Union and Democracy (part 2)

The Non-Intercourse Act had brought some measure of relief to New England shipping. Trade with parts of the European continent could now be carried on by those who wished to incur the hazard. A greater volume of trade was probably carried on illicitly with England. Amelia Island, just across the Florida line, and Halifax, in Nova Scotia, became intermediate ports to which American goods went for reshipment to Europe and to which British merchandise was shipped for distribution in the United States. Notwithstanding these well-known evasions of the law, Congress would probably have been content to leave well enough alone but for the fact that the Non-Intercourse Act would expire by limitation in the spring of 1810. Some action was imperative. A bill was drawn by the Administration to meet the situation and introduced in the House by Macon; but it failed to command the support of the party and was dropped in favor of a second bill, commonly known as Macon's Bill No. 2, though he was not the author of it. This measure eventually became law, May 1, 1810. "It marked the last stage toward the admitted failure of commercial restrictions as a substitute for war," writes Mr. Adams. By repealing the Non-Intercourse Act it left commerce free once more to seek the markets of the world. In case either Great Britain or France should revoke or modify its hostile policy, the President was authorized to revive the Non-Intercourse Act against the delinquent nation.

After the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, Napoleon had begun the "sequestration" of American vessels in European ports. Sequestration proved to be only a euphemistic expression for confiscation. On May 14, he issued from Rambouillet a decree which authorized the seizure and condemnation of all American ships in French ports. With an eye to the needs of his war chest, the Emperor calculated that by drawing in this net he would make a catch amounting to about six million dollars. As a matter of fact, this was a conservative estimate. The American consul at Paris reported the seizure of one hundred and thirty-four vessels between April, 1809, and April, 1810. The actual loss to American shipowners could not have been less than ten millions of dollars.

The news of the passage of Macon's bill suggested another stroke to the wily conqueror of Europe. On August 5, he announced to the American Minister that the decrees of Berlin and Milan were revoked and would be inoperative after November 1, "it being understood that in consequence of this declaration the English are to revoke their orders in council and renounce the new principles of blockade," and that the United States, conforming to its act of May 1, 1810, would "cause their rights to be respected by the English."

Accepting this letter at its face value, with a credulity which now seems incredible, President Madison proclaimed on November 2 that France had withdrawn its decrees, and that in consequence commercial intercourse with Great Britain would be suspended on and after February 2, 1811. Madison's haste was due to a very natural desire to coerce Great Britain into a similar renunciation, but to his chagrin, the British Ministry refused to accept the mere notification of Napoleon as evidence of the repeal of the various decrees. Even the supporters of the Administration became uneasy as months passed without any formal edict of revocation. Might not the courts adjudge that the decrees had not been repealed pro forma? The Administration was greatly perturbed in December, too, by the news that two American vessels had been sequestered at Bordeaux. After much hesitation, Congress came to the support of the President and revived the Non-Intercourse Act against Great Britain, at the same time admitting the weakness of its position by the additional provision that the courts should not entertain the question whether the French decrees were or were not revoked. On the same day, February 28, 1811, Pinkney took formal leave of the Prince Regent under circumstances which presaged, if they did not imply, a rupture of diplomatic relations. Yet the British Ministry had so little comprehension of the temper of the American people that at this very moment Wellesley was drafting instructions for the new Minister, Mr. Augustus John Foster, which bade him yield not a jot or a tittle to the alleged rights of neutrals. He was, however, to make proper reparation for the Chesapeake affair.

In these months of struggle for the rights of neutral commerce, the question of impressments had been relegated to second place in the minds of Americans. The blockade of New York by British frigates in the spring of 1811 suddenly revived the old controversy. For a year past an American squadron under the command of Commodore John Rodgers had patrolled the coast, under instructions to protect all merchantmen from molestation by armed foreign cruisers within the three-mile limit.

The British frigate Guerrière had made itself particularly offensive by its search crews and arbitrary seizures of alleged deserters. On May 16, 1811, Commodore Rodgers's flagship, the frigate President carrying forty-four guns, sighted a British sloop-of-war some fifty miles east of Cape Henry, which he believed to be the Guerrière, and wishing to make inquiries about a certain seaman who was reported to have been impressed, Rodgers sailed toward the stranger. The vessel acted in a manner which was thought suspicious, so the President gave chase. On coming within range about dusk, the American frigate was fired upon, so it was alleged in a subsequent court of inquiry. The President then opened its batteries and in less than fifteen minutes had overpowered the British corvette. To his surprise and disappointment, Rodgers then learned that his antagonist was not the Guerrière, but the Little Belt, a vessel far inferior to his own and carrying only twenty guns. When the new British Minister arrived in Washington, he found the Administration singularly indifferent to the historic Chesapeake affair. In the opinion of the American public, the President had avenged the Chesapeake.

While Congress was vacillating between non-intercourse and partial non-intercourse, in the early months of 1810, with a strong inclination toward the path of least resistance, one voice was raised for war. Henry Clay was then filling out an unexpired term in the Senate upon appointment by the Governor of Kentucky. Born in Virginia, thirty-three years before, he had sought his fortune as a young lawyer in the new communities beyond the Alleghanies. Closely identified with the aggressive spirit of his section, he voiced a growing sense of humiliation that his country should be buffeted by every British ministry. The people of Kentucky and Tennessee had little patience with half measures in defense of national rights. The petty diplomacy of closet statesmen did not appeal to the soul of the frontiersman who was accustomed to hew his way to his goal. The people of this section, imperial in its dimensions, were prepared for large tasks done in a bold way. Their ideas of the Union transcended the policies of Eastern statesmen, whose eyes saw no farther than the tops of the Alleghanies and whose ears listened all too readily to the admonitions of European chancellors. Clay spoke heatedly of the "ignominious surrender of our rights"—heritage of the heroes of the Revolution. He would have Congress exhibit the vigor of their forbears. "The conquest of Canada is in your power," he cried. "I trust I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state that I verily believe that the militia of Kentucky alone are competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet." This was a new and unfamiliar style of oratory in the Senate of the United States.

At this moment, however, the United States seemed far more likely to acquire the Floridas than Canada. In the summer of 1810, Americans who had crossed the border and settled in and around the district of West Feliciana rose in revolt against the Spanish governor at Baton Rouge, and declared West Florida a free and independent state, appealing to the Supreme Ruler of the world for the rectitude of their intentions. What their intentions were appeared in a petition to the President for annexation to the United States. This was an opportune moment for the realization of the hopes which Madison had cherished ever since the acquisition of Louisiana. On October 27, 1810, he issued a proclamation, announcing that Governor Claiborne would take possession of West Florida to the river Perdido, in the name of the United States.

Not satisfied with this achievement, President Madison called attention in a secret message to the condition of East Florida and asked Congress for authority to take temporary possession of any part or parts of the territory. With equal secrecy Congress gave the desired authorization, and the President immediately sent two commissioners with large discretionary powers to the St. Mary's River. In March, 1812, another "revolution" took place. The Spanish governor of East Florida was forced to surrender and to permit the occupation of Amelia Island in the name of the United States. The farce was too broad, however, even for the eager Administration. The President was obliged to disavow the acts of his agents. But Amelia Island was not evacuated until May, 1813, and West Florida was never released. After much deliberation Congress annexed part of the region to the new State of Louisiana and joined the rest to the Territory of Mississippi.

In the Northwest also American pioneers were overrunning the bounds, not those fixed by international agreement, to be sure, but those marked by Indian treaties, which commanded even less respect. A society which believed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian was not likely to be over-nice in its appraisal of his property rights. The line of intercourse marked by the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 had receded somewhat as home-seekers had pushed their way up the rivers from the Ohio into the Indiana Territory; but the vast interior around the upper waters of the Wabash River was still closed to white men. Governor William Henry Harrison fully shared the irritation of the settlers that Indians should monopolize the best lands. He was therefore a willing agent of the President when in 1804 and 1805 he took advantage of the necessities of certain chieftains, whom he called "the most depraved wretches on earth," to despoil whole tribes of their lands, under the guise of treaties.

Among the better class of Indians this policy aroused the bitterest resentment. The rise of Tecumseh, son of a Shawnee warrior, and of his brother the Prophet, dates from this time. It was the aim of these remarkable individuals to prevent the further alienation of Indian lands by limiting the authority of irresponsible local chiefs and conferring it upon a congress of warriors from all allied tribes. During the year 1808, Tecumseh and the Prophet laid the foundation of a confederacy by establishing an Indian village on Tippecanoe Creek, one hundred and fifty miles above Vincennes.

In the following year (1809), Governor Harrison anticipated the formation of this Indian confederation by beginning negotiations with the same irresponsible sachems for the cession of more lands. The treaty, which was readily concluded, carried despair to the heart of every follower of Tecumseh, for it conveyed to the National Government three millions of acres of the best lands in the Indian country, extending along both banks of the Wabash for a hundred miles. An alliance with the British seemed to be the only recourse of the Indians. Only a spark was needed to start a conflagration along the whole frontier.

Although war was believed to be imminent by the people of Indiana, the winter and summer of 1811 passed without untoward events. Toward the end of October, Harrison began a forward movement into the Indian country. On the morning of November 7, his camp on the banks of the Tippecanoe was attacked. A sharp engagement followed, in which the army narrowly escaped disaster; but the troops rallied and finally succeeded in routing the Indians. In the abandoned village of the Prophet were found English arms—confirmatory evidence, it was said, of the part which the British in Canada had taken in the projects of Tecumseh and the Prophet. Occurring at a moment of tension between the United States and Great Britain, the battle of Tippecanoe may be regarded properly as "a premature outbreak of the great wars of 1812." An unforeseen consequence of this skirmish on the frontier was the rise of a new popular hero in the West.

Nationally minded men indulged high hopes of the new Congress which convened at the capital in November, 1811. The presence of some seventy new members, many of whom belonged to a younger generation, warranted the expectation that the Twelfth Congress would exhibit greater vigor than its predecessor. In organizing, the House passed over Macon, who belonged to the old school of statesmen, and chose as Speaker Henry Clay, who had exchanged his seat in the Senate for this more stirring arena. Clay's conception of the Speakership was novel. He was determined to be something more than a mere presiding officer. As a leader of his party he proposed to use his powers of office to shape legislation. His heart was set upon an aggressive policy. War had no terrors for him. He therefore named his committees with the possibility of war in mind.

There were many young men who shared Clay's impatience with the policy of peaceable coercion and its humiliating sequel. Grundy, of Tennessee, had been elected because he openly favored war. He admitted that he was "anxious not only to add the Floridas to the south, but the Canadas to the north of this Empire." John C. Calhoun, a new member from South Carolina, openly repudiated the restrictive system of the President as a mode of resistance suited neither to the genius of the people nor to the geographical character of the country. "We have had a peace like a war," he cried; "in the name of Heaven let us not have the only thing that is worse—a war like a peace!" Clay left the chair frequently to stir the House by his glowing eloquence. Whatever else might be said about these young stalwarts, no one could doubt their ardent nationalism and devotion to the Union. Even the President was moved to allude gently in his annual message to the duty of assuming "an attitude demanded by the crisis and corresponding with the national spirit and expectations."

The response of Congress was exasperatingly slow. It was January before a bill to increase the standing army by twenty-five thousand men became law. Another month passed before Congress would agree to a bill authorizing the President to raise a volunteer force of fifty thousand men. No arguments would move the House to vote an appropriation of seven and a half million dollars for a navy of twenty frigates and twelve ships-of-the-line. Even more discouraging was the reluctance of Congress to anticipate the financial drain of war by levying the internal revenue taxes which Gallatin strongly recommended, now that Congress had suffered the charter of the National Bank to expire. Without that important instrument of credit, he saw no alternative but to revive the excise which was so hateful to Republicans. In the end Congress authorized a loan of eleven million dollars, but no additional taxes.

From the first the war party had fixed upon Great Britain as the object of attack. In the sober light of history, France appears to be quite as much an enemy to American commerce. But so long as the Administration maintained that Napoleon had withdrawn his decrees, and that England had not, consistency required that Great Britain should be regarded as the greater offender. Reparation had been made for the Chesapeake affair, to be sure, but no guaranties had been given that the rights of neutral vessels would be respected on the high seas. Besides, the group of young Republicans led by Clay and Grundy had looked forward to the conquest of Canada on the north and of Florida on the south as the result of war. Madison was too keen a politician not to know that he could not afford to alienate this group if he wished a second term in office. On April 1, he recommended an embargo for sixty days, and two months later, on June 1, he sent his famous war message to Congress.

In reciting the grievances of the United States, the President thrust into the foreground "the continued practice of violating the American flag on the great highway of nations, and of seizing and carrying off persons sailing under it." No one could deny that these were real grievances, but they had not been pressed in recent negotiations as a possible cause of war. A second grievance was the blockade of American ports by British cruisers. "They hover over and harass our entering and departing commerce," said the President. "To the most insulting pretentions they have added the most lawless proceedings in our very harbors; and have wantonly spilt American blood within the sanctuary of our territorial jurisdiction." This grievance was also real, but not of recent date. When the President alluded to "pretended blockades" under which "our commerce has been plundered in every sea," he touched upon outrages which were still fresh in the minds of all. "Not content with these occasional expedients for laying waste our neutral trade," continued the message, "the Cabinet of Great Britain resorted, at length, to the sweeping system of blockades, under the name of Orders in Council." Finally, the President did not refrain from the plain intimation that the Indian hostilities on the frontier were due to the influence of British traders and British garrisons.

Three days later the House of Representatives passed a bill declaring war by a vote of 79 to 49. The opposition came largely from the Northeast. The representatives from Connecticut and Rhode Island were to a man against war, and they were supported by Federalists from Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. In the Senate the vote stood 19 for war and 13 against it. "Except Pennsylvania, the entire representation of no Northern State declared itself for the war; except Kentucky, every State south of the Potomac and Ohio voted for the declaration."

While Congress was debating the alternatives of peace or war, the British Government took a step which under modern conditions would have averted hostilities. Taking advantage of a decree of Napoleon dating from 1810, which declared his edicts revoked so far as American vessels were concerned, the Ministry announced on June 23 that the British orders would be withdrawn. But just five days earlier, President Madison had proclaimed a state of war between the United States and Great Britain.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A brief account of the events which formed the prelude to the War of 1812 may be found in K. C. Babcock, The Rise of American Nationality (in The American Nation, vol. 13, 1906). The diplomatic and military antecedents of the war are set forth at greater length in A. T. Mahan, Sea Power in its Relation to the War of 1812 (2 vols., 1905). Biographies contribute much that is of interest. Carl Schurz, Henry Clay (2 vols., 1887), is one of the best. J. T. Morse, John Quincy Adams (1882), and Edmund Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts (1867), also contain interesting information. M. P. Follett, The Speaker of the House of Representatives (1896); Edward Stanwood, History of the Presidency (1898); and M. L. Hinsdale, History of the President's Cabinet (1911), touch upon important aspects of politics. The volume entitled Memoirs and Letters of Dolly Madison (1886) gives many charming glimpses of social life at the capital. The discomforts and hazards of travel in the West are described with great vivacity by Margaret Van Horn, A Journey to Ohio in 1810 (1912).

CHAPTER XII

THE WAR OF 1812

When hostilities began in North America, the war establishment of the United States stood officially at 36,700 men. Actually the army consisted of ten regiments with ranks half filled, scattered in garrisons from Mackinac to Lake Champlain,—a force of less than 10,000 men, of whom 4000 were raw recruits. The staff was made up of old and incompetent officers; and from a military point of view the new appointments left much to be desired. The navy which was to contest the supremacy of the seas with the victor at Trafalgar consisted of twelve sea-going vessels and some two hundred gunboats, which were useless except for coast defense. There was bitter truth in the manifesto issued by the Federalist members of Congress when it said: "Our enemy is the greatest maritime power that has ever been on earth, and to her we offer the most tempting prizes. Our merchantmen are on every sea. Our rich cities lie along the Atlantic seaboard close to the water's edge. And to defend these from the cruisers of Great Britain we are to have an army of raw recruits yet to be raised and a navy of gunboats now stranded on the beaches and frigates that have long been rotting in the slime of the Potomac."

The worst aspect of the war was its sectional character. New England was in opposition. From the outset the activity of the National Administration was weakened by the indubitable fact that the United States, as the Federalists were never tired of repeating, began the war "as a divided people." When General Dearborn made requisition upon the governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut for militia to defend the coast, Governor Strong ignored the summons. Pressed for a reply, he finally stated to the Secretary of War that the judges of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts had advised him that the commanders-in-chief of the militia in the several States, rather than the President, had the right to determine whether any of the exigencies contemplated by the Constitution existed so as to require them to place the militia in the service of the United States. The judges also advised the governor that the militia, when in the service of the United States, could not lawfully be commanded by any federal officers below the President, but only by state officers. The general assembly of Connecticut sustained Governor Griswold in a similar attitude toward the federal authorities, holding that the war was an offensive war to which the provisions of the Constitution respecting the militia did not apply.

From the first the war-hawks had cried, "On to Canada," for their hope of conquest was undisguised. "Agrarian cupidity," declared Randolph, "not maritime right, urges the war. Ever since the report of the Committee on Foreign Relations came into the House, we have heard but one word,—like the whippoorwill, but one eternal monotonous tone,—Canada, Canada, Canada!" Military considerations, however, probably determined the campaign of 1812,—so far, indeed, as any well-considered plans were worked out. A general advance was to be made along the route by Lake Champlain to Montreal. Three expeditions were also to be sent against Sackett's Harbor, Niagara, and Malden. All were strategic points on the Lakes; but Malden was particularly important as the center of British influence among the Indians of the Northwest.

The expedition against Malden, which was entrusted to General William Hull, not only failed to accomplish its purpose, but terminated in the most humiliating reverse of the war. For reasons that have never been adequately explained, Hull laid siege to Malden instead of attacking it at once with his superior force; and when British reënforcements appeared, he not only abandoned the siege, but on August 15, surrendered Fort Detroit without firing a shot. The army, the fort, and the undisputed control of the Michigan country passed into the hands of the British. On the same day occurred the surrender of Fort Dearborn and the massacre of its garrison by the Indians.

The other military operations on the northern frontier were scarcely less inglorious. The failure of the attack upon Queenston, October 13, was due largely to the incompetence of the commanding general. Nowhere did the American troops pierce the Niagara or Lake Champlain frontier. The Duke of Wellington was well within the truth when he declared the American campaign of 1812 "beneath criticism."

The smart of these humiliating failures was only relieved by the series of stirring naval victories which began with the duel between the Constitution and the Guerrière. The frigates met on August 19, some three hundred miles off Cape Race. "In less than thirty minutes from the time we got alongside of the enemy," reported Captain Hull of the Constitution, "she was left without a spar standing, and the hull cut to pieces in such a manner as to make it difficult to keep her above water." The effect of this victory was electric. When the Constitution reached Boston Harbor, even Federalists broke into exultation. The cry in every New England home was, "Thank God for Hull's victory!" Nothing could have been better timed and more dramatic. The papers which announced the humiliating surrender of General Hull contained the news of his nephew's victory.

If the victory of the Constitution was won on unequal terms,—the Guerrière was undoubtedly inferior,—the British Admiralty could not excuse a second naval defeat on this score. On October 17, the American sloop-of-war Wasp encountered the brig Frolic convoying merchantmen six hundred miles east of Norfolk. There was little to choose between the vessels either in size or equipment, yet the marksmanship of the American gunners was so far superior that in forty-three minutes the crew of the Wasp had boarded the Frolic. Not even the subsequent capture of both vessels by a British ship-of-the-line could dim the glory of this victory. A week later the frigate United States under Captain Decatur captured the Macedonia and brought her into New London—"the only British frigate ever brought as a prize into an American port." In December the Constitution, now commanded by Captain Bainbridge, added to her laurels by overpowering the powerful frigate Java.

The effect of these disasters upon the British public was out of all proportion to the actual value of the vessels lost. Canning afterward declared that the loss of the Guerrière and the Macedonia produced a sensation scarcely to be equaled by the most violent convulsion of nature. "The sacred spell of the invincibility of the British navy was broken by those unfortunate captures."

In the midst of the war occurred a presidential election. Madison had been the unanimous choice of the congressional caucus held in May; but only eighty-three out of one hundred and thirty-three Republicans had attended, and the discontent of New York Republicans was well known. The nomination of De Witt Clinton by the New York legislative caucus opened wide the breach in the party. In September a convention of Federalists repeated the error of 1804 and indorsed Clinton's nomination, naming as his partner Jared Ingersoll, of Pennsylvania. Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, was finally nominated for Vice-President by the Republicans. The alternatives presented to the people seemed to be Madison and continued war ineffectively conducted, or Clinton and still more humiliating peace. New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and all the New England States but Vermont, preferred Clinton. The South and West supported Madison; but without the vote of Pennsylvania Madison would have been defeated.

To retrieve Hull's disaster, General William Henry Harrison, the hero of Tippecanoe, was placed in command of the Western army in the fall of 1812; but a succession of mishaps overtook his expedition into the Northwest. He not only failed to reach Detroit, but lost most of his available troops by disease, desertion, and the onset of British detachments from Fort Malden.

It was now clear that the control of the Lakes was indispensable for a successful invasion of Canada. At the close of the year 1812, there was not a war-vessel flying the American flag on Lake Erie. To create a fleet was the task set for Oliver Hazard Perry, a young naval officer, who was sent from Newport to Presqu' Isle. Of the needful supplies only timber was abundant; the rest had to be brought overland from Philadelphia by way of Pittsburg. Surmounting all obstacles, nevertheless, the energetic Perry finally got together a flotilla of vessels which was quite equal to the British squadron. The two fleets met in battle off Sandusky on September 10, 1813. The American boat Lawrence, Perry's flagship, was obliged to strike her colors, but Perry boarded another vessel of his fleet and succeeded in turning defeat into a brilliant victory. "We have met the enemy and they are ours," was his triumphant dispatch to General Harrison.

The way was now open to the invasion of Canada. Under the protection of Perry's fleet, Harrison was able to transport his army to the Canadian shore below Fort Malden. The British troops were already in full retreat. On October 5, 1813, the American army overtook them and in a short but decisive battle on the river Thames revenged the loss of Detroit. Among the dead on the British side was found the body of Tecumseh. In point of numbers, the battle of the Thames is insignificant; but it has an important place in the annals of the war because it destroyed the British military power in the Northwest and recovered control of the Michigan Territory.

No such success attended the movement of American troops on the Niagara and St. Lawrence frontier. The control of Lake Ontario was in doubt throughout the year 1813. The military operations, first under Dearborn, and then under Wilkinson and Hampton, were indecisive. Indeed, the events of the year served only one good purpose: they revealed the incompetence of the older generals and the ability of the younger officers.

The loss of the Chesapeake in a duel with the Shannon, on June 1, 1813, outside of Boston Harbor, left the United States with an available sea-going navy of just two frigates and a few small sloops. All the other frigates were shut up in various ports by the British blockade, which extended from Cape Cod to Florida. The burden of offense during the rest of the war fell upon privateers. During the war more than five hundred fitted out in American ports. In the year 1813 they took over three hundred prizes, while the frigates took but seventy-nine. While British cruisers were blockading the coast of the United States, these craft, with their beautiful lines and wonderful spread of canvas, carried consternation to all British shippers in the English Channel and in the Irish Sea. They "seize prizes in sight of those that should afford protection," complained the London Times, "and if pursued put on their sea-wings and laugh at the clumsy English pursuers." No exploits of the regular navy contributed so much to dispose the British governing class to peace as the depredations of these privateers.

In the remote Southwest, the war assumed a different character. There the enemy on the border was not Great Britain but Spain. The people of the Carolinas and Georgia fully expected to acquire the Floridas while the North was wresting Canada from British control. Had President Madison been given his way, this wish would have been gratified; but Congress refused to countenance the seizure of East Florida, and in May, 1813, Madison very reluctantly ordered the troops to evacuate Amelia Island. No scruples deterred Congress from authorizing the occupation of West Florida. In the spring of 1813, General Wilkinson forced the surrender of the only Spanish fort on Mobile Bay and took possession of the country as far as the Perdido—"the only permanent gain of territory made during the war."

During the first year of the war the younger warriors of the Western Creeks, in what is now Alabama, had been incited to hostilities by Tecumseh, and in the following spring began depredations which culminated in the capture of Fort Mims and the massacre of its inhabitants on August 30, 1813. The horrors of an Indian war brought every able-bodied settler in the adjoining States to arms. Before the end of the year seven thousand whites had invaded the Indian territory and had killed about one fifth of the Creek warriors. The hero of the war was General Andrew Jackson, who at the head of an army of Tennessee militiamen won a decisive battle at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River. On August 9, 1814, he forced the chieftains who had not fled across the Florida border to sign a treaty of capitulation at Fort Jackson and to cede nearly two thirds of their lands in southern Georgia and in what afterward became central Alabama. This phase of the war opened up a vast territory to settlement and made the military reputation of Andrew Jackson.

Operations on the Niagara frontier were resumed by the American troops in 1814; but they were now directed by one of the new major-generals, Jacob Brown, who infused a new spirit into his soldiers. On July 5, General Winfield Scott's brigade won a signal victory at Chippewa. Three weeks later, on July 25, the entire army fought a desperate battle at Lundy's Lane, which lasted from sunset to midnight. The Americans claimed a victory, but the losses were about even and the British remained in possession of the field. At the close of the year, despite the valiant fighting of Brown's army, the situation on the Niagara had not changed materially. The invasion of Canada and a peace dictated from Quebec seemed as remote as ever.

The British plans for the campaign of 1814 called for "a diversion on the coasts of the United States, in favor of the army employed in the defense of Upper and Lower Canada." For the first time since the opening of hostilities, British military authorities could concentrate their attention on the war in North America. The defeat of Napoleon on the plains of Leipzig had thrown his shattered columns back upon France. Thither the allied armies had followed him and forced his capitulation. With the end of European wars in sight, Wellington could release his veteran troops for service in America. In early summer eleven thousand seasoned troops were sent to Canada. Four thousand more were dispatched under Major-General Ross, of the Peninsular army, to coöperate with the navy under Admiral Cochrane on the shores of Chesapeake Bay. Later in the year Major-General Pakenham, also a veteran of the Peninsular campaign, was sent with ten thousand troops to seize the mouth of the Mississippi and to force the capitulation of the West by closing the ports on the Gulf.

Those whose memories went back thirty-seven years may well have recalled Burgoyne's expedition, for it was by the old Lake Champlain route that Sir George Prevost began his invasion of New York in September, 1814. His objective was Plattsburg, where an American army of not more than two thousand men was stationed. Accompanying his army, to insure its line of communication with Canada, was a fleet consisting of a frigate, a brig, and a dozen smaller vessels. To this fleet, Captain Thomas Macdonough could oppose only a corvette and a dozen small craft. The fleets met in a battle for the control of the lake on September 11. The resourcefulness of the young American officer saved the day. By winding his corvette, the Saratoga, about, so as to bring her unused guns to bear just when the fight seemed lost, he forced the formidable Confiance to strike her colors. The surrender of the smaller British boats followed. The battle of Plattsburg was decisive of the invasion. Fearing greater disasters if he pressed on without the control of the waterway at his rear, Prevost at once ordered a retreat.

The expedition directed toward Chesapeake Bay was well under way before Prevost's ill-starred invasion began. On August 19, General Ross landed his forces on the banks of Patuxent River, within striking distance of Washington. Marching leisurely across country toward the capital, the British finally met at Bladensburg a motley array of some seven thousand Americans, hastily summoned from the countryside. What followed is not easily described. Some show of resistance was made by the marines from the American gunboats in the Patuxent; but for the most part the Americans were seized with a panic and fled in wild disorder. The President and his Cabinet took to the Virginia woods, leaving the enemy to wreak their vengeance on the government buildings. Having fired the Capitol, the White House, and other edifices, the British forces returned to their fleet and reëmbarked. The historian can take no pleasure in dwelling upon details which are discreditable to all concerned; for if the British committed acts of vandalism, the Americans had provoked retaliation when they burned the parliament houses at York in the campaign of 1813.

An attack upon Baltimore which might have resulted in further outrages was frustrated by the measures of defense which the government of the city had already wisely undertaken. After a skirmish in which General Ross was killed, and an ineffective bombardment of the harbor defenses, the British withdrew.

A visitor to the national capital after its capture described the President as "miserably shattered and woe-begone," and heart-broken at the defection of New England. To prosecute the war, money and men were needed; but both were wanting. The Administration hoped, but hoped in vain, that the victories at Chippewa, Lundy's Lane, and Plattsburg would stimulate enlistments; but recruits were not likely to be lured by promises which every one knew the Government could not redeem. It became clearer every day that unless Congress was disposed to adopt Monroe's plan of conscription, the National Government would have to put its dependence upon state armies. In September, after Castine and the eastern part of Maine to the Penobscot had been occupied by the British, Governor Strong consented to call out the militia of Massachusetts, but he was careful to place the troops under the command of state officers. At the same time he made inquiry of the Secretary of War whether the expenses of the militia would be assumed by the National Government. Monroe replied rather sharply that so long as Massachusetts refused to put her troops under the command of national officers, she need not expect the United States to maintain them. The Governor of Connecticut had already withdrawn the militia of that State from national service. At the moment when Prevost was beginning his invasion, the Governor of Vermont declined to call out the state militia because he doubted his authority to order the militia out of the State. The Union seemed on the point of disintegrating into its original elements.

The anxieties of the Administration were further increased by the action of the Massachusetts General Court, which called a convention of those States "the affinity of whose interests is closest," with the avowed purpose of devising some mode of common defense and of securing a convention of delegates from all the States to revise the National Constitution. In spite of vigorous opposition, delegates were chosen, to meet on December 15 with "such as may be chosen by any or all of the other New England States." The legislatures of Connecticut and Rhode Island responded promptly; but the legislature of Vermont unanimously declined the invitation, and New Hampshire failed to reply. The movement seemed all the more ominous after the fall elections, which resulted in the choice of thirty-nine Federalist Congressmen from New England and of only two Republicans. In the preceding Congress there had been thirty Federalists and eleven Republicans.

That members of the Essex Junto would gladly have seized this opportunity to remake the Federal Union by excluding the Western States appears clearly enough in the correspondence of men like Timothy Pickering. A new Union of the "good old thirteen States" on terms set by New England was believed to be well within the bounds of possibility. Radical newspapers referred with enthusiasm to the erection of a new federal edifice. Little wonder that the harassed President was obsessed with the idea that New England was on the verge of secession.

From the first, however, this movement in New England was kept well in hand by men like Harrison Gray Otis, who always insisted that the object of a convention was to defend New England against the common enemy and to prevent radical action under the stress of popular excitement. If this be true, it was unfortunate, to say the least, that these patriots chose just this moment, when the Federal Government was about to succumb to the common enemy, to propose alterations in the Constitution; and it was equally unfortunate for the reputations of all concerned that they should have held their deliberations in secret, giving an air of conspiracy to their proceedings. The official journal of the Convention at Hartford was not published until 1823. When the Convention adjourned on January 5, 1815, all that the general public was permitted to know of its deliberations was contained in its famous report.

The Convention was at no little pains to reassure a waiting world that it did not contemplate or countenance secession. It was not yet ready to concede that the defects in the Constitution were incurable nor that multiplied abuses justified a severance of the Union, "especially in a time of war." "If the Union be destined to dissolution, ... it should, if possible, be the work of peaceable times, and deliberate consent." But these philosophical considerations did not deter the author of the report from a vicious and partisan attack upon "the multiplied abuses of bad administrations."

President Madison must have read this document with mingled feelings, for the Convention held, almost in the words of his Resolutions of 1798, that the infractions of the Constitution were so "deliberate, dangerous, and palpable" as to put the liberties of the people in jeopardy and to make it the duty of a State "to interpose its authority for their protection." The legislatures of the several States were recommended to adopt measures for protecting their citizens against all unconstitutional acts of Congress which should subject the militia or other citizens to forcible drafts, conscriptions, or impressments. They were also urged to apply to the Federal Government for consent to some arrangement whereby the States, separately or in concert, could undertake their own defense and retain a reasonable proportion of the national taxes for the purpose. Finally, seven amendments to the Constitution were proposed, to prevent a recurrence of the grievances from which the New England States suffered. Four of these proposed amendments put limitations upon Congress: a two-thirds vote of both houses was to be required to admit a new State, to interdict commerce, to lay an embargo, and to declare war. In future, representation and direct taxes were to be apportioned according to the respective numbers of free persons. Naturalized citizens were to be excluded from all federal civil offices; and finally—a blow at the Virginia dynasty—"the same person shall not be elected President of the United States a second time; nor shall the President be elected from the same State two terms in succession."

The General Court of Massachusetts acted promptly. Three commissioners were dispatched at once to Washington, to work out an amicable arrangement for the defense of the State. On February 3, 1815, the "three ambassadors," as they styled themselves, set out for the capital. Ten days later, en route, they learned that General Andrew Jackson had decisively repulsed an attack of the British upon New Orleans on January 8. On reaching Washington the commissioners were met with the news that a treaty of peace had been signed at Ghent. Their cause had met with the most unlucky fate which can befall any cause in the United States: it had become ridiculous. The tension of war-times relaxed in a roar of laughter at their expense.

Early in the year 1813, Russia had endeavored to mediate between her ally and the United States. President Madison had at once, and as it appeared somewhat precipitately, sent Albert Gallatin and James A. Bayard as peace commissioners to St. Petersburg; but Great Britain declined the Czar's good offices. The American envoys, however, remained in Europe. When, then, in October, the British Ministry intimated that it was prepared to begin direct negotiations, President Madison created a new commission by sending John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and Jonathan Russell to join Gallatin and Bayard. In the last week in June, the commissioners repaired to Ghent, which had been chosen as the place of meeting. Thither the British negotiators followed them in leisurely fashion. The first joint conference was not held until August 8, 1814.

The task of the American commissioners was one of very great difficulty. Confronted by the unexpected demand that the revision of the Canadian boundary, the fisheries, and the establishment of an Indian state in the Northwest should be included in the pourparler, they could only reply that they had been instructed to discuss only matters of maritime law—impressments, blockades, and neutral rights. There seemed so little likelihood of agreement that the American commissioners prepared to leave Ghent. But the British Ministry abated its extreme demands and continued the negotiations. At the same time new instructions from Washington advised the American representatives that they might drop the subject of impressments if they found it an insuperable obstacle in the way of peace.

The insistence of the British agents upon the principle of uti possidetis—the state of possession at the close of the war—again threatened to break off negotiations, for the Americans resolutely insisted on the status quo ante bellum, a restoration of all places taken during the war. It was at this juncture that tidings arrived of the British repulse at Plattsburg. For a week the British Ministry debated the feasibility of renewing the war; but the complications at the Congress of Vienna, the "prodigious expense" of continued war, the change in public opinion, and the emphatic conviction of Wellington that the Ministry had "no right from the state of the war to demand any cession of territory"—these and many lesser considerations disposed the Cabinet to ask the American envoys to prepare a draft of a treaty.

Strong differences of opinion developed among the Americans when they set to work upon their preliminary draft. As the representative of Western interests, Clay set himself obstinately against any further recognition of the British right—secured by the treaty of 1783—of free navigation of the Mississippi. Adams was equally determined not to sacrifice the correlative right to the Labrador and Newfoundland fisheries, which his father had secured in the Treaty of Paris. Gallatin, the peacemaker, was in favor of offering to renew both privileges; and he finally succeeded in winning Clay's reluctant assent to this plan. But when the British commissioners objected, both sides agreed to omit all reference to these vexing questions.

The treaty which was signed on December 24, 1814, is remarkable for its omissions. The reader will scan it in vain for any allusion to impressments, blockades, and neutral rights. It is equally silent as to the control of the Lakes, Indian territories, the fisheries, and the navigation of the Mississippi. It was "simply a cessation of hostilities, leaving every claim on either side open for future settlement." Clay probably reflected the disappointment of Republicans when he pronounced it "a damned bad treaty." Nevertheless, it brought what was most desired by the exhausted Administration—peace. Moreover, the treaty must be viewed in the light of events in Europe. The overthrow of the Napoleonic Empire and the exile of Bonaparte gave promise of a return to normal conditions so far as maritime rights were concerned. The victories of American seamen in the war were after all better guaranties of neutral rights than any declarations on parchment.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Besides the larger histories, which contain abundant information about the war, mention should be made of B. J. Lossing's Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (1868), written by one who visited most of the battlefields of the war. A well-balanced account of the military operations is contained in K. C. Babcock's The Rise of American Nationality (in The American Nation, vol. XIII, 1906). Theodore Roosevelt, The Naval War of 1812 (various editions); E. S. Maclay, History of the United States Navy from 1775 to 1901 (3 vols., 1901-02), and History of American Privateers (1899); J. R. Spears, History of Our Navy (4 vols., 1897); and C. O. Paullin, Commodore John Rodgers (1910), give the history of the maritime war. The most comprehensive study of the naval operations of the war is the work by Admiral Mahan already cited. The part of Jackson in the war is set forth in many biographies. The most picturesque is James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson (3 vols., 1860); the most recent is J. S. Bassett, Life of Andrew Jackson (2 vols., 1911). S. E. Morison, Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis (2 vols., 1913), gives a fresh account of the disaffection in New England and of the Hartford Convention. The peace negotiations at Ghent are set forth circumstantially by Henry Adams in his History of the United States (9 vols., 1889-91).

CHAPTER XIII

THE RESULTS OF THE WAR

In a message to Congress transmitting the treaty of peace, President Madison congratulated the country on the termination of a war "waged with a success which is the natural result of the wisdom of the legislative councils, of the patriotism of the people, of the public spirit of the militia, and of the valor of the military and naval forces of the country." The verdict of history does not sustain this pæan of victory. "The record, upon the whole," declares Admiral Mahan, "is one of gloom, disaster, and governmental incompetence, resulting from lack of national preparation, due to the obstinate and blind prepossessions of the Government, and, in part, of the people." Public opinion indorsed the President's estimate of the late struggle.

As a matter of fact, the people of the United States had seen little of the disasters and ravages of war. All the important battles took place on the borders. The great mass of the people were undisturbed in their vocations. There was hardly a day during the war when a farmer could not till his acres in tranquillity. Not an important city save Washington was taken during the war. Nor was the loss of life large in proportion to population. All told, the killed and wounded did not exceed five thousand men. Napoleon lost nearly two hundred thousand French soldiers in his disastrous Russian campaign.

American character appeared at its best and at its worst in these three years of war. Even the British press could not gainsay the resourcefulness and intelligence of the American soldier and sailor, though the phrase "Yankee smartness" conveyed also the unpleasant imputation of trickiness and moral laxity. Wherever conditions permitted a fair test, the superiority of the American gunner was incontestable. The greater losses of the British whenever the armies met on even terms proved the superior marksmanship of the American militiaman. The adaptation of the fast-sailing schooner to privateering was further evidence of an alert intellect which was quick to adapt means to ends. This quality, to be sure, has been bred in every frontier folk by the very necessities of existence, but it appeared in marked strength in the American of this time. While the shipbuilders of New England were laying the keels of these privateers, Robert Fulton was perfecting his steamboat on the Delaware and Hudson rivers. In the year before the war, the first steamboat appeared on the Ohio, and before the end of the war fourteen were plying on Western waters, and opening up a new era in the American colonization of the continent.

This instinctive adaptation of means to ends was less successful in the realm of American politics. No celerity could compensate for want of prevision on the part of the authorities at Washington. The lesson of the war was not lost upon James Madison, at least. "Experience has taught us," said he in a message to Congress,—and the words amounted to a confession of error,—"that neither the pacific dispositions of the American people nor the pacific character of their political institutions, can altogether exempt them from that strife which appears, beyond the ordinary lot of nations, to be incident to the actual period of the world; and the same faithful monitor demonstrates that a certain degree of preparation for war is not only indispensable to avert disaster in the onset, but affords also the best security for the continuance of peace."

The indirect effects of war were more widely felt. The blockade affected adversely all the extractive industries upon which the vast majority of the people in all the States depended. Only New England escaped unscathed—and the circumstance was not creditable to the section. In the latter months of 1814 ruin stared the Southern planter in the face. The lifting of the blockade wrought a transformation. Planters in the Old Dominion, who could find no market for their tobacco and wheat on February 13, sold their produce on February 14 at prices which made them rich again. Flour which had found almost no purchasers at seven and a half dollars a barrel sold readily at ten. Imported commodities fell in price correspondingly. Ships put to sea at once laden with the accumulated produce of two long years. The export trade, which had fallen to less than $7,000,000, leaped to $46,000,000 between March and October. Fully two thirds of this wealth accrued to the Southern planters who raised the three great staples, tobacco, cotton, and rice. The people of the Middle States shared only moderately in this prosperity. The value of the wheat and corn which the farmers of Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey raised for export did not much exceed that of tobacco alone.

The return of peace brought relief also to the shipping industry of New England. Vessels which the embargo and the restrictive policy and the hazards of war had kept in port now put to sea again. But the European conditions which had created such immense profits for the Yankee skipper in 1805, 1806, and 1807 had passed away. Foreign ships now bid for the carrying trade of the Atlantic, and their competition cut down freight rates to a point which caused melancholy forebodings in the homes of Boston and Salem shipowners.

The long period of commercial restriction followed by three years of war caused a dislocation of industry in New England. Capital which had been invested in shipping now sought larger returns in the manufacture of those commodities hitherto supplied by British factories. When the embargo was laid, only fifteen cotton mills were in operation, representing a capital of about $500,000. Two years later, capital to the amount of $4,000,000 had been invested in factories which employed nearly 4000 hands. At the close of the war, $40,000,000 were invested in cotton mills which consumed 27,000,000 pounds of raw cotton and gave employment to 100,000 men and women. Hitherto much of the weaving had been done on hand looms in the farmhouses of New England: only the spinning had been done by machinery. In 1814, Francis Lowell introduced the power loom into his mill at Waltham, Massachusetts, and brought the various processes of cotton manufacturing under one roof. The foundation of the New England factory system was thus laid before the end of the war. In the following decade the famous factory towns on the Merrimac came into existence. The metamorphosis of the section had begun.

The woolen industry received a great impetus in this same period of artificial stimulation, but it failed to expand with the same rapidity, owing to the scarcity and cost of the finer grades of wool. Nevertheless, in the year 1816, about $12,000,000 were invested in the manufacture of woolen fabrics. Like the cotton industry, this owed its development to the policy of Presidents from Virginia. It is one of the ironies of history that Jefferson and Madison should have unwittingly sacrificed Southern planters to build up industries in the North, and that New Englanders should have excoriated those worthies for policies which became the source of New England prosperity.

To these new industries peace spelled disaster. English manufacturers seized the opportunity to unload the goods which they had been piling up in their warehouses for years. Importations which had amounted to $13,000,000 in 1813 rose to the staggering sum of $147,000,000 in 1816. Not even import duties stemmed the tide, for as Lord Brougham stated in Parliament, "It was well worth while to incur a loss upon the first exportation, in order, by a glut, to stifle in the cradle those rising manufactures in the United States which the war had forced into existence, contrary to the natural course of things."

In October, 1815, the cotton manufacturers of Rhode Island sent a memorial to Congress, stating that their one hundred and forty factories were threatened with destruction by this cut-throat competition. Such complaints seemed unduly apprehensive; yet before the year closed, most of the textile mills had shut down. The distress of New England was no longer feigned. Caught in a process of transition from shipping to manufacturing, capital could neither advance nor retreat. It was a legitimate case for governmental aid. Even Jefferson laid aside his early prepossessions in favor of a simple bucolic life for the American citizen, and admitted that "to be independent for the comforts of life, we must fabricate them for ourselves. We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist." Madison, too, departed from the Virginia faith so far as to recommend sufficient protection of "the enterprising citizens whose interests are now at stake" to guard them "against occasional competition from abroad."

Within sight of the blackened walls of the Capitol, in temporary quarters which it had rented, Congress set its hand to the work of national reconstruction. Before many months had passed, the new Capitol, under the supervision of Latrobe, began to rise from the ruins of the old, a symbol of a new era. On the walls of the rotunda, John Trumbull painted scenes which were to remind coming generations of the heroic days of the Revolution, and within its confines was eventually installed what was left of the library of Congress, with the gaps supplied in part by Jefferson's private collection, which Congress purchased. The new nation was not to disdain wholly the finer aspects of life nor to despise the garnered wisdom of the ages.

In March, 1816, Congress took under consideration a tariff bill which had been drafted on lines marked out by the new Secretary of the Treasury, A. J. Dallas, of Pennsylvania. The debates brought out a wide diversity of interests. Daniel Webster represented admirably the mingled feelings of his New England constituents when he professed to favor existing manufactures, but deprecated any action calculated to produce new industries. He never wished to see the time when the young men of the country would be forced to close their eyes to heaven and earth, and open them in the dust and smoke of unwholesome factories. On the other hand, Calhoun, eschewing a narrow sectionalism, declared that manufacturing must be encouraged as a wise national policy. "Neither agriculture, manufactures, nor commerce, taken separately, is the cause of wealth," said he. "It flows from the three combined and cannot exist without each." The South showed little of the apprehension which John Randolph expressed when he cried, "Upon whom bears the duty on coarse woolens and linens and blankets, upon salt, and all the necessaries of life?" and answered, "On poor men, and on slaveholders."

The bill which Congress eventually passed fixed somewhat lower duties than Dallas had advised. A duty of twenty-five per cent was placed on cotton and woolen goods until June 30, 1819, when it was to be reduced to twenty per cent. By what was known as the minimum principle, all cotton fabrics costing less than twenty-five cents a square yard were held to have cost that amount and were made to pay corresponding duties. The object of this provision was to exclude from India the coarser and cheaper cotton textiles which would menace the products of New England looms. Other important articles were made subject to higher duties, such as rolled and hammered iron, leather goods, hats, carriages, and writing-paper. A comparison of these duties with those of the tariff of 1789 shows a marked increase. Where the average duty was seven and one half per cent in 1789, it was thirty per cent in the tariff of 1816. So far as the intent of the law is concerned, this tariff act committed the country to a fiscal policy in which "revenue was subordinated to industrial needs."

Although the largest vote against the tariff bill came from the South and Southwest, twenty-three out of fifty-seven Representatives voted for the bill. New England showed a prepondering opinion in favor of protection: only ten out of twenty-seven Representatives opposed the bill. The Representatives of the Middle States ranged themselves emphatically on the side of protection; and with them stood the Congressmen from Ohio and Kentucky.

The close of the war found the country with a badly disordered currency and with a bankrupt treasury. Nowhere were the remedial efforts of Congress needed more. The condition of the currency was due, in part at least, to the failure of Congress in 1811 to perceive the regulative influence of a national bank. By refusing to recharter the United States Bank, Congress not only deprived the Treasury of an exceedingly valuable fiscal agent during the war, but also threw the door wide open to indiscriminate and unregulated state banking. Between 1811 and 1816 the number of these state institutions increased from eighty-eight to two hundred and forty-six, all of which exercised the right of issuing notes with little or no restriction. Inflation followed inevitably. During the blockade the banks of the Middle and Southern States suffered great distress by the constant drain of specie to New England and abroad. After the capture of Washington, practically all banks outside of New England were forced to suspend specie payments. The country experienced once more all the evils of a depreciated currency. Southern bank notes were refused for deposit in Philadelphia banks. Notes of these institutions in Philadelphia, in turn, were subject to a discount of twenty-four per cent in Boston. Uncertainty and distrust demoralized financial operations everywhere.

Wiser by the experience of five years, Congress was now disposed to establish another national bank. A first bill, however, fell short of the President's desires and was vetoed. A second bill became law on April 10, 1816. The provisions of this Bank of the United States differed in several particulars from that chartered in 1790. Its capital was three and one half times as large. One fifth of the total capital of $35,000,000 was to be subscribed by the Government, and the remainder by individuals. Five of the twenty-five directors were to be appointed by the President of the United States. The funds of the Government were to be deposited in the Bank unless the Secretary of the Treasury should otherwise direct, laying his reasons for any such change before Congress. In return for the privileges granted in the charter, the Bank was required to transfer the government funds from place to place without charge, and to pay $1,500,000 to the Government. On its side the Government agreed not to charter any other bank except in the District of Columbia. The circulation of the Bank was limited to the amount of its capital. Its notes were to be payable on demand in specie and to be receivable in all payments to the Government.

Such an institution gave promise of serving the Government as a sound fiscal agent and of assisting materially in the restoration of the currency to a specie basis. The stock was subscribed promptly by 31,334 individuals, all but three thousand of whom resided in the Middle States. New England was still reluctant to support the plans of Mr. Madison; the South had other uses for its capital. To facilitate the resumption of specie payments, Congress passed a joint resolution, that after February 20 of the following year (1817), all dues to the Government should be paid in specie, treasury notes, national bank notes, or notes of banks payable in the "said currency of the United States." This was strong medicine for the state banks. Unwilling or unable to contract their circulation and to call in their loans, the banks of the Middle States asked to have the date of resumption deferred, on the ostensible ground that the new bank could not be organized in time to assist them. The energetic Secretary of the Treasury disposed of this plea by putting the Bank in operation in January, 1817. On the date set by Congress the banks very generally resumed specie payments.

The propulsive force given to the Government by the war seemed likely to continue. The task of the National Government no longer seemed merely negative,—to "restrain men from injuring one another," in the Jeffersonian phrase,—but positive and constructive. Even Madison, in his annual message of 1815, recommended liberal provision for defense, more military academies, an improved and enlarged navy, protection to manufactures, new national roads and canals, and a national university. He gave his support to Monroe's proposal to fix the peace establishment at twenty thousand men; and he experienced the unique sensation of finding himself in advance of his party, which finally agreed upon an army of ten thousand men. Still more striking evidence of the change which had passed over the party of Jefferson was its willingness to retain the entire naval establishment and to appropriate $4,000,000 for frigates and ships-of-the-line. Clay and Calhoun, speaking for the younger Republicans, agreed that the greatest danger of the future lay in weak government. They were not in the least intimidated by the addition of $80,000,000 to the national debt as the result of war. That sum represented to their minds simply the price, none too large, of commercial and industrial independence.

These young aggressive spirits seemed at times quite indifferent to nice questions of constitutional law. Calhoun dismissed constitutional objections to a national bank with a wave of the hand: he thought discussion of such abstract themes "a useless consumption of time." On introducing his bill for internal improvements, in December, 1816, he intimated that he did not propose to indulge in metaphysical subtleties respecting the Constitution. "The instrument was not intended as a thesis for the logician to exercise his ingenuity on; ... it ought to be construed with plain good sense." If Clay exhibited more sensitiveness to constitutional limitations, it was because he had to clear himself from the charge of inconsistency. In supporting the Bank Bill in 1816 he frankly confessed that he had changed his mind on the point of constitutionality. He had believed the incorporation of a bank in 1811 unwarranted by the Constitution; but conditions had changed. What was then neither necessary nor proper was now both necessary and proper. The interpretation of the Constitution must always take existing circumstances into account. If Clay did not add to his reputation as an expounder of the Constitution by this speech, he represented admirably, nevertheless, the changes which circumstances had wrought in the convictions of his associates.

Against these new tendencies John Randolph set himself stark and grim. "The question is," said he, replying to Calhoun's new nationalism, "whether or not we are willing to become one great consolidated nation, or whether we have still respect enough for those old, respectable institutions [the States] to regard their integrity and preservation as a part of our policy." Randolph spoke for a generation which was passing away; but his words touched a responsive chord in the breast of President Madison. On March 3, 1817, as he was about to leave office, he sent to Congress a message vetoing the Internal Improvements Bill and warning his party associates of the danger of latitudinarian views of the Constitution. This message was Madison's farewell address. It was thoroughly characteristic of the man and the statesman.

The relaxing of Republican doctrines, and of party ties generally, divested the presidential election of any real political significance. The Federalists were thoroughly discredited. As a party they made no concerted effort to nominate candidates. Virtually, therefore, the selection of a President rested with the congressional caucus of the Republican party. The choice lay between two members of the President's Cabinet: James Monroe, Secretary of State, and William H. Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury. Governor Tompkins, of New York, was put forward by enthusiastic partisans from that State, but he was not a national figure in any sense and commanded no support outside of his State. Intrigue played a part in this caucus, if contemporary testimony may be believed. Tradition has it that Martin Van Buren and Peter B. Porter prevented their New York delegation from voting for Crawford and thus threw the nomination to Monroe. Governor Tompkins was the choice of the caucus for Vice-President. No one could safely affirm that these nominees were the choice of the rank and file of the party. Here and there public meetings were held to protest against the dictation of the congressional caucus; but no organized opposition developed. The campaign proved to be a tame affair. Nowhere was there a real contest. Only three States, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware, chose Federalist electors. Not a ripple of excitement stirred the public when announcement was finally made that Monroe had received 183 electoral votes and Rufus King, 34. For the fourth time a Virginian had been raised to the Presidency.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Of the general histories, only that by McMaster contains any great amount of information bearing on the economic changes wrought by war and the preceding period of commercial restriction. Adams summarizes the economic results of war in a single chapter in the last volume of his work. K. C. Babcock, The Rise of American Nationality (in The American Nation, vol. 13, 1906), attempts the same task. Besides the manuals on economic history which have already been mentioned, there are several excellent volumes dealing with various phases of national life: such as, D. R. Dewey, Financial History of the United States (1903); F. W. Taussig, Tariff History of the United Stales (rev. ed., 1913); R. C. H. Catterall, The Second Bank of the United Stales (1903); J. L. Bishop, History of American Manufactures from 1608-1860 (2 vols., 1861-64); C. W. Wright, Wool-Growing and the Tariff (1910). Among the biographies of statesmen of the new generation, the best are: G. T. Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster (2 vols., 1869); W. W. Story, Life and Letters of Joseph Story (2 vols., 1851); G. Hunt, John C. Calhoun (1908).

CHAPTER XIV

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

At the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century, the people of the United States were still in the main a homogeneous folk, native-born descendants of native-born ancestors. The tide of immigration which was by the end of the century to inundate the nation and transform its character was just beginning to flow. Its volume between the close of the Revolution and the year 1820, when the first official statistics were collected, must remain a matter of conjecture. In 1817, the painstaking Niles, in his Register, estimated that about twenty-two thousand immigrants had arrived in that year in the ports of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, of whom four thousand were Germans and the rest inhabitants of the British Isles. Fully one half of these British subjects were brawny Irishmen, often a turbulent lot, but always in demand for hard labor on the roads and canals which were projected in every part of the Union. Among these newcomers, however, were many undesirables. Not a few English parishes emptied their poorhouses by sending the helpless inmates to the New World. Some of these deported paupers, no doubt, found a livelihood and became respectable citizens; but the records of almshouses in the Eastern States indicate that many of these unfortunates had only exchanged one asylum for another. In the Philadelphia poorhouses in the early thirties, from one third to one half of the inmates were foreign-born. Cargoes of redemptioners came into American ports as late as the year 1818. Of that traffic which was bringing helpless Africans into bondage in the Southern States, more will be said in a subsequent chapter.

Among the new arrivals, it goes without saying, were men and women, who, and whose descendants, contributed mightily to the building up of American Commonwealths. Entire communities seeking an asylum in the New World continued to arrive as in the early years of the seventeenth century. In 1817, a body of German separatists from Württemberg, under the leadership of Joseph Baumeler, landed at Philadelphia. Like the English Pilgrims they sought freedom from religious persecution, but the Plymouth which they founded was on a new frontier—at Zoar in the wilderness of Ohio.

What particularly impressed every foreign traveler in America during these years of transition and expansion was the incessant movement of society. The earlier westward movement of population had never wholly ceased, but it had been retarded by the war. The return of peace was like the first warm days of spring. The roads leading West were fairly inundated by a swelling stream of emigrants. An observer at the Genesee turnpike noted a train of some twenty wagons and one hundred and sixteen persons on their way to Indiana from a single town in Maine. A traveler on his way from Nashville to Georgia, in January, 1817, met an astonishing number of people from the Carolinas and Georgia who were bound for the cotton lands of Alabama. He counted over two hundred conveyances and three thousand people, driving herds of cattle and droves of hogs before them. But the great highway to the West lay through Pennsylvania. On the road from Chambersburg to Pittsburg, Fearon, an intelligent and in such particulars a trustworthy English traveler, counted one hundred and three stage-wagons, drawn by four and six horses, proceeding from Philadelphia and Baltimore to Pittsburg, and seventy-nine wagons bound in the opposite direction. "On the road," comments Fearon, "every emigrant tells you he is going to Ohio; when you arrive in Ohio, its inhabitants are 'moving' to Missouri and Alabama; thus it is that the point for final settlement is forever receding as you advance, and thus it will hereafter proceed, and only be terminated by that effectual barrier—the Pacific Ocean."

To this emigration all sections of the Union contributed. In the back-country of New England—in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts—was a restive population little loved by the governing class. President Timothy Dwight, of Yale College, described these people as "impatient of the restraints of law, religion, and morality," contentious, always complaining, and always indebted. They were likely to be Baptists or Methodists, by persuasion, and Democrats in politics. As small farmers their lot was a hard one. They needed only the incentive of cheap lands in the West to sever the slender ties which bound them to the stony hillsides of New England. Yet the older towns of New England also complained of the Western fever which was carrying off the available labor supply. Fearon found "the small and middling tradesmen" always ready to sell out when business got bad and "pack up for the back-country." The immediate destination of these New Englanders was western New York. Within a decade what had been a frontier area was filled with an industrious population eager to secure markets for the surplus products of their farms.

Before a very large number of New Englanders passed beyond western New York, emigrants from the Middle States were pushing into the Ohio country, where Harrison's victories had opened vast tracts to the white settlers. The earliest settlers in Indiana and Illinois, however, were of Southern extraction. Tennessee and Kentucky, having no longer a supply of good land at low prices, sent the younger generation on to a new frontier. In the year 1816 the father of Abraham Lincoln took his family across the Ohio on a raft and hewed his way into the timber lands along the river bottoms of Indiana. With these migratory Kentuckians went also descendants of the Germans and the Scotch-Irish who had peopled the Great Valley in the previous century. Even from the Carolinas came all sorts and conditions of men,—poor whites, Quakers, Baptists,—small farmers whom the advancing plantation system was driving from the uplands.

Even more significant than this advance of population into the region north of the Ohio was the contemporaneous movement from the Southern Seaboard States into the cotton lands of the Gulf plains. The way had been prepared by Andrew Jackson's conquest of the Creeks. Alabama was the immediate goal of the migrating Southerner. From Kentucky, also, but more particularly from Tennessee, stalwart pioneers entered this new El Dorado. The father of Jefferson Davis was one of those who tried their luck in the alluvial plains of the lower Mississippi. By the year 1820, the area of settlement had extended from southern Tennessee to Mobile, and from Mobile to the Mississippi along the Gulf.

The causes and consequences of this colonization of the Southwest form a vital chapter in the economic history of the country. In the year before the war, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia produced 75,000,000 pounds of cotton; the only other cotton-raising States, Tennessee and Louisiana, produced 5,000,000 pounds. Ten years later, the Seaboard States raised 117,000,000 pounds; the Southwest, 60,000,000. In another decade the States of the Southwest had outstripped the Old South. This comparison throws a flood of light upon Southern history. The invention of the cotton gin had made possible the cultivation of the short-staple cotton plant, which was the only variety that could be raised profitably in the uplands. Occurring just at the moment when the use of the power loom in factories was giving an unprecedented stimulus to the manufacture of cotton, the cotton gin worked a revolution in Southern life and industry. From the tidewater, with its large plantations worked by African slaves, the cultivation of cotton passed into the region above the fall-line of the rivers, where the small farmer practiced a diversified agriculture. Socially and politically the two regions had always been distinct. The gentlemen planters of the tidewater, with much the same outlook as the English gentry of the same period, regarded the democratic yeomen of the Piedmont with distrust not unmixed with contempt. By excluding them from their proportionate representation in the state legislatures, the aristocratic planters maintained an ascendency which was at once political and social. But as cotton-growing became more profitable and advanced into the interior, the farmer of the uplands found himself pushed to the wall. Either he must adopt the plantation system and purchase slaves, or sell his land and move on. For want of capital large numbers chose the latter alternative and swelled the numbers of those who had already set their faces westward.

The communities which within six years after the Treaty of Ghent were admitted into the Union as the States of Mississippi and Alabama, did not at first differ materially from Indiana and Illinois, which became Commonwealths at the same time. Much the same obstacles confronted the pioneer in the pine forests of Mississippi as in the hard woods of the Northwest. Either as squatter or bona fide purchaser he had with the aid of his neighbors hewed out a clearing, or single-handed girdled the trees, and laid the sills of his log cabin. A "raising" or "frolic" was one of the few opportunities for social intercourse in the hard life of the frontiersman. Between the stumps of his clearing he planted his first crop of Indian corn; and what the soil did not yield for his sustenance, he supplied with his trusty rifle. Time wrought vast transformations in these new communities. The thriftless, who scratched the surface of the ground and then sold out to a newcomer of sterner fiber, passed on to a new frontier. Log cabins gave way to frame houses. Clearings became well-tilled farms. Better methods of cultivation extracted a surplus of produce which could be sent to market. Along the rivers of the Northwest, cities sprang up like mushrooms.

From this point the history of the Southwest diverged from that of the Northwest. The virgin lands of the Gulf attracted also the planter with his capital invested in African slaves. Once again the small farmer felt the combined pressure of social and economic forces. He saw his wealthier neighbor acquire the more fertile lands; he found himself thrust into a socially inferior class; and again he yielded to fate. While a democratic society of self-reliant yeomen was developing in the northern half of the Mississippi Valley, a society based upon a plantation economy and aristocratic in its outward characteristics was forming in the Gulf States. Yet in its aggressiveness and commercial enterprise, the new South resembled the Northwest rather than the old South.

While the South was producing staples for an ever-growing market, it became itself the market for the surplus products of the Northwest. An active internal trade sprang up between the sections in spite of the natural barriers to commercial intercourse. Live stock could be driven to market. It was a common occurrence to see droves of thousands of "razor-back" hogs on their way from Kentucky to the Seaboard States, feeding on nuts and roots by the way. Rivers were the chief highways for such produce as could not provide for its own locomotion. The Western waters floated all sorts of craft, from the lumber raft to the flatboat, laden with pork, cheese, butter, flour, corn, and whiskey. The greater part of these boats were makeshifts, and made no return voyage. It was not until 1809 that a barge was warped upstream from New Orleans to Nashville. The entire traffic on the Mississippi and the Ohio was carried on until 1817 in less than a score of keel boats, which made the voyage downstream from Louisville to New Orleans in about forty days, and upstream in ninety. When, then, a steamboat succeeded in making a return voyage in twenty-five days, it was hailed as an epoch-making performance. In the next year twenty steamboats were competing for the river traffic; and three years later (1820) seventy-two were in actual service. Yet the steamboat did not drive the flatboat from the Western rivers. So late as 1840 one fifth of the freight handled on the lower Mississippi was carried in flatboats or barges.

The rapid rise of this internal commerce between the farmer of the Northwest and the cotton planter of the South increased the ability of both to purchase manufactures in the Eastern markets. Both sections had wants which they could not supply by their simple household industries. They had to import not only their farming implements, but most of those articles, useful or ornamental, which were thought indispensable to a higher civilization. "Spots in Tennessee, in Ohio, and Kentucky," comments an English traveler, "that within the lifetime of even young men, witnessed only the arrow and the scalping knife, now present the traveler with articles of elegance and modes of luxury which might rival the displays of London and Paris." Most of this stock was transported over the mountains from Philadelphia or Baltimore. In 1820, three thousand wagons carried to Pittsburg, the distributing center of the West, nearly eighteen million dollars' worth of merchandise.

The commercial interests of the East were quick to see the possibilities of this new market. An eager rivalry sprang up between the merchants of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Everywhere ways and means of cheaper transportation were discussed. In this subject the Western farmer was vitally interested, for freight charges added nearly one third to the cost of merchandise transported over the mountains. The cotton planter of the Seaboard States, also, feeling the competition of the Southwest, where riverways were abundant and easily navigable, saw the need of better roads to tidewater, in order to lessen the cost of marketing his produce.

The popular demand for better roads was not recent. All the States had encouraged, directly or indirectly, the building of turnpikes and bridges. Between 1793 and 1812, Pennsylvania had chartered fifty-five turnpike companies, and other States had been scarcely less ready to grant articles of incorporation to stock companies. Private enterprise had, indeed, done much to improve communication along the seaboard. Turnpikes and bridges had shortened the journey by stage from Boston to Washington to four and a quarter days by the year 1815. The city of New York was in 1816 within twenty-four hours of Albany by the Hudson River steamboats.

Numerous canal companies had also been chartered; but of all the canals projected, only three had been completed when the War of 1812 began: the Dismal Swamp Canal in Virginia, the Santee Canal in South Carolina, and the Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts. It remained for New York to usher in a new era in internal communication by authorizing in 1817 the construction of the Erie Canal. In the ardent imagination of its chief promoter, De Witt Clinton, this canal was destined to be "a bond of union between the Atlantic and Western States" and "an organ of communication between the Hudson, the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes of the North and West, and their tributary rivers," creating "the greatest inland trade ever witnessed" and transforming New York into a vast emporium of commerce and "the granary of the world."

This bold bid for Western trade alarmed the merchants of Philadelphia, particularly as the completion of the national road threatened to divert much of their traffic to Baltimore. In 1825, the legislature of Pennsylvania grappled with the problem by projecting a series of canals which were to connect its great seaport with Pittsburg on the west and with Lake Erie and the upper Susquehanna on the north.

The magnitude of the transportation problem was such, however, that neither individual States nor private corporations seemed able to meet the demands of an expanding internal trade. As early as 1807, Albert Gallatin had advocated the construction of a great system of internal waterways to connect East and West, at an estimated cost of $20,000,000. But the only contribution of the National Government to internal improvements during the Jeffersonian era was an appropriation in 1806 of two per cent of the net proceeds of the sales of public lands in Ohio for the construction of a national road, with the consent of the States through which it should pass. By 1818 the road was open to traffic from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, Virginia.

In 1816, with the experiences of the war before him, no well-informed statesman could shut his eyes to the national aspects of the problem. Even President Madison invited the attention of Congress to the need of establishing "a comprehensive system of roads and canals." Soon after Congress met, it took under consideration a bill drafted by Calhoun which proposed an appropriation of $1,500,000 for internal improvements. Because this appropriation was to be met by the moneys paid by the National Bank to the Government, the bill was commonly referred to as the "Bonus Bill." "Let it not be forgotten," said Calhoun in advocacy of his bill, "that it [the size of the Union] exposes us to the greatest of all calamities,—next to the loss of liberty,—and even to that in its consequences—disunion. We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing. This is our pride and our danger; our weakness and our strength.... We are under the most imperious obligation to counteract every tendency to disunion.... Whatever impedes the intercourse of the extremes with this, the center of the Republic, weakens the Union."

The one section which was impervious to these national considerations at this moment was New England; but it was President Madison, and not New England, who defeated the Bonus Bill. On the day before he left office, Madison sent to Congress a notable veto message. Reverting to his earlier faith, he pronounced the measure unconstitutional. Neither the express words of the Constitution nor any fair inference could, in his judgment, warrant the exercise of such powers by Congress. To pass the bill over his veto was impossible. Monroe, too, in his first message to Congress intimated that he also held strict views of the powers of Congress. The policy of internal improvements by Federal aid was thus wrecked on the constitutional scruples of the last of the Virginia dynasty.

Having less regard for consistency, the House of Representatives recorded its conviction, by close votes, that Congress could appropriate money to construct roads and canals, but had not the power to construct them. As yet the only direct aid of the National Government to internal improvements consisted of various appropriations, amounting to about $1,500,000 for the Cumberland Road.

Circumstances were also pressing the claims of the Far West upon the Government. Beyond the scattered settlements of Illinois and Indiana extended vast forests, known only to the Indians and the fur traders. With the experiences of the war fresh in mind, the new Secretary of War, Calhoun, urged upon the Government the necessity of taking resolute measures to hold this territory. Laws excluding foreigners from the Indian trade were passed; forts were established at strategic points like Chicago, Prairie du Chien, and Green Bay; and in 1820, Governor Cass, of the Michigan Territory, was sent on an expedition through the Wisconsin forests into Minnesota, to assert American claims wherever British influence was still felt.

Still farther west lay an almost unknown region of imperial dimensions. Save where venturesome pioneers had pushed up the Arkansas and the Missouri, and where the Spaniards maintained their feeble hold in the Southwest, no white men inhabited the great prairies which swept westward to the foothills of the Rockies. Only nomadic Indian tribes and occasional traders followed the buffalo trails across this wide expanse. Between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific was the region which Lewis and Clark had penetrated. Along the valley of the northern branch of the Columbia River, the Hudson's Bay Company had planted their trading posts. Farther to the south lay Spanish California and the ill-defined region to the eastward over which presidios maintained a shadowy jurisdiction.

On October 20, 1818, Benjamin Rush and Albert Gallatin, ministers to England and France respectively, concluded a convention with Great Britain which left the fate of the Oregon country in suspense for a period of ten years. To the British claims of prior discovery by Cook and Mackenzie and of prior occupation by the Hudson's Bay Company, the American commissioners opposed the claims based on the voyage of Captain Gray in 1792 and on the founding of Astoria by John Jacob Astor in 1811. It was finally agreed that the northern boundary of the United States should run from the Lake of the Woods to the Stony Mountains, along the forty-ninth parallel, and that the disputed country beyond the mountains should be occupied jointly for a period of ten years. An agreement was also reached regarding the Newfoundland and Labrador fisheries.

On another frontier conditions existed to which Congress could not remain indifferent. East Florida was still a thorn in the side of Georgia and Alabama. The province had become a rendezvous for pirates, filibusters, renegade Indians, and runaway negroes. Creek warriors who would not submit to the loss of their lands had taken refuge with their kinsmen, the Seminoles, and were inciting malcontents of every stripe against the whites. A band of negroes, estimated at not less than a thousand in number, together with some Creek Indians, had taken possession of an abandoned fort on the Apalachicola and had terrorized the country for miles around. The Spanish commander at Pensacola was summoned to destroy this pirates' nest and to disperse the marauders; but he was either unable or unwilling to do so, and in 1816 a red-hot shot from a United States gunboat blew up the magazine of the negro fort, killing nearly three hundred men, women, and children. Early in 1818, in equally summary fashion troops of the United States expelled a band of freebooters from Amelia Island.

The slight regard which the United States paid to the territorial sovereignty of Spain in Florida sprang from a general conviction that Spain could not and would not observe the provisions of the Treaty of 1795. Spain had then agreed to restrain the Indians living within her borders from attacking the citizens or Indians of the United States. President Monroe seemed to assume that Spain had forfeited her rights over Florida. At all events, he authorized General Andrew Jackson to assume command of the forces at Fort Scott and to call on the governors of adjacent States for militia to terminate the war. This order of December 26, 1817, was stated in dangerously broad terms. Jackson did not doubt for an instant that it authorized him to pursue the Indians into Florida. To his mind the time seemed opportune for the seizure of East Florida as an indemnity for the outrages committed by the Seminoles. He wrote to the President to this effect. "Let it be signified to me," said he, "through any channel (say Mr. J. Rhea) that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States and in sixty days it will be accomplished."

To his dying day Jackson maintained that the President signified his approval through Congressman Rhea, of Tennessee. Monroe denied that he had read Jackson's letter until after the exploits which so nearly plunged the country into war with Spain. Whatever may be the truth of the matter, General Jackson acted in accord with what he believed to be the President's desires. With a thousand men he marched across the border and was soon in possession of St. Mark's. Among those who fell into his hands was Alexander Arbuthnot, a Scotch trader who was suspected of inciting the Indians. Continuing his march, Jackson surprised and captured Suwanee, another rendezvous of Indians and runaway negroes. Here he found Robert Ambrister, another British subject, who was also regarded as a suspicious character. Returning to St. Mark's, Jackson handed these two suspects over to a court martial, which found both guilty of giving aid and comfort to the enemy and of inciting or waging war against the United States. Arbuthnot was hanged from the yardarm of his own schooner; Ambrister was shot. The fall of Pensacola finished the campaign. By the end of May, 1818, Florida was in the possession of the troops of the United States and Jackson was on his way to Tennessee, the idol of his men and a national hero in the estimation of the people of the Southwest.

The outcome of these exploits might easily have been war with both Spain and Great Britain. Don Luis de Onis, the Spanish Minister at Washington, immediately suspended the negotiations then in progress respecting the Floridas and made a spirited protest "against these acts of hostility and invasion." He demanded the immediate restitution of the places which had been seized, indemnity for all damage to property, and the punishment of General Jackson. As for Great Britain, Lord Castlereagh afterward said that, such was the temper of Parliament and the country, war might have been produced by holding up a finger and an address to the Crown carried by an almost unanimous vote.

The Cabinet of President Monroe was divided over the course to be pursued. Calhoun insisted that Jackson had virtually committed an act of war, which should be promptly disavowed. But Adams held—and the President was inclined to side with him—that in reality Spain had been the aggressor, and that Jackson had not violated the spirit of his orders. In order to terminate the war, Jackson had been obliged to cross the Spanish line. He had not done so with the purpose of waging war upon Spain.

Following a memorandum made by the President, Adams replied to Don Onis in this spirit. Later, in a masterly state paper, he set forth the intolerable conditions which obtained on the Florida frontier. The lax conduct of the Spanish authorities was held to justify the aggressive measures of Jackson. The United States was prepared to restore Pensacola and St. Mark's whenever Spain should give guaranties for the observance of treaty obligations. So far from consenting to punish Jackson, the United States demanded the punishment of those Spanish officials who had so flagrantly violated the obligations of the Treaty of 1795. "Spain must immediately make her election either to place a force in Florida at once adequate for the protection of her territory and to the fulfillment of her engagements, or cede to the United States a province of which she retains nothing but the nominal possession." This latter alternative, indeed, the Administration never lost from view.

Confronted by the revolt of all her American colonies, Spain could hardly resist this insistent pressure upon a province which she could neither govern nor defend. On February 22, 1819, Don Onis set his hand to a treaty which ceded the Floridas in return for the assumption by the United States of claims of American citizens against her to an amount not exceeding $5,000,000. The treaty contained also a definition of the boundary between Spanish and American possessions on the North American continent. Beginning at the mouth of the Sabine River, the line ran along that river to the thirty-second parallel; thence due north to the Red River, which it followed to the hundredth meridian; thence north to the Arkansas and along that river to its source; thence to the forty-second parallel, which it followed to the Pacific. As the United States renounced all claims to the west and south of this boundary, so Spain surrendered whatever shadowy title she had to the Northwest.

The ratification of the Florida Treaty was delayed by the attempt of the Spanish Crown to grant extensive tracts to certain grandees, and by the vigorous opposition of Henry Clay in the House of Representatives. The treaty seemed to him a bad bargain. "What do we get?" he cried. "We get Florida loaded and encumbered with land grants which leave scarcely a foot of soil for the United States. What do we give? We give Texas free and unencumbered, and we surrender all our claims on Spain for damages not included in that five millions of dollars." He challenged the right of the President and Senate to alienate territory without the consent of the House. Behind Clay's opposition lay some personal pique against the President and his Secretary of State; but he voiced, nevertheless, the spirit of the Southwest, which already looked toward Texas as a possible field of expansion and resented its surrender.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The westward movement is described in various chapters of volumes IV and V of McMaster, History of the People of the United States. The significance of the movement is best explained in F. J. Turner, Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 (in The American Nation, vol. 14, 1906), which contains also excellent chapters on the social and economic life of the different sections of the country. The highways and waterways to the West are described in A. B. Hurlbert, Historic Highways of America (10 vols., 1902-05). A summary account of the development of transportation is given in J. L. Ringwalt, Development of Transportation Systems in the United States (1888). Among the biographies which contribute materially to an understanding of the new West may be mentioned Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas H. Benton (1887), and James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson (3 vols., 1860). Edward Eggleston, The Circuit Rider (1888), and the Autobiography of Peter Cartwright (1856), touch upon important aspects of frontier life. The importance of the German element in American history is admirably set forth in Faust, The German Element in the United States (2 vols., 1909). The spread of New Englanders in the West is described by L. K. Mathews, The Expansion of New England (1909). The diplomatic negotiations which resulted in the cession of Florida are reviewed by F. E. Chadwick, The Relations of the United States and Spain (1909).

CHAPTER XV

HARD TIMES

The phrase "era of good feelings" applied to the Administration of President Monroe is a misnomer. It is descriptive neither of politics nor of business and industry, for the historic Democratic party was all but rent by bitter personal animosities, and the country was prostrated by a severe industrial crisis.

The first symptoms of hard times appeared in the early months of the year 1819. Undoubtedly the causes of the crisis were world-wide; but local conditions go far to explain the industrial collapse in the United States. All indications point to the conclusion that the country was experiencing the inevitable reaction from a period of too rapid commercial expansion and of unsound speculation. The high prices of commodities after the war had given a sort of fictitious prosperity to industry and trade, and had encouraged unduly the spirit of commercial enterprise. On credit easily secured from wild-cat banks, the Western pioneer had bought lands beyond the purchasing power of his own meager capital; and the speculator in turn had borrowed money to secure title to lands which he would unload upon unsuspecting settlers. State banks had met these demands by liberal issues of notes which were imperfectly covered by their specie reserves. It needed only a sudden demand for liquidation to cause widespread distress.

The unwise management of the National Bank may have contributed to the approaching disaster. The branch banks in the South and West had loaned freely, issuing notes which were payable at any branch of the National Bank. Capital was thus diverted from the East to sections of the country where there was least conservatism in banking. In 1818, the directors of the Bank became alarmed at the excessive expansion of credit, and issued instructions which compelled the redemption of notes at the bank where they were issued. At the same time the branch banks curtailed their loans. This sudden reversal of policy caused a fearful pressure which was transmitted from creditor to debtor all along the line.

Every sufferer by the panic was disposed to blame the National Bank for his misfortunes, particularly as it was common rumor that the directors of the Bank had speculated in its stock and had used their influence to cripple local banks. Congress had been obliged to take cognizance of these charges and to appoint a committee to investigate the condition of the institution. On the report of this committee, in January, 1819, the stock of the Bank fell from 140 to 93. The investigation revealed nothing worse than mismanagement; but a vigorous effort was made in Congress to revoke the charter.

The widespread hostility of the West and South toward the National Bank was born at this time. Everywhere it was known as "the Monster." State after State passed acts to tax the branch banks out of existence. The decision of Chief Justice Marshall, to be sure, in the famous case of M'Culloch v. Maryland, declared emphatically that the States had no constitutional power to tax the branches of an institution chartered under the laws of the United States; nevertheless, the legislature of Ohio deliberately levied such a tax, and when resistance was offered to its collection, withdrew the protection of the State from the branch banks. Feeling themselves the victims of the money power, the people in many of the Western States resorted to the remedies which were broached during hard times under the Confederation. Kentucky became notorious by reason of its laws in behalf of the debtor class. In every Western State there was a disposition to seek shelter from the operation of federal law behind the ægis of State rights. The people of these newer communities were slow to accept the force of precedent in cases decided by the federal courts. Andrew Jackson voiced this feeling when he became President. "Mere precedent," said he, "is a dangerous source of authority, and should not be regarded as deciding questions of constitutional power, except where the acquiescence of the people and the States can be considered as well settled."

That there was much real suffering during this panic admits of no doubt. Niles estimated that not less than twenty thousand persons were seeking employment in Philadelphia in the summer of 1819, and quite as many wandering in the streets of New York looking for work. In both cities soup-houses were established by private charitable societies to relieve distress in the following winter. In the city of New York, during the year 1816, over nineteen hundred unfortunates were imprisoned for debt; and of these, over seven hundred owed less than twenty-five dollars.

But it was not merely the city dweller who felt the pinch of poverty. Thousands of Western settlers who had purchased land under the Act of 1800, which permitted deferred payments, found themselves insolvent. More than $21,000,000, one fifth of the national debt, remained unpaid in the year 1820. To the importunities of these debtors Congress had yielded from time to time, but it was not until 1821 that it passed the first general relief act. Those who had not completed their payments within the prescribed five years were then permitted to give up the land which they had not paid for, and to apply the payments already made to the full purchase of the lands which they retained. Arrears of interest were remitted.

In 1820, Congress passed an act which wrought a far-reaching change in the disposal of the public domain. The credit system was abolished outright. After July 1, 1820, land was to be sold for cash at a minimum price of a dollar and a quarter an acre, and in eighty-acre tracts. A payment of one hundred dollars, then, would make a settler the owner of eighty acres in his own right. The prospect of actual ownership of a small tract made him far less ready to listen to the voice of the tempter in the form of the speculator, who had heretofore lured him to make larger purchases on credit than he could ever pay for by the labor of his hands.

In the midst of this period of financial depression, the Territory of Missouri applied for admission into the Union. On February 13, 1819, while an enabling act was under consideration in the House of Representatives, James Tallmadge, of New York, moved an amendment which touched Southern interests to the quick. "And provided, That the further introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited, except for the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted; and that all children born within the said State, after the admission thereof into the Union, shall be free at the age of twenty-five years."

This bold attempt to prevent the spread of slavery provoked a brief but momentous debate. Clay left the Speaker's chair to remonstrate, "in the name of humanity," against a policy which could result, he believed, only in the misery of the slaves of the South. The lot of the negro would be vastly improved if the unfortunate people were more widely dispersed. Taylor, of New York, called this a specious plea. "It is that humanity," said he, "which seeks to palliate disease by the application of nostrums, which scatter its seeds through the whole system." To open the West to slavery would be simply to create an additional demand for the importation of slaves. Of those Southern Representatives who took part in this debate, not a man posed as the defender of slavery in the abstract. Barbour, of Virginia, frankly admitted that slavery "like all other human things is mixed with good and evil—the latter, no doubt, preponderating." And Johnson, of Kentucky, maintained that though slavery might be a necessary evil, "not incompatible with true religion," even so "slavery must still be a bitter draught."

What rankled in the breasts of all Southern men was the insinuation that their social system was founded on hypocrisy and tyranny. Tallmadge commented with biting sarcasm on the willingness of Southern gentlemen to contribute to missionary enterprises for the uplifting of the Hottentots and Hindus, and their determination to keep their African slaves in ignorance. And his colleague contrasted the plantations, overrun with weeds on one side of Mason and Dixon's line, with the cultivated farms on the other: in Pennsylvania, he observed "a neat, blooming, animated, rosy-cheeked peasantry"; in Maryland, "a squalid, slow-motioned black population." These were barbed shafts which left sore wounds.

When the Union was formed, African negroes were held in servitude in all but two of the States. At the time of this debate, slavery had been abolished, or was on the way to ultimate extinction, in every State north of Maryland and Delaware. Climate rather than humanitarian considerations sealed the fate of slavery at the North; and climate, in the last analysis, fastened African slavery on the South. As the South became committed to the raising of a staple, and that staple cotton, the negro was regarded as an indispensable factor in plantation economy. There were far-sighted individuals, it is true, who deprecated slavery on humanitarian grounds; but they were, for the most part, citizens of border States where the profitableness of negro labor was less apparent. Even in these communities opposition to slavery was tempered by dread of what emancipation might bring in its train. The history of Santo Domingo revealed the hideous possibilities of a negro insurrection. No father of a family could contemplate with equanimity the proximity of a large body of free, semi-civilized blacks. For a time even prominent slaveholders favored the aims of the Colonization Society which proposed to deport emancipated blacks to the African coast. So late as 1820 the Governor of Virginia recommended an appropriation by the legislature for the emancipation and removal of the negroes.

Although slavery was a local institution, and regulated by state law, its existence was recognized by the Federal Convention of 1787. The arrangement which obtained under the old Confederation, whereby five slaves were to count as three whites in apportioning representation and taxes, was continued; the mutual obligation of the States to return fugitives from justice and labor was distinctly stated in the Constitution; and the slave trade was permitted to continue at least to the year 1808.

In 1793, Congress had met its constitutional obligations by enacting a law for the return of fugitive slaves; and in 1794, Congress passed an act—"the first national act against the slave trade"—which prohibited all trade in slaves from the United States to any foreign country. By the opening of the new century all the States had forbidden the importation of slaves from abroad. But in 1803, South Carolina again legalized the slave trade; and in 1805, Congress after a brief interdiction removed all restrictions upon the importation of slaves into the Louisiana Territory. The slave trade at once assumed alarming proportions. It was officially stated that between 1803 and 1807, 39,075 negroes were brought into the port of Charleston. Eighteen hundred of these unfortunate blacks were imported in American vessels. One half of the consignees of these slavers were Americans, of whom thirteen were natives of Charleston and eighty-eight of Rhode Island.

This traffic, coupled with the alarm caused by negro insurrections in the West Indies, prepared the public mind for positive action, as the year approached when Congress might constitutionally prohibit the foreign slave trade. The Act of March 2, 1807, however, only partially met the expectations of the anti-slavery people. The African slave trade was forbidden, but negroes illegally imported were to be disposed of as the legislatures of the several States should determine. There was reason to fear that the Southern States would neglect to legislate on this important matter, and that the act would be indifferently enforced. Moreover, the coastwise slave trade for purposes of sale was not interdicted, but forbidden only in vessels under forty tons burden.

That the Act of 1807 did not prevent the African slave trade was patent to every one who knew conditions in the Southern Seaboard States; but the extent of this traffic can only be surmised. During the debates on the Missouri Bill, Tallmadge stated that fourteen thousand negroes had been brought into the country within the last year, and the statement was not challenged.

When the Missouri controversy was renewed in the session of December, 1819, the number of free States equaled the number of slave States. The addition of a twenty-third State, then, would unsettle the equilibrium between the sections in the Senate. A growing antagonism based upon widely different economic and social organizations was coming to be felt—felt rather than clearly perceived and openly recognized. In the year 1800, the two sections had been nearly equal in population; in 1820, the North outnumbered the South by over half a million. This disparity in numbers had a direct political significance, for the national House of Representatives was beyond all question controlled by the delegations from the free States. No great prescience was needed to warn the South that in self-defense it must maintain the even balance of sections in the Senate. The contest for Missouri was therefore essentially "a struggle for sectional domination."

The Tallmadge amendment was passed by the House, but rejected by the Senate, after a heated debate which convinced Southern statesmen that there was a distinct anti-slavery sentiment at the North. The adjournment of Congress threw the whole controversy into the crucible of public opinion. The latent hostility of men and women with humanitarian sympathies was at once raised to white heat. Mass meetings in city, town, and county passed resolutions against the spread of slavery and the admission of more slave States. Yet it can hardly be said that the public conscience was deeply touched. The leaven of abolitionism had to work many years before it could produce results in politics.

The whole question assumed a new guise when Congress met in December, 1820. The people of Maine had held a convention and formed a constitution, and were now applying for admission as a State. Here was a free State which would offset Missouri if it were admitted as a slave State. When the House passed a bill to admit Maine, the Senate promptly attached to it, as a "rider," a bill for the admission of Missouri without any prohibition of slavery. It was to this bill that Senator Thomas, of Illinois, representing a constituency divided against itself on the subject of slavery, offered an amendment in the nature of a compromise. He would admit Missouri as a slave State, but prohibit slavery forever in the rest of the old Province of Louisiana north of 36° 30'. The Senate accepted this amendment and sent the bill to the House. Here the original Maine Bill was stripped of the rider and the Thomas amendment by large majorities. Shortly after this vigorous assertion of independence, the House passed a bill for the admission of Missouri with the prohibition of slavery. The deadlock seemed complete.

The constitutional aspects of the problem called forth some exceedingly able argumentation. Those who favored imposing a restriction upon Missouri argued, plausibly enough, that as Congress was given the power to admit new States, so it was fully warranted in exercising discretion and refusing to admit. Precedents existed for imposing restrictions. Three States carved out of the Northwest Territory had been admitted on condition that their constitutions should not be repugnant to the sixth article of the Ordinance of 1787. The State of Louisiana had been admitted under explicit conditions. It was fully competent for Congress, by virtue of its authority over Territories, to regulate all the stages in the process of framing a constitution, and then to give or to withhold its approval.

The most brilliant argument on the other side was made by William Pinkney, of Maryland. Conceding that the power of Congress was discretionary, he insisted that Congress might not exact terms which would interfere with the results to be accomplished. "What, then," he asked, "is the professed result? To admit a State into this Union. What is that Union?... An equal Union between parties equally sovereign.... It is into that Union that a new State is to come. By acceding to it the new State is placed on the same footing with the original States.... If it comes in shorn of its beams—crippled and disparaged beyond the original States—it is not into the original Union that it comes.... The first was a Union inter pares; this is a Union between disparates, between giants and a dwarf, between power and feebleness, between full proportioned sovereignties and a miserable image of power."

Yet there were Senators and Representatives from the North who would not be diverted from the discussion of the larger sectional and ethical issues involved in the extension of slavery. Chief among these was Rufus King, who then represented New York in the Senate. His cogent arguments made a profound impression. "The great slaveholders in the House," Adams wrote in his journal, "gnawed their lips and clenched their fists as they heard him."

Meantime, a joint committee of conference was endeavoring to reconcile the differences between the House and the Senate. The House was put at a disadvantage by the approach of March 4—when the consent of Massachusetts to the admission of Maine would expire. It was finally agreed that the Senate should pass the bill admitting Maine as a separate measure, while the House should accept the Missouri Bill with the Thomas amendment. Missouri, in short, was to come in as a slave State, but slavery was forever prohibited in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of her southern boundary. An analysis of the voting in the House of Representatives reveals no clear-cut sectional divisions, though it forecasts a time when slavery might split parties along sectional lines. In New England and the Middle States public opinion had not yet crystallized into inflexible opposition to the spread of slavery; but the Northwest was distinctly in favor of a restriction upon Missouri. The Southwest and the South were a unit in desiring the admission of Missouri as a slave State.

In the fall of 1820, the Missouri question in another form returned to vex Congress. When the constitution of the State was presented to Congress, it was found to contain a clause which excluded free negroes. Again the two houses locked horns. Passions rose again. The work of the preceding session seemed about to be undone. But under the persuasive leadership of Henry Clay, a joint committee elaborated a resolution which was acceptable to both houses. Missouri was to be admitted on the express condition that the offending clause in her constitution should never be construed so as to authorize the passing of any law by which any citizen of any of the States of the Union should be deprived of his privileges and immunities under the Federal Constitution. The legislature of Missouri was to give its solemn consent to this fundamental condition. Then, and not until then, the President was to declare Missouri a member of the Union. The State complied with the requirement, though in the same breath protesting that all this was an empty form, since Congress could not thus bind a State. On August 10, 1821, President Monroe declared Missouri a State of the Union.

In the midst of this exciting controversy, Monroe was reëlected President. Nowhere but in Pennsylvania was there any serious opposition. Old distinctions of party had so far disappeared that the venerable ex-President John Adams was chosen as a presidential elector in Massachusetts, and voted with his fourteen colleagues—who were half Federalists and half Democrats—for James Monroe. In the electoral count Monroe lacked only a single vote of a unanimous election.

When the electoral vote was about to be counted, an embarrassing question arose with regard to the vote of Missouri. As the State had not yet complied with the condition imposed by Congress, its right to vote was challenged. Again Clay appeared in his rôle of compromiser. The delicate question was adroitly avoided by having the President of the Senate announce the electoral vote with and without the votes of Missouri. At last the Missouri question was disposed of; but words had been uttered which could not be recalled; and wounds had been inflicted which left scars. The South could never quite forget that it had been charged with conniving at crime in maintaining slavery. "You have kindled a fire," said Cobb, of Georgia, to Tallmadge, "which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood only can extinguish."

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

An account of the crisis of 1819 is contained in F. J. Turner's Rise of the New West (in The American Nation, vol. 14, 1906); a shorter and less satisfactory account in A. M. Simons's Social Forces in American History (1911). Much information may be gleaned from the pages of McMaster's history. Detailed information must be sought in the special studies already cited, such as R. C. H. Catterall, The Second Bank of the United States (1903), and P. J. Treat, The National Land System, 1785-1820 (1910). From the vast literature dealing with slavery and the slavery controversy, the following titles may be selected as especially important: W. E. B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1896); W. H. Collins, The Domestic Slave-Trade (1904); A. B. Hart, Slavery and Abolition (in The American Nation, vol. 16, 1906); N. D. Harris, The History of Negro Servitude in Illinois (1904); E. R. Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania (1911); and a number of monographs in the Johns Hopkins University Studies. All the larger histories discourse with great particularity upon the Missouri controversy. Contemporary views of the congressional struggle are presented in J. Q. Adams's Memoirs, and in T. H. Benton's Thirty Years' View; or, A History of the Working of American Government, 1820-1850 (2 vols., 1854).

CHAPTER XVI

THE NATIONAL AWAKENING

There is a measure of truth in speaking of the War of 1812 as a second war of independence. In throwing off the shackles of British commercial ascendency, American society experienced much the same sense of elation and liberation as the peoples of Europe who contemporaneously rose in their might against Napoleon and asserted their right to independent national existence. The war was followed in the United States by an expansion of the vital forces of the nation in all directions. The earliest manifestations of this new national consciousness, however, were characteristically boisterous. An English traveler, who visited the United States soon after the war, found every man, woman, and child talking about the Guerrière, the Java, the Macedonia, the Frolic, Lake Erie, Lake Champlain, and the "vast inferiority of British sailors and soldiers to the true-blooded Yankees." The events of the war were commemorated in songs which this Briton declared—and no doubt truthfully—to be "frothy, senseless bombast." But whatever limitations of culture were disclosed by this outburst of national conceit, no one could doubt for an instant that an exuberant vitality was coursing through the veins of the nation.

It was a fair question, however, whether this national feeling would find expression in any permanent literary form. A literature of its own America did not possess: every one with literary tastes was forced to this humiliating admission. Writing from Berlin in 1801, John Quincy Adams hailed the first number of Dennie's Port Folio with delight. "The object," he declared, "is noble. It is to take off that foul stain of literary barbarism which has so long exposed our country to the reproach of strangers and to the derision of our enemies." But the periodical had a very limited circle of readers, and its literary merits were slight. The Anthology and Boston Review, founded in 1805, had a wider influence upon letters in America; but it is memorable chiefly as the forerunner of the North American Review, modeled upon the English quarterlies, which was first published by William Tudor, in the year 1815, at Boston.

The publication of American books at this time was a hazardous enterprise. "The successful booksellers of the country," wrote one who recalled his own experiences in the book trade, "were for the most part the mere reproducers and sellers of English books." Yet American publishers often showed commendable enterprise. In 1817, Byron's Manfred was received, printed, and published at Philadelphia in a single day. Walter Scott, Moore, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Porter, and Lord Byron were the favorite British novelists and poets whose writings were reprinted in America. Among the American publications advertised by booksellers, were sermons, geographies, and schoolbooks; but rarely any productions which belonged to the category termed by contemporaries belles-lettres.

The slender literary product of the United States from 1815 to 1830 is contained in magazines rather than in books. Prose and verse which could never have found a publisher separately appeared in periodicals of every description. Most of these were ephemeral publications. The more serious reviews, like the American Biblical Repository, the American Law Journal, and the religious reviews, had a longer life; but the lighter magazines, like the Ladies' Literary Cabinet, the Young Ladies' Parental Mentor, and the Casket: or Flowers of Literature, Wit, and Sentiment, rose and fell on the fickle tide of public taste. Even the West had its magazines. Lexington, Kentucky, which disputed with Cincinnati the proud title, "Athens of the West," published the Western Review, one number of which contained a review of Don Juan within six weeks after the poem was published in England.

In the September number of the North American Review, in 1817, appeared an original poem of such merit as to mark an era in the history of American verse. There was in William Cullen Bryant's Thanatopsis, it is true, no such youthful exuberance of feeling as the first stirrings of poetic genius in a new world might be expected to exhibit. The sense of refined form seemed almost un-American; yet there are lines in the poem which suggest the primeval background of American life and its influence upon the American mind. In 1819 appeared Washington Irving's Sketch-Book—the first American book which was widely read in England; and in 1821, Cooper published The Spy, which was the first to win favor on the Continent. Both Cooper and Irving were more or less conscious imitators of English prose writers, the one of Scott and the other of Addison; and they lacked consequently that originality which critics have always demanded as the hall-mark of a genuinely native art. It is easy to forget, however, that the Americans were not a primitive people. They were folk with a literary inheritance, of which albeit they often showed little knowledge. It was not for them to invent new forms, but to press new wine into old bottles. Of Irving, moreover, it should be said that he drew freely upon a vein of delicious humor, as in his Knickerbocker History of New York, which may be truly characterized as American.

The annals of American art in these years are even more bare. Benjamin West, to be sure, was born in Pennsylvania, but he achieved eminence in England. That he could succeed Sir Joshua Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy was a tribute to his fame, but equally convincing proof that he had ceased to be identified with the land of his nativity. Gilbert Stuart owed much to West, but his return to America in 1792 saved him from complete subservience to English models. As a portrait painter he developed power and individuality. Posterity may well be grateful that the portraits of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were painted with fidelity to nature as Stuart saw it, rather than in the grandiose manner of West. Two other names, Malbone and Allston, deserve brief mention. The one achieved some distinction as a painter of miniatures; the other is remembered both as artist and man of letters in the literary circle which was forming about Boston. The name of Jonathan Trumbull completes the list of American artists. What David was to the great actors in the revolutionary drama in France, Trumbull was to the notable characters of the American Revolution. In his conception of his themes he was perhaps the most genuinely American painter of his time.

In the pages of his autobiography, Trumbull recounts an interview with his father which may take the place of any further comment on the dearth of artistic feeling in the United States. The young man was arguing passionately for his vocation. The father, a typical Yankee, listened with commendable patience, and complimented the lad when he had finished. "'But,' added he, 'you must give me leave to say, that you appear to have overlooked, or forgotten, one very important point in your case.' 'Pray, sir,' I rejoined, 'what was that?' 'You appear to forget, sir, that Connecticut is not Athens'; and with this pithy remark, he bowed and withdrew, and nevermore opened his lips upon the subject. How often have those few impressive words recurred to my memory."

The names of Bryant, Cooper, and Irving are linked with the city of New York which enjoyed for a brief time that primacy in the world of American letters which it was fast acquiring in commerce. The center of literary and scholarly activity in the next generation was Boston, where the New England renaissance began. In this revival of letters Harvard College had a notable part. In 1806, John Quincy Adams was appointed Professor of Rhetoric and gave a course of lectures which moulded the taste of that school of orators to which Edward Everett belonged—a school of oratory which found its models in Demosthenes and Cicero. Everett became Professor of Greek in 1815; and George Ticknor, Professor of Belles-Lettres in 1816. Prescott graduated in 1814, Palfrey in 1815, and George Bancroft in 1817,—all three to add to American historiography works of enduring excellence. In 1817, young Ralph Waldo Emerson entered college.

It was Boston, however, rather than Harvard College, which created the atmosphere that these young scholars—all from Boston families—breathed: for the Athenæum, the American School of Arts and Sciences, and the Massachusetts Historical Society had begun to exercise an increasing influence on the younger generation. Harvard College, like all colleges of the day, was hardly more than a species of higher academy whither boys went at a tender age to continue their study of the classics and mathematics, and incidentally to cultivate rhetoric and belles-lettres.

The liberation of the American mind from time-honored traditions and conventions appeared markedly in the ecclesiastical revolts and religious revivals of the age. Unitarianism took its rise quite as much in protest against the teaching of Calvinism, that man was brought into the world hopelessly depraved, as against the orthodox conception of Christ's nature. The definite separation of Unitarianism from Congregationalism dates from 1815 when William E. Channing published his memorable letter to the Reverend Samuel C. Thacher. The writings of Buckminster, Channing, and other theological liberals have a distinct place in the annals of American intellectual life. Universalism also took its rise at this time and spread with remarkable rapidity under the lead of Hosea Ballou. In western Pennsylvania and Virginia, the Campbells, father and son, led a departure from the established Presbyterian order. The Society of Friends was also rent by the teachings of Elias Hicks.

Revivals had been a recurring feature of New England religious life since the latter years of the seventeenth century. That they stimulated many forms of religious activity appears in the annals of missionary enterprises at home and abroad. In 1810 the American Board of Foreign Missions and in 1814 the American Baptist Missionary Union were founded. In 1812 four young missionaries went out to India; and five years later other devoted young men began their labors among the Cherokees and Choctaws of the Southwest. There is something at once heroic and pathetic in the humanitarian zeal of a people, whom Europeans still regarded with disdain, to carry to the remote ends of the earth a Christian civilization which they had themselves hardly attained. But an incomprehensible idealism has from first to last been interwoven in the texture of American character.

After the cessation of European wars the United States stood singularly aloof from the Old World, yet in the affairs of South America they did not cease to take a lively interest. The successive revolutions by which the provinces of the Rio de la Plata, Chili, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico threw off the yoke of Spain woke a thrill in the people of the United States, for they thought they saw the events of their own revolution repeated in the exploits of San Martín and Bolívar. To the imagination of Henry Clay, this was a sublime spectacle—"eighteen millions of people struggling to burst their chains and be free." He would have had the United States recognize these sister republics and join hands with them in forming an American system independent of Europe. And when the Administration hesitated, he exclaimed: "We look too much abroad. Let us break these commercial and political fetters; let us no longer watch the nod of any European politician; let us become real and true Americans, and place ourselves at the head of the American system."

The conception of an American system did not originate in the ardent mind of Henry Clay. It was as old as the Union itself. Foreign encroachment had been feared from the very birth of the nation. "You are afraid of being made the tool of the powers of Europe," said Richard Oswald to John Adams while peace negotiations were pending at Paris. "Indeed I am," rejoined Adams. "What powers?" asked Oswald. "All of them," said Adams; "it is obvious that all the powers of Europe will be continually manœuvring with us to work us into their real or imaginary balances of power.... But I think that it ought to be our rule not to meddle." Washington's refusal to enter into an alliance with France and his firm insistence upon neutrality were inspired by this same fear. Jefferson's negotiations for the purchase of New Orleans were motivated by the fear that France, once in possession of the mouth of the Mississippi, would threaten the isolation of the United States and drive us into the arms of Great Britain. "Jefferson is an American," Adet once said, with rare insight, "and by that title, it is impossible for him to be sincerely our friend. An American is the born enemy of European peoples."

The corollary of the principle of non-intervention was abstention on the part of the United States from the affairs of Europe. Could the United States, then, recognize the colonies of Spain as independent republics without emerging from its traditional isolation? President Monroe would have been glad to recognize the South American republics even before they had demonstrated their ability to maintain their independence; but his cool-headed Secretary of State prevailed upon him to await further evidence. It was not until 1822, indeed, that the President recommended to Congress the establishment of missions in the new republics of South America. Spain protested emphatically against this action; but Adams, now sure of his ground, justified the action of the Administration by an appeal to facts. So long as Spain was attempting to reduce the colonies by arms, the United States had observed "the most impartial neutrality." But war had ceased, and the United States had "yielded to an obligation of duty of the highest order, by recognizing, as independent states, nations which, after deliberately asserting their right to that character, had maintained and established it against all the resistance which had been or could be brought to oppose it."

In the year 1823, the traditional principles of American foreign policy were put to a severer test. Soon after the Congress of Vienna, that combination of the great powers was consummated which contemporaries usually but erroneously styled the Holy Alliance. Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain covenanted together to meet at fixed periods to consult upon their common interests and to consider the measures "most salutary for the repose and prosperity of nations, and for the maintenance of the peace of Europe." Three years later, France was admitted to the councils of these "self-appointed keepers of the world's peace." Innocent enough in its public professions, this association of the great powers was converted by Metternich of Austria, who had acquired a remarkable ascendency over the mind of his own sovereign and over that of the impressionable czar, into an instrument of reaction and repression, whenever and wherever the specter of revolution raised its head. Within a few years revolutionary uprisings occurred in Italy and Spain. The so-called legitimate sovereigns were driven from their thrones and constitutional governments were established. In successive congresses at Troppau and Laybach, the three powers, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, resolved to suppress these revolutionary movements. An Austrian army was commissioned to carry out this policy of intervention, as it was termed; and the King of the Two Sicilies was restored to his uneasy throne. Neither Great Britain nor France took part in these congresses. It now remained to chastise the revolutionists of Spain. At the Congress of Verona in 1822, the representative of Great Britain openly protested against any intervention in Spain. But again the three powers, now joined by France, resolved to restore the deposed Fernando VII. Early in the following year a French army crossed the Pyrenees and entered Madrid. It was commonly believed that the restoration of the monarchy was to be followed by a reduction of the revolted colonies and a restoration of the Spanish colonial empire.

It was at this juncture that Canning, who had become the head of the British ministry, protested against the policy of intervention and sought for ways and means to make the protest effective. The one power whose traditions of liberty and whose interests in this particular seemed to be identical with those of Great Britain was the United States. In truth, their interests were far from being identical. Two years before, in a conversation with the British minister at Washington, the Secretary of State, in his most uncompromising manner, had challenged the right of Great Britain to the valley of the Columbia River or to any part of the Pacific Coast. And so recently as April of this critical year 1823, Adams had taken alarm at the appearance of a British naval force off the coast of Cuba and had warned the Government at Madrid that "the transfer of Cuba to Great Britain would be an event unpropitious to the interests of the United States." At the same time Adams stated his conviction that within half a century the annexation of Cuba to the United States would be "indispensable to the continuance of the Union itself." Coupled with this prophecy was the equally frank assurance that the United States desired to have Cuba and Porto Rico "continue attached to Spain"—for the present.

It was in midsummer of this year, too, that Adams protested against the ukase of the czar which had asserted the claim of Russia to the Pacific Coast as far south as the fifty-first degree, and to a maritime jurisdiction one hundred Italian miles from the coast. Adams records in his diary that he told the Russian minister "that we should contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this continent, and that we should assume distinctly the principle that the American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments." The time had come when the United States was bound to take more than a sentimental interest in the affairs of Spanish America. The disintegration of the Spanish colonial empire not only invited the Intervention of European powers in the internal affairs of the new republics, but also exposed portions of the North American continent to their aggressions.

On several occasions Canning conferred with Richard Rush, the minister of the United States resident in London, to ascertain whether his Government would join Great Britain in a public declaration against any "forcible enterprise for reducing the colonies to subjugation on behalf of or in the name of Spain; or which meditates the acquisition of any part of them to itself, by cession or by conquest." England had no designs upon the distant colonies of Spain, Canning asseverated; at the same time it "could not see any part of them transferred to any other power with indifference." Not trusting implicitly in Canning's altruism, Rush wisely suggested that Great Britain should first recognize the South American republics as a preliminary to a joint declaration. To this Canning would not commit himself; and Rush would not assume responsibility for a public declaration on any other conditions.

On receiving the dispatches from Rush recounting these interesting conferences, President Monroe took counsel with the two Virginia oracles, Jefferson and Madison. Both advised him to meet Canning's overtures and to make common cause with Great Britain—the one nation, as Jefferson put it, which could prevent America from having an independent system and which now offered "to lead, aid, and accompany us in it." Monroe was disposed to follow this advice. He not only drafted a message to Congress upon these lines, but he went further and urged the recognition of Greek independence in a way which departed widely from the traditional aloofness which earlier Presidents had maintained in matters of European concern. On the other hand, Adams was decidedly of the opinion that Canning's invitation should be declined. He did not wish the country to appear "as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war." Moreover, Adams was considerably alarmed at the reactionary principles which the Russian ministry had avowed in a communication addressed to the minister at Washington. He urged the President to seize the occasion to make an explicit declaration of American principles. "The ground I wish to take," said he, "is that of earnest remonstrance against the interference of European powers by force with South America, but to disclaim all interference on our part with Europe; to make an American cause and adhere inflexibly to that."

Yielding to his contentious Secretary of State, President Monroe redrafted his message to Congress. In its final form, December 2, 1823, this famous state paper contained the essential principles of what has come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. It was asserted "as a general principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers." The message expressly disclaimed any purpose to interfere in European politics; but respecting the affairs of the Western hemisphere a direct and immediate interest was frankly avowed. "The political system of the allied powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America." "We should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States."

The immediate effects of the message are not easily traced. It is not clear, even, that the favorable treaty made with Russia in the following year was the outcome of what Canning somewhat contemptuously styled "the new Doctrine of the President." Russia, it is true, agreed to waive her claims below fifty-four degrees forty minutes and to exclusive jurisdiction in Bering Sea; but the conflicting claims of England in the Northwest remained, and Canning predicted that England would "have a squabble with the Yankees yet in and about those regions."

Later generations have read strange meanings into the message of President Monroe. Even contemporaries were not clear as to its import. Interpreted in the light of its origin, it was a candid announcement that the United States did not purpose to meddle in the affairs of European states or of their existing dependencies, and a protest against the increase of power of European states in America either by intervention or by new colonization.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

In the concluding volume of Henry Adams's History of the United States are excellent chapters on American literature, art, and religious thought. W. B. Cairns's On the Development of American Literature from 1815 to 1833 (1898) contains much interesting information about periodicals. Barrett Wendell's A Literary History of America (1900) is full of pungent comment on early men of letters. C. C. Caffin, The Story of American Painting (1907), and H. T. Tuckerman, Artist-Life, or Sketches of American Artists (1847), record the small achievements of American art. John Trumbull's Autobiography, Reminiscences, and Letters, from 1756 to 1841 (1841), is a book of great interest. E. G. Dexter's A History of Education in the United States (1904) is an excellent manual. The Unitarian Movement can be best followed in J. W. Chadwick's William Ellery Channing (1903). The history of the various denominations may be found in volumes of the American Church History Series. The genesis of Monroe's message is described by F. J. Turner, The Rise of the New West(in The American Nation, vol. 14, 1906), and F. E. Chadwick, The Relations of the United States and Spain (1909). Both of these accounts are based on W. C. Ford, John Quincy Adams: His Connection with the Monroe Doctrine (in Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 1902). An excellent essay is that by W. F. Reddaway, The Monroe Doctrine (2d. ed., 1905).

CHAPTER XVII

THE NEW DEMOCRACY

By the year 1824, the West had become a section to be reckoned with by those who were calculating their chances in the presidential race. Since the war six Western States had been admitted into the Union. The population west of the Alleghanies had increased by nearly a million and a half within a decade. The relative importance of this new section appears in the census returns. In 1790, less than six per cent of the total population lived west of the Alleghanies; in 1820, nearly thirty-two per cent were domiciled in this vast region. In the National Legislature the West had acquired notable weight. By the apportionment of 1822, it had forty-seven out of two hundred and thirteen members of the House; in the Senate, eighteen out of forty-eight. But these figures do not tell the whole tale. As Professor Turner has well said, rightly to estimate the weight of Western population we must add the people of western New York and of the interior counties of Pennsylvania, and of the trans-Alleghany counties of Virginia, as well as the people of the back-country of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, North Carolina, and Georgia. "All of these regions were to be influenced by the ideals of democratic rule which were springing up in the Mississippi Valley."

Economic conditions bred a democratic society in the West. What Gallatin said of Pennsylvania was true of the greater West: "An equal distribution of property made every individual independent and produced a true and real equality." The basal characteristic of the West was individual ownership of land; and the reaction of the sense of proprietorship upon individual character was the most significant fact in the history of its population. Intense individualism and rugged self-reliance were the salient characteristics of the Westerner. So far as he reflected upon his social relations, he believed in complete social equality. In numberless instances the pioneer had migrated to escape the social inequalities and depressing conventions of older communities; and he was not minded to encourage the reproduction of these conditions in his new home. "America, then, exhibits in her social state an extraordinary phenomenon," wrote De Tocqueville in his notable study of American democracy. "Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or, in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance."

Life on the frontier, where a man wrestled with the primitive forces of Nature and conquered by dint of his indomitable will, made the Westerner perhaps overconfident in his ability to deal with all obstacles in the way of human achievement and withal somewhat impatient under the restraints imposed by the more complicated social order in the older communities to the East. The sweep of the prairies and the wide horizon lines of the Middle West may have exercised a subtle influence upon temperament. At all events, the Westerner was buoyant and optimistic, taking large views of national destiny and of the possibilities of human achievement in a democracy.

There was danger, indeed, that in cutting loose from the irritating restraints of the older communities, the people of the West would sacrifice much of the grace and many of the intellectual and spiritual refinements of an older civilization. "In this part of the American continent," observes De Tocqueville, "population has escaped the influence not only of great names and great wealth, but even of the natural aristocracy of knowledge and virtue." It seemed to two young New Englanders who traversed the vast region from the Western Reserve to New Orleans in 1813, in the interests of missionary societies, that the people were wrapped in spiritual darkness, "being ignorant, often vicious, and utterly destitute of Bibles and religious literature." The General Bible Society of the United States was founded in 1816 to dispel this irreligious gloom. Within five years this organization and its numerous auxiliaries had distributed one hundred and forty thousand Bibles and Testaments through the new States.

Yet the irreligion of the West was painted darker than it really was. Methodism had struck root where other denominations could not thrive. Its methods and organization, indeed, were peculiarly adapted to a people which could not support a settled pastor. "A sect, therefore, which marked out the region into circuits, put a rider on each and bade him cover it once a month, preaching here to-day and there to-morrow, but returning at regular intervals to each community, provided the largest amount of religious teaching and preaching at the least expense." The Baptists, too, secured a footing in the new communities and labored effectively in creating religious ties between the old and the new sections of the country. In religion as in politics the people of the West were responsive to emotional appeals. The circuit rider, with his intense conviction of sin and his equally strong conviction of salvation through repentance, wrought great crowds in camp meetings into ecstasies of religious excitement. Odd religious sects and strange "isms" were to be found in the back-country. At New Harmony on the Wabash River were the Rappites, a sect of German peasants who came first to Pennsylvania under their leader George Rapp, and who afterward returned thither. At Zoar in Ohio was the Separatist community led by Joseph Baumeler. Shaker societies were formed at many places; and Mormonism was just beginning its strange history through the revelations of Joseph Smith in western New York.

The intellectual horizon of the Western world was necessarily limited. Absorbed in the stern struggle for existence, the people had no leisure and no heart to enjoy the finer aspects of life. Education was a luxury which only the prosperous might possess. The purpose to make elementary education a public charge developed tardily. Outside of New England, indeed, a public school system did not exist. Throughout the older portions of the West the traveler might find academies and so-called colleges, but none supported at public expense. The State of Indiana, it is true, entered the Union with a constitution which made it the duty of the legislature to provide, as soon as circumstances permitted, "for a general system of education, ascending in a regular gradation from township schools to a State University, wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to all." But years passed before circumstances permitted the realization of this ideal. Meantime, the prosperous planters of the Southwest employed tutors for their children, and the well-to-do farmers of the Northwest paid tuition for their boys at academies. But young Abraham Lincoln had to teach himself Euclid and to cipher on the back of a wooden shovel, by the flickering embers of a log-cabin fire.

The new Commonwealths entered the Union as self-confessed democracies. In all the States formed after the War of 1812, with one exception, property qualifications such as prevailed in the older States were swept away and the right to vote was accorded to every adult white male. In Mississippi alone there was the additional qualification that a voter should be enrolled in the militia or have paid a state or county tax. Everywhere, too, the principle was accepted that representation should be based upon population and not upon property. The men who framed these new constitutions believed that they were establishing the rule of the people. It was, indeed, unthinkable that, believing themselves equal in all other respects, they should not accept the principle of political equality and popular sovereignty.

There is evidence in these new constitutions, however, that the people placed less reliance in their legislative bodies than did the people of the Revolutionary era. Instead of general grants of legislative power, there are specific prohibitions and positive injunctions. Important limitations are imposed upon the form and mode of legislation. It is clear, too, that fear of an over-strong executive had given way to a belief in the necessity of having a stronger countervailing influence, capable of checking the legislative. Everywhere the governor was made elective directly by the people and given the veto power. The conviction was often expressed in constitutional conventions that the governor was peculiarly the representative of the people, a popular tribune who would protect them against the indiscretions of their legislative representatives. The extension of the elective principle to all important offices was accompanied also by a general conviction that life tenure of office is undemocratic. "Rotation in office," said Andrew Jackson, voicing a popular feeling, "is a cardinal principle of democracy."

The spirit of Western democracy leavened also the older States. The people of Maine, breaking away from Massachusetts and her ancient ideals, boldly declared for manhood suffrage in their new constitution. Connecticut adopted a constitution in 1818 to replace the old charter, and dissolved the old union of Church and State by declaring that no preference should be given by law to any Christian sect or mode of worship. At the same time Connecticut extended the suffrage to all who served in the militia or paid a state tax. New York in the constitution of 1821 and Massachusetts by a constitutional amendment in the same year abandoned the old property qualifications for voting.

In both Massachusetts and New York, conservative men like Chancellor Kent and Daniel Webster frankly avowed their apprehensions of universal suffrage. "The tendency of universal suffrage," said Kent in the New York convention, "is to jeopardize the rights of property, and the principles of liberty." He held society to be an association for the protection of property as well as of life, "and the individual who contributes only one cent to the common stock ought not to have the same power and influence in directing the property concerns of the partnership as he who contributes his thousands."

The democratic movement affected not only the formal organization of State Governments, but also the machinery and methods of political parties. In the Northern States there was increasing dissatisfaction with the practice of nominating candidates for office by legislative caucus. The rank and file of the parties were no longer willing to submit blindly to the dictation of leaders. In deference to party voters in districts which were not represented by men of their political faith, the leaders of the respective parties now found it expedient to summon special delegates to their party conclaves, in order to give a more truly representative character to the organization of party. The legislative caucus, in short, gave way to the mixed caucus.

But the old vice remained. The selection of candidates for office was still made by those who had no mandate to act for the party except in a legislative capacity. If the voters of the party were in truth the source of authority within the party, then a means had to be devised of ascertaining their will. The democratic principle, in short, had to be applied to party. In response to this feeling, mass meetings and irregular conventions were held; but these methods of securing an expression of party opinion were only transitional. Indeed, so long as the means of communication were defective, popular gatherings were necessarily poorly attended. The next step in the democratization of party organization could only be taken when the barriers of space were overcome by the application of the steam engine to transportation. The nominating delegate convention waited on the development of transportation.

Much the same popular hostility was directed against the congressional caucus. Candidates for the presidential nomination were not blind to this movement, and for the most part they sought other means of promoting their chances. Monroe had hardly entered upon his second term when state legislative caucuses began to nominate favorite sons. In 1821, the legislature of South Carolina put forward the name of William Lowndes, and upon his death named John C. Calhoun as its candidate for the Presidency. In 1822, the legislature of Tennessee presented the name of Andrew Jackson, "the soldier, the statesman, the honest man," to the consideration of the people of the United States. In the same year Republican members of the legislature of Kentucky recommended Henry Clay "as a suitable person to succeed James Monroe as President." A "joint meeting of the Republican members of the Massachusetts legislature and of Republican delegates from the various towns of the Commonwealth not represented in the legislature" nominated John Quincy Adams for the Presidency in January, 1823. And finally, illustrative of the varied methods in use and of the strange vicissitudes of politics at this time, a public gathering or mass meeting at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in March, 1824, nominated Adams for President and Jackson for Vice-President.

A series of resolutions passed by the legislature of Tennessee in 1823 called attention in no uncertain language to the shortcomings of the congressional caucus and called for its overthrow. A canvass of the members of Congress showed that one hundred and eighty-one out of two hundred and sixty-one believed a caucus inexpedient at this time. Nevertheless, the minority, acting in Crawford's interest, took their courage in both hands and held a caucus on February 14, 1824. Sixty-four out of sixty-eight votes were cast for William H. Crawford, who thus became by all precedents the "regular" candidate of the Republican party. This nomination and the indorsement of Jackson by the Republicans of Pennsylvania spoiled Calhoun's chances. In the spring of 1824, he allied himself with the Jackson faction by accepting the nomination for Vice-President at the hands of a state nominating convention at Harrisburg, which had put Jackson at the head of the ticket.

Such issues as were discoverable in the presidential contest of 1824 were formulated in the debates in Congress during the early part of the year. As the country recovered from financial depression, the question of internal improvements again forged to the front. In 1822, a bill to authorize the collection of tolls on the Cumberland Road had been vetoed by the President. In an elaborate essay Monroe set forth his views on the constitutional aspects of a policy of internal improvements. Congress might appropriate money, he admitted, but it might not undertake the actual construction of national works nor assume jurisdiction over them. For the moment the drift toward a larger participation of the National Government in internal improvements was stayed. Two years later, however, Congress authorized the President to institute surveys for such roads and canals as he believed to be needed for commerce and military defense. The vote on this bill shows that the source of opposition to internal improvements was chiefly in the Northeast, in Virginia, and in the Carolinas. The West and Southwest, with Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey, were a unit in support of the general survey.

No one pleaded more eloquently for a larger conception of the functions of the National Government than Clay. No one voiced the aspirations of his section more faithfully. He called the attention of his hearers to provisions made for coast surveys and lighthouses on the Atlantic seaboard and deplored the neglect of the great interior of the country. "A new world has come into being since the Constitution was adopted," he exclaimed. "Are the narrow, limited necessities of the old thirteen States, of, indeed, parts only of the old thirteen States as they existed at the formation of the present Constitution, forever to remain the rule of its interpretation?" Of the other presidential candidates, Jackson voted in the Senate for the general survey bill; and Adams left no doubt in the public mind that he did not reflect the narrow views of his section on this issue. Crawford felt the constitutional scruples which were everywhere being voiced in the South, and followed the old expedient of advocating a constitutional amendment to sanction national internal improvements.

The Tariff Act of 1824 also entered somewhat into the presidential campaign. The failure of the protectionists to secure a higher tariff in 1820 had been followed by other efforts to secure congressional action; but none succeeded until Clay was again elected Speaker of the House and thrust the matter into the foreground of discussion. Clay dwelt eloquently upon the loss of the foreign market for agricultural products and upon the consequent widespread distress. To his mind the remedy was the establishment of an American market by fostering manufactures. That such a policy would involve a clash of sectional interests, he did not deny; but he believed that "reconciliation by mutual concessions" could be effected and a genuine "American system" be brought into existence.

The tariff bill presented in 1824 was avowedly a protective measure. Among lesser changes, increased duties were proposed on iron, lead, wool, hemp, cotton bagging, and cotton and woolen goods. At once the clash of sectional interests began. New England shippers protested against the duty on hemp, which they needed for cordage; and Southern planters made common cause with them on this item, because the cheap bagging which they used for baling their cotton was made of coarse hemp. For the same reason the maritime sections of New England opposed the duty on iron. For precisely opposite reasons, Kentucky clamored for the protection of her hemp-growers, and Pennsylvania, for the protection of her iron-workers. It was well understood that the cotton industry was established and needed no protection; nevertheless, the minimum duty on cotton fabrics was raised. The increased duty on woolens, however, was offset by an increased duty on raw wool, so that the woolen manufacturers profited little by the change of rate. A proposal to apply to woolens the minimum principle which had been extended to cottons in 1816 was defeated by the opposition of the South. Any increase in the cost of cheap woolen goods was bound to enhance the cost of clothing the slaves. On the other hand, the representatives of the great grain-growing and farming States of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, together with the States of the Ohio Valley, were almost unanimously in favor of the proposed bill. When the bill came to a vote in the House on April 16, 1824, only nine of the combined ninety-five votes of these sections were cast in the negative. Equally emphatic was the protest of the South and Southwest: only six out of seventy-six Representatives favored the bill. New England by its divided vote revealed the internal conflict between the commercial and manufacturing interests. The bill passed both houses of Congress by small majorities and received the signature of the President.

Of the presidential candidates, only one spoke with uncertain sound on the tariff issue. Clay was the outspoken advocate of a far-reaching American system; Adams thought the tariff of 1824 a fair compromise; Jackson, properly coached by his intimates, put himself on record as a supporter of a protective policy to create a home market; only Crawford, representative of the peculiar interests of the South and candidate for Northern support, felt the impossibility of harmonizing the conflicting interests of his followers by a clear-cut and explicit utterance on the tariff.

With so many candidates in the field, it was difficult to forecast the outcome of the presidential campaign. Even if there had been a pronounced popular drift toward any candidate, the result would have remained in doubt until the six States which still gave the choice of electors to their legislatures had completed the complicated electoral process. There was a strong likelihood, however, that the election would go to the House of Representatives. As the choice would then be confined to the three candidates having the highest vote, there was not a little bargaining in the States where the legislatures chose the electors. The completed returns gave Jackson 99 electoral votes; Adams, 84; Crawford, 41; and Clay, 37. Calhoun was elected Vice-President by more than two thirds of the electoral vote. The House, therefore, as wiseacres had foretold, was called upon for the second time to decide a contested presidential election.

The position of Clay was one of unenviable distinction and power. He could not be elected President, but he could, it was believed, determine which of his rivals should have the coveted office. His own State favored Jackson as a second choice; but Clay wrote to a friend that he could not consider the killing of twenty-five hundred Englishmen at New Orleans proved the fitness of Jackson for the chief civil magistracy. Crawford was personally less objectionable to Clay; but he had suffered a paralytic stroke and his health was precarious. Besides, Crawford had opposed some of the policies which Clay had most at heart. For years Clay had been a bitter opponent of Adams; yet after all was said, he was bound to admit that his interests would be best served by an alliance with this stiff-necked New Englander. At an early date, therefore, he determined to throw his support to Adams.

For weeks the capital was enveloped in an atmosphere of intrigue. Clay was courted by all factions. The possibility of securing his support was a standing temptation to wire-pullers. Even Adams wrote in his diary, "Incedo super ignes" (I walk over fires). When Clay announced positively, on January 24, that he and his friends would support Adams, a storm of passionate denunciation broke upon him. An anonymous letter appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper, charging that friends of Adams had offered Clay the Secretaryship of State in return for his support, and that friends of Clay had reported the offer to friends of Jackson, with the intimation that Clay would support the general on similar terms. When the friends of Jackson spurned these overtures, Clay sold out to Adams. With quite unnecessary heat Clay branded the author of this letter as "a base and infamous calumniator, a dastard, and a liar." His first instinct was to challenge the author whoever he might be; but when Representative George Kremer, an odd character who was chiefly conspicuous by reason of the leopard-skin coat which he wore avowed himself the writer of the offensive letter, Clay wisely concluded not to make himself ridiculous by an affair of honor with this Gil Blas. He demanded a congressional investigation instead.

While this investigation of the alleged bargain between Adams and Clay was pending, the House proceeded to the election of a President. On the first ballot, Adams received the votes of thirteen States, while Jackson was the choice of seven States, and Crawford of four. New England, New York, Louisiana, Maryland, and the States of the Northwest, except Indiana, supported Adams. Combined with these were now Missouri and Kentucky, which had voted for Clay. Jackson received the votes of the Southwest, together with those of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and South Carolina. Crawford was supported by Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. Two days later the President-elect announced that he had invited Henry Clay to be his Secretary of State. After some hesitation, Clay accepted the post.

The cry of corruption is a recurrent note in the history of democracies. The American democracy is no exception. With most of the charges of corruption, the historian has little concern; but the bargain and corruption cry of 1825 has a historical significance. The falsity of the charge against Clay has been proved as nearly as a negative can be. Adams may not have been above the uncongenial task of soliciting votes, but he kept safely within the moral domain which his conscience marked out. The motive which governed his appointment of Clay as Secretary of State is stated frankly in a letter to Monroe, two days after the election by the House. He considered the appointment "due to his talents and services to the western section of the Union, whence he comes, and to the confidence in me manifested by their delegations." Upon one individual these considerations made no impression: Andrew Jackson left the capital with wrath in his soul. He felt that he had been defrauded by a corrupt bargain. From this time on his hand was against Clay,—that "Judas of the West," as he afterward called him,—who had conspired to "impair the pure principles of our republican institutions" and to "prostrate that fundamental maxim which maintains the supremacy of the people's will."

Years after the events of 1824-25, the belief of Jackson that the will of the people had been defeated found classic expression in Thomas H. Benton's Thirty Years' View of Congress. What Benton termed "the Demos Krateo principle" was thoroughly in accord with the spirit of the new democracy, but it rested upon an entire misunderstanding of the Constitution. A direct popular election of the President was never contemplated by the framers of the Constitution. It is impossible to find in either the letter or the spirit of the Constitution any justification for the view that the House of Representatives is bound to elect the candidate having the highest popular vote.

What the will of the people really was in the presidential election of 1824 is by no means clear. Even in those States where presidential electors were chosen by popular vote, Jackson received less than half of the popular vote; and in many of these States the actual vote fell far below the potential. In Massachusetts, where 66,000 votes had been cast for governor the year before, only 37,000 voters took the trouble to vote for President. In Pennsylvania, which boasted of a population of over a million, less than 48,000 voted in 1824. Moreover, the six States which chose the presidential electors through their legislatures, contained one fourth of the population of the country. One fact, however, stands out with unmistakable clearness,—and it did not escape politicians like Van Buren, of New York, who had their fingers on the pulse of the people,—this martial hero from out of the West had an unprecedented vote-getting capacity. It were well to observe the Western horizon more intently.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The best description of the political characteristics of American society in this period is given by Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (2 vols., trans., 1862). F. J. Turner has pointed out the importance of the West in the development of the nation in several studies, notably: "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (American Historical Association, Report, 1893); "The Problem of the West" (Atlantic Monthly, vol. 78); "Contributions of the West to American Democracy" (Atlantic Monthly, vol. 91). The political development of the South is set forth with great thoroughness by U. B. Phillips, Georgia and State Rights (American Historical Association, Report, 1901); W. A. Schaper, Sectionalism and Representation in South Carolina (ibid., 1900); and C. H. Ambler, Sectionalism in Virginia from 1776 to 1861 (1910). Important aspects of the tariff are discussed in Edward Stanwood's American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century (2 vols., 1903), and in C. W. Wright's Wool-Growing and the Tariff (1910).

CHAPTER XVIII

POLITICS AND STATE RIGHTS

The circumstances of his election made the position of President Adams one of very great difficulty. He alluded to his embarrassment in his first message to Congress. "Less possessed of your confidence in advance than any of my predecessors," said he, "I am deeply conscious of the prospect that I shall stand more and oftener in need of your indulgence." It is doubtful, however, if even he appreciated the momentum of the forces which were already combining to discredit his administration. In October, the legislature of Tennessee had again nominated Jackson for the Presidency, and he had accepted the nomination as a summons to wage war upon the forces of evil in high places. The campaign of 1828, indeed, had already begun: and it was to be a campaign of personal vindication as well as of popular rights.

Under similar circumstances most men would have made sure of the loyalty of their constitutional advisers, at least, but Adams flattered himself that he could carry on a non-partisan administration. The results were disastrous, for at least two of the Cabinet were not above using the patronage of office to further the cause of Jackson. In his laudable desire not to allow the Government to become "a perpetual and unintermitting scramble for office," Adams refused to make removals in the civil service on partisan grounds, yet he retained in office underlings who labored incessantly in the cause of the opposition.

Equally impolitic was the attitude of the President toward questions of public policy in his first message to Congress. Just when the opposition was in a fluid state and the winds of conflicting doctrines were ruffling the surface of national politics, Adams gave utterance to opinions on the functions of government which were bound to alienate many of his followers. Entertaining no doubts as to constitutional limitations upon the powers of the National Government, he advocated not only the construction of roads and canals, but the establishment of observatories and a national university. His program included governmental aid to the arts, mechanical and literary, and to the sciences, "ornamental and profound." He was prepared to give encouragement not only to manufacturing but to agriculture and to commerce. Many of these were objects which President Jefferson had recommended to the consideration of Congress in 1806; but whereas he had urged the adoption of amendments to the Constitution which would authorize Congress to provide for roads and canals and education, Adams seemed oblivious to the limitations of the Constitution. In much alarm Jefferson suggested to Madison the desirability of having Virginia adopt a new set of resolutions, bottomed on those of 1798, and directed against the acts for internal improvements. In March, 1826, the general assembly declared that all the principles of the earlier resolutions applied "with full force against the powers assumed by Congress" in passing acts to protect manufactures and to further internal improvements. That the Administration would meet with opposition in Congress, whatever its program might be, was a foregone conclusion. The only question was whether the diverse and mutually hostile factions which had followed the fortunes of Crawford, Calhoun, and Jackson could coalesce into a consistent opposition. The first test occurred when the Administration proposed the Panama mission.

The overthrow of the authority of Spain in South America had left the way clear for the long-projected union of the republics. Early in the year 1825, the ministers of Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia waited on Clay to learn whether the United States would accept an invitation to a great council or congress which had been called by the revolutionist Bolívar, now President of Colombia. The project appealed strongly to Clay. A league of young republics in the New World to offset the Holy Alliance in Europe was, as his biographer remarks, "one of those large, generous conceptions well calculated to fascinate his ardent mind." The imagination of the President was not so easily touched: he instructed Clay to inquire more particularly into the purposes of the congress.

The condition of affairs in the countries bordering on the Caribbean Sea—the American Mediterranean—was such, indeed, as to justify extreme caution in dealing with the Latin-American republics. It was matter of common knowledge that Colombia and Mexico had designs upon Cuba, the last of the Spanish outposts in the New World. So long as Spain continued at war with her old colonies, the United States was bound to be uneasy about the fate of Cuba and Porto Rico. Even if the islands were liberated by the republican armies of Central and South America, they were likely to fall a prey to some European power. The appearance of a French fleet off the coast of Cuba during the summer of 1825 gave point to these not unwarranted apprehensions. It was rumored that Cuba was to be made the basis for an expedition against Mexico in behalf of Spain. This episode prompted Clay to make strong representations to France that the United States could not consent to the occupation of Cuba by any other European power.

When, then, a formal invitation came to participate in the Panama Congress, the Administration determined to seize the occasion to exercise a wholesome restraint by friendly advice upon the assembled delegates of the republics, and at the same time to ascertain their purposes. In asking the Senate to confirm the nomination of two delegates, however, the President voiced his own expectation of what the Congress would be and do, rather than the purposes of Bolívar and his associates. The occasion would be favorable, the President intimated, for the discussion of commercial reciprocity, of neutral rights, and of principles of religious liberty. An alliance with the Latin-American republics was not contemplated. On the contrary, the delegates from the United States would urge "an agreement between all of the parties represented at the meeting, that each will guard by its own means against the establishment of any future European colony within its borders." At this stage in its evolution the Monroe Doctrine was not understood to include any obligation on the part of the United States to police the territories of the lesser republics of the New World.

The instructions given to the envoys leave no doubt as to the intentions of the Administration. Every possible endeavor was to be made to dissuade Colombia and Mexico from their designs upon Cuba and Porto Rico. The recognition of Hayti as an independent state was to be deprecated. In short, the status quo in the Caribbean Sea was to be maintained; and throughout, the congress was to be regarded as a diplomatic conference and in no wise as a convention to constitute a permanent league of republics.

Nevertheless, the opposition in Congress persisted in misrepresenting the President's purposes. It was pointed out that the republics to the south very generally believed that the United States was pledged by Monroe's message to make common cause with them when their independence was threatened. "Are we prepared," asked Hayne, of South Carolina, "to send ministers to the Congress of Panama for the purpose of making effectual this pledge of President Monroe as construed by the present administration and understood by the Spanish-American states?" With greater sincerity Southern Representatives protested against participating in a congress which proposed to discuss the suppression of the slave trade and the future of Hayti. "Slavery in all its bearings," said Hayne, "is a question of extreme delicacy, concerning which there is but one safe rule either for the States in which it exists or for the Union. It must ever be treated as a domestic question. To foreign governments the language of the United States must be that the question of slavery concerns the peace and safety of our political family, and that we cannot allow it to be discussed." Least of all, he continued, could the United States touch the question of the independence of Hayti in connection with revolutionary governments which had marched to victory under the banner of universal emancipation and which had permitted men of color to command their armies and enter their legislative halls.

In the end the Administration had its way and the nominations were confirmed; but the delay was most unfortunate. On their way to the Isthmus, one of the delegates died, and the other arrived too late to take part in the congress. From the viewpoint of domestic politics, the controversy over the mission was only an incident in the evolution of a party within the bosom of the Democratic party. The animus of the opposition is revealed in the often-quoted remark of Martin Van Buren, who was trying to drill the varied elements in the Senate into a coherent organization: "Yes, they have beaten us by a few votes, after a hard battle; but if they had only taken the other side and refused the mission, we should have had them."

Of far more serious import than this factional opposition in Congress was the resistance which the authorities of Georgia offered to the National Administration in the matter of Indian lands. On March 5, 1825, the Senate ratified the Treaty of Indian Springs with the Creek Indians, which provided for the cession of practically all the lands of the tribe between the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers. For years the planters of Georgia had coveted these fertile tracts, awaiting with impatience the negotiations of the Federal Government with the reluctant Indians. Although the title to the lands was not to pass to Georgia until September 1, 1826, Governor Troup ordered them to be surveyed with a view to their immediate occupation. Meantime, well-founded charges were current that the treaty had been made by a faction among the Creeks, without the consent of the responsible chiefs. President Adams at once ordered the state authorities to desist from their survey; but the governor replied that Georgia was convinced of the validity of the treaty and fully determined to enter into possession of her own. The tone of the governor's letter was ominous. Nevertheless, the President instituted negotiations for a new treaty. The diplomatic shifts resorted to by the Indian agents in this instance were not above suspicion, but the President seemed to entertain no misgivings, for he assured the Senate that the new Treaty of Washington (January 24, 1826) was the will and deed of "the chiefs of the whole Creek Nation." The grant left the Indians still in possession of some lands west of the Chattahoochee.

The feelings of all loyal Georgians were outraged by the course of the Administration. The legislature protested against the Treaty of Washington as "illegal and unconstitutional," and denounced the President's action as "an instance of dictation and federal supremacy unwarranted by any grant of powers to the General Government." "Georgia owns exclusively the soil and jurisdiction of all the territory within her present chartered and conventional limits," read the resolutions of December 22, 1826. "She has never relinquished said right, either territorial or jurisdictional, to the General Government."

The ebullient governor hardly needed the indorsement of the legislature. He pushed on the surveys to the limits set by the original treaty. But the surveyors soon met with resistance from the Indians; and the Indians appealed to the President. The Secretary of War then notified Troup that the President felt himself compelled to employ all the means under his control to maintain the faith of the nation and to carry the treaty into effect. Governor Troup replied defiantly that the "military character of the menace" was well understood. "You will distinctly understand, therefore, that I feel it my duty to resist to the utmost any military attack.... From the first decisive act of hostility, you will be considered and treated as a public enemy, and with less repugnance because you, to whom we might constitutionally have appealed for our defense against invasion, are yourselves the invaders, and, what is more, the unblushing allies of the savages whose course you have adopted." He at once issued orders to the state military officers to hold the militia in readiness to repel any invasion of the soil of Georgia.

The tension which had now become acute was relieved by the intelligence that the President had ordered the Indian agent to the Creeks to resume negotiations for the cession of the rest of their lands. The governor hastened to point out jubilantly that the President had beaten a retreat. Meantime, the President had laid the whole matter before Congress in a special message. A committee of the House advised the purchase of the rest of the Indian lands, but in the mean time the maintenance of the terms of the Treaty of Washington. A committee of the Senate, however, with Benton as chairman, took an opposite view of the situation, and deprecated any action looking toward the coercion of a sister State. A treaty concluded with the Creeks in November, 1827, fortunately satisfied all parties and put an end to this exciting controversy—a controversy in which the President had played a lone and not very successful hand.

In this same year (1827), another Indian problem of even greater perplexity arose. The Cherokees of northwestern Georgia, who were ruled by a group of intelligent half-breeds, declared themselves one of the sovereign and independent nations of the earth, and drafted a constitution which completely excluded the authority of the State of Georgia. Again, in no uncertain language, Georgia asserted her title to all the lands within her limits, regarding the Indians simply as "tenants at her will"; but before the controversy reached an acute stage Adams had surrendered the Presidency to General Andrew Jackson, who had only contempt for Indian rights when they fell athwart the purposes of honest white settlers.

In the midst of these protestations against federal intervention, the legislature of Georgia sounded a note of defiance also in the matter of the tariff. It was "their decided opinion an increase of Tariff duties will and ought to be RESISTED by all legal and constitutional means." Just what should be "the mode of opposition" they would not pretend to say, but for the present they would content themselves with "the peaceable course of remonstrating with Congress." This rather ominous protest was inspired by the demands of certain manufacturers and politicians who had assembled in convention at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1827.

The woolen industry had profited least of all those which had been protected by the Tariff of 1824. Not only had the slight advance in rates been offset by the increase of the duty on raw wool, but the effect of English competition in 1825 had been most depressing to the woolen trade. A tariff bill to meet the wishes of the wool-growers and woolen manufacturers had passed the House early in 1827, but had been defeated in the Senate by the casting vote of the Vice-President. The convention at Harrisburg was designed to create a public sentiment in favor of the protected interests and to bring pressure from various sources to bear upon Congress. The failure of the tariff bill in the spring session had impressed upon woolen manufacturers the necessity of securing allies.

The recommendations of the convention at Harrisburg were comprehensive. Higher duties all along the line, from wool to glass, were urged. But that which the promoters of the convention had most at heart was the extension to woolens of the minimum principle already applied to cotton fabrics. According to their demands, the ad valorem duty on woolens should range from forty to fifty per cent, assessed on minimum valuations of fifty cents, two dollars and a half, four dollars, and six dollars a yard. That is to say, goods valued at less than fifty cents a yard were to be treated as though they had a value of fifty cents; and all between fifty cents and two dollars and a half, as though they were worth two dollars and a half; and so on—a system which offered a high degree of protection to the cheaper fabrics in each group.

The high hopes of the protectionists were only partially realized. In the following session of Congress, economic interests became badly tangled with political. The President and the greater part of his supporters were protectionists. Indeed, it was openly charged by the opposition that the Harrisburg Convention was a device of the Adams men to promote his reëlection. The opposition, on the other hand, was far from united on the tariff question. The only affinity between Southern planters and their Northern allies in the Middle and Western States was hostility to the Administration. According to Calhoun, who in after years made a frank avowal of his part in the intrigue, the opposition determined to frame a tariff bill with a general high level of duties to satisfy the Middle and Western States, but to increase the duties on raw material which New England manufacturers needed. All the stanch Jackson men were to unite in forcing this bill to a passage without amendment. At the last moment, however, the Southern group were to part company with their allies and to vote against the bill. The Representatives from New England, and the supporters of the Administration generally, would of course vote against the bill also, and so compass its defeat. The odium would then fall upon the Adams men, while the Jackson men could pose as the only whole-hearted advocates of protection; and, finally, not the least factor in Calhoun's calculations, the South would escape the toils of high protection. There was only one hitch in this cleverly planned game. To the consternation of the plotters, enough New England Representatives swallowed the bitter dose to enact the bill.

The "tariff of abominations" deserves all the abuse which has been heaped upon it. Shapen in political iniquity, it bore upon its face the marks of its origin. High duties for which no one had asked were imposed on certain raw material like pig and bar iron, and hemp, the better quality of which was always in demand and never produced in the United States. Items like the increased duty on molasses and the heavy duty on sail-duck were added to make the bill distasteful to New England. But the woolen industry suffered the most grievous disappointment. Instead of the minimum principle advocated by the Harrisburg Convention, the Act of 1828 established a minimum of one dollar between the minimal points of fifty cents and two dollars and a half. Whereas the proposed rate would have fixed a prohibitory duty on woolens costing about a dollar a yard, the act allowed only a duty of forty-five per cent. "The dollar minimum," as one of the aggrieved manufacturers put it, "was planted in the very midst of the woolen trade."

Again the Middle States and the States of the Ohio Valley united in support of the protective principle. New England was divided against itself. Political considerations weighed heavily with those New Englanders who like Webster voted for the bill. John Randolph hardly exaggerated when he declared that "the bill referred to manufactures of no sort or kind, except the manufacture of a President of the United States."

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

To the bibliography at the close of the preceding chapter only a few titles need be added. The foreign policy of the Adams Administration is well described in F. E. Chadwick's The Relations of the United States and Spain (1909). The stages in the Indian controversy may be traced in U. B. Phillips's Georgia and State Rights (American Historical Association, Report, 1901), and in E. J. Hardin's Life of George M. Troup (1859). E. M. Shepard, Martin Van Buren (1888), and T. D. Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne and His Times (1909), are important biographies. Josiah Quincy's Figures of the Past (1883) contains some interesting sketches of Washington society, while N. Sargent's Public Men and Events (2 vols., 1875) supplies an abundance of political gossip.

CHAPTER XIX

THE RISE OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

Shortly after the Federal Convention of 1787, a friend remarked to Gouverneur Morris, "You have made a good constitution." "That," replied Morris laconically, "depends on how it is construed!" From Washington to Jackson the process of construing the Constitution had gone on, intermittently by the executive and legislative, steadily by the judiciary. "The judiciary of the United States," wrote Jefferson in 1820, "is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working underground to undermine the foundations of our confederate fabric. They are constantly construing our constitution from a coördination of a general and a special government, to a general and supreme one alone. They will lay all things at their feet, and they are too well versed in the English law to forget the maxim, 'boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem.'"

Yet as late as 1800 the federal judiciary had pronounced none of those decisions which were to make it so powerful a factor in the assertion and maintenance of national sovereignty. In declining an appointment as Chief Justice, John Jay wrote to President Adams that he had "left the bench perfectly convinced that under a system so defective, it would not obtain the energy, weight, and dignity, which were essential to its affording due support to the National Government; nor acquire the public confidence and respect which, as the last resort of the justice of the Nation, it should possess."

The uncertainty of the law was in large part responsible for this lack of prestige. "Too great inattention," complained a Boston lawyer, in the Columbian Centinel in 1801, "has hitherto prevailed as to the preservation of the decisions of our courts of law. We have neither authorized nor voluntary reporters. Hence we are compelled to the loose and interested recollections of counsel, or to depend wholly on British decisions." The first systematic attempt to secure records of opinions was made by Connecticut in 1785. Four years later, Ephraim Kirby, a printer in Litchfield, issued "the first regular printed law reports in America." This example was followed in other States; and in 1798 the first volume of United States Supreme Court Reports was published by Dallas.

The great period in the history of the Supreme Court coincides with the thirty-four years during which John Marshall held the office of Chief Justice. President John Adams rendered no more lasting service to the Federalist cause than when he appointed this great Virginian to the bench, for Marshall, if not a Federalist of the strictest sect, was a thoroughgoing nationalist. Down to his appointment only six decisions involving constitutional questions of any moment had been handed down; between 1801 and 1835, sixty-two were rendered, of which Marshall wrote thirty-six. The decisions of the court during "the reign of Marshall" fill thirty volumes of the Reports. Seven hundred and fifty-three cases were taken on appeal to the Supreme Court from the lower federal courts, and in nearly one half of these cases the decisions were reversed.

An American constitutional law did not exist when Marshall took office. Few precedents were available. In some of his important cases Marshall did not cite a single judicial decision. He reached his conclusions by the light of reason. "There, Story," he would say to his associate, "is the law. Now you must find the authorities." In a peculiar sense it is true to say that Marshall both laid the foundations of constitutional law and reared the superstructure, as one of his biographers remarks. But Marshall was ably supported by his colleagues; and he owed much, as he freely admitted, to the arguments of a remarkable body of lawyers of the federal bar. Wirt, Pinkney, and Webster were as truly creators of American constitutional law as the learned justices.

The constitutional importance of the decision of the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison has already been pointed out. In the development of the idea of national sovereignty, the significance of the decision lies in the emphatic assertion that the Supreme Court is the tribunal of last resort in cases involving the constitutionality of acts of Congress.

The first open resistance of a State to federal authority, as asserted by the Supreme Court, occurred in 1809, when the legislature of Pennsylvania interposed its authority to prevent the payment of prize money which had been awarded by a federal district court to Gideon Olmstead and others for their capture of the sloop Active during the Revolution. All efforts to secure a peaceful settlement of this controversy having failed, the Attorney-General, in behalf of Olmstead, applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus, directing Judge Peters of the district court to enforce his judgment. In granting the writ, Chief Justice Marshall pointed out the gravity of the issue. "If the legislatures of the several States," said he, "may at will annul the judgment of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the Constitution becomes a solemn mockery, and the nation is deprived of the means of enforcing its laws by the instrumentality of its own tribunals." Such a conclusion he emphatically repudiated. Reviewing the history of the case with all its details, he reached the uncompromising conclusion that "the State of Pennsylvania can possess no constitutional right to resist the legal process which may be directed in this cause.... A peremptory mandamus must be awarded."

Judge Peters issued the writ, but all efforts of the marshal to serve the writ were thwarted by the state militia. The marshal then summoned a posse comitatus of two thousand men. Bloodshed seemed imminent; but after an ineffectual appeal to the President, the Pennsylvania authorities gave way and paid over the money. Subsequently the officer commanding the militia and others were indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to fine and imprisonment, for resisting the writ of a federal court; but they were pardoned by the President because "they had acted under a mistaken sense of duty."

In this conflict of authority the National Government won at every point. Even the resolution which the legislature adopted in the heat of the controversy, calling for an amendment to the Constitution which should establish "an impartial tribunal to determine disputes between the General and State Governments," met with no approval from other States. Virginia, soon to be of a very different mind, responded that "a tribunal is already provided ... to wit: the Supreme Court, more eminently qualified from their habits and duties, from the mode of their selection, and from the tenure of their offices, to decide the disputes aforesaid in an enlightened and impartial manner, than any other tribunal which could be erected."

In two notable cases, the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of the Judiciary Act of 1789 and asserted its authority to review and reverse decisions of the state courts when those decisions were adverse to alleged federal rights. The opinion in the first case, that of Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, in 1816, was written by Joseph Story, of Massachusetts, who had been appointed to a vacancy on the bench by President Madison. Story was reputed to be a Republican, but he disappointed all expectations by becoming a stanch supporter of nationalist doctrines and only second to Marshall in his influence upon the development of American constitutional law.

The case of Martin v. Hunter's Lessee grew out of the old Fairfax claims which Marshall had represented as counsel before his appointment to the bench. In 1815, the Supreme Court had reversed the decision of the Court of Appeals of Virginia, and ordered the state court to execute the judgment rendered in the lower state court. The judges of the Court of Appeals, headed by Judge Spencer Roane, a bitter opponent of Marshall, formally announced that they would not obey the mandamus, holding that the twenty-fifth section of the Judiciary Act of 1789—that extending the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court over state tribunals—was unconstitutional. The state-rights elements in Virginia quickly rallied to the support of the judges, and the Supreme Court found itself face to face with an incensed public opinion in the Old Dominion. In no wise daunted by this opposition, the Supreme Court reviewed its position in 1816 and again ordered the execution of its judgment.

Five years later, Chief Justice Marshall rendered a similar decision in the case of Cohens v. Virginia. The counsel for the Commonwealth had argued that the appellate jurisdiction conferred by the Constitution on the Supreme Court was merely authority to revise the decisions of the inferior courts of the United States. "Congress," it was contended, "is not authorized to make the supreme court or any other court of a State an inferior court.... The inferior courts spoken of in the Constitution are manifestly to be held by federal judges." "It is the case, not the court, that gives jurisdiction," replied Marshall. "The courts of the United States can, without question, revise the proceedings of the executive and legislative authorities of the States, and if they are found to be contrary to the Constitution may declare them to be of no legal validity. Surely the exercise of the same right over judicial tribunals is not a higher or more dangerous act of sovereign power."

It was in the course of this decision that Marshall asserted in unmistakable language the sovereignty of the National Government. "The people made the Constitution and the people can unmake it.... But this supreme and irresistible power to make or to unmake resides only in the whole body of the people; not in any subdivision of them. The attempts of any of the parts to exercise it is usurpation, and ought to be repelled by those to whom the people have delegated the power of repelling it.... The framers of the Constitution were indeed unable to make any provisions which should protect that instrument against a general combination of the States, or of the people for its destruction; and conscious of this inability, they have not made the attempt. But they were able to provide against the operation of measures adopted in any one State, whose tendency might be to arrest the execution of the laws; and this it was the part of wisdom to attempt. We think they have attempted it."

Between these notable Virginia cases was decided, in 1819, the case of M'Culloch v. Maryland, in which the Chief Justice sustained the constitutionality of the act establishing the National Bank, and declared a state law imposing a tax on a branch of the Bank unconstitutional and void. In the course of his opinion, which followed much the same line of reasoning that Alexander Hamilton had employed, Marshall stated in classic phraseology the doctrine of liberal construction. Holding that the Constitution was not a code of law, but a document marking out in large characters the powers of government, he sought, among the enumerated powers, not the lesser, but the great substantive, powers necessary to the purposes of the Union. These substantive powers, however, carry with them many incidental (Hamilton said resulting) powers, among which a choice may freely be made to achieve the desired and legitimate end. "Let the end be legitimate," said Marshall, "let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are constitutional." In an earlier decision (United States v. Fisher, 1804), indeed, Marshall had refused to concede the force of the argument that the Federal Government was clothed only with the powers indispensably necessary to exercise powers expressly granted to it. "Congress must possess the choice of means which are in fact conducive to the exercise of a power granted by the Constitution."

The cumulative effect of these decisions was to provoke a violent reaction in Virginia. Under the pen-name "Algernon Sidney," Judge Roane renewed his attacks upon the Chief Justice in violent and at times offensive language. "The judgment before us," he declared, referring to the case of Cohens v. Virginia, "will not be less disastrous in its consequences, than any of these memorable judgments [of the time of Charles I]. It completely negatives the idea, that the American States have a real existence, or are to be considered, in any sense, as sovereign and independent States." It seemed to Jefferson that the powerful arguments of Roane completely "pulverized" every word which had been uttered by John Marshall. John Taylor of Caroline, however, was the philosophical exponent of this reactionary movement. In his Construction Construed (1820), Tyranny Unmasked (1822), and New Views of the Constitution (1823), he pointed out the manifest tendency of the decisions of the Supreme Court and suggested the "state veto" as the remedy against usurpation of power by the Supreme Court or by Congress. The legislature of Virginia indorsed an amendment to the Constitution drafted by Judge Roane which would have limited the jurisdiction of the federal courts, where the rights of the States were concerned, and which would have forbidden appeals from the courts of a State to any court of the United States. Beyond such remonstrances and protests, however, public opinion in Virginia was not prepared to go at this time.

The judges of the Supreme Court could not remain indifferent to these assaults. "If, indeed, the Judiciary is to be destroyed," wrote Story, "I should be glad to have the decisive blow now struck, while I am young, and can return to my profession and earn an honest livelihood." But he added, "For the Judges of the Supreme Court there is but one course to pursue. That is, to do their duty firmly and honestly, according to their best judgments."

It was in this spirit that the court rendered judgment in the case of Green v. Biddle (1823), which gave deep offense to the people of Kentucky by setting aside as unconstitutional the so-called "Occupying Claimant Laws." The remonstrance of the legislature was all the more bitter because the decision had been rendered by a bench of only four judges, one of whom dissented from the majority opinion. The resolutions of the legislature demanded a reorganization of the court in such wise that the concurrence of at least two thirds of the judges should be necessary in an opinion affecting the validity of state laws. And when Congress made no response, the lower House called upon the governor to express his opinion "whether it may be advisable to call forth the physical power of the State to resist the execution of the decisions of the court, or in what manner the mandates of said court should be met by disobedience." But Kentucky like Virginia kept well within the legal limits of petition and remonstrance.

In Ohio, also, there was an ominous spirit of resistance to the force of precedent. Notwithstanding the decision of the court in the case of M'Culloch v. Maryland, the general assembly of that State not only enacted a law to tax the local branch of the National Bank, but actually seized the amount of the tax. Suit was thereupon brought against the state auditor; and in spite of the vigorous remonstrance of the legislature, the Supreme Court again sustained the constitutionality of the Bank and declared the state tax unconstitutional. The State was ultimately obliged to make restitution of the funds of the Bank.

Meantime, the national judiciary had contributed to the expansion of the Constitution in notable ways; sometimes by affirming the constitutionality of powers exercised by the President or Congress, and at other times by narrowing the limits of state authority. In the case of the American Insurance Company v. Canter, twenty-five years after the acquisition of Louisiana, Marshall affirmed the constitutionality of the treaty which had so aroused Jefferson's misgivings. "The Constitution," said the Chief Justice, "confers absolutely on the Government of the Union the powers of making war and of making treaties; consequently, that Government possesses the power of acquiring territory, either by conquest or by treaty."

In two instances, on the other hand, the Supreme Court gave an interpretation of the "obligation of contracts" clause of the Constitution which seriously limited the powers of the States. In the case of Fletcher v. Peck (1810), the court declared unconstitutional an act of the legislature of Georgia which attempted to revoke the notorious Yazoo land grants of 1795. A grant was held to be a contract within the meaning of the Constitution; and the court found no adequate ground for exempting such contracts from the prohibition of the Constitution.

Far-reaching in its implication, also, was the second instance, when the Supreme Court held unconstitutional and void the acts of the New Hampshire legislature which amended the charter granted by the Crown to Dartmouth College in 1769. Arguing as counsel for the college, of which he was an honored graduate, Daniel Webster held that the charter of a private corporation was a contract which might not be impaired by an act of a state legislature. Chief Justice Marshall only restated and amplified Webster's argument, when he rendered the opinion of the court and declared that New Hampshire might not by law impair the charter of Dartmouth College. To the argument of the counsel for the Commonwealth, contending that the framers of the Constitution never contemplated such a broad use of the word "contract," Marshall replied that it was not enough to say this particular use of the word was not in the mind of the Convention when the article was adopted. "It is necessary to go farther, and to say that, had this particular case been suggested, the language would have been so varied as to exclude it, or it would have been made a special exception."

The immense significance of this decision was not immediately apparent. The peculiar immunity which it gave to private property could not be appreciated until the rise of corporations with concentrated capital. Not even the Chief Justice foresaw that the guaranty of inviolability which he had thrown about a private educational corporation would be demanded with equal right by the great business corporations of the succeeding era.

In the famous case of Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), the Supreme Court gave an interpretation of the commerce clause of the Constitution which also had a profound effect upon subsequent history. In the course of its decision the court declared unconstitutional a law of the State of New York which had granted an exclusive right to operate steamboats in the waters of New York. The regulation of commerce, the court held, had been given exclusively to Congress, and "commerce" as used in the Constitution comprehended not merely traffic and intercourse but also navigation. The power to regulate was regarded as a unit. In regulating commerce with foreign nations, the power of Congress does not stop at the jurisdictional lines of the several States. "If a foreign voyage may commence or terminate at a port within a State, then the power of Congress may be exercised within a State." Similarly, the court reasoned that commerce "among the States" cannot stop at the external boundary of each State. "Commerce among the States must of necessity be commerce with the States." In short, while expressly disclaiming that Congress had the power to regulate the internal commerce of a State, the court asserted the complete control of Congress over inter-state commerce so far as navigation was concerned. The deeper significance of this interpretation of the commerce clause appeared only when railroads began to span the continent and the jurisdictional lines of States were crossed and re-crossed by an ever-increasing volume of trade.

Twenty-five years had wrought a vast change in the position of the national judiciary in the American constitutional system. "It is now seen on every hand," wrote Attorney-General Wirt, urging the appointment of Chancellor Kent to a vacancy on the Supreme Court bench, "that the functions to be performed by the Supreme Court of the United States are among the most difficult and perilous which are to be performed under the Constitution. They demand the loftiest range of talents and learning and a soul of Roman purity and firmness. The questions which come before them frequently involve the fate of the Constitution, the happiness of the whole Nation, and even its peace as it concerns other nations." In the light of the decisions reviewed, the nationalizing tendency of the federal judiciary is unmistakable. But a constitutional reaction had set in; and even while John Marshall was setting forth the doctrine of national sovereignty in its most uncompromising form, John C. Calhoun in the quiet of his estate in South Carolina was elaborating a defense of state rights on premises which the great Chief Justice had combated for a quarter of a century.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

An adequate history of the Supreme Court has yet to be written. H. L. Carson, The History of the Supreme Court of the United States, with biographies of all the chief and associate justices (2 vols., 1902-04), and H. Flanders, The Lives and Times of the Chief-Justices of the Supreme Court (2 vols., 1855-58), are serviceable works. The best selection of cases on constitutional law is that by J. B. Thayer, Cases in Constitutional Law (2 vols., 1894-95). Some of the more important decisions may be found abridged in Allen Johnson's Readings in American Constitutional History (1912). W. W. Willoughby, The Supreme Court: its History and Influence in our Constitutional System (1890), and The American Constitutional System (1904), are interesting volumes by an authority on constitutional law. J. P. Kennedy, Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt (2 vols., 1850); G. J. McRee, Life and Correspondence of James Iredell (2 vols., 1857-58); W. W. Story, Life and Letters of Joseph Story (2 vols., 1851); and G. T. Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster (2 vols., 1870), contribute to an understanding of the relation of the federal bench and bar. Especially valuable is Charles Warren's History of the American Bar, Colonial and Federal, to 1860 (1911). The progress of American law is reviewed in Two Centuries' Growth of American Law, 1701-1901, by members of the faculty of the Yale Law School.

INDEX

Adams, Abigail, , .

Adams, John, Minister to England, ;
demands Western posts, ;
on the adoption of the Constitution, ;
elected Vice-President, ;
on the President's address, ;
re-elected Vice-President, ;
candidate for the Presidency, ;
elected President, ;
his attitude toward France, ;
appoints commissioners, 96-97;
urges preparations for war, ;
sends X Y Z letters to Congress, ;
appoints officers of army, 101-02;
at odds with Hamilton faction, ;
resumes relations with France, 103-04;
his title to fame, ;
pardons Fries, ;
candidate for Presidency (1800), ;
and federal judiciary, 121-22;
presidential elector (1820), ;
on European entanglements, 289-90;
offers Chief Justiceship to Jay, .

Adams, John Quincy, and the practice of law, ;
on the new Constitution, ;
special envoy to England, ;
secures amendment of Jay Treaty, ;
defends the embargo, ;
resigns from Senate, ;
commissioner at Ghent, 227-29;
on Jackson's invasion of Florida, ;
his reply to Spain, 262-63;
on recognition of South American Republics, 290-91;
challenges British claims on Pacific, ;
on future of Cuba, 292-93;
protests Russian claims on the Pacific Coast, ;
advises against joint declaration with England, ;
candidate for the Presidency (1824), ;
favors internal improvements, ;
favors Tariff of 1824, ;
his electoral vote (1824), ;
wins Clay's following, 313-14;
elected President by the House, ;
appoints Clay Secretary of State, ;
his first message, 318-19;
and the civil service, 318-19;
on the Panama Congress, , ;
and the Creek Indians, 324-26;
and the Cherokee Indians, 326-27.

Adet, French Minister to United States, interferes in the election of 1800, 92-93;
on Jefferson as an American, .

Agriculture, American, 126-27.

Alabama, admitted as a State, .

Alien and Sedition Acts, ;
petitions for the repeal of, ;
expiration of, .

Allston, Washington, .

Ambrister, Robert C., 261-62.

Amelia Island, entrepôt for neutral trade, ;
occupied by the United States, ;
evacuated, .

American character, disclosed by the war, 232-33.

American Insurance Company v. Canter, 341-42.

American literature, want of, ;
from 1815 to 1830, .

Ames, Fisher, on the heads of departments, 89-90;
on the Republican opposition, ;
on democracy, 161-62.

Annapolis Trade Convention, .

Anthology and Boston Review, .

Anti-Federalists, and the Constitution, .

Appointments, by Washington, 54-55;
by John Adams, ;
by Jefferson, 130-31;
by John Q. Adams, 318-19.

Arbuthnot, Alexander, 261-62.

Army, at the establishment of Government, ;
provisional, in 1798, 101-03;
at the beginning of the War of 1812, ;
after the War of 1812, .

Articles of Confederation, proposed amendments to, ;
inadequacy of, 16-17, 21-24, 25-27.

Assumption of state debts, 58-61.

Ballou, Hosea, .

Baltimore, and Western trade, , .

Bancroft, George, .

Bank of the United States, opposed by Jefferson, ;
advocated by Hamilton, ;
charter of, ;
speculation in the stock of, 63-64;
Congress refuses to recharter, ;
charter of the second, 239-40;
management of, ;
investigation of, ;
popular hostility to, 267-68;
taxation of the branches of, .

Baptists, in New England, ;
in the West, 301-02.

Barbour, James, .

Baumeler, Joseph, , .

Bayard, James A., and the election of 1801, 118-19;
commissioner at Ghent, .

Benton, Thomas H., on the election of 1825, 315-16.

Berlin Decree, of Napoleon, ;
its revocation, .

Bible Society of the United States, .

Bladensburg, battle of, .

Blennerhassett, Harman, and Burr, 172-73, 175-76.

Blockade of American ports by British cruisers, 181-82, , , .

Blount conspiracy, .

Bonus Bill, advocated by Calhoun, ;
vetoed by Madison, .

Boone, Daniel, .

Boston, as an intellectual and literary center, .

Bowdoin, Governor James, and Shays' Rebellion, 20-21;
suggests convention of the States, .

Breckenridge, John, .

Brown, Jacob, .

Brown, Moses, .

Bryant, William Cullen, .

Burr, Aaron, candidate for the Vice-Presidency (1796), ;
on politics in Connecticut, ;
carries the city of New York (1800), 115-16;
elected Vice-President (1800), ;
candidate for Governor of New York, ;
approached by Federalists, 165-66;
his duel with Hamilton, ;
his intrigues, 172-73;
his expedition, 173-76;
his arrest and trial, 176-78.

Cabot, George, .

Calhoun, John C., repudiates peaceable coercion, ;
favors Tariff of 1816, ;
his nationalism, 241-42;
on constitutional limitations, ;
his Bonus Bill, ;
Secretary of War, ;
candidate for the Presidency, ;
candidate for the Vice-Presidency, ;
elected Vice-President, ;
on the Tariff of 1828, 328-29;
elaborates his defense of state rights, .

Campbell, Alexander, .

Canada, proposed conquest of, , .

Canals, constructed and projected, in 1825, 255-56.

Canning, George, and the Chesapeake affair, ;
on the embargo, ;
on British naval losses, ;
on intervention, ;
overtures to Rush, ;
on the new doctrine of President Monroe, .

Capital, location of the national, 60-61;
removed from Philadelphia to Washington, 119-21.

Caucus,
congressional (1800), ;
(1804), ;
(1808), 193-94;
(1812), ;
(1816), ;
hostility to, , ;
(1824), .
legislative, .

Channing, William E., .

Chase, Samuel, impeachment of, 139-41.

Cherokee Indians, in Georgia, 326-27.

Chesapeake Bay, navigation of, 27-28;
British military operations in, 221-23.

Chesapeake, United States frigate, and the Leopard, 184-86;
reparation offered for, ;
avenged, ;
captured, .

Chippewa, battle of, .

Cincinnati, Society of the, .

Civil service. See Appointments.

Claiborne, W. C. C., Governor of the Mississippi Territory, reports withdrawal of the right of deposit, ;
takes possession of West Florida, .

Clark, George Rogers, and Genet, 74-75.

Clay, Henry, his early career, 202-03;
in the Senate, ;
Speaker of the House, ;
commissioner at Ghent, , ;
his nationalism, 241-42;
on the National Bank Bill, ;
opposes the Florida Treaty, 264-65;
on the extension of slavery, ;
on the admission of Missouri, ;
on the counting of the electoral vote (1820), ;
advocates an American system, ;
candidate for the Presidency (1824), 307-08;
on internal improvements, 309-10;
urges a protective tariff, ;
favors the Tariff of 1824, ;
his electoral vote (1824), ;
and Jackson, , , ;
and Crawford, ;
and Adams, 313-14;
accepts Secretaryship of State, ;
denies corrupt-bargain charge, 313-15;
favors Panama Congress, ;
on the status of Cuba, .

Clinton, De Witt, nominated for the Presidency (1812), ;
promotes the Erie Canal, 255-56.

Clinton, George, candidate for Vice-Presidency (1792), ;
elected Vice-President (1804), ;
candidate for the Presidency (1808), .

Cohens v. Virginia, 336-37.

Colonization Society, .

Commerce,
foreign, during the Revolution, ;
restrictions upon, , ;
power to regulate, ;
revival of, 46-47;
aggressions on, 76-77, 86-87;
and Jay's Treaty, 85-87;
Mississippi opened to, ;
during European wars, , 179-80;
during the War of 1812, ;
after the Treaty of Ghent, 233-34.
internal,
between South and Northwest, 252-53;
along the Mississippi, 253-54;
between East and other sections, 254-56.

Commonwealth v. Caton, .

Compromises of the Constitution, 33-35.

Congress,
of the Confederation, and finance, 5-6;
peregrinations of, ;
and foreign commerce, 7-8;
and the public domain, ;
organizes the Northwest Territory, 10-12;
and the State of Franklin, ;
and Shays' Rebellion, 21-22;
and the Annapolis Convention, 28-29;
and the new Constitution, , .
of the new Union, elections to, ;
assembles, ;
organizes, ;
attends the counting of the electoral vote, ;
hears the inaugural address, , ;
enters upon its duties, .

Connecticut, favors the open door, ;
ratifies the Constitution, ;
refuses call for militia, ;
and the Hartford Convention, ;
adopts a new Constitution, ;
suffrage in, ;
authorizes first law reports, .

Connecticut Wits, the, .

Constitution of the United States, drafting of, 30-35;
publication of, 35-38;
ratification of, 39-43;
voting on, 43-44;
first amendments to, ;
Twelfth Amendment to, 166-67;
judicial interpretation of, 331-45.

Constitution, United States frigate, captures L'Insurgente, ;
captures the Guerrière, ;
captures the Java, .

Constitutions, of new States, 303-04;
of the old States, 304-05.

Convention of 1787, origin, 28-29;
choice of delegates to, ;
proceedings of, 30-38;
journal of, ;
its work, 35-36.

Cooper, J. Fenimore, .

Corrupt-bargain cry, in 1825, 313-15.

Cotton gin, invention of, ;
effect of, 127-28.

Cotton-growing, spread of, , 249-51.

Cotton manufacturing, beginnings of, ;
after the embargo, 234-35;
after the Peace of Ghent, 235-36.

Court reports, first published, .

Courts, federal.

See Federal judiciary, Judiciary Act, etc.

Crawford, William H., candidate for presidential nomination (1816), 243-44;
nominated for the Presidency (1824), ;
on internal improvements, ;
on the Tariff of 1824, ;
his electoral vote (1824), ;
his vote in the election by the House, .

Creek Indians, rising of, ;
capitulation of, ;
in East Florida, ;
lands in Georgia, 324-26.

Crisis of 1819, 266-67.

Cuba, interest of the United States in, , .

Cumberland Road. See National Road.

Currency, under the Confederation, ;
after the War of 1812, 238-39, 240-41.

Cushing, William, .

Cutler, Manasseh, 11-12.

Dallas, A. J., Secretary of the Treasury, and the tariff, 237-38;
and the new National Bank, .

Dartmouth College Case, 342-43.

Davis, Jefferson, father of, .

Dearborn, Henry, Secretary of War, 130-31;
in the War of 1812, , .

Decatur, Stephen, , .

Delaware, instructs delegates to the Federal Convention, ;
ratifies the Constitution, .

Democracy in the United States, 298-301, 303-07.

Democratic societies, founded, ;
condemned by Washington, 83-84.

Demos Krateo principle, 315-16.

Dennie, Joseph, .

Departments, executive, organized, 51-52;
Fisher Ames on, 89-90.

Deposit, right of, at New Orleans, ;
withdrawn, .

Detroit, surrender of, .

Dorchester, Lord, Governor of Canada, 68, 78-79.

Duties on imports, proposed in 1781, 1783, .

Dwight, Timothy, his Conquest of Canaan, ;
on the back-country people, .

East Florida, revolution in, ;
occupied by United States, ;
rendezvous, 259-60;
invaded by Jackson, 260-62.

Ellsworth, Oliver, 53-54.

Embargo Act, of 1794, ;
of 1807, 188-89;
enforcement of, 190-91, 194-95;
as a coercive weapon, , ;
effect of, 191-93;
in New England, , ;
repeal of, ;
of 1812, .

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, .

Emigration, from New England, 247-48;
from the Middle States, ;
from the South, .

Era of Good Feelings, .

Erie Canal, construction of, 255-56.

Erskine, D. M., British Minister to the United States, .

Essex, case of the, .

Essex Junto, , , .

Everett, Edward, .

Executive Departments, establishment of, 51-52.

Fallen Timber, battle of, 80-81.

Far West, 258-59.

Fauchet, J. A. J., succeeds Genet, ;
urges acquisition of Louisiana, .

Fearon, Henry B., , .

Federal Convention of 1787. See Convention of 1787.

Federalist, the, .

Federalist party, origin of, 39-40.
See also Presidential elections.

Finances, of the Confederation, 5-6;
of the new Government, 50-51, 56-64.

Fiscal administration, beginnings of national, .

Fisheries, discussed at Ghent, ;
in the Convention of 1818, .

Fletcher v. Peck, , .

Floridas, controversy over the boundaries of, , ;
northern boundary settled, ;
proposed purchase of, ;
and the province of Louisiana, 151, 158-59;
sought by Jefferson, 170-71;
acquisition of, .

Florida Treaty, 264-65.

Foreign-born in the United States, 245-46.

Foster, A. J., British Minister to the United States, .

France, concessions to American commerce, ;
covets Spanish colonies, 70-71;
sends Genet to United States, 71-72;
demands rights under treaties of 1778, 72-73;
substitutes Fauchet for Genet, ;
opens colonies to neutral trade, 76-77;
attempts to procure Louisiana, ;
offended at Jay's Treaty, 92-93;
refuses to receive Pinckney, ;
the X Y Z affair, 98-99;
involved in hostilities with United States, ;
convention of 1800, , ;
acquires Louisiana, ;
expedition against Santo Domingo, 146-47;
cedes Louisiana to United States, , ;
continental system, 187-88;
and the embargo, 191-92;
sequesters American vessels, 199-200;
withdraws decrees, .

Franklin, Benjamin, in the Convention of 1787, , .

Franklin, State of, .

French Revolution, influence on America, .

Freneau, Philip, 65-66, .

Fries Rebellion, .

Fulton, Robert, .

Gallatin, Albert, Representative, ;
on the treaty-making power, 90-91;
Secretary of the Treasury, ;
his policy of retrenchment, 132-33;
and the Mediterranean Fund, ;
urges enforcement of the embargo, ;
recommends war taxes, ;
commissioner at Ghent, , ;
and the Convention of 1818, ;
on equality in Pennsylvania, .

Gardoqui, Don Diego de, Spanish Minister to United States, .

Genet, E. C., French Minister to United States, 71-72;
designs on Florida and Louisiana, ;
sets up prize courts, 73-74;
revolutionary activities, 73-75;
discredited, ;
recalled, .

Georgia, ratifies the Constitution, ;
and the Yazoo land grants, 168-70;
and the Creek Indians, ;
protests against the Treaty of Washington, ;
and the Indian lands, 325-26;
protests against the tariff, .

Gerry, Elbridge, commissioner to France, ;
and the X Y Z affair, 98-100;
elected Vice-President (1812), .

Ghent, Treaty of, preliminary negotiations, 227-29;
terms of, 229-30.

Gibbons v. Ogden, 343-45.

Giles, William, resolution censuring Hamilton, ;
on the reform of the judiciary, 134-35;
on impeachment, .

Gray, Captain Robert, of the Columbia, .

Great Britain, imposes restriction on American commerce, ;
refuses commercial treaty, ;
retains Western posts, ;
Nootka Sound affair, ;
policy in the Northwest, 68-70;
and the Rule of 1756, 76-77;
preys on neutral commerce, 77-78;
and the Jay Treaty, 84-88;
and the Blount conspiracy, ;
and the case of the Essex, ;
exercises right of search, ;
condones impressment, ;
evades reparation for the Chesapeake affair, ;
demands recall of proclamation, ;
retaliates for French decrees, ;
and the embargo, ;
repudiates Erskine Treaty, ;
recalls Jackson, ;
and the withdrawal of French decrees, ;
offers reparation for the Chesapeake affair, ;
blockades New York, ;
incurs American hostility, 208-10;
withdraws orders in council, ;
and the War of 1812, 212-30;
declines Russian mediation, ;
negotiates for peace, ;
concludes Treaty of Ghent, 228-29;
concludes Convention of 1818, ;
aroused by Jackson's Florida campaign, ;
and the European congresses, ;
protests against intervention, ;
overtures to the United States, 292-94.

Green v. Biddle, .

Greenville, Treaty of, ;
disregarded by settlers, .

Grenville, Lord, negotiates with Jay, , .

Griswold, Roger, on the treaty-making power, ;
and the project of a New England confederacy, ;
on the office of Vice-President, .

Grundy, Felix, .

Guerrière, British frigate, , .

Hamilton, Alexander, defends Waddington, ;
drafts Annapolis report, ;
on the opposition to the Constitution, ;
contributes to the Federalist papers, ;
and the bill to establish the Treasury Department, ;
Secretary of the Treasury, ;
first Report on the Public Credit, 56-60;
alleged deal with Jefferson, 61-62;
second Report, 61-62;
on the National Bank Bill, 62-63;
on the French treaties, ;
defends Jay's Treaty, ;
retires from the Treasury, ;
and the Presidency, ;
advises recall of Monroe, ;
major-general, ;
urges enforcement of Alien Act, ;
hostility to John Adams, ;
opposes Federalist alliance with Burr, ;
duel with Burr, .

Hard times, under the Confederation, 2-3;
in 1819-20, 268-69.

Harmar, Fort, seat of government in the Northwest, .

Harrisburg Convention, 327-28.

Harrison, William Henry, concludes Indian treaties, 205-06;
wins battle of Tippecanoe, ;
in the War of 1812, 217-18.

Hartford Convention, origin of, 224-25;
journal of, ;
report of, 225-27.

Harvard College, .

Hayne, Robert Y., on the Panama Mission, 322-23.

Henry of Prussia, Prince, and the regency of the United States, .

Hicks, Elias, .

Holy Alliance, designs of the so-called, .

Hopkinson, Joseph, .

Horseshoe Bend, battle of, .

Hudson's Bay Company, .

Hull, Captain Isaac, captures the Guerrière, .

Hull, General William, surrenders Detroit, .

Ildefonso, Treaty of, .

Illinois, settlement of, ;
admitted as a State, .

Immigration into the United States, .

Impeachment, of Senator Blount, ;
of Judge Pickering, 138-39;
of Justice Chase, 139-41.

Impressment of American seamen, in 1793-94, 77-78;
not mentioned in the Jay Treaty, 84-85;
condoned by the British Admiralty, ;
deeply resented in United States in 1806, ;
abolition demanded by Monroe, ;
as a cause of the War of 1812, ;
in the negotiations at Ghent, 228
and the Treaty of Ghent, 229-30.

Imprisonment for debt, .

Indiana, settlement of, ;
admitted as a State, .

Indian Treaties in the Northwest, 205-06.

Industry, during the Revolution, ;
revival of, ;
protection of, in the tariff of 1789, ;
growth of, .
See also special industries, and Tariff Acts.

Ingersoll, Jared, .

Internal improvements, popular demand for, ;
carried on by States, 255-56;
proposed by Gallatin in 1806, ;
Calhoun's Bonus Bill, ;
Madison on, ;
Monroe on, ;
in Congress, , ;
Survey Bill, .

Intervention of the Great Powers, in Italy, ;
in Spain, .

Irving, Washington, , .

Jackson, Andrew, wins battle of Horseshoe Bend, ;
concludes treaty with the Creeks, ;

wins the battle of New Orleans, ;
invades East Florida, 261-62;
on precedent, ;
on rotation in office, ;
candidate for the Presidency (1824), 307-08;
favors Survey Bill, ;
favors protective policy, ;
his electoral vote (1824), ;
his vote in the House election, ;
and Clay, ;
significance of his popular vote, ;
candidate for the Presidency (1828), .

Jackson, F. J., British Minister to United States, .

Jacobinism, , , .

Jay, John, diplomatic agent of United States, ;
contributes to the Federalist papers, ;
appointed Chief justice, ;
envoy extraordinary to England, ;
drafts treaty, ;
declines appointment as Chief Justice, 331-32.

Jay Treaty, negotiated, ;
discussed in Senate, 84-85;
evaluation of, 85-86;
popular opinion of, ;
amended in Senate, 86-87;
promulgated by President, ;
debated in the House, 90-91;
gives offense to France, 92-93.

Jefferson, Thomas, Ordinance of 1784, ;
Secretary of State, ;
on speculation in government paper, ;
on assumption, 60-61;
on the excise, ;
on the Bank Bill, 62-63;
his distrust of Hamilton, ;
fears British designs on Louisiana, ;
on the French treaties, ;
proposes retaliatory legislation against England, ;
candidate for the Presidency (1796), ;
elected Vice-President, ;
on war message of Adams, ;
drafts Kentucky Resolutions, ;
candidate for the Presidency (1800), ;
directs political campaign of 1800, ;
elected President, ;
on the Revolution of 1800, ;
personal appearance, ;
on husbandry, ;
on commerce and coercion, ;
inaugural address, 129-30;
on the work of the general Government, ;
and the patronage, 131-33;
mastery of Congress, 132, 133-34;
on retrenchment, 132-33;
on the judiciary, 134-35, , ;
on impeachment, ;
on the navy, ;
on the retrocession of Louisiana, ;
instructions to Livingston, ;
his information about Louisiana, ;
authorizes Lewis and Clark expedition, ;
on the acquisition of Louisiana, 153-54;
on New England Federalism, 162-63;
reëlected President (1804), ;
attempts to acquire the Floridas, 170-71;
his proclamation against Burr, ;
sends Pinkney to England, ;
and the Chesapeake affair, ;
recommends embargo, ;
abdicates, ;
favors protection of manufactures, ;
on Canning's overtures, ;
on internal improvements, .

Johnson, R. M., .

Judicial review, power of, , , 137-38.

Judiciary Act, of 1789, passed, 53-54;
tested, 335-37;
of 1801, passed, 121-22;
repealed, 134-35.

Judiciary, federal, organized, 53-54;
reorganized, 121-22;
and Republican reforms, 134-35;
feared by Jefferson, ;
influence in 1800, 331-32;
controversy with Pennsylvania, 333-35;
controversy with Virginia, 336-37, 338-39;
expands the Constitution, 341-45;
nationalizing influence, .

Kent, James, on universal suffrage, ;
his appointment to the Supreme Court urged, .

Kentucky, separatist movement in, ;
admitted as a State, ;
intrigues in, ;
radical legislation in, ;
protests against the decision of court in Green v. Biddle, .

King, Rufus, candidate for the Vice-Presidency, , ;
elected Vice-President, ;
on slavery in Missouri, .

Kirby, Ephraim, .

Knox, Henry, refuses to serve in the provisional army, ;
Secretary of War, , ;
and Shays' Rebellion, .

Kremer, George, .

L'Ambuscade, French frigate, .

Land Act of 1820, .

Land Ordinance of 1785, .

Lands, disposal of the public, 10-12, 269-70.

Latrobe, Benjamin H., , .

Leander, British frigate, 181-82.

Leclerc, V. E., expedition against Santo Domingo, 146-47, .

Lee, Henry, and the Whiskey Insurrection, .

Leopard-Chesapeake affair, 184-86.

Lewis and Clark expedition, 152-53.

Lincoln, Abraham, father of, ;
education of, .

Lincoln, Levi, 130-31.

L'Insurgente, French frigate, .

Little Belt, British sloop-of-war, .

Little Sarah affair, .

Livingston, Robert, Minister to France, 148-49;
negotiates for Louisiana, 150-51;
on the bounds of Louisiana, 151, 158-59.

Louisiana, Spanish province, threatened by France, ;
retroceded to France, ;
acquired by the United States, 149-51;
Senate opposition to, 155-56;
provision for the government of, 156-58;
transfer of, ;
bounds of, 158-59;
western boundary settled, .

Lowndes, William, .

Lundy's Lane, battle of, .

Lyon, Matthew, prosecution of, .

M'Culloch v. Maryland, , 337-38.

Macdonough, Thomas, wins battle of Plattsburg, 221-22.

McHenry, James, Secretary of War, , .

Maclay, William, on the President's address, ;
on the Judiciary Act, .

Macon bills, .

Macon, Nathaniel, Speaker of the House, 133-34;
on non-intercourse, .

Madison, James, on affairs in Georgia, ;
on state jealousies, ;
in the Federal Convention, 29-30;
contributes to the Federalist papers, ;
proposes constitutional amendments, ;
on stock-jobbing, 63-64;
on Hamilton's financial policy, ;
proposes retaliatory legislation (1793), ;
drafts Virginia Resolutions, 110-11;
Secretary of State, ;
on the Yazoo commission, ;
favors peaceable coercion, 180-81;
on impressments, ;
and George Rose, ;
elected President, ;
and Erskine, ;
and Jackson, ;
issues proclamation against England, ;
authorizes occupation of West Florida, ;
and the war party, 208-09;
recommends an embargo, ;
his war message, 209-10;
his proclamation of war, ;
reëlected President (1812), 216-17;
and New England, , ;
his estimate of the war, 231-32;
favors mild protection of industries, ;
vetoes Bank Bill, ;
signs second Bank Bill, ;
message of 1815, ;
his farewell address, , ;
on Canning's overtures, .

Magazines as literature, 1815-30, .

Mahan, Admiral A. T., on the War of 1812, .

Maine, the admission of, 275-77;
suffrage in, .

Malbone, Edward G., .

Manufactures, beginnings of, , .
See special industries.

Marbury v. Madison, case of, 136-37;
constitutional importance of, .

Marietta, founding of, .

Marshall, John, on the Constitution as the expression of the will of the people, ;
commissioner to France, ;
and the X Y Z affair, 98-100;
appointed Chief Justice, ;
and Jefferson, ;
opinion in Marbury v. Madison, 136-37, ;
at the trial of Burr, 177-78;
influence of, 332-33;
opinion in United States v. Peters, ;
opinion in Cohens v. Virginia, 336-37;
opinion in M'Culloch v. Maryland, 337-38;
opinion in United States v. Fisher, ;
opinion in American Insurance Company v. Canter, 341-42;
opinion in Fletcher v. Peck, ;
opinion in Dartmouth College Case, 342-43;
opinion in Gibbons v. Ogden, 343-45.

Martin, Luther, , .

Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, 335-36.

Maryland, commercial differences with Virginia, 27-28;
ratifies the Constitution, ;
taxes branch bank, .

Mason, George, .

Massachusetts, disorders in, 19-20;
Shays' Rebellion, 20-22;
ratifies the Constitution, ;
refuses call for militia, ;
calls Hartford Convention, ;
dispatches commissioners to Washington, ;
suffrage in, .

Mediterranean Fund, .

Methodism, in New England, ;
in the West, 301-02.

Metternich, Prince, and the Holy Alliance, 291-92.

Migration, inter-state, after the Revolution, 13-14;
after the War of 1812, 246-47.

Milan Decree, issued by Napoleon, ;
withdrawn, .

Militia question, in Massachusetts, , .

Miranda, Francisco, .

Missionary enterprises, .

Mississippi, admitted as a State, ;
suffrage in, .

Mississippi River, navigation of, , , .

Missouri, admission as a State, , ;
electoral vote in 1820, .

Missouri Compromise, the, .

Missouri controversy, political aspects, 274-75;
and public opinion, ;
constitutional aspects, 276-77;
settlement, , .

Monroe, James, Minister to France, 94-95;
recalled, ;
and the purchase of Louisiana, 149-50;
Minister to England, 183-84;
candidate for the Presidency (1808), ;
elected President (1816), ;
on internal improvements, ;
and General Jackson, 260-63;
reëlected President (1820), ;
on recognition of South American republics, ;
on Canning's overtures, ;
re-drafts message, ;
message of 1823, 295-96;
vetoes Cumberland Road Bill, ;
pardons Pennsylvania militiamen, 334-35.

Monroe Doctrine, genesis of, 289-95;
in the President's message, 295-96;
Canning on, ;
implications of, 296-97, .

Moore, Thomas, on American letters, .

Morfontaine, Treaty of, , .

Mormonism, rise of, .

Morris, Gouverneur, in Federal Convention, 35-36;
on the Constitution, .

Morris, Robert, Superintendent of Finance, .

Napoleon Bonaparte, concludes convention with United States, ;
acquires Louisiana, ;
sends Leclerc against Santo Domingo, ;
sells Louisiana to United States, 149-50;
his Berlin Decree, ;
his Milan Decree, ;
sequesters American vessels, 189-200;
and the embargo, 191-92;
revokes decrees, .

National Gazette, Republican newspaper, .

National Road, construction of,

;
appropriations for, ;
bill for collection of tolls on, .

Naturalization Act, of 1798, ;
of 1801, 135-36.

Navigation laws, want of power in Congress to pass, ;
of the States, ;
passed by Congress (1789), ;
and shipping, .

Navy of the United States, in 1798-99, ;
under Jefferson, ;
in Tripolitan War, 144-45;
in the War of 1812, 212-30, passim.

Navy Department, established, .

Neutrality, proclamation of, 72-73.

Neutral trade. See Commerce.

New England Confederacy, projected in 1804, 163-66.

New England Federalism, characteristics of, 161-63;
and the embargo, 192-93, 195-96.

New Hampshire, ratifies the Constitution, ;
on assumption, ;
and the Hartford Convention, .

New Jersey, and its neighbors under the Confederation, ;
ratifies the Constitution, .

New Orleans, battle of, .

Newspapers, character of, in 1800, , , ;
founding of, .

New York, treatment of the Tories in, ;
ratifies the Constitution, 42-43;
settlement of western, ;
constitution of 1821, 304-05.

New York City, and Western trade, 255-56;
as a literary center, .

Nicholson, Joseph, and the impeachment of Pickering, ;
on the nature of impeachable offenses, .

Nominating methods, changes in, , , .

Non-Importation Act of 1806, , .

Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, ;
evasions of, 198-99;
enforcement of, 198-99;
revived against England, .

Nootka Sound affair, .

North American Review, founded 283-84.

North Carolina, and the Watauga settlers, 14-15;
rejects the Constitution, ;
ratifies the Constitution, .

Northwest, receives settlers from New England, 13-14, ;
from the Middle States, ;
from the South, 248-49;
commerce of, 252-54.

Ohio Company, origin of, 10-11;
concessions of Congress to, 11-12;
begins colonization, .

Ohio, taxes branch Bank of the United States, ;
seizes funds, ;
forced to make restitution, .

Olmstead, Gideon, claimant in federal courts, 333-34.

Onis, Luis de, Spanish Minister to the United States, 262-64.

Orders in council, of 1783, ;
of 1793-94, 77-78;
of 1807, ;
withdrawal in 1812, .

Ordinance of 1784, ;
of 1785, ;
of 1787, 12-13.

Oregon, joint occupation of, .

Otis, Harrison Gray, .

Palfrey, John G., .

Panama, Congress, invitation to, 320-21;
opposition in Congress to, 322-23;
fate of the mission, .

Paper money, continental, ;
state, 17-18.

Paris, Treaty of, aftermath of, 1-2.

Parsons, Samuel, .

Party, deprecated by Washington, ;
identified with faction, 108-09;
rights of, in opposition, ;
place of, in popular government, .

Party organization, , , .

Pasha of Tripoli, , .

Paterson, William, in the Federal Convention, 31-32.

Patronage. See Appointments.

Pennsylvania, and the Federal judiciary, 333-35.

Perry, Oliver H., wins naval supremacy of Lake Erie, .

Philadelphia, as the seat of government, 119-20;
as a literary center, ;
and Western trade, , .

Pickering, John, impeachment of, 138-39.

Pickering, Timothy, Secretary of State, , ;
on the Louisiana Treaty, ;
plots a New England confederacy, ;
opposes the embargo, ;
secessionist in 1814, .

Pike, Zebulon M., expeditions of, .

Pinckney, Charles, and the election of 1800, .

Pinckney, Charles C, Minister to France, ;
commissioner to France, ;
and the X Y Z affair, 98-99;
appointed major-general, ;
candidate for the Vice-Presidency (1800), ;
candidate for the Presidency (1804), ;
candidate for the Presidency (1808), .

Pinckney, Thomas, concludes Treaty of San Lorenzo, ;
candidate for the Vice-Presidency (1800), 92-93.

Pinkney, William, Envoy to England, ;
negotiates treaty, ;
takes abrupt leave, ;
on the admission of Missouri, 276-77;
influence at the federal bar, .

Pittsburg, distributing center in the West, .

Plattsburg, battle of, 221-22.

Port Folio, Dennie's, .

Postal service in 1800, .

Posts, retention of Western, , , , .

Potomac, navigation of, , 27-28;
location of the capital on, 60-61.

Preble, Edward, and the Tripolitan War, .

Prescott, William H., .

Presidency, created in the Federal Convention, 34-35.

President, appointing and removing power of, .

President, American frigate, .

Presidential elections, of 1788, ;
of 1792, 66-67;
of 1796, 92-94;
of 1800, 115-17;
of 1801, 118-19;
of 1804, ;
of 1808, 193-94;
of 1812, 216-17;
of 1816, 243-44;
of 1820, ;
of 1824, 312-13, ;
of 1825, .

Prevost, Sir George, 221-22.

Privateers, in the War of 1812, 218-19.

Prophet, the, .

Public domain, origin of, .

Quids, followers of Randolph, .

Rambouillet, decree of, 199-200.

Randolph, Edmund, in the Federal Convention, 30-31;
Attorney-General, ;
on the French treaties of 1778, .

Randolph, John, position in the House, ;
in the Chase impeachment, 139-41;
and the Yazoo controversy, 169-70;
and the purchase of Florida, ;
and the indictment of Burr, ;
derides the Non-Importation Bill, ;
on the cause of the War of 1812, ;
on the Tariff of 1816, ;
on state rights, ;
on the Tariff of 1828, .

Rapp, George, .

Relief Act of 1821, .

Republican court at Philadelphia, 119-20.

Republican party, origin of, 64-67.
See also Presidential elections.

Revivals in New England, .

Rhea letter to General Jackson, .

Rhode Island, opposes changes in the Articles of Confederation, ;
paper money craze, 18-19;
out of the new Union, ;
ratifies the Constitution, ;
and the Hartford Convention, .

Right of deposit at New Orleans, ;
withdrawn, .

Roane, Spencer, resists judgment in the case of Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, ;
attacks the federal judiciary, 338-39.

Robertson, James, , .

Rodgers, John, , .

Rose, George, 186-87.

Rule of 1756, 76-77, 179-80.

Rush, Benjamin, Minister to England, ;
Canning's overtures to, .

Russell, Jonathan, commissioner at Ghent, .

Russia, offers to mediate in 1813, ;
and the Holy Alliance, ;
and intervention, ;
claims on the Pacific Coast, ;
concludes the Treaty of 1824, .

Rutgers v. Waddington, .

Rutledge, John, .

St. Clair, Arthur, Governor of Northwest Territory, ;
defeated by the Indians, .

San Lorenzo, Treaty of, .

Santo Domingo, negro republic, ;
resists French expedition, 146-47.

Scioto Company, land grants to, 11-12.

Scott, Winfield, .

Sedition Act, prosecutions under, .

Seminole War, 260-262.

Sevier, John, , .

Shaker Societies, .

Shays' Rebellion, 20-22.

Shipping, of the United States, during the European wars, , ;
after the Treaty of Ghent, .

Simcoe, J. G., .

Slater, Samuel, .

Slavery, debated in Congress, 270-271, ;
in Missouri, ;
extent in 1789, 271-272;
decrease in North, ;
recognized by the Constitution, 272-73;
congressional legislation on, 273-74;
and the Missouri Compromise, .

Slave trade, acts relating to, ;
extent of, ;
forbidden by the Act of 1807, 273-74;
extent of, after 1808, .

Smith, Joseph, .

Smith, Robert, , .

Smith, William, .

Somers, Richard, .

South, effect of cotton gin upon, ;
extention of cotton growing in, 251-52;
becomes the market for Northwest, 252-53.

South American republics, recognition of, 289-91.

South Carolina, ratifies the Constitution, .

Southwest, colonization of, 14-15, 249-52;
commerce of, 15-16;
a frontier society, 251-52;
diverges from Northwest, .

Spain, disputes the line of 1783, 16-17;
in the Southwest, , ;
concludes Treaty of San Lorenzo, ;
withholds posts, ;
cedes Louisiana to France, ;
retains the Floridas, ;
menaced by the United States, 170-72;
threatens hostilities, 173-74;
in East Florida, ;
protests against Jackson's invasion, ;
cedes the Floridas to the United States, ;
loses her American colonies, 289-90;
invaded by France, .

Specie payment, suspension of, ;
resumption of, 240-41.

Speculation, in Western lands, 10-12, 26-27;
in government paper, ;
in bank stock, 63-64.

Squatter, the, 251-52.

State banks, increase of, ;
notes of, .

Steamboat, on Western waters, 253-54.

Story, Joseph, and Marshall, ;
appointed Associate Justice, ;
on criticism of the judiciary, 339-40;
opinion in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, 335-36.

Stuart, Gilbert, .

Supreme Court. See Federal judiciary.

Survey Bill, vote in Congress on, .

Symmes, John C., land grants to, , ;
begins colony, .

Talleyrand-Périgord, C. M., urges acquisition of Louisiana, ;
and the X Y Z affair, 98-99;
to the American commissioners, ;
and the retrocession of Louisiana, ;
and the cession of Louisiana to the United States, 149-50;
on the boundaries of the province, .

Tallmadge, James, ,

Tariff Act, of 1789, 50-51;
of 1816, 237-38;
of 1824, 310-13;
of 1828, 328-30;

Tariff of Abominations. See Tariff Act, of 1828.

Taylor, John, on agriculture at the South, ;
on the Louisiana Treaty, ;
on state rights, .

Taylor, John W., .

Tecumseh, , , .

Tennessee, settlement of, ;
intrigues in, ;
admitted as a State, .

Thames, battle of the, .

Thomas, Jesse B., 275-76.

Ticknor, George, .

Tippecanoe, battle of, .

Tocqueville, De, on equality in America, ;
on the character of Western society, .

Tonnage dues, , .

Tories, persecution of, 3-5.

Toussaint L'Ouverture, .

Tracy, Uriah, on the Louisiana Treaty, 155-56;
on a New England confederacy, .

Trade. See Commerce.

Transportation, in 1800, .
See also National Road, Canals, Internal improvements, etc.

Travel, difficulties of, about 1800, 105-06;
improvement after the War of 1812, .

Treasury, Secretary of, bill to establish, ;
reports of, 56-62.

Treaty-making power, debated in House, 90-91.

Treaty of Paris (1783), ;
(1794), 84-88;
of Greenville (1795), ;
of San Lorenzo (1795), 87-88;
of Morfontaine (1800), , ;
of Louisiana (1803), ;
with Tripoli (1805), ;
(1806), ;
(1809), ;
of Ghent (1814), 229-30;
with Spain (1819), .

Trespass Act of New York, .

Trevett v. Weeden, .

Tripolitan War, 143-45.

Troup, George M., 325-26.

Trumbull, John, 236-37, .

Tudor, William, .

Turnpikes, construction of, .

Unitarianism, rise of, 287-88.

United States, frigate, .

United States Gazette, Federalist newspaper, .

United States v. Peters, 333-34.

Universalism, rise of, .

Van Buren, Martin, 243-44, , .

Vans Murray, William, .

Vermont, admitted as a State, ;
refuses the call for militia, ;
and the Hartford Convention, .

Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, 110-12.

Virginia, commercial difficulties with Maryland, 27-28;
ratifies the Constitution, ;
protests against internal improvements, 319-20;
on the Supreme Court (1809), ;
protests against decisions of federal courts, 336-37;
proposes constitutional amendment, .

War of 1812, preparations for, 208-09;
motives for, 208-10;
vote for, ;
political aspects of, 212-13, 216-17, 223-27;
land operations of, 213-14, 217-18, 220-23;
naval operations, 215-16, 218-19, 221-22;
in the Southwest, 219-20;
end of, ;
results of, 231-244, .

Washington, George, on the prospects of the United States, ;
on Tories, ;
resigns commission, ;
on the West, ;
on Shays' Rebellion, ;
in the Federal Convention, ;
on the growth of industry, 46-47;
elected President, ;
inauguration, 48-50;
appointments of, 54-55;
and the Bank Bill, 62-63;
levees of, ;
reëlected President, 66-67;
proclaims neutrality, ;
sends Jay on mission to England, ;
and the Whiskey Insurrection, 82-83;
censures Democratic Clubs, 83-84;
and the Jay Treaty, 86-88;
Farewell Address, 91-92;
appointed head of provisional army, .

Wasp, American sloop-of-war, .

Watauga settlement, .

Wayne, Anthony, wins battle of Fallen Timber, 80-81;
secures Treaty of Greenville, .

Webster, Daniel, on the principle of protection, ;
on universal suffrage, ;
and the Tariff of 1828, ;
influence at the federal bar, ;
counsel for Dartmouth College, .

Wellington, Duke of, 214, 228-29.

West, Benjamin, .

West, the, social aspects, , 299-300;
political aspects, , 303-04;
intellectual aspects, 300-01, ;
religious aspects, 301-02;
education in, 302-03.

Western lands, speculation in, .

West Florida, claimed by the United States, , 158-59;
revolt in, 203-04;
annexed in part, .

Whiskey Insurrection, the, 81-83.

Whitney, Eli, .

Wilkinson, James, in Kentucky, ;
his relation to Burr's conspiracy, 172-75, ;
in the campaign of 1813, ;
occupies West Florida, .

Wilson, James, in the Federal Convention, ;
appointed Associate Justice, .

Wirt, William, , .

Wolcott, Oliver, .

Woolen manufacturing, beginnings of, ;
after the War of 1812, 235-36.

X Y Z affair, 98-100.

Yazoo land controversy, 168-70, .