United States History

B

The Debate over Federalism

The new national government was dominated by men who had led the movement for the Constitution, most of whom called themselves Federalists. They were committed to making an authoritative and stable national state. This became clear early on when President Washington asked Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton to offer solutions to the problems of the national debt and government finances. Hamilton proposed that the federal government assume the revolutionary war debts of the states and combine them with the debt of the United States into one national debt. The federal government would pay off the parts of the debt that were owed to foreigners, thus establishing the international credit of the new government. But the new government would make the domestic debt permanent, selling government bonds that paid a guaranteed high interest rate. Hamilton also proposed a national bank to hold treasury funds and print and back the federal currency. The bank would be a government-chartered and government–regulated private corporation. The bank and the permanent debt would cement ties between private financiers and the government, and they would require an enlarged government bureaucracy and federal taxation. Hamilton asked for a federal excise tax on coffee, tea, wine, and spirits. The latter included whiskey, and the excise quickly became known as the Whiskey Tax. The tax would provide some of the funds to pay interest on the national debt. It would also announce to western farmers that they had a national government that could tax them. Hamilton’s plan increased the power of the national government. See also Federalism.

Hamilton’s measures promised to stabilize government finances and to establish the government’s reputation internationally and its authority in every corner of the republic. They would also dramatically centralize power in the national government. Many citizens and members of Congress distrusted Hamilton’s plans. The assumption of state debts, the funding of the national debt, and stock sales for the Bank of the United States would reward commercial interests, nearly all of them from the Northeast, who invested in the bank and the bonds to pay the debt. Also, establishment of the bank required Congress to use the clause in the Constitution that empowers the legislature “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper” to carry out its specified powers—a clause that some feared might allow Congress to do anything it wanted. Finally, the government would require a large civil service to administer the debt and collect taxes—a civil service that would be appointed by the executive. To Madison, Jefferson, and many others, Hamilton’s plans for the national government too closely duplicated the powerful, debt–driven, patronage–wielding British government against which they had fought the revolution.

Jefferson became the leader of a group that called themselves Democratic Republicans. They wanted the United States to remain a republic of the small, property-holding farmers who, they believed, were its most trustworthy citizens. Democratic Republicans envisioned a central government that was strong enough to protect property but not strong or active enough to threaten property or other republican rights. Jefferson feared the national debt, the federal taxes, and the enlarged civil service that Hamilton’s plans required.

When Jefferson was elected president in 1800, he paid off much of the debt that Hamilton had envisioned as a permanent fixture of government. The Jeffersonians then abolished federal taxes other than the tariff, reduced the number of government employees, and drastically reduced the size of the military. They did, however, retain the Bank of the United States. Internationally, the Jeffersonians had no ambitions other than free trade—the right of Americans to trade the produce of their plantations and farms for finished goods from other countries.

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C

Foreign Affairs, 1789–1812

Unfortunately for both Federalists and Democratic Republicans, it was very hard for the United States to act as a free and neutral country in the international arena because of the wars that followed the establishment of a republic in France (see French Revolution; Napoleonic Wars). The French republic became violent and expansionist, and Britain led three coalitions of European powers in wars against its expansionist activities. These wars affected the domestic policy and the foreign policy of the new United States (see American Foreign Policy).

Federalists valued American sovereignty, but they also valued the old trading relationship with Britain; Americans did 90 percent of their trade with Britain. The Federalists also admired British political stability, and they sided with Britain in its wars against France.

In Jay’s Treaty of 1794 the Washington administration tried to create a postrevolutionary relationship with Britain. The British agreed to abandon the forts they occupied in the Northwest Territory. An American army under General Anthony Wayne had defeated the northwestern Native Americans at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, and the British were glad to leave. But the British refused to allow Americans to trade internationally on any basis other than as part of the British mercantile system. The Federalists, knowing that they could ask for nothing better, agreed.

The French regarded Jay’s Treaty as an Anglo–American alliance. They recalled their ambassador and began harassing American merchant ships at sea. By 1798 the Americans and the French were fighting an undeclared naval war in the Caribbean. During this crisis, Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. These acts undermined civil liberties and were clearly directed against Jeffersonian newspaper editors, who were critical of the Federalist-dominated government. The Federalist government also began to raise a large army. The size of the Federalist government and the danger of Federalist repression were the principal issues in the election of 1800. Campaigning for civil liberties and limited government, Thomas Jefferson was elected president.

Jeffersonians cared more about farmers than about the merchants who carried their produce to Europe and imported European goods—particularly when those merchants operated within established British trade networks and voted for Federalist candidates. Jeffersonians demanded that the United States be free to trade with any nation (a demand unlikely to be granted during wartime) and that both France and Britain respect American sovereignty and neutral rights.

During most of Jefferson’s first term, Europe was at peace during a break in the Napoleonic Wars. The one major foreign policy issue was a huge success: Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 (see Louisiana Purchase). The purchase gave western farmers free use of the river system that emptied below New Orleans, removed the French presence from the western border of the United States, and provided American farmers with vast new lands on which to expand their rural republic. Ignoring the fact that independent Native American peoples occupied the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson proclaimed his new land a great “empire of liberty.”

Britain and France again went to war a few weeks after the Louisiana Purchase. Americans once again tried to sell food and plantation crops and to carry goods between the warring European powers and their Caribbean colonies. Both sides permitted this trade when it benefited them and tampered with it when it did not. In 1805 the British destroyed the French navy at the Battle of Trafalgar off the Spanish coast and became dominant on the ocean. Britain outlawed American trade with France and maintained a loose blockade of the American coast, seizing American ships and often kidnapping American sailors into the Royal Navy. This happened to as many as 6,000 Americans between 1803 and 1812.

The Americans could not fight the British navy, and President Jefferson responded with “peaceable coercion.” Believing that Britain needed American food more than America needed British manufactures, he asked Congress in 1807 for an embargo that would suspend all U.S. trade with foreign nations. Jefferson hoped to coerce Britain and France into respecting American sovereignty. The embargo did not work, however. Britain found other sources of food, and the American economy—particularly in the seaports—stopped. American exports were valued at $108 million in 1807. They dropped to $22 million the following year. In 1808 James Madison, Jefferson’s friend and chosen successor, easily won the presidential election against a Federalist opposition.

D

The Threat of a Second War with Britain

The United States declared war on Britain in 1812. The first cause of the war was British interference with American shipping. The second was military assistance that the British in Canada were providing to the Native American peoples of the United States interior. In Ohio, Native Americans defeated two American armies before being defeated themselves by American troops under General “Mad” Anthony Wayne in 1795. They and indigenous peoples in other parts of the Northwest Territory continued to resist white encroachment. Beginning in 1805, the Shawnee, Delaware, and other northern tribes formed an unprecedentedly large political and military alliance under the Shawnee leader Tecumseh. Americans under William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory, attacked and defeated them at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. But Tecumseh’s army, along with Creeks from the South who had joined him, were a serious threat to white settlement. All of this Native American resistance was encouraged and supplied by the British in Canada.

After the embargo failed, most northeastern representatives in Congress were willing to reconcile with Britain on British terms. Westerners and Southerners, however, would not compromise the safety of western settlements and the freedom of the seas. Led by young members who came to be called War Hawks (including Henry Clay, the 34–year–old Speaker of the House), Congress prepared for war. It would be the first war declared under the Constitution, and President Madison was careful to leave the actual declaration to Congress. But in June 1812 he sent a message to Congress listing British crimes on the ocean and on the frontier. The message ended “We behold … on the side of Britain a state of war against the United States, and on the side of the United States a state of peace toward Britain.” Congress, led by Southern and Western Jeffersonians, declared war two weeks later.

E

The War of 1812

The United States entered the War of 1812 to defend its sovereignty, its western settlements, and its maritime rights. American leaders knew that they could not fight the British navy. They decided instead to fight a land war, with Canada as the prize. Americans reasoned that they could get to the British settlements in Canada more easily than the British could. The capture of Canada would cut western Native Americans off from British supplies and allow Americans to hold a valuable colony hostage until the British agreed to their demands.

General William Hull, governor of the Michigan Territory, led an American invasion of Canada in 1812. The British and Native Americans threw him back, besieged him at Detroit, and forced him to surrender his whole army. A second invasion of Canada from western New York failed when New York militiamen refused to cross into Canada to back up American regulars who had captured Queenston Heights below Niagara Falls (see Battle of Queenston Heights). Tecumseh’s northern Native American confederacy was an important part of the British effort. In the South, Creek warriors terrorized Tennessee and killed about 250 settlers who had taken refuge at Fort Mims in Alabama (see Massacre of Fort Mims).

The war went better for the Americans in 1813. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry defeated a British fleet and gained control of Lake Erie—and thus of the supply lines between British Canada and the American Northwest. Americans sailed across Lake Ontario and raided and burned York (now Toronto). Further west, Americans led by William Henry Harrison chased the British and Native Americans back into Canada. At the Battle of the Thames in October, Americans killed Tecumseh. The following spring, American General Andrew Jackson, with Cherokee allies, defeated and then slaughtered the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend in Alabama. With these two battles the military power of Native Americans east of the Mississippi River was finally broken.

The British went on the offensive in 1814. The Royal Navy had blockaded the Atlantic Coast throughout the war and now began raiding American cities. In the summer, the British raided Washington, D.C., and burned down the Capitol and the White House. In September the British attacked Baltimore, but were held off by Americans at Fort McHenry who defended the harbor. (It was this engagement that inspired a witness, American poet Francis Scott Key, to write “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which later became the national anthem.) The British then moved their attention to the Gulf Coast. At New Orleans, Andrew Jackson’s army soundly defeated the British on January 8, 1815. Neither side in the Battle of New Orleans knew that the war had ended the previous month with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent.

New England Federalists, opponents of the war, were also unaware of the treaty when they met at Hartford, Connecticut, in December 1814. With their commerce destroyed, some wanted to secede from the United States and make a separate peace with Britain. But the Hartford Convention settled for proposed amendments to the Constitution (all of which were directed at the Jeffersonian Republicans’ southern and western majority). However, when members of the Hartford Convention carried their proposals to Washington in February, they found the capital celebrating Jackson’s victory at New Orleans and the end of the war. Thus the Hartford Convention became the final disgrace for the New England Federalists.

The War of 1812 had been a product of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. After Napoleon was defeated in 1814, neither the Americans nor the British cared to keep on fighting. In the treaty, the British abandoned their Native American allies, and the Americans dropped their complaints about maritime rights. Both assumed that peace would eliminate issues that had been created by war in Europe.

VIII

United States Expansion

A

Era of Good Feelings

The year 1815 marks a watershed in American history. Before that date American history was closely tied to European history—particularly to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. With Napoleon’s defeat and the success of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, a long period of peace began in Europe. American leaders paid less attention to European trade and European war, and more to the internal development of the United States.

This was bad news for Native Americans east of the Mississippi River, who had lost their last European ally, Britain, in 1815. Now they faced only land–hungry Americans who were determined to turn Native American hunting lands into farms. By the 1830s the federal government was moving the eastern Native Americans to new lands beyond the Mississippi, while whites filled their old lands with farms and plantations and began eyeing more lands to the west.