage, she worked in favor of temperance, divorce reform, and equal educational opportunities for women.

One area in which Stanton attempted to address inequality between the sexes was religion. Stanton herself was deeply opposed to organized religion, misgivings that went back to her days at the Troy Female Seminary. During her time in school, she had fallen under the influence of revivalist preacher Charles Finney (1792–1875), and as a result found herself consumed with fear of damnation, which she said resulted in the “dethronement of [her] reason.” After her marriage, Stanton came to know a number of the leading members of the Transcendentalist movement while living in Boston. These experiences helped form Stanton’s concept of a non-paternalistic faith, which she shared in speeches and writings throughout her career.

In the early 1890s Stanton worked with Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898)—with whom she had collaborated on the multi-volume History of Woman Suffrage—and Eva Parker Ingersoll to produce The Woman’s Bible, a series of feminist commentaries, critiques, and re-interpretations of scripture. When it was published in 1895, The Woman’s Bible was widely denounced by religious leaders. Over the objections of Anthony, who was by then the organization’s president, NAWSA censured Stanton on the grounds that The Woman’s Bible was harmful to the suffragist cause. So deep was the separation between suffragists and Stanton that after her death in 1902, and Anthony’s death in 1906, many credited Anthony alone as the founder of the suffragist movement, overlooking Stanton’s contributions altogether.

See also Susan B. Anthony

See also The Seneca Falls Convention

We Must Be Captain

In 1892 Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) addressed the House Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C., on the issue of women’s suffrage. Utilizing a speech she had presented at the end of her term with the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Stanton couched her argument for suffrage in terms of “The Solitude of Self,” that is, the need for every individual in society, man or woman, to be self-reliant in a lonely world.

The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties and forces of mind and body, for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear, is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the Government, under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself. No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation. To guide our own craft, we must be Captain, Pilot, Engineer; with chart and compass to watch at the wheel; to watch the wind and waves and know when to take in the sail; and to read the signs of coming storms in the firmament over all. It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman. Nature having endowed them equally, leaves them to their own skill and judgment in the hour of danger, and, if not equal to the occasion, alike they perish. To appreciate the importance of fitting every human soul for independent action, think for a moment of the immeasurable solitude of self. We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us; we leave it alone under circumstances peculiar to ourselves. No mortal ever has been, no mortal ever will be, like the soul just launched on the sea of life. There can never again be just such a combination of prenatal influences; never again just such environment as make up the infancy, youth and manhood of this one. Nature never repeats itself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another. No one has ever found two blades of ribbon grass alike, and no one will ever find two human beings alike. Seeing, then, what must be the infinite diversity in human character, we can, in a measure, appreciate the loss to a nation, when any large class of the people in uneducated and unrepresented in the Government. We ask for the complete development of every individual, first for his own benefit and happiness.

Bibliography

Elizabeth Cady Stanton. “The Solitude of Self,” in Masterpieces of American Eloquence, edited by the Christian Herald. New York: The Christian Herald, 1900.

Henry David Thoreau

Best known for his book Walden, or Life in the Woods, writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was a leading member of the transcendentalist movement, which rejected established religion and modern society in favor of a spiritual state attained through intuition that “transcends” the physical world. In addition to his literary achievements, Thoreau’s political writings remain extremely influential to this day. Although the term would not be coined until years later, Thoreau was an ecologist and an early advocate of the creation of national nature preserves. He was also a fervent abolitionist, and his views on non-violent protest influenced future political leaders including Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) and Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968).

Early Experiences and Education

Thoreau graduated from Harvard in 1837, when the country was in the midst of an economic depression. While he was fortunate to find a teaching job soon after graduation, he only remained in the position for two weeks, quitting rather than being forced to use corporal punishment on his students. Afterward, with the help of his brother, John, Thoreau established a school in his home in Concord, Massachusetts. The school closed in 1841 due to John Thoreau’s ill health; he died of tetanus early the following year.

After the school closed, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), who was by then a famous author and leader of the transcendentalist movement, invited his friend Thoreau to come live in his home. Living with Emerson immersed Thoreau in Emerson’s social circle and deepened what would prove to be a lifelong friendship. Emerson encouraged Thoreau’s writing and obtained work for him as a tutor to his brother’s children on Long Island, near New York City.

Life on Walden Pond

In 1845 Thoreau sought solitude to write his first full-length book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, based on a rowboat expedition he had taken with John in 1839. So Thoreau built a small house on land Emerson owned on the shores of Walden Pond, where he could concentrate on writing. Thoreau spent two years, two months, and two days at the house on Walden Pond, living a life of simplicity. Not only was he able to complete A Week during his time at Walden, but he also maintained a journal of his days living by the pond, which by the end of Thoreau’s sojourn in the woods formed a second completed manuscript, called Walden, or a Life in the Woods.

Although Thoreau lived alone at Walden, his solitude and reliance on the land were never quite as profound as legend later made them out to be, as the pond was only two miles from his childhood home of Concord. His mother and his sister visited frequently, bringing supplies, and Thoreau often walked to town.

Resistance to the Mexican-American War

During one of these trips, in July 1846, Thoreau was, at his own insistence, arrested. Following in the footsteps of his friend Amos Alcott (1799–1888)—an abolitionist and the father of the author Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888)—Thoreau had refused to pay his poll tax (a flat tax paid by each individual) as a protest against the Mexican-American War and the expansion of slavery that would result. Thoreau hoped to use his arrest as an opportunity to mount a legal challenge to slavery.

His ambitions (as Alcott’s ambitions before him) were thwarted when a relative paid the tax for him. Thoreau spent a night in jail, and was quite upset when he was released the next day. More than a year later, on his return from the pond, he resumed living in his family home and heard talk around the town of his eccentricities, particularly his arrest. In the winter of 1848, Thoreau prepared and delivered a series of speeches on the reasons for his refusal to pay taxes and his arrest, entitled “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to the Government,” which he delivered at the Concord Lyceum. In 1849 the speeches were published in the short-lived journal Aesthetic Papers under the title “Resistance to Civil Government.” It was only after Thoreau’s death, when the essay was included in a collection, that it was given the title by which it is known today, “Civil Disobedience.”

More than a simple explanation of his actions, “Civil Disobedience” was a discourse on transcendentalist values, which long outlived the transcendentalist movement. At its core, the essay dealt with the consequences of a conflict between “higher law”—the law of the conscience—and the laws of government, explaining that in any such conflict, it is the duty of the individual to follow his or her conscience. As Thoreau put it, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

The power and influence of these words would not be properly felt until the twentieth century, long after Thoreau’s death. Mohandas Gandhi is said to have first encountered “Civil Disobedience” in 1900 while studying at Oxford. When Gandhi was imprisoned in South Africa for refusing to pay his taxes in 1908, Walden was one of the books he read in jail. Thoreau’s philosophy influenced Gandhi’s own concept of nonviolent resistance, known as the Satyagraha. Martin Luther King Jr.’s efforts in nonviolent civil resistance built on the ideas of both Gandhi and Thoreau—enough so that King quoted Thoreau in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

Publication of Walden

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was not a success—it was not published until 1849, and only then when Thoreau agreed to personally underwrite any loss the publishers suffered. One thousand copies of the book were printed, more than seven hundred of which were returned, unsold, to Thoreau in 1853. The difficulties Thoreau experienced publishing A Week, and its tepid reception by the public, held back publication of Walden until 1854.

Walden, however, was a success to rival any of Emerson’s works. To Thoreau’s frustration, those who enjoyed Walden did so more because of his vivid descriptions of nature than the many philosophical observations it contained. Because Thoreau did not want Walden to be dismissed as a “nature book,” he had the subtitle “Life in the Woods” removed after the first printing. Nonetheless, Walden is still considered the best American book about nature. Future generations were more receptive to Walden’s discourses on society and spiritualism, and as the world awakened to conservationism, and later environmentalism, Walden’s anti-industrial broadsides and pleas for greater simplicity in life became more influential.

After Walden’s publication, Thoreau continued to give speeches and write, most notably in support of John Brown’s (1800–1859) attempts to incite a slave revolt in the South in 1859, and relating his various excursions in nature throughout the 1850s, before he became too ill to travel. However, he never again published a book of his writings, although he prepared numerous book-length works that were published after his death in 1862.

See also The Mexican-American War

See also Transcendentalism

The Definition of a Peaceable Revolution

During the McCarthy Era of the 1950s—more than one hundred years after Civil Disobedience was published—the State Department attempted to ban the essay by preventing post offices from shipping copies of the book to libraries and universities. The government claimed that Thoreau’s essay posed a threat to national security because it advocated violating the law. The following excerpt illustrates why the government found this essay, and others like it, so threatening:

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,—the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is “If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.

Bibliography

Henry David Thoreau. Miscellanies. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1863.

Millard Fillmore

A lawyer and politician, Millard Fillmore (1800–1874) was vice president under Zachary Taylor (1784–1850) and became the thirteenth president of the United States after Taylor’s death in July 1850. Serving the remainder of Taylor’s term as president, Fillmore signed the various bills that made up the Compromise of 1850, including the infamous Fugitive Slave Law, which reinforced slaves’ status as property, even when they had escaped to states where slavery was illegal. Fillmore also proposed the creation of a transcontinental railroad and sent Commodore Matthew Perry (1794–1858) on a mission to Japan to open the way for trade with the United States.

Early Political Career

Millard Fillmore was born on January 7, 1800, in Cayuga County, New York, the second child of frontier farmers. As a child, Fillmore’s formal education was sporadic. However, at the age of eighteen, he began studying law at the office of a Cayuga County judge. After five years of clerkships and independent study, Fillmore was admitted to the Erie County bar in 1823 and opened a law practice in East Aurora, New York, near Buffalo.

Fillmore soon became interested in politics. He befriended William H. Seward (1801–1872) and Thurlow Weed (1797–1882) and became involved in Weed’s nascent Anti-Masonic Party. In 1828 Fillmore was elected to the New York State legislature, where he served until he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1832. Fillmore did not stand for re-election in 1834 when he, along with Weed, joined the Whig Party, but he went on to serve three consecutive terms in the House of Representatives from 1836 to 1842 as a Whig. In Congress he was an ally of Henry Clay (1777–1852) and a proponent of tariffs and protectionism.

In 1844 Fillmore ran for governor of New York, losing to Democratic candidate Silas Wright (1795–1847). In 1847 he became state comptroller, but he did not serve long in that position before being nominated vice president on the Whig ticket with Zachary Taylor. After Taylor won the election, Fillmore resigned as comptroller.

Vice Presidency

Fillmore was not Taylor’s first choice for vice president. Taylor, a Louisiana slave owner, preferred a Massachusetts cotton manufacturer, but his selection was rejected by the Whigs as too sympathetic to the South’s cotton farming interests. As Weed proclaimed, the Whigs would not “have cotton at both ends of the ticket.” Fillmore was a compromise vice presidential candidate, a man who was personally opposed to slavery but who did not support the abolition movement. As vice president, Fillmore was marginalized within the Taylor administration and excluded from policy-making decisions.

Fillmore’s vice presidential duties, however, made him the president of the Senate, where in December 1849 a confrontation began over the possible expansion of slavery to the territories acquired during the Mexican-American War. Fillmore was respected in the Senate, but even he could not moderate the tone of the angry debate. His old ally, Clay, was now a member of the Senate and was intent on brokering a compromise between the pro- and anti-slavery factions. Clay proposed an omnibus bill to resolve the conflict, a piece of legislation that would simultaneously resolve the issues with the former Mexican territories, abolish the slave trade (but not slave ownership) in the District of Columbia, and strengthen the fugitive slave laws that required law enforcement personnel to aid in the capture of escaped slaves—even in states where slavery was illegal.

Ironically, the Southerner Taylor opposed anything that could be considered capitulation to the South’s demands. He pledged to veto Clay’s bill if it passed through Congress. Fillmore, however, viewed the compromise as the key to a long-term resolution of the slavery debate. Fillmore admitted to the president that, despite Taylor’s opposition, if there was a tie vote in the Senate on Clay’s bill, Fillmore would likely cast his tiebreaking vote in its favor.

Neither man would have the opportunity to put his words into action. In July 1850, as the debate over Clay’s bill still raged, Taylor died of gastroenteritis. Fillmore became the second vice president in U.S. history to take over as president after his predecessor’s death.

The Fillmore Presidency

As president, Fillmore quickly made his intentions clear by appointing a number of Clay’s allies to cabinet positions, including Daniel Webster (1782–1852) as secretary of state. Although Clay’s bill was defeated in the Senate, Fillmore worked with Senator Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861), who separated the various proposals from Clay’s bill into individual pieces of legislation, each of which was passed by Congress. By late September 1850, Fillmore had signed all the pieces of what would be called the Compromise of 1850 into law.

The Compromise of 1850 was the defining act of Fillmore’s administration. Through the Compromise, California was admitted as the thirty-first state in the Union. With California’s statehood, interest increased in creating a rail link between the East and West Coasts. Fillmore encouraged this interest by supporting railroad land grants. California’s admission also spurred American interest in trade with countries on the Pacific Rim, and Fillmore initiated a successful naval expedition to open Japan to trade with the West, for the first time in more than 200 years.

Post-Presidency

By the time Commodore Perry’s expedition reached Japan in 1854, Fillmore was no longer president, and the Compromise of 1850 had badly fractured the Whig Party. Abolitionist Whigs such as Seward and Weed were disgusted by Fillmore’s vigorous enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law; they supported an antislavery candidate, General Winfield Scott (1786–1866), in the 1852 presidential election. Webster also sought the party’s nomination, splitting the non-abolitionist support with Fillmore. The successful candidate, Scott, was defeated handily by Democratic candidate Franklin Pierce (1804–1869), in what proved to be the death knell of the Whig Party.

After the 1852 election, many former Whigs flocked to the newly formed Republican Party, but Fillmore was not among them. In 1856 he ran for president with the anti-immigration Know-Nothing Party, winning only one state (Maryland). With that defeat, Fillmore retreated from the national stage, but he remained active in local causes in upstate New York until his death in 1874.

See also Compromise of 1850

Zachary Taylor

Before his brief career in politics, Millard Fillmore’s predecessor, Zachary Taylor (1784–1850), was one of the country’s most successful soldiers. During the War of 1812, Taylor, then a captain, won prominence for successfully defending Fort Harrison (located near the present-day city of Terre Haute, Indiana) with only fifteen soldiers under his command, against a force of six hundred warriors from various Native American tribes.

From 1816 to 1845 Taylor served a number of military assignments around the United States and its territories, often fighting various Native American tribes as the United States expanded westward, but it was the Mexican-American War that made him a national hero. In May 1846 Taylor, now a brigadier general, used precision artillery to defeat superior Mexican forces at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, victories for which he received the rank of major general and was named commander of the Army of the Rio Grande. After capturing the Mexican city of Monterrey, Taylor was ordered to put his forces on the defensive, and many of his troops were transferred to the command of General Winfield Scott (1786–1866), leaving Taylor mainly with untrained Texas volunteers. However, when Taylor learned that the famed Mexican leader Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794–1876) was leading an army of twenty thousand in his direction, he took action. Taylor used a liberal interpretation of the area he was supposed to be “defending” to lead his army south from Monterrey to meet Santa Anna’s forces—which outnumbered Taylor’s by four to one—in battle. Taylor’s defeat of Santa Anna’s army at Buena Vista in February 1847 was the decisive victory of the war, and it drove Taylor’s national profile to new heights.

Even before the victory at Buena Vista, forces within the Whig Party had been agitating for Taylor to lead the presidential ticket in 1848. Although he was a Whig, Taylor rejected partisanship and stated that if elected, he would “act independent of party domination.” True to his word, Taylor’s administration rejected many central aspects of the Whigs’ economic policy, including the use of protective tariffs and the re-establishment of a national bank. Taylor was also considered blunt to the point of tactlessness, a trait that put a strain on U.S. foreign policy.

This same bluntness was central to his dealing with the South over the issue of the expansion of slavery. Opposing any compromise on this issue, Taylor plainly stated the policy that “disunion is treason”—a policy he would enforce by personally leading the U.S. Army to battle any seceding states if it became necessary.

Taylor fell ill during a ceremony to lay the cornerstone of the Washington Monument, on July 4, 1850. He died five days later, after only sixteen months in office, making Fillmore president and setting America on a course to the Compromise of 1850. Although the cause of Taylor’s death was given as gastroenteritis, speculation abounded, and in 1991 his remains were disinterred to check for evidence of arsenic poisoning. Although a coroner found trace amounts of arsenic in his system, the amounts were insufficient to support a finding of poisoning.

Political Parties, Platforms, and Key Issues

The Democratic Party

The Democratic Party is one of two dominant political parties in the United States. Founded in 1792 as a legislative coalition, the party prevailed from 1800 until the election of the first Republican president in 1860. The Democratic platform initially focused on decentralization of power and state autonomy, but during the twentieth century it shifted toward creating a strong central government to protect the rights of minorities and the working class.

Background

In 1792 Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and James Madison (1751–1836) formed a coalition of legislators who were opposed to the policies of the Federalist Party. By the 1798 election that congressional caucus had evolved into a political party, calling itself the Democratic-Republican Party. Its chief goals were decentralization of federal powers, expansion of states’ rights, and protection of the Bill of Rights.

The party’s chief adversaries in the Federalist Party were its founder, Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), and President John Adams (1735–1826). During Adams’s presidency (1787–1801), war between the French and British threatened the nation’s security and hindered its efforts to develop an export industry. Adams steadfastly refused to declare war on France, a position that angered Hamilton and others within the Federalist Party. The disagreement split Federalist allegiance during the election of 1800, a leading factor in the election of the first Democratic-Republican president, Jefferson.

Jeffersonian Democracy

The division of power between state and federal governments had been a crucial issue from the earliest days of the nation. During Jefferson’s two administrations, from 1801 to 1809, most of his policies promoted state autonomy and restricted federal oversight. In 1803, however, he demonstrated that the Democratic-Republican Party would exercise federal power when it suited the interests of the nation: his administration organized the Louisiana Purchase, in which the United States bought more than eight hundred thousand square miles of North American land from France. Though some opponents criticized the purchase as an abuse of executive authority, the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the nation and strengthened diplomatic relations with France. As a result, the United States was able to avoid military involvement in the Napoleonic Wars. In addition, alleviating the imminent threat of war allowed Jefferson to reduce the military budget and fund domestic development.

The War of 1812

In 1806 French military leader Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821) issued the Berlin Decree, which restricted all trade to and from continental Europe and became known as the Continental System. Although it was intended to cause the economic collapse of Britain, the decree also hindered trade and development in the United States.

Both France and Britain utilized U.S. agricultural and industrial products to fuel their war efforts, and both nations occasionally hijacked U.S. shipments intended for their enemy. To persuade them to cease their interference with U.S. exports, Jefferson and Congress put forth the ultimately futile Embargo Act of 1807, which restricted U.S. exports to France and Britain. In 1810 Madison, as president, sided with France and agreed to restrict all trade with Britain. Over the next two years repeated interference from the British navy convinced many in Congress that Britain posed a continued threat to the nation’s economy. In 1812 Madison declared war.

The War of 1812, which lasted until 1815, resulted in a stalemate, as neither side was able to gain a lasting advantage. The most significant victory for the British came in August 1814, when the British invaded Washington, D.C., and set fire to the White House and the Capitol. The most significant U.S. victory came in January 1815, shortly after a peace treaty had been signed in Ghent, Belgium, but before news of the agreement had reached all combatants: American forces under General Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) defeated the British Navy in the Battle of New Orleans. The Treaty of Ghent restored prewar territories and created a new trade agreement with Britain.

Perhaps the most significant effect of the War of 1812 was the decline of the Federalist Party, which split into factions over such issues as military investment, foreign relations, and state autonomy. In 1817 the Democrats capitalized on that rift. James Monroe (1758–1831) was elected president, beginning what is known as the Era of Good Feeling, a time when partisan bickering largely disappeared and the Democratic-Republican Party enjoyed dominance in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

Jacksonian Democracy

The 1824 presidential election, which Jackson lost to John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), revealed divisions in the Democratic-Republican Party, primarily over the issues of slavery, economic centralization, and territorial expansion. During the election of 1828 the party split into the National Republican Party under Adams and the Democratic-Republican Party under Jackson.

Jackson’s faction won the 1828 and 1832 elections on a platform that advocated states’ rights and economic decentralization. A proponent of increased democratization, he supported legislation to increase popular representation in state elections. In addition his administration created the national political convention, a meeting where party leaders and supporters gather to nominate candidates for upcoming elections.

As Jackson’s presidency continued, however, the political environment became increasingly polarized and partisan. Two of his adversaries, Henry Clay (1777–1852) of Kentucky and Daniel Webster (1782–1852) of Massachusetts, defected from the National Republican Party to form the Whig Party. The Whigs supported strong economic centralization and defended the establishment of a national bank.

After Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) succeeded Jackson in 1837, the Democratic-Republican Party leadership began to diverge along ideological lines. That allowed the Whig Party to ascend to the presidency in 1841. At its national convention in 1844, the Democratic-Republican Party shortened its name to the Democratic Party.

The Evolution of the Party

After a brief period when the Whig Party was in power, the Democrats regained the presidency with James K. Polk (1795–1849) in 1845. Polk presided during the Mexican-American War, which not only gained significant new territory for the nation but also brought slavery to the forefront of the political debate. Whig representative Clay tried to alleviate sectionalist tensions by creating the Compromise of 1850, which established a latitudinal line that separated “free” states from “slave” states, and the Fugitive Slave Act. Though some portions of the 1850 compromise were well received, the Fugitive Slave Act, which required law-enforcement agents in free states to capture and return fugitive slaves, ignited fervent debate and deepened political divisions.

Seeking a mediating voice to represent the party, the Democrats chose James Buchanan (1791–1868), whose foreign-relations posts had isolated him from internal conflicts within the party. Though Buchanan won the presidential election in 1856, he had little effect on sectionalist rifts in Congress.

In 1854, while the Democratic Party struggled to maintain popular support, members of the former Whig Party joined with minority party leaders to form the Republican Party. Four years later, with the Democratic Party divided by the issue of slavery, the Republican Party won the election with candidate Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865). His election signified the end of the Democratic Party as it had existed during the previous sixty years and led to twenty-four years of Republican Party leadership, dominated by the Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed.

Post–Civil War Democrats

The Democratic Party that emerged after the Civil War had shifted from a policy of limited government to one that favored stronger central power to guarantee civil rights. As industrialization further complicated the divisions within the populace, both the Democratic and Republican parties were forced to adapt to emerging issues. Today’s Republican Party advocates limited government and state autonomy and is considered the more economically and socially conservative of the major parties. By contrast, the modern Democratic Party focuses on a strong central government and is viewed as the more populist and liberal party.

The Whig Party

The Whig Party rose in the 1830s out of opposition to the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), whose liberal use of war powers and disregard for congressional authority drew charges of authoritarianism. The term Whig was originally applied to Scottish Presbyterians who rebelled against the ruling religious class in the seventeenth century, but it eventually came to symbolize any group that defied an authoritarian regime. It was later adopted by the colonists who opposed the British during the American Revolution.

The Whig Party has been described as a continuation of the Federalist Party created by Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) because it endorsed a similar view of national politics. The Whigs developed a platform called the American System, which advocated increased powers for Congress; strong central control over foreign affairs and military issues; high tariffs and a national bank to build the economy; and extensive infrastructure improvements—financed and carried out by the central government—to create more connectivity between the states.

The Whig Party was active in regional and national elections from 1836 to 1856, after which many of its supporters joined the newly formed Republican Party, while others left to support moderate factions of the Democratic Party.

Origins of the Whig Party

In the 1824 presidential election, none of the candidates was able to secure a majority of the electoral votes. When that happens, according to the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the House of Representatives selects a president from the top three candidates. Henry Clay (1777–1852) of Kentucky, who came in fourth, was therefore out of contention and announced his support for John Quincy Adams (1767–1848). Electors from Clay’s home state, who had been pledged to vote for Jackson, voted for Adams instead. Other electors followed suit, and Adams was elected. Three days later he appointed Clay to serve as his secretary of state, which enraged Jackson, who said the two men had made a “corrupt bargain.”

Adams’s administration was mired in internal conflict, and his supporters were divided on key issues. By contrast, Jackson strengthened the remaining factions of the Democratic-Republican Party and won his second election campaign in 1828. Eventually, however, social reformers objected to Jackson’s support of slavery and relocation of native tribes to territories west of the Mississippi River, and industrialists and business leaders objected to Jackson’s opposition to the banking system. Adams and Clay joined forces with several minor parties, including the Anti-Masonic Party, to form the National Republican Party. Clay became its candidate for president in 1832, but the party was split on central issues, which enabled Jackson to win re-election.

In 1833 Clay and fellow anti–Jackson politician Daniel Webster (1782–1852) abandoned the National Republican Party to form the Whig Party. Clay and Webster were largely responsible for developing the American System, an economic theory that drew inspiration from Hamilton’s Federalist economic model. It called for strong central leadership in the economic sector; the establishment of a national banking system; and development of the nation’s infrastructure.

The Whig Party in National Elections

Clay and Webster are generally considered the most important of the Whig Party’s leaders. Both ran for president several times, but the primary reason the Whig Party was created—to oppose the Democratic Party—was not enough to ensure the election of either candidate.

Whig candidates fared well in regional and congressional elections; however, during their first presidential election in 1836, the Whig Party ran three competing candidates, which splintered support and allowed the victory of the Democratic candidate, Martin Van Buren (1782–1862).

During the 1840 elections the Whig Party promoted a single candidate, William Henry Harrison (1773–1841), the former military leader, who had gained fame at the Battle of Tippecanoe, an important confrontation with the Native American confederacy during the War of 1812. Harrison won the election—he amassed 53 percent of the popular vote—but developed pneumonia and died within a month of his inauguration. Vice President John Tyler (1790–1852) succeeded him.

Tyler had been chosen as the vice presidential candidate because he was a Virginia native, which helped the party win support from the Southern electorate. After inheriting the presidency, however, Tyler diverged from the Whig platform and surrounded himself with Southern-rights supporters. Tyler was expelled from the Whig Party, and the majority of his Whig associates in the cabinet resigned. However, Webster remained as secretary of state and played a leading role in settling persistent foreign-relations issues with Britain.

Clay ran as the Whig Party candidate in the 1844 campaign. Because of increasing divisions within the party and the involvement of the abolitionist Liberty Party, he lost to Democratic candidate James K. Polk (1795–1849).

Division of the Party Platform

Whig candidate Zachary Taylor (1784–1850), whose military exploits during the Mexican-American War had brought him national attention, won the presidential election in 1848. His administration was marked by tension over the legality of slavery in the new territories of California and New Mexico. Taylor believed that as each new state formed, it should decide whether it would allow slavery and incorporate that decision into its constitution—a position that angered members on both sides of the debate. As sectionalist tensions grew, Taylor threatened military action in the South. He became ill and died in 1850, passing the presidency to Millard Fillmore (1800–1874). Following Taylor’s death, Clay and members of the Democratic Party cooperated in creating the Compromise of 1850, which temporarily eased tensions over slavery.

By the 1852 elections the Whig Party was split on the issue of slavery. The Northern faction, known as the Conscience Whigs, favored abolition or at least restrictions on expansion of slavery, while the Cotton Whigs of the South favored state determination and the expansion of slavery into new territories. The Whig Party was unable to unite, and Democrat Franklin Pierce (1804–1869) won the 1852 presidential election by a significant margin.

In the 1856 election some of the former Whig Party adherents supported Fillmore and the American (Know-Nothing) Party. The remaining members of the Whig Party cast their support for the newly formed Republican Party, whose candidate, John C. Fremont (1813–1890), came in second to Democrat James Buchanan (1791–1868).

The American System

Although the Whig Party’s national successes were transitory, the economic policies championed by Webster and Clay became part of the Republican Party platform after the election of Lincoln in 1860. During the Civil War, while Southern supporters were absent from the cabinet and Congress, Lincoln signed into law many of the economic initiatives supported by Clay and Webster, including measures that strengthened the national banking system and instituted the first federal income tax. Economic nationalism allowed record growth and remained a central tenet of U.S. policy into the twenty-first century.

The Liberty Party

The Liberty Party was an abolitionist political party in the 1840s that emerged from factional disputes among slavery opponents in the Northeast. While some leaders wanted to abolish the U.S. Constitution because it did not provide for African-American citizenship, those who formed the Liberty Party argued that abolition could be achieved through legislative action.

Background

The American Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1833 by New England abolitionists and developed into the largest and most influential abolitionist organization in the country. Its leaders included William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1875), a Massachusetts-born writer and publisher, who believed that slavery was an affront to moral and ethical decency and advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves. In his newspaper, the Liberator, he stressed passive resistance and nonviolent protest, but he also cemented his reputation as a radical leader of the movement. He argued, for example, that the Constitution should be abandoned because it implicitly condoned slavery. In fact, he thought states and territories that favored abolition should secede from the Union and form a new country with a constitution that banned slavery.

In 1840 disagreements between Garrison’s radical faction and more moderate abolitionists led to a split in the antislavery society. The moderates included the organization’s president, Arthur Tappan (1786–1865); reformer and philanthropist Gerrit Smith (1797–1874); legal scholar William Jay (1789–1858); and Salmon Chase (1808–1873), who was elected to state and national offices and later became chief justice of the United States. They sought to end slavery through constitutional amendments and by promoting the election of politicians who favored abolition. At a convention in 1839, the reformers organized a national political party—the Liberty Party—and made plans to sponsor candidates for gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential elections.

Liberty Party Elections

James G. Birney (1792–1857), a conservative abolitionist from Kentucky, was the party’s presidential candidate in 1840 and 1844. Birney lost both elections, but because of active campaigning by abolitionists, Liberty Party support increased from about seven thousand votes in 1840 to more than sixty-two thousand votes in 1844. One year after the election, a horseback-riding injury left Birney an invalid and unable to campaign again. Though Birney did not gather sufficient support to win the presidency, his campaign drew enough support away from Whig Party candidate Henry Clay (1777–1852) to secure the election of the Democratic candidate, James K. Polk (1795–1849).

By the national elections of 1848, many of the Liberty Party supporters had joined with moderate Whig and Democratic Party politicians to form the Free-Soil Party, which wanted to prohibit the expansion of slavery into new territories but did not support nationwide abolition of slavery. The Free-Soil Party nominated Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) for president in 1848. Those who remained in the Liberty Party nominated Smith for president in 1848 and 1852, but after early campaigning proved unsuccessful, they urged supporters to cast their votes for candidates of the Free-Soil Party.

Minor Political Parties

The United States functions under a two-party political system with the Democratic and Republican parties competing for control of the executive and legislative branches. Since the founding of the Union, however, minority parties have competed in local and national elections and exerted a powerful influence on the development of American politics. Most minor parties arise during times of deep political crisis, when contentious issues divide the majority parties. Though single-issue parties are unlikely to win presidential elections, they fill an important political role by shifting the balance of power between the leading parties and fostering interest and involvement among the electorate.

The relative authority of states versus the federal government has been one of America’s primary political issues since independence. The Democratic Party was originally founded to lobby for states’ rights, against the centralist Federalist Party. Other political parties, including the Nullifer Party, which was founded in 1828 in opposition to the government’s tariff policies, were formed to lobby against specific policies initiated by the central government.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the legality of slavery had become the most definitive issue in American politics, creating and breaking allegiances between politicians. While the Liberty Party favored abolition throughout the Union, the more moderate Free-Soil Party, advocated restricting the expansion of slavery into new territories but did not oppose allowing slavery to continue in existing slave states. In the 1848 presidential elections, Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) ran as a candidate for the Free-Soil Party, receiving 10 percent of the popular vote. Van Buren’s candidacy effectively drew support away from the Whig Party, allowing the Democratic Party to secure victory.

Following the Civil War, economic parties like the Greenback Party—which opposed the transition from paper currency to “specie” currency—and the Free Silver Party and Populist Party—which opposed the “gold standard” currency model—became the most prominent of America’s minority party organizations. Though none of these parties was able to dominate in executive or legislative elections, their influence helped to raise public awareness about important economic issues.

The Know-Nothing Movement

The Know-Nothing Movement, represented by the American Party (Native American Party), was a nativist political party that enjoyed national influence from 1850 to 1855. American nativists defined “native Americans” as white, native-born, Protestants. The Know-Nothing Movement opposed immigration, especially of Catholic Irish and Germans, on the basis that competing foreign governments might influence immigrants to undermine the security of the nation and/or white, Protestant dominance of the government.

Background

Anti-immigration sentiment in the United States has its roots in the eighteenth century. Congress passed legislation, including the Anti-Sedition Act of 1798, to protect local leaders from foreign agents and supporters of European monarchies. Nativists were especially opposed to Catholics; they believed that the pope, a foreign leader, controlled the thinking and political behavior of many American Catholics.

Despite anti-immigrant sentiment, immigration to the United States rose as refugees fled political instability and dictatorial regimes in Europe, reaching its peak in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Approximately ten million Irish and German immigrants arrived between 1820 and 1920.

Secret Societies

In 1843 Charles B. Allen of New York City founded the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB), a fraternal nativist organization that operated on a strict code of secrecy. When members of the OSSB were asked about its political activities, they responded, “I know nothing,” a phrase that opponents would later use to refer to the national movement.

In 1845 the OSSB joined with another nativist society, the Order of United Americans (OUA), vastly increasing their membership. In its earliest days the Know-Nothing Movement backed sympathetic Whig and Democratic candidates; however, as immigration increased, some of its leaders decided to forgo secrecy and come forward as a national political party. The American Party was formed in time to compete in the 1856 election.

The American Party

The American Party advocated increasing the time required for naturalization and barring Catholics from holding political offices. It also supported Protestant candidates at each governmental level. Although it exerted significant regional influence from 1852 through 1855, it was not successful at the national level.

When the Whig Party disbanded in the 1850s, President Millard Fillmore (1800–1874) decided not to join the Republican Party. He accepted the American Party nomination for president in 1856, which represented the pinnacle of nativist influence. Though Fillmore lost the election to James Buchanan (1791–1868), the American Party won more than 21 percent of the popular vote and carried the state of Maryland.

During the 1856 elections slavery became the primary political issue. Most of the American Party’s abolitionist supporters defected to the Republican Party, which left proslavery nativists with little chance at national prominence.

The Legacy of Nativism

Anti-immigrant, nativist movements have remained a factor in U.S. politics. Immigration restrictions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, were based partially on influence by local and national nativist movements. In the twenty-first century, debates over immigration reform and concern about the growing influence of the Hispanic population are linked to the nativist lobby. Media and political figures occasionally use the term “know nothing” to refer to contemporary opponents of immigration.

Current Events and Social Movements

The Second Great Awakening

The Second Great Awakening was an evangelical Christian religious movement that flourished in the United States during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Its overall effect was an increase in the number of American adherents to Christianity and the proliferation of new Christian sects. Revival members played an important role in social reform movements that supported such causes as women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and especially temperance, which led to the prohibition of alcohol in the early twentieth century.

A Response to Secularization

In the late eighteenth century, involvement in religion was declining, in part because the nation’s way of life had diverged from the tenets of Calvinism. Strict Calvinist doctrine holds that election into heaven is based on the arbitrary will of God and stresses the powerlessness of adherents to affect God’s judgment—a doctrine that held little appeal for many Americans and made church attendance seem unnecessary. In addition, early pioneers who left the East to settle new territories were isolated from their former religious communities. Reaction to Calvinism, coupled with socioeconomic factors, helped to push society toward secularism.

During the first Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, religious leaders focused on “personal religious experience” and “repentance.” Leaders such as John Edwards (1703–1758) still emphasized the inherent sin of human beings and God’s primacy as the sole agent of forgiveness, but they also encouraged a more emotional relationship with religion.

The first Great Awakening allowed Protestant churches to retain their membership but did little to promote the growth of Christianity. The Second Great Awakening, beginning in the 1790s, involved the emergence of itinerant preachers and small, issue-driven religious groups. Combining the emotional approach of the first Great Awakening with active conversion, the Second Awakening reversed the trend toward secularization and led to a rapid rise in the popularity and influence of Christianity.

By the mid nineteenth century, thousands of traveling preachers were holding religious meetings in a wide variety of public venues. They utilized emphatic sermons, public conversions, and faith-based medicine to generate interest and involvement at a grassroots level. In their wake they often left small groups of converts who established religious groups.

Resistance to Authority

By the nineteenth century resistance to central authority had become a central tenet of American culture. Independence, free will, and personal effort were considered primary virtues that contributed not only to personal achievement but also to the success and well being of the nation. While strict Calvinist orthodoxy stressed the primacy of central power, Awakening leaders stressed individual effort, which had been the prevailing attitude of the original colonists.

The Awakening also reflected the ongoing class struggle. Members of the elite were more likely to follow the cultural, spiritual, and economic traditions of their predecessors, while members of lower strata had become increasingly critical of the established religious, economic, and cultural leadership. Just as political authoritarianism had declined with the spread of democratic principles, religious authority also gave way to a more populist form of spiritual involvement.

As faith-based healers rejected the authority of the medical elite, other religious leaders encouraged the belief that faith and prayer could reap economic and social benefits. Therefore, the Awakening appealed especially to members of lower strata who found, in conversion and acceptance of evangelical faith, the potential to transcend the social and economic limits of their lives. In addition, as Americans increasingly left population centers in the East to settle frontier properties, the Awakening provided an avenue for community organization.

Christian Reformism

Revivalist preacher Charles Finney (1792–1875) favored a cross-denominational approach, delivering sermons based on a general Christian ethos and stressing the potential for “emotionalism” in religion. Finney helped guide a new generation of religious leaders who preached to large gatherings of people in rural areas. A professor of theology at Oberlin College in Ohio, he used his position to spread the evangelical approach throughout the religious education system.

By focusing on qualities common to all Christians, Finney and like-minded contemporaries inspired cooperation among religious groups. Interfaith organization allowed Christians to exert a more potent influence on the social movements of the period including prison reform and, most notably, abolition of slavery. In addition Christian leaders supported the idea of westward expansion as part of the overall mission to spread the Christian ideal into new areas. Evangelical Christians also led the temperance movement, which resulted in Prohibition and led many state governments to pass vice laws intended to eliminate social ills through the regulation of individual behavior.

Effects of the Awakening

Although the excitement of the Awakening declined during the second half of the nineteenth century, evangelism remained an important part of Christianity in the United States. Revival meetings were still popular, especially in the Midwest and in agricultural communities where they became avenues for social networking and community organization.

The Louisiana Purchase

The Louisiana Purchase was a treaty initiated by President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) in 1803, by which the United States bought strategically important territory in North America and avoided war with France. The land—more than eight hundred thousand square miles that stretched west and north from New Orleans to present-day Montana—nearly doubled the size of the nation and provided impetus and justification for westward expansion. It is considered one of Jefferson’s greatest achievements.

The treaty included the acquisition of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and the port of New Orleans, which greatly expanded the U.S. export industry and increased productivity in neighboring agricultural regions. In addition, because many observers doubted that Jefferson possessed the authority to enter into such a treaty without Congressional approval, the Louisiana Purchase helped refine the political system through the ensuing national debate over the constitutional relationship between the executive and legislative branches.

Contested Territory

In 1763, as part of their mutual-cooperation agreement during the French and Indian War, the French ceded the Louisiana Territory to Spain. Two years later the U.S. special envoy, Thomas Pinckney (1750–1828), negotiated a treaty of friendship with Spain that gained the United States the rights to navigate the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and to deposit goods at the port of New Orleans.

Spain valued Louisiana because it formed a buffer between its territories in Latin America and the United States; however, the territory was also troublesome for the Spanish, who were concerned about the encroachment of U.S. settlers and the financial strain of managing the export industry. In 1800 King Carlos IV (1748–1819) of Spain negotiated the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso with Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821) of France. Their agreement returned control of the territory to France in exchange for Spanish territory in Europe.

When Jefferson became president in 1801, he made westward expansion a focus of his administration. He hoped to acquire New Orleans, because the growing export industry needed permanent access to the Gulf of Mexico. Although the Treaty of San Ildefonso was negotiated in secret, news of it reached Washington, D.C., where concern rose that Napoléeon might restrict U.S. trade or try to claim parts of America. In 1802 the Spanish announced that they were closing their ports to U.S. trade, leading the Federalist Party and representatives of the export lobby to pressure for a declaration of war. Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison (1751–1836) decided to pursue a diplomatic solution and dispatched Robert R. Livingston (1746–1813), the U.S. minister to France, to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans and a small portion of the surrounding area.

Although Napoléon hoped to use Louisiana as an agricultural production center to fuel his sugar industry in the Caribbean, he was forced to reconsider after losing a military bid for what was then the island of Santo Domingo. He also needed funds for his war against Britain. In April 1803 Napoléon’s negotiators agreed to meet with Livingston in Paris.

Treaty Negotiations

Jefferson authorized Livingston to offer $2 million for New Orleans and later sent special envoy James Monroe (1758–1831) to assist Livingston and increase the offer to $10 million. When Monroe arrived in Paris, he learned from Livingston that negotiators had offered to sell the entire Louisiana Territory, which covered some eight hundred twenty-eight thousand square miles. Agreeing that they could not wait for Jefferson’s approval, they entered into negotiations immediately and by April 1803 had arranged to purchase Louisiana for approximately $15 million. Although Jefferson was surprised to learn what had transpired, he realized the potential that the Louisiana Territory represented, both in terms of national security and economic development.

When Jefferson brought the Louisiana Purchase treaty before Congress for ratification, his opponents complained that the executive branch did not have constitutional authority to negotiate treaties or purchase territory without the approval of the legislature. In addition, many in the Federalist Party were concerned that westward expansion would significantly draw influence away from the Federalist base in New England. Madison and Jefferson negotiated with congressional leaders over the next several months and, in the fall of 1803, secured ratification by a vote of 24 to 7. The United States formally took possession of the territory, still nominally occupied by the Spanish, in December 1803.

Westward Expansion

Shortly after receiving word of what had transpired in Paris, Jefferson asked Congress to fund an exploratory mission to the Pacific Ocean along the Missouri and Ohio rivers. The expedition, led by Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) and William Clark (1770–1838), produced a wealth of information on the natural resources and inhabitants of the central and northwestern regions and helped to initiate cooperative agreements with the native population. Exploration of the Northwest also gave the United States an early claim to the territories of Oregon, California, and New Mexico.

Executive Precedent

Jefferson’s decision to negotiate a treaty with France, even though his constitutional power to do so was questionable, helped to establish a precedent for executive authority that would play a major role in later administrations. It also served as a foreign relations model, both in commerce and diplomatic strategy. It both expanded the nation’s economic potential and isolated the United States from direct involvement in the Napoleonic Wars that began the following year.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition

The Lewis and Clark Expedition explored the Pacific Northwest of the United States between 1804 and 1806, searching for river systems connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The expedition, led by Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) and William Clark (1770–1834), was partially initiated to prevent the French from laying political claim to the western portions of the continent but also to provide valuable information for the later economic and territorial expansion of the nation.

Background of the Expedition

When the emissaries of President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) succeeded in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase with the French government in 1803, the United States acquired more than eight hundred thousand square miles of territory for potential expansion, including the strategic and economically important port of New Orleans. Jefferson decided to send an expedition along the Missouri River to the western mountains and, if a navigable route could be found, on to the Pacific Ocean.

Jefferson appointed Lewis, his personal secretary, to lead the expedition, to keep detailed records and maps, and, if possible, to make contact with the indigenous inhabitants of the area. Lewis selected Clark, an experienced explorer and naturalist, to serve as co-captain of the mission. They recruited forty soldiers to join the expedition, later called the Corps of Discovery, and met in St. Louis, Missouri, where they spent the winter of 1803 gathering supplies and preparing for departure.

The Aid of Sacagawea

The expedition set out from St. Louis in May 1804, following the Missouri River for two thousand miles. During the first season the corps made contact with such native tribes as the Lakota, the Missouri, and the Omaha, and made inroads toward diplomacy. By October 2004 the Corps of Discovery had arrived in North Dakota.

During the winter of 1804 Lewis and Clark’s party ran short on food, and inclement weather confounded their attempts to hunt and forage. The expedition was saved by the arrival of Sacagawea (c.1787–1812), the daughter of a Shoshone chief, and her French-Canadian husband, Toussaint Charbonneau (c. 1767–1843). Sacagawea arranged for Lewis and Clark to trade gold and jewelry to the Shoshone for food and agreed to accompany the corps the following spring.

The addition of Sacagawea and her child, born late in the winter, was a great benefit to the expedition. Her familiarity with the local inhabitants allowed the corps to trade for food, and the presence of a native woman and child helped to reassure the tribes that the corps was not an adversarial expedition.

When the expedition reached the headwaters of the Missouri River—near present-day Oregon—the explorers realized that no viable passage linked the Missouri to the Pacific Ocean. The corps was forced to halt, while Lewis and Clark procured horses to cross the Rocky Mountains.

On to the Pacific

By the time the explorers located the Columbia River on the western side of the mountains, they were facing starvation. Fortunately, they encountered members of the Nez Percé tribe, who agreed to feed and shelter them and to care for their horses while they completed their journey. After several weeks of recovery, the expedition set out on the river and reached the Pacific Ocean in November 1805.

After spending the winter near Cape Disappointment—present-day Astoria, Oregon—the expedition departed in April 1806 for its return journey. In June Lewis and Clark decided to split the expedition into northern and southern groups to explore a greater portion of the territory. Lewis’s northern contingent engaged in a minor military conflict with the Blackfoot Tribe, which resulted in the death of several natives. It was the only violent encounter of the three-year journey. Clark’s southern group encountered the Crow Tribe, which stole several of the explorers’ horses but posed no violent threat. The two groups met in August, at the junction of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, and continued downstream to Missouri, where the expedition ended in September 1806. Despite navigating dangerous river systems and facing exposure to disease and parasites, only one member of the corps died during the expedition.

The Significance of the Expedition

The Lewis and Clark expedition resulted in an extensive survey of regional geography, plants, and animals. In addition the expedition’s meetings with native tribes formed the basis for subsequent military and diplomatic relations and helped to create public interest in westward exploration.

Most of the information gathered during the expedition was kept in government archives for more than a century before it was released to the public. The full value of the mission would not be fully appreciated until historians and naturalists were able to compare the state of the natural environment as encountered by the Corps of Discovery with the changing landscape after and during territorial expansion into the region.

The Seminole Wars

The Seminole Wars were fought during the first half of the nineteenth century between the U.S. military and the Seminole tribe in Florida and portions of surrounding states. Chief among the causes of the standoff were the U.S. desire to occupy Florida’s coastal territory; objections by slaveholders to the Seminoles’ practice of harboring fugitive slaves; and fear that a Seminole alliance with Spain could pose a threat to national security. The final Seminole conflict ended in 1858, after which some three hundred Seminoles remained in Florida, never fully relinquishing their claim to the territory.

The First Seminole War

In the early nineteenth century most of the Seminole territory in Florida was controlled by Spain, which saw it as a strategic buffer between Spanish interests and U.S. territory. Settlers in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida soon came into contact with the region’s indigenous inhabitants, leading to conflicts over territory and resources. White settlers accused the Seminoles of stealing livestock, food, and weapons, while Seminoles objected to colonial encroachment and to restrictions on their access to productive tribal territory. Another major issue was the settlers’ perception that the Seminoles were stealing their slaves. Though the Seminoles owned slaves, frequent intermarriage and interbreeding created strong bonds between the groups. The Seminoles also had a tradition of harboring fugitive slaves from other areas.

When Seminole warriors in Georgia were implicated in the deaths of several colonists in 1817, General Andrew Jackson (1767–1855) and his troops attacked Fowl Town, a Seminole village close to the northern border of Florida. During the following year Seminole warriors retaliated with raids against white settlements in Florida.

Because Jackson believed the Spanish were aiding the Seminoles and encouraging them to disrupt American settlement, his forces occupied the Spanish forts of St. Marks and Pensacola in May 1818. The Spanish government wanted to avoid a costly war, and agreed to sell Florida to the United States in return for $5 million in debt forgiveness. The 1819 Treaty of Adams-Onís, negotiated by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), made Florida a U.S. territory. Jackson’s soldiers were able to drive most of the Seminoles into hiding, effectively ending the first Seminole War.

The Second Seminole War

During the 1820s hundreds of citizens complained to the federal government about Seminole interference in Florida and Georgia. Using the Seminole tradition of sheltering slaves as justification, the government determined to move the Seminoles to a reservation near the Peace River in southwest Florida. The Moultrie Creek Treaty was prepared by Indian agent James Gadsden (1788–1858) and accepted, after negotiation, by a council of Seminole elders. Some Seminoles refused to sign the treaty, however, objecting to the fact that the reservation was inadequate for agriculture and was isolated from the ocean. The location of the reservation had, in fact, been part of U.S. strategy: without direct access to the ocean, the Seminoles were less likely to collaborate with Spanish forces in Cuba.

Although the treaty temporarily relieved local conflict, the government wanted to find a permanent solution and, in 1830, Jackson—by then president—proposed the Indian Relocation Act, which called for relocating all tribes to reservations west of the Mississippi River. His theory was that, once the tribes had been moved, the remaining portions of the Southeast would be open for U.S. development.

Some Seminoles agreed to relocation, but the majority refused and united behind a small group of leaders, most notably Osceola (c. 1804–1838), whose military campaigns became the most celebrated of the time. In 1835 he and his warriors attacked a military regiment in northern Florida, killing more than one hundred soldiers. The Dade Massacre, as it became known, persuaded the government to commit more troops to the area. During the following two years Osceola and his allies fought a guerrilla-style campaign, repeatedly striking in short engagements and then retreating to the safety of the swamps. Several of the army’s famous generals were placed in command but were unable effectively to counter the Seminoles’ tactics and were removed from the operation.

In 1836 Jackson enlisted Major General Thomas Jessup, who determined to end the conflict by whatever means was necessary. In 1837 he offered a truce to the Seminoles and lured Osceola to a meeting to negotiate a treaty. As soon as Osceola arrived, he was captured and imprisoned. He became ill and died in 1838, while confined in Fort Moultrie, South Carolina.

Though Osceola’s capture was a significant setback for the Seminoles, the military was still unable to deal a fatal blow. By 1841 U.S. and Seminole forces had been weakened by the extended engagement, and the military campaign had cost the United States an estimated $30 million. In 1842 the government resolved to allow the remaining Seminoles to stay in Florida on an unofficial reservation near the southern coast. Though neither party resigned to defeat, the government offered financial compensation to any Seminoles who voluntarily agreed to move out. Most of them did, leaving only about three hundred in Florida.

The Third Seminole War

The primary impetus for the third conflict in 1855 was white settlers’ desire to occupy territory within the unofficial Seminole reservation. Minor conflicts between settlers and Seminoles occurred in 1848 and 1849 and continued to escalate. White settlers hired Indian hunters to patrol their territories, while the Seminoles conducted raids on settlements.

In 1855 a group of Seminoles under the command of Chief Billy Bowlegs (c. 1810–c. 1864) attacked an army station, killing several soldiers. In response Congress raised funds to pay local militia and volunteer soldiers to kill or capture the remaining Seminoles. Bowlegs utilized methods similar to those of Osceola, attacking at random locations and then retreating to the safety of swampland. During the following year militia groups, private Indian hunters, and military incursions reduced Bowlegs’s group to fewer than two hundred. After the Seminoles lost a final skirmish in 1857, Bowlegs accepted an offer of truce from the government and agreed to move to a reservation. By 1858 the conflict had ended, though a small group of Seminoles never surrendered and were eventually allowed to remain in Florida.

Black Seminoles

The Seminoles maintained close relations with many free and fugitive African-Americans who settled in Florida. Seminoles often allowed African-Americans to marry into the tribe and granted mixed African/Seminole children full tribal status. In response to the Seminoles’ acceptance of former slaves, groups of African-Americans joined the Seminole resistance during the Seminole Wars. Over time the presence of Black Seminoles became common in many Seminole tribes, and in some cases Black Seminoles formed their own settlements and forts.

During the Second Seminole War, one of the most notable engagements was fought between the Tennessee Militia and a group of Black Seminoles living near the Suwannee River. Although they were outnumbered by more than four to one, the Black Seminoles defended their settlement until the women and children could escape to the safety of the swamp. The military prowess of the Black Seminoles became well-known among abolitionists and those who opposed the Seminole relocation policies of President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845).

Chief Billy Bowlegs (c. 1810–c. 1864), who was a prominent leader during the Second Seminole War and the primary leader during the Third Seminole War, was among the most widely known of the Black Seminole warriors. Bowlegs, also known as Alligator Chief, became famous for his military skill: in dozens of engagements with the military, his fighting force seldom suffered casualties and was often successful in routing much larger forces.

Many of the Black Seminoles survived the Seminole Wars and the tribe’s subsequent relocation to reservations. Descendents of the Black Seminoles live in the Bahamas, Mexico, and throughout the American South and West; some are still located in Florida.

The Panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857

The Panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857 were periods of economic depression that resulted from shifting fiscal policies and economic reforms as the United States struggled to refine its monetary system. Contributing to the Panics were fluctuations in foreign trade and investment, public mistrust of the banking industry, rapid population growth, and territorial expansion.

The Panic of 1819

In the years following the War of 1812, the U.S. export industry grew rapidly, because both France and Britain needed industrial and agricultural commodities to maintain their war efforts. Economic growth from 1812 to 1815 led to an increase in investment in land for farms and businesses. However, when the Napoleonic Wars came to an end in 1815, the American economy stalled, and many speculators were unable to meet their debts.

By 1819 the Bank of the United States began calling in most of its loans and foreclosing on those who could not afford to pay. The government tried to alleviate the situation with the Land Act of 1820, which reduced the minimum amount of land sold in government parcels and reduced the overall cost for loan repayment, and the Relief Act of 1821, which allowed land owners to return a portion of the land they had purchased for government credit.

At the height of the crisis, unemployment topped 50 percent in some U.S. cities and land ownership reached a historic low. Thousands of Americans were confined to debtors’ prisons while investment in the newly opened western territories slowed to a halt. Later investigations indicated that approximately one-third of the population was adversely affected by the crisis.

The Panic of 1819 led to a shift in public opinion regarding the Bank of the United States and the banking industry in general, which became a major issue in the candidacy and presidency of Andrew Jackson (1767–1845). The growing distrust of the banking system would also play a role in the first government antitrust legislation.

The Panic of 1837

In 1837, shortly after the election of President Martin Van Buren (1782–1862), the nation experienced its second economic depression. The panic was partially the result of Jackson’s crusade against the Bank of the United States. The bank, which had received a twenty-year charter from Congress in 1816, applied to renew its charter in 1832, four years before the previous charter ended. Jackson had opposed the banking system during his campaign, so he vetoed the charter despite widespread congressional support. After winning re-election in 1832, Jackson decided to strike a decisive blow against the bank by withdrawing all federal funds.

Nicholas Biddle (1786–1844), the head of the federal bank, attempted to prevent its collapse by calling in the bank’s loans. Hundreds of businesses, especially in the Northeast, were forced to close between 1833 and 1834 because they could not repay their loans. With the mediating influence of the federal bank removed, private banking institutions could suddenly take a greater role in the money-lending industry. The brief recession of 1833–34, therefore, gave way to an unchecked period of economic growth, which in turn led to rising inflation.

Entrepreneurs borrowed heavily from domestic and foreign investors to make speculative purchases in frontier territories. In 1836 Jackson issued an executive order that required all purchases of federal land to be transacted in gold or silver rather than with paper money. Before long, eastern banks found themselves unable to maintain adequate reserves and began calling in loans. Many local banks exhausted their reserves and, without the buffering effect of a central bank to provide aid, the banking system began to collapse. In 1837 more than eight hundred banks were forced to close, leaving many customers without property or the funds to pay their debts. Unemployment rose, as businesses had to shut down. At the height of the depression, more than 10 percent of the population was unemployed.

The federal government did little to reduce the effects of the depression, as the newly elected Van Buren was unwilling to commit federal funds to aid local businesses. The panic was largely resolved by the mid 1840s, in part because several large banking institutions used their reserves—much as the national bank had—to provide loans that prevented the closure of smaller banks. As a result of the central government’s ineffectual policies, the Democratic Party lost popular support, and Whig Party candidate William Henry Harrison (1773–1841) was able to defeat Van Buren in 1840.

The Panic of 1857

In 1853 France and Britain formed an alliance to defend the Ottoman Empire from the Russian Army. The Crimean War, which lasted until 1856, benefited the U.S. economy because its agricultural and industrial products were sent to France and Britain to fuel the war effort.

At the conclusion of the Crimean conflict, decreased demand for U.S. exports caused a minor panic in the agricultural community. While revenues declined, a major economic scandal involving embezzlement forced the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, one of the nation’s major banking organizations, to close its doors. That event, coupled with the loss of the merchant ship Central America, which sank while carrying a shipment of gold bullion, caused alarm in the New York stock market.

The panic primarily affected the banking community in the northeastern United States. Investors began to remove money from the banking system, leading to bank failures, defaulted loans, and rising levels of unemployment. Though the depression had begun to abate by 1858, its effects lingered, and economic debates between Northern and Southern factions played a role in precipitating the Civil War.

The Eaton Affair

The Eaton Affair was a Washington, D.C., scandal that threatened the stability of the first administration of President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) in 1831. The scandal involved the marriage of Jackson’s friend and secretary of war, John Eaton (1790–1856), to Margaret “Peggy” O’Neil (1796–1879), a recent widow who was seen as “overtly sexual” and “flirtatious” by members of the Washington social elite. When the Washington women ostracized O’Neil, Jackson objected and made known his support for the Eatons, leading to the resignation of Vice President John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) and most of Jackson’s first cabinet.

Background

During Jackson’s first and second presidential campaigns, Eaton—who, like Jackson, was a senator from Tennessee—befriended O’Neil, the daughter of a Georgetown boardinghouse owner. Eaton, Jackson, and many of their contemporaries visited O’Neil’s inn during their frequent visits to Washington.

O’Neil’s husband, naval officer John B. Timberlake (c.1777–1828), died at sea under suspicious circumstances that led many to suspect suicide. Because O’Neil had a reputation as a flirtatious woman and because her close friendship with John Eaton was common knowledge, rumors circulated that Timberlake had committed suicide after discovering his wife’s unfaithfulness. Eaton married O’Neil within a year, leading to further speculation that the two had had an affair while her husband was at sea.

Jackson fervently supported Eaton’s relationship with O’Neil, partially because it bore resemblance to his own experience with the Washington social circle. Jackson’s wife, Rachel Donelson (1767–1828), was separated from her first husband, Lewis Robards, in 1790, shortly after she met Jackson. Donelson and Jackson married in 1791, only to discover two years later that Robards had never divorced her. Though Jackson and Robards rectified the situation, critics accused the Jacksons of immorality and bigamy. When Rachel Jackson died of a heart attack prior to her husband’s inauguration in 1828, Jackson blamed her death partially on the criticism his family endured during the campaign.

Banned from Polite Society

Some of Jackson’s allies cautioned him against appointing Eaton as secretary of war, fearing that Eaton’s marriage to O’Neil would leave the presidency vulnerable to attack. Jackson refused to allow his opponents to affect his appointments and assiduously defended the Eatons.

Several prominent Washington wives, led by Floride Calhoun (1792–1866), wife of the vice president, shunned Peggy Eaton and would not attend any function that included the Eatons. The Eatons suffered considerably from their social ostracism, though both John Eaton and Jackson defended the marriage and Peggy Eaton’s morality. Jackson was forced to acknowledge the significance of the issue when his niece, Emily Donelson (1897–1836), who acted as White House hostess and unofficial first lady following the death of Jackson’s wife, participated in the shunning of the Eatons.

Political Repercussions

The scandal intensified political differences between Jackson and Calhoun and made it difficult for the cabinet to carry out government business. Secretary of State Martin Van Buren (1782–1862), who was a widower and therefore personally unaffected by the affair, was the only cabinet member who supported Jackson and the Eatons. Van Buren realized that Jackson would not ask for Eaton’s resignation, so he tendered his own resignation and persuaded Eaton to do likewise. The resignation of Van Buren and Eaton in 1831 gave Jackson the leverage to force a mass resignation of the cabinet and eventually of Calhoun. Jackson appointed Eaton to serve as governor of Florida and, during his second presidential campaign in 1832, chose Van Buren to be his vice president.

Sex Scandals in U.S. Political History

The Eaton Affair was one of the most famous sex scandals in political history. Though President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) was not implicated in the scandal, his opponents drew allegations of immorality against Jackson for his association with the Eatons.

Through the centuries the sexual behavior of political leaders has remained a major issue in U.S. politics. During the 1800 campaign critics of John Adams (1735–1826) and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) cast allegations of sexual impropriety against both candidates, saying that Adams visited prostitutes and that Jefferson had engaged in a series of affairs with married women while serving as a diplomat in Paris and fathered a child with one of his slaves.

Though opponents often allege sexual misbehavior as a way of casting doubt on a politician’s credibility, the public has routinely chosen to ignore such allegations unless they seemed to affect the president’s performance. Critics accused President Grover Cleveland (1837–1908), during his campaign for a second term, of fathering a child with a New York prostitute. Cleveland acknowledged that he was financially sponsoring both the woman and the child and won re-election by a large margin.

The private lives of American presidents have always been the subject of considerable media and public attention. While presidents John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), Warren G. Harding (1865–1923), and Franklin Roosevelt (1882–1945) were widely believed to have engaged in affairs with multiple mistresses during their terms, President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) gained fame as the only president to be remarried while in office. Shortly after the death of his first wife in 1914, he met and began an intimate relationship with Edith Galt (1872–1961), whom he married the following year. Although his opponents questioned the president’s priorities, Wilson’s courtship and marriage did not prevent him from being elected to a second term or effectively governing during World War I.

The nature of Washington sexual scandals has not effectively changed since the time of Jefferson and Adams, except in that increased media attention makes it more difficult for political leaders to have illicit affairs beyond the public’s view. The greater visibility has not changed the essential function of the sex scandal, as critics continue to use sexual impropriety as grounds for impeachment while the public opinion seems to differ, believing that the president’s job and the president’s personal life should remain distinct.

The Texas Independence Movement

The Texas Independence Movement, a series of confrontations in the 1830s and 1840s between separatist forces in Texas and the Mexican government, resulted in the formation of the Republic of Texas. Texas remained a republic until it was voluntarily annexed by the United States in 1845, precipitating the Mexican-American War of 1846.

Mexican Independence

In 1821, with the Treaty of Córdoba, Mexico gained its independence from Spain. At the time Mexico’s population was insufficient to occupy the entire territory—only the central regions were heavily populated. To prevent foreign powers from infringing on its territory, Mexico invited U.S. settlers to move into the isolated northern parts of the country.

Stephen F. Austin (1793–1836), one of the first settlers to head to Texas, was allowed in 1823 to lead three hundred families into the region. The Mexican government planned to relocate an additional nine hundred families during the following two years. The settlers were required to swear allegiance to the Mexican government, to learn Spanish, and to convert to Catholicism.

By 1830, however, the Mexican government was becoming concerned about the growing numbers of Anglo-American settlers in Texas and by the region’s close economic and social ties with the United States. The government responded by abolishing immigration and placing heavy restrictions on trade with the United States. When the Mexican government passed legislation that abolished slavery in 1831, members of the Texas cotton industry began advocating secession.

In 1833 the new Mexican president, Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794–1876), embarked on a program to strengthen the central government and promote nationalism. Many Texans were dismayed by the shift of power, especially when Santa Anna replaced regional and local leaders with appointed governors. He also sent additional military forces to the Texas region. Conflicts between the settlers and Mexican militia escalated between 1833 and 1835, setting the stage for civil war.

Course of the Conflict

In October 1835 Santa Anna dispatched a military detachment to the Anglo settlement of Gonzalez to remove the town’s cannon, which the government had given to the town earlier to protect it against Indian raids. The settlers prevented Mexican troops from taking the cannon and, during the following week, gathered additional supporters into an ad hoc militia, known as the Army of the People. The settlers’ army succeeded in forcing the Mexican military to retreat to San Antonio.

In December a group of insurgents took control of the Alamo mission in San Antonio, prompting Santa Anna to send a large contingent of soldiers. The siege at the Alamo lasted for several weeks and resulted in the deaths of one hundred eighty settlers and native supporters, including famed American folk heroes David “Davy” Crockett (1786–1836) and James “Jim” Bowie (1796–1836). Though the Battle of the Alamo was a major victory for Santa Anna’s forces, at least six hundred Mexican soldiers died during the fighting. News of the struggle spread throughout the territory, significantly increasing support for the independence movement.

Santa Anna pressed his advantage by occupying San Antonio and pushing into the surrounding regions. The Texans’ leadership began to deteriorate because of internal conflicts over strategy. However, when Santa Anna’s forces captured the city of Goliad in March 1836 and executed more than three hundred insurgents, General Sam Houston (1793–1863), who commanded the largest contingent of the insurgent military, united the remaining forces and prepared for a major confrontation.

On April 21, 1836, Houston and his fellow commanders led a surprise attack against the Mexican army at San Jacinto. Santa Anna was captured. While a prisoner of Houston’s forces, he signed peace treaties promising to remove the Mexican armies from Texas. Though the treaties did not officially grant Texas independence, Santa Anna agreed to submit a proposal for independence to the Mexican legislature. He was allowed to return to Mexico City. After his release Santa Anna rejected the treaties and refused to recognize Texas as an independent nation.

The Republic of Texas

Even before the battle was decisively over and Santa Anna had been captured, the insurgents had declared the independence of the Republic of Texas. In March 1836 the settlers had asserted their separation from Mexico in a document based on the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The Texans formed a rudimentary government with Houston serving as the first president of the republic. One of Houston’s earliest objectives was to send a representative to the United States to open diplomatic relations and discuss the possibility of annexation. The leaders of the new Texas government, realizing that Mexico would eventually try to reclaim the territory, agreed that they needed strong foreign military support. A majority of Texans favored annexation by the United States.

The Texas legislature’s decision to make slavery legal again brought about opposition from abolitionist and Northern factions in the United States and stalled progress on annexation. President Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) opposed annexation because he thought it would incite further sectionalist debate and lead to war with Mexico. The financial Panic of 1837 further stalled negotiations in Congress. Concerned by threats of invasion, Houston sent envoys to Britain to discuss annexation, but the British government was not prepared to admit a territory that allowed slavery.

President John Tyler (1790–1862), a strong supporter of Southern rights and slavery, submitted an annexation proposal to Congress in 1844. Though many in Congress were initially opposed to it, the subsequent election of Democratic candidate James K. Polk (1795–1849), who supported annexation, helped to gather support from Northern Democrats and to allow the resolution to pass. The official transfer was concluded in December 1845.

Consequences of Independence

The annexation of Texas exacerbated tensions between Northern and Southern factions in the United States and brought about the Mexican-American War. The war was a costly effort that extended from 1846 to 1848 but solidified the political landscape at a time when a split in the Union was looming. However, after the war the acquisition of Texas, California, and New Mexico again ignited sectionalist debate. Though the Compromise of 1850 temporarily relieved tensions over slavery, both the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War contributed to the rancor that led ultimately to the Civil War.

Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism was a nineteenth-century literary and philosophical movement centered in New England that departed from prevailing social and religious attitudes in emphasizing the unity of nature and the precedence of intuition over experience. It was a major factor in the antebellum reform period. Between 1830 and 1850, such transcendentalist thinkers as Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Sophia Peabody (1809–1871), Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), and Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) produced a large body of artistic works including literary and philosophical texts, poetry, and paintings.

Origins of the Movement

Some historians regard transcendentalism as a “religious” or “spiritual” movement because several founding members, including Emerson and Frederick Henry Hedge (1805–1890), took part in the Unitarian religious movement of the nineteenth century. Others see transcendentalism as a philosophical movement, inspired by the Germans Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Still others find it to be an alternative to the rationalism of such philosophers as René Descartes (1596–1650) and the empiricism of John Locke (1632–1704).

In 1836 Hedge and Emerson formed the Transcendental Club in Boston, Massachusetts, which met to discuss philosophy, art, literature, religion, and science. Through their meetings the small group of intellectuals developed a philosophical movement that focused on the primacy of intuition and insight, the experience of nature, and the rejection of conservative ideological and religious views.

Development of the Doctrine

Emerson’s 1836 essay Nature is considered one of the seminal works of transcendentalism. It proposes that nature and human behavior are manifestations of the divine and that intuitive experience of these phenomena will allow humans to understand the universal truth of existence. The essay also argues that neither the inherited dogma of organized religion nor the focus on rigorous science and logic are necessary for perception of primary truth.

Members of the Transcendental Club published essays and critiques in a number of New England scholarly journals, including the Boston Quarterly Review. After the club disbanded, some of the former members created their own journal, the Dial, which was published from 1840 to 1844. Fuller, a journalist and women’s rights activist, was its first editor.

One of the first prominent female journalists in New England, Fuller traveled extensively to organize women’s rights groups. Women’s rights pioneers Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) regarded Fuller as an important influence for the women’s suffrage movement. Though some of the transcendentalists were primarily academic and scholarly, Fuller was a vigorous activist, arguing for philosophical equality among the sexes. Her essay Women in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845, argues that both femininity and masculinity are present in all men and women and that women must be allowed to seek and express self-reliance both for the benefit of women and for the development of society.

Walden Pond

Henry David Thoreau is often considered the most accessible of the transcendentalist writers. He was introduced to transcendentalism by Emerson, who published some of Thoreau’s early literary criticism in the Dial. After moving to Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau immersed himself in an intuitive study of nature, similar to the kind Emerson described in his essays. Thoreau’s experience led to his most famous work, Walden, published in 1854.

In Walden and other essays, Thoreau built on Emerson’s earlier consideration of nature and used the experiences of his retreat to discuss morality, ethics, and the social changes brought about by urbanization and population growth. Thoreau’s book not only became the most enduring legacy of the transcendentalists, but also provided an intellectual basis for the environmental movement.

Political Activism

Transcendentalism was essentially a reformist philosophy concerned with identifying the problems of modern existence and recommending a philosophical and active path for personal and social change. Most of the transcendentalists were ardent abolitionists and also supported other social movements, including women’s rights, education reform, and prison reform.

In 1838 Emerson wrote a letter to President Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) condemning the government’s policy of removing Native Americans from their ancestral lands and relocating them to territories west of Mississippi. Emerson believed that the government’s mistreatment of the tribes was amoral and advocated the release of Native American prisoners and the relinquishment of seized territory. Peabody also took up the Native American cause, advocating schools for the tribes’ children.

Most of the transcendentalists also supported the abolitionist movement, especially after the Fugitive Slave Law, passed in 1850, required law-enforcement officers in “free” states to capture and return fugitive slaves. Transcendentalists wrote and lectured extensively in favor of abolition, believing that slavery was a moral crime that represented the ills of the modern world.

As sectionalist tensions grew during the 1850s, the Transcendentalist Movement was part of the intellectual and philosophical underpinning of the antebellum reform movement. In the general populace, the Second Great Awakening and the rise of evangelism played a similar role by encouraging resistance to central authority and personal involvement in combating injustice and immorality.

See also Henry David Thoreau

Manifest Destiny

Manifest Destiny, a concept popularized in the 1840s, was the widely held belief that Americans had the right and obligation to occupy and develop the entire North American continent. Since then politicians, journalists, and pioneers have used Manifest Destiny to justify the entire history of western expansion, from the Louisiana Purchase through the acquisition of Alaska and Hawaii.

Historians have identified numerous causes and motivations behind westward expansion, but economic and logistic concerns played major roles. From 1800 to 1805, the nation’s population increased from about five million to more than twenty-three million, while economic depressions in urban areas forced many Americans to search for new opportunities on the frontier.

Early Expansion

After the War of 1812, thousands of settlers headed into the frontier to occupy parts of present-day Illinois, Indiana, Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Between 1812 and 1820, Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, and Mississippi were admitted as new states. Expansion forced the government to revise land-ownership policies and to devise a more extensive system of roads linking the newly formed territories. Politicians worried that, without adequate avenues for shipping and distribution, states farther from the capital would be more likely to move toward separation from the Union.

Roughly one hundred thousand pioneers were living west of the Mississippi River by 1830 and had occupied territory on the Pacific Ocean and along the Mexican borders of Texas by 1850. The fur trade played an early role in westward migration but began to decline in the 1840s, after which a majority of settlers formed agricultural and ranching communities. With the establishment of the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails, family migration became more common and the population of settlers increased.

Although the term Manifest Destiny was not coined until the mid nineteenth century, the sentiments embodied by the phrase were implicitly and explicitly part of government policy from the beginning of the century. Prime examples are the Native American pacification campaigns of Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) in 1817, which gained control of Florida and adjacent territories, and the Monroe Doctrine articulated in 1823 by President James Monroe (1758–1831), which officially stated that the U.S. government would no longer tolerate European colonization on the North American continent.

Origin of the Slogan

In an 1845 issue of Democratic Review, journalist John L. O’Sullivan (1813–1895) wrote that Americans had a “Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” O’Sullivan, who was writing in support of the annexation of Texas, hoped opponents of annexation would recognize that expansion of the nation was inevitable. More territory would be necessary to house the increasing population and to ensure its peace and prosperity.

Overspreading the Continent

After the publication of O’Sullivan’s article, politicians and supporters of expansion began using Manifest Destiny as the catchall phrase to encapsulate the spirit of western migration and American pioneer culture. It reached a zenith in 1846 when the U.S. government, under James K. Polk (1795–1849), declared war on Mexico. The Mexican government objected to encroachment and to the annexation of Texas. Polk sent troops to the border region where they were engaged by the Mexican military. By 1847 U.S. forces had occupied large portions of Mexico’s northern territory and invaded Mexico City. At the conclusion of the conflict, the United States gained additional territories in the Southwest. Although political debate over the war and the newly acquired territories continued for the following decade, the idea of Manifest Destiny was established as part of the American ideology.

A Lasting Legacy

Though expansionism helped to solidify American standing as a globally influential nation, it also led to a systematic obliteration of many Native American and Native Mexican cultures. In addition the idea of Manifest Destiny propagated a culture of “ultraexpansionists,” who urged complete domination of Canada, Mexico, and Central America. Popular support for expansion, however, was tempered by governmental concerns about maintaining the balance of power and pacing expansion with economic growth.

By combining the appeal of spiritual authority with the utilitarian desire for economic and military stability, O’Sullivan’s phrase captured the imagination of a generation and came to symbolize an entire period in U.S. history. Though historians and analysts continue to debate the motivations, costs, and benefits of westward expansion, Manifest Destiny and the worldview it represented played a major role in the formation of one of the world’s foremost superpowers.

The Mexican-American War

The Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 resulted in U.S. control of the territory from the Rio Grande in Texas to the Pacific Coast of California at San Diego. In Mexican historiography the conflict is known as the U.S. Invasion.

Escalation of Hostilities

The 1845 annexation of Texas angered the Mexican government, because it had never fully relinquished ownership of the territory. In 1846 General Mariano Paredes (1797–1849) led a military coup that resulted in the overthrow of moderate President José Herrera (1792–1854). Paredes then ordered all U.S. soldiers to leave Texas.

In January 1846 President James K. Polk (1795–1849) dispatched General Zachary Taylor (1784–1850) to occupy an area near the Rio Grande. Mexican military leaders threatened to attack unless Taylor immediately left the area; he steadfastly refused and called on the U.S. Navy to create a blockade protecting the Rio Grande from the Mexican Navy.

In April 1846 Mexican troops crossed the Rio Grande to engage a marine detachment under the command of Seth Thornton (1817–1847). The battle, which came to be known as the Thornton Affair, resulted in the death of at least fourteen U.S. soldiers; the others were imprisoned. Congress gave Polk permission to declare war on May 13, 1846.

The Northern Invasion

The first major battle of the war actually took place on March 8, 1846, at Palo Alto. Mexican troops under the command of General Mariano Arista (1802–1855) were forced to retreat from the Rio Grande. The following day, Taylor met Mexican forces again at Resaca de la Palma, resulting in another major victory for the U.S. army.

In September U.S. forces captured Monterrey after a fierce battle that lasted for several days. Polk ordered Taylor to push into central Mexico. The most devastating battle of the war occurred in February 1847 when a large Mexican contingent, under the command of General Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794–1876), met with Taylor’s forces in Buena Vista. Though the U.S. army suffered heavy casualties, Santa Anna eventually retreated, leaving the territory to the United States.

The following month a naval contingent under the command of General Winfield Scott (1786–1866) landed at Collado Beach near Veracruz, where, after two weeks of minor engagements, U.S. artillery effectively reduced the city’s resistance and forced Mexican troops to surrender. The capture of Veracruz significantly undermined Mexico’s naval operations and made it possible for U.S. forces to move farther into central Mexico.

The American Occupation

In April 1847 Scott’s forces engaged the Mexican Army under Santa Anna at the Cerro Gordo mountain pass. Reconnaissance provided by Captain Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) allowed the U.S. Army to occupy strategic positions surrounding Santa Anna’s regiments and force the Mexican Army into retreat. As Scott’s troops approached Mexico City, they engaged and defeated small contingents of Mexican forces, weakening their morale.

Scott’s army began its assault on Mexico City in August 1847. After several weeks, Santa Anna’s forces abandoned the city. The Mexican Army and citizen militias continued to launch minor assaults against U.S. forces in other regions, while Scott maintained control over the capital. Santa Anna, who had declared himself president of Mexico during the spring, was removed from office in mid-September 1847 and left Mexico for exile. In November of the same year, a new Mexican government took control under President Manuel de la Peña y Peña (1794–1854), who agreed to meet with U.S. representatives and discuss a treaty.

The End of Hostilities

In May 1847, prior to the capture of Mexico City, the United States dispatched the veteran diplomat Nicholas Trist (1800–1874) to establish a dialogue with Mexican leaders. He was rebuffed until the ascension of Peña. Shortly before Trist entered negotiations, he received a dispatch from Polk recalling him to Washington. Fearful that his departure would destroy the potential for a truce, Trist decided to ignore the recall and to meet with Mexico’s negotiators.

Trist obtained nearly all of the objectives set forth by Polk, including the accession of New Mexico and additional territory in Texas. The United States conceded southern California to Mexican control and agreed to pay $15 million for ownership of northern California. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was delivered to Washington in February 1848 and ratified the following month. By August U.S. troops had withdrawn from Mexico.

A Lasting Legacy

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is still in effect, making it the oldest treaty between the United States and Mexico. The invasion of Mexico dominated U.S.-Mexican relations for the rest of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. It also thoroughly destabilized Mexico, resulting in several decades of political turmoil.

The Mexican-American war was the first military invasion for the U.S. Army and helped to establish the United States as a world power. Though not an intended consequence, the Mexican-American War also served as the training and proving ground for soldiers and leaders who would serve during the Civil War. Taylor used his fame to achieve the presidency in 1848, running as a candidate for the Whig Party.

Saint Patrick’s Battalion

During the first year of the Mexican-American War, the U.S. military actively recruited soldiers from across the nation. Among the new recruits were hundreds of Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States after fleeing the “Great Hunger,” an agricultural famine that reduced the Irish population from eight million to five million in the years between 1845 and 1852.

Nineteenth-century America was an unfriendly environment for Irish immigrants. Some Americans, including the powerful nativist movement, opposed the immigration of Irish Catholics out of fear that they would undermine the dominance of the Protestant majority. In addition, many urban residents were hostile toward Irish immigrants competing for jobs. As jobs were scarce, hundreds of Irish joined the armed forces. More than 40 percent of the soldiers sent to Mexico in 1846 were recent immigrants, most of whom were Irish, Scottish, or German.

Catholic and other immigrant soldiers faced discrimination and mistreatment from Protestant commanders and were granted little in the form of compensation for their service. In addition, many Catholic immigrants sympathized with the plight of the predominantly Catholic Mexican population. The Catholic Church in Mexico distributed propaganda among U.S. soldiers that encouraged Catholics to aid in Mexico’s defense and offered substantial rewards in the form of payment and property.

John Riley (1805–1850), an Irish immigrant who was serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, defected to the Mexican Army in 1846, shortly before the start of the war. Riley became the leader of Saint Patrick’s Battalion (Los Batallón de San Patricio), a predominantly Irish group of soldiers who fought against the Americans at the battles of Monterey and Churubusco. After the start of the engagement, additional soldiers fled the U.S. ranks and joined Riley’s battalion, eventually increasing the numbers to more than 200.

Historians have debated the various motivations that prompted Riley and his compatriots to choose defection. While many of the men were undoubtedly influenced by the promise of financial reward, some were also motivated by the U.S. Army’s destruction of Catholic monuments and institutions. Both in terms of financial security and religious acceptance, the Mexican Army offered a more favorable environment.

Saint Patrick’s Battalion defended the Catholic convent in Churubusco against forces led by U.S. General Winfield Scott (1786–1866). Though the convent was eventually overrun and Riley’s men were captured or killed, the bravery and effectiveness of the Battalion engendered the respect and admiration of the Mexican population. Most of Riley’s men were executed, in what was the largest mass hanging in the history of America. The remaining soldiers, including Riley, were whipped in a public display and branded on the cheek with the letter “D” (for deserter). Word of the remaining members of Saint Patrick’s Battalion reached the United States as the men were awaiting execution, and many Catholics petitioned the government for their release. Threatened by popular unrest, the government allowed Riley and nineteen of his men to return to Mexico at the end of the war.

Perception of the Mexican-American War is vastly different in Mexico, where the war is generally known as the “U.S. Invasion.” In both Ireland and Mexico, the members of Saint Patrick’s Battalion are considered heroes of conscience, who died defending Mexico from an unjust war of territorial expansion. In 1959 the Mexican government erected a plaque in Mexico City honoring the Battalion. Both Mexico and Ireland hold annual celebrations honoring the contribution of Irish soldiers during the Mexican-American War.

The Seneca Falls Convention

The Seneca Falls Convention, held in July 1848, was the first national convention dedicated to women’s rights in the United States. Organized by activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) and Quaker minister Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), the convention produced a “Declaration of Sentiments,” which established the goals of the women’s rights movement and led directly to the establishment of the women’s suffrage lobby.

Generations of Inequality

Prior to the convention the women’s rights movement asserted itself through local leaders primarily in the northeastern United States. Such influential women as Abigail Adams (1744–1818), wife of President John Adams (1735–1826), had raised the question of women’s rights before the formation of an organized movement. The intellectual underpinnings of the feminist movement were set by the British social theorist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) in her book, Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), and by the American poet and playwright Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820), whose collection of feminist essays was published in 1791.

By the 1820s more women were working outside the home, especially in education, although many young women were still prohibited from acquiring advanced education. The activist and educator Catherine Beecher (1800–1878), a pioneer in women’s educational rights, opened one of the nation’s first private schools for women in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1824. By lobbying for education rights, Beecher and her contemporaries helped to remove a major obstacle to the women’s rights movement.

Inspired by the religious revival of the Second Great Awakening and the dawn of the Transcendentalist Movement, an active social reform movement developed in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s. It attracted a number of prominent women, who became deeply involved in lobbying for, among other issues, the abolition of slavery, educational reform, and the humane treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill. They were often prohibited from holding leadership in the reform organizations, however, which inspired Stanton, Mott, and other women to organize a national women’s movement.

The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments

Mott met Stanton at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in England in 1840. When Mott and other women abolitionists were prevented from speaking at the convention, Mott and Stanton began organizing a meeting to discuss women’s issues. Mott and her sister, Martha Coffin Wright (1806–1875), were members of the Hicksite Quaker sect, a reformist religious organization that promoted women’s rights and allowed women to hold leadership positions within the church.

In June 1848 Mott and Wright paid a social visit to Stanton at her home in Seneca Falls, New York. Among other topics, they discussed the New York Married Woman’s Property Rights Act, for which Stanton had lobbied by distributing petitions in Seneca Falls County. That discussion led to plans for a national convention, to be held on June 19 and 20 at the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Seneca Falls. The chapel, built by a congregation of ardent abolitionists, often hosted reform meetings. The only announcement of the convention was a small advertisement in the Seneca County Courier.

In preparing for the convention, Stanton drafted a “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments,” which outlined the current state of women’s rights; the purposes and goals of the convention; and the future of the women’s movement. Stanton based the document on the Declaration of Independence, using the same style and format. In her opening statement, Stanton asserted that “all men and women” are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. She continued with a list of eighteen accusations of “repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman,” exactly as the Declaration of Independence had levied eighteen charges against the king of England. Among the charges were unfair labor laws, unequal access to education, denial of the right to vote, and inequality in employment and property ownership. Stanton also listed twelve resolutions for the convention to adopt, including measures calling for the right to vote and the right to equal participation in the private and public workforce.

The Three Hundred

Approximately two hundred sixty women and forty men attended the convention. None of the women felt comfortable leading the group, so the conference was officiated by Mott’s husband and Quaker reformer James Mott (1788–1868). Among notable attendees was Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the former-slave-turned-abolitionist, writer, and editor of the Rochester North Star newspaper.

The most contentious issue at the convention was the resolution calling for women’s suffrage, which many activists believed to be an unrealistic goal. The Quakers, including Mott, were willing to remove suffrage from the declaration but Stanton refused, believing that suffrage should be a central goal of the movement. Douglass supported Stanton and helped to persuade a majority of those present to call for suffrage.

On the second day of the convention Mott gave a speech regarding women’s inequality in the church and the workplace and calling for women across the country to rise up and reject discriminatory policies. At the close of the convention one hundred women and men signed the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments,” though some later had their names removed from the document under pressure from peers and critics.

Several days later Mott and Stanton held another meeting in Rochester, New York, at which the declaration received another vote of approval. Though the Seneca Falls and Rochester Conventions were only the first steps, they allowed the women’s rights movement to become more cohesive and to determine its direction.

A Larger Audience

The convention received intense attention from the media and religious organizations. In fact, the New York Herald decided to publish the entire “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments” so it could criticize the women’s movement. Stanton and Mott were pleased, for it gave their ideas a much larger audience. Neither woman would live to see the end of the suffrage movement, which found its success in the Nineteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in 1920.

See also Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Legislation, Court Cases, and Trials

The Missouri Compromise

The acts of Congress known as the Missouri Compromise (1820) set a geographical boundary between “free” and “slave” territories. As important, they preserved the balance of Northern and Southern power in the U.S. Senate. The arrangement held for a quarter century, but finally gave way as disputes over the expansion of slavery intensified in the 1850s and led the nation toward the Civil War.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had prohibited slavery in the territories east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio River. However, the region west of the Mississippi, which became U.S. property with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, was not covered by that ordinance. Thousands of enslaved blacks and their masters were soon settled in the former French province of Missouri.

In February 1819 Congress took up the Missouri Territory’s petition to enter the Union as a slave state. At that time the Senate was equally divided between representatives of the nation’s eleven slave states and eleven free states. The more populous Northern states held a majority in the House of Representatives.

A Delicate Bargain

James Tallmadge (1778–1853), a representative from New York, proposed the gradual abolition of slavery in Missouri. The measure, which would have freed slave children at age twenty-five, passed the House but failed in the Senate. The congressional session ended with the matter unsettled. Antislavery activists mounted a campaign to persuade members of the House from the North to oppose any extension of legalized slavery. Some argued that abolition of slavery was required by the Declaration of Independence, which had affirmed that “all men are created equal.” Southern representatives, by contrast, anchored their arguments in states’ rights. New states had to join the Union on equal footing with the original thirteen states, they contended; therefore, the people of Missouri had to be allowed to accept or reject slavery themselves, without interference from Congress.

By the time Congress reconvened in December 1819, another territory was applying for statehood: Maine, which had voted by referendum to separate from Massachusetts. The elements of the Missouri Compromise were offered by Jesse B. Thomas (1777–1853), a senator from Illinois: According to his proposal, Maine would join the Union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state—which would maintain the even division in the Senate. In addition, the portion of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30’—Missouri’s southern border—would be closed to future slavery. The acrimonious debate on the measure aroused the nation “like a fire bell in the night,” in the words of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). However, maneuvering by such skilled politicians as Speaker of the House Henry Clay (1777–1852) of Kentucky got the Thomas proposals through both houses in early March 1820.

A second Missouri Compromise was necessary a year later. Some members of Congress objected to a provision in Missouri’s proposed constitution that banned the entrance of free blacks and mulattoes. Clay had by then relinquished the speaker’s chair but—despite the searing rancor between Northerners and Southerners—he was able to broker a new deal. Missouri could join the Union, according to the agreement, provided its state charter upheld the U.S. Constitution and the rights and privileges of U.S citizens, including freed slaves and other black citizens. Missouri complied and became a state on August 10, 1821.

The Compromise Unravels

The Missouri Compromise successfully kept slavery issues off the congressional agenda for a number of years. However, it did nothing to defuse the fundamental conflict. As the nation’s expansion westward accelerated in the 1840s and 1850s, the carefully calibrated balance of the Missouri Compromise came undone. The annexation of Texas; the addition of the Oregon Territory and the parts of Mexico ceded to the United States following the Mexican-American War in 1848; and the discovery of gold along the California coast—all gave rise to new disputes over slavery. An 1848 proposal by President James K. Polk (1795–1849) to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific was rejected.

Thirty years after the first Missouri Compromise the issue of slavery in newly forming states continued to threaten the Union, so Clay, the “Great Compromiser,” engineered another tenuous bargain. The Compromise of 1850 approved the organization of New Mexico and Utah without reference to slavery, granting those territories the right of self-determination on the matter. In 1854 Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861), a senator from Illinois, promoted the principle of “popular sovereignty”—leaving the decision to the settlers—as his solution to the slavery question in the Kansas and Nebraska territories. Because both regions were north of latitude 36°30’, the Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, inflaming Northern supporters of the old settlement. Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act led to violence between groups of armed settlers in Kansas—the press gave the name “Bleeding Kansas” to the skirmishes—and presaged the larger conflict that would eventually embroil the nation.

The final blow arrived in 1857 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Dred Scott v. Sanford, declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. The radically proslavery decision further exacerbated the national polarization. One of the most outspoken critics of the Dred Scott decision would become the next president: Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865).

See also The Louisiana Purchase

See alsoDred Scott vs. Sanford

Gibbons v. Ogden

In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) the U.S. Supreme Court declared that transportation across state lines cannot be restricted by state laws because it falls under the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce. An important ruling for U.S. businesses, it protected their freedom to operate on a regional and national scale as technologies developed.

The year 1807 witnessed a breakthrough in maritime travel: engineer Robert Fulton (1765–1815) developed the first steamship, the Clermont, which navigated the Hudson River from New York to Albany. New York state granted Fulton and his partner, Robert R. Livingston (1746–1813), the exclusive right to operate steamboats in the state’s waterways. As other states granted monopoly rights to steamboat operators, the transport of goods between states became tangled in legal confusion.

Navigation as Commerce

Aaron Ogden (1756–1839) obtained a license from Fulton and Livingston to run a steamship line from New York City to points in New Jersey. Thomas Gibbons (1757–1826), a former business partner of Ogden’s, began to run boats of his own between New York and Elizabethtown, New Jersey. Ogden tried to get an injunction against Gibbons, whose boats had been licensed by an act of Congress in 1793 for use in the coasting trade (that is, trade between ports within the United States).

New York state courts sided with Ogden, ruling that because the case involved navigation, rather than commerce, his exclusive state license was valid. The Supreme Court, however, unanimously overturned that decision on March 2, 1824. Chief Justice John Marshall (1755–1835), who generally favored the expansion of national power, wrote that because steamships were instrumental to interstate commerce, they were covered by the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. According to the ruling, any state law that restricted interstate steamboat travel, including legislation that permitted monopoly licenses, violated the Constitution.

The decision immediately opened the way for wider travel and transport of goods by steamship, including along the Erie Canal, which was completed in 1825. During the following decades the court’s expansive definition of commerce protected the nationwide spread of the railroad, the telegraph, and other technologies of transportation and communication by which the modern economy was built.

See also John Marshall

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