I.

Introduction

United States History, story of how the republic developed from colonial beginnings in the 16th century, when the first European explorers arrived, until modern times. As the nation developed, it expanded westward from small settlements along the Atlantic Coast, eventually including all the territory between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across the middle of the North American continent, as well as two noncontiguous states and a number of territories. At the same time, the population and the economy of the United States grew and changed dramatically. The population diversified as immigrants arrived from all countries of the world. From its beginnings as a remote English colony, the United States has developed the largest economy in the world. Throughout its history, the United States has faced struggles, both within the country—between various ethnic, religious, political, and economic groups—and with other nations. The efforts to deal with and resolve these struggles have shaped the United States of America into the 21st century.

This is one of seven major articles that together provide a comprehensive discussion of the United States of America. For more information on the United States, please see the other six major articles: United States (Overview), United States (Geography), United States (People), United States (Culture), United States (Economy), and United States (Government).

II.

Early Cultural Interaction

Early American history began in the collision of European, West African, and Native American peoples in North America. Europeans “discovered” America by accident, then created empires out of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans. Yet conquest and enslavement were accompanied by centuries of cultural interaction—interaction that spelled disaster for Africans and Native Americans and triumph for Europeans, to be sure, but interaction that transformed all three peoples in the process.

A.

Native America in 1580

The lands and human societies that European explorers called a New World were in fact very old. During the Ice Ages much of the world’s water was bound up in glaciers. Sea level dropped by hundreds of feet, creating a land bridge between Alaska and Siberia. Asians walked across to become the first human inhabitants of the Americas. Precisely when this happened remains unknown, but most scientists believe it occured before 15,000 years ago. When the last glaciers receded about 10,000 years ago (thus ending this first great migration to America), ancestors of the Native Americans filled nearly all of the habitable parts of North and South America. They lived in isolation from the history—and particularly from the diseases—of what became known as the Old World. See also First Americans.

The Native Americans who greeted the first Europeans had become diverse peoples. They spoke between 300 and 350 distinct languages, and their societies and ways of living varied tremendously. The Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru built great empires (see Aztec Empire; Inca Empire). In what is now the United States, the Mississippians (see Mound Builders) built cities surrounded by farmland between present–day St. Louis, Missouri, (where their city of Cahokia was larger than medieval London) and Natchez, Mississippi. The Mississippians’ “Great Sun” king ruled authoritatively and was carried from place to place by servants, preceded by flute–players. The Pueblo peoples of the Southwest lived in large towns, irrigated their dry land with river water, and traded with peoples as far away as Mexico and California.

In the East, the peoples who eventually encountered English settlers were varied, but they lived in similar ways. All of them grew much of their food. Women farmed and gathered food in the woods. Men hunted, fished, and made war. None of these peoples kept herds of domestic animals; they relied on abundant wild game for protein. All lived in family groups, but owed their principal loyalties to a wider network of kin and to their clans. Some—the Iroquois in upstate New York and the Powhatan confederacy in Virginia—formed alliances called confederacies for the purposes of keeping peace among neighbors and making war on outsiders. Even within these confederacies, however, everyday political organization seldom extended beyond villages, and village chiefs ruled their independent–minded people by consent.

B.

West Africa in 1580

In Central and West Africa, the great inland kingdoms of Mali and Ghana were influenced (and largely converted) by Islam, and these kingdoms had traded with the Muslim world for hundreds of years. From the beginning, slaves were among the articles of trade. These earliest enslaved Africans were criminals, war captives, and people sold by their relatives to settle debts. New World demand increased the slave trade and changed it. Some of the coastal kingdoms of present–day Togo and Benin entered the trade as middlemen. They conducted raids into the interior and sold their captives to European slavers. Nearly all of the Africans enslaved and brought to America by this trade were natives of the western coastal rain forests and the inland forests of the Congo and Central Africa.

About half of all Africans who were captured, enslaved, and sent to the Americas were Bantu–speaking peoples. Others were from smaller ethnic and language groups. Most had been farmers in their homeland. The men hunted, fished, and tended animals, while women and men worked the fields cooperatively and in large groups. They lived in kin–based villages that were parts of small kingdoms. They practiced polygyny (men often had several wives, each of whom maintained a separate household), and their societies tended to give very specific spiritual duties to women and men. Adolescent girls and boys were inducted into secret societies in which they learned the sacred and separate duties of women and men. These secret societies provided supernatural help from the spirits that governed tasks such as hunting, farming, fertility, and childbirth. Although formal political leaders were all men, older, privileged women exercised great power over other women. Thus enslaved African peoples in the New World came from societies in which women raised children and governed one another, and where men and women were more nearly equal than in America or Europe.

C.

European Exploration

In the century before Columbus sailed to America, Western Europeans were unlikely candidates for worldwide exploration. The Chinese possessed the wealth and the seafaring skills that would have enabled them to explore, but they had little interest in the world outside of China. The Arabs and other Islamic peoples also possessed wealth and skills. But they expanded into territories that were next to them—and not across uncharted oceans. The Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453 and by the 1520s had nearly reached Vienna. These conquests gave them control over the overland trade routes to Asia as well as the sea route through the Persian Gulf. The conquests also gave them an expanding empire to occupy their attention.

Western Europeans, on the other hand, were developing the necessary wealth and technology and a compelling need to explore. A group of new monarchs were making nation-states in Britain and in continental Europe—states with unprecedentedly large treasuries and military establishments. The population of Western European nations was growing, providing a tax base and a labor force for new classes of large landholders. These “elites” provided markets for goods that were available only through trade with Asia. When the expansion of Islam gave control of eastern trade routes to Islamic middlemen, Western Europeans had strong incentives to find other ways to get to Asia.

They were also developing sailing technology and knowledge of currents and winds to travel long distances on the open sea. The Portuguese led the way. They copied and improved upon the designs of Arab sailing ships and learned to mount cannons on those ships. In the 15th century they began exploring the west coast of Africa—bypassing Arab merchants to trade directly for African gold and slaves. They also colonized the Madeira Islands, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands and turned them into the first European slave plantations.

The European explorers were all looking for an ocean route to Asia. Christopher Columbus sailed for the monarchs of Spain in 1492. He used the familiar prevailing winds to the Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa, and then sailed on. In about two months he landed in the Caribbean on an island in the Bahamas, thinking he had reached the East Indies. Columbus made three more voyages. He died in 1506, still believing that he had discovered a water route to Asia.

The Spanish investigated further. Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci sailed to the northern coast of South America in 1499 and pronounced the land a new continent. European mapmakers named it America in his honor. Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and in 1513 became the first of the European explorers of America to see the Pacific Ocean. That same year another Spaniard, Juan Ponce de León, explored the Bahamas and Florida in search of the fountain of youth.

The first European voyages to the northern coast of America were old and forgotten: The Norsemen (Scandinavian Vikings) sailed from Greenland and stayed in Newfoundland for a time around 1000. Some scholars argue that European fishermen had discovered the fishing waters off eastern Canada by 1480. But the first recorded voyage was made by John Cabot, an Italian navigator in the service of England, who sailed from England to Newfoundland in 1497. Giovanni da Verrazzano, in 1524, and Jacques Cartier, in 1534, explored nearly the whole Atlantic coast of the present United States for France. By that time, Europeans had scouted the American coast from Newfoundland to Brazil. While they continued to look for shortcuts to Asia, Europeans began to think of America for its own sake. Spain again led the way: Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico in 1519, and Francisco Pizarro did the same in Peru in 1532.

D.

Cultural Interaction: The Columbian Exchange

What was to become American history began in a biological and cultural collision of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans. Europeans initiated this contact and often dictated its terms. For Native Americans and Africans, American history began in disaster.

Native Americans suffered heavily because of their isolation from the rest of the world. Europe, Africa, and Asia had been trading knowledge and technologies for centuries. Societies on all three continents had learned to use iron and kept herds of domestic animals. Europeans had acquired gunpowder, paper, and navigational equipment from the Chinese. Native Americans, on the other hand, had none of these. They were often helpless against European conquerors with horses, firearms, and—especially—armor and weapons.

The most disastrous consequence of the long-term isolation of the Americas was biological. Asians, Africans, and Europeans had been exposed to one another’s diseases for millennia; by 1500 they had developed an Old World immune system that partially protected them from most diseases. On average, Native Americans were bigger and healthier than the Europeans who first encountered them. But they were helpless against European and African diseases. Smallpox was the biggest killer, but illnesses such as measles and influenza also killed millions of people. The indigenous population of Mexico, for example, was more than 17 million when Cortés landed in 1519. By 1630 it had dropped to 750,000, largely as a result of disease. Scholars estimate that on average the population of a Native American people dropped 90 percent in the first century of contact. The worst wave of epidemics in human history cleared the way for European conquest. See also United States (People): Disease and Death in Early America.

Europeans used the new lands as sources of precious metals and plantation agriculture. Both were complex operations that required labor in large, closely supervised groups. Attempts to enslave indigenous peoples failed, and attempts to force them into other forms of bound labor were slightly more successful but also failed because workers died of disease. Europeans turned to the African slave trade as a source of labor for the Americas. During the colonial periods of North and South America and the Caribbean, far more Africans than Europeans came to the New World. The slave trade brought wealth to some Europeans and some Africans, but the growth of the slave trade disrupted African political systems, turned slave raiding into full–scale war, and robbed many African societies of their young men. The European success story in the Americas was achieved at horrendous expense for the millions of Native Americans who died and for the millions of Africans who were enslaved.

III.

Colonial Experiments

Beginning in 1519, Spain, Portugal, France, The Netherlands, and England established colonies in the Americas. Spain made a great mining and agricultural empire in Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean. Portugal created a slave-based agricultural colony in Brazil. In North America the French and Dutch established rudimentary European societies and, more importantly, elaborate, long-term trading networks with the indigenous peoples. Among the European invaders of North America, only the English established colonies of agricultural settlers, whose interests in Native Americans was less about trade than about the acquisition of land. That fact would have huge implications in the long struggle for control of North America.

A.

New Spain

Spain was the first European nation to colonize America. Cortés invaded Mexico and (with the help of smallpox and other Native Americans) defeated the Aztec Empire between 1519 and 1521. By 1533 Pizarro had conquered the Incas of Peru. Both civilizations possessed artifacts made of precious metals, and the Spanish searched for rumored piles of gold and silver. They sent expeditions under Hernando de Soto, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca as far north as what is now Kansas and Colorado. They were looking for cities made of gold and did not find them. But in 1545 they did discover silver at Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, and in Mexico around the same time. New World gold and silver mines were the base of Spanish wealth and power for the next hundred years.

Shortly after the conquests, Catholic missionaries—Jesuits until 1571, Franciscans and Dominicans after that—attempted to convert Native Americans to Christianity. They established missions not only at the centers of the new empire but also in New Mexico and Florida. Spanish Jesuits even built a short–lived mission outpost in Virginia.

After defeating indigenous peoples, Spanish conquerors established a system of forced labor called encomienda. However, Spanish governmental and religious officials disliked the brutality of this system. As time passed, Spanish settlers claimed land rather than labor, establishing large estates called haciendas. By the time French, Dutch, Swedish, and English colonists began arriving in the New World in the early 17th century, the Spanish colonies in New Spain (Mexico), New Granada (Colombia), and the Caribbean were nearly 100 years old. The colonies were a source of power for Spain, and a source of jealousy from other European nations.

B.

New France

By the 1530s French explorers had scouted the coast of America from Newfoundland to the Carolinas. Samuel de Champlain built the foundations of what would become French Canada (New France). From 1604 to 1606 he established a settlement at Acadia in Nova Scotia, and in 1608 he traveled up the St. Lawrence River, made contact with the Huron and Algonquin peoples, and established a French settlement at Québec.

From the beginning, New France concentrated on two activities: fur trade and Catholic missions. Missionaries and traders were often at odds, but both knew that the success of New France depended upon friendly relations with the native peoples. While Jesuits converted thousands of Native Americans, French traders roamed the forests. Both were among the first white explorers of the interior of North America, and France’s ties with Native Americans would have important implications for the next 150 years. By 1700 the French population of New France was 14,000. French Canada was a strategically crucial brake on English settlement. But the much smaller sugar islands in the Caribbean—Saint-Domingue (Haiti), Guadeloupe, and Martinique—were economically far more valuable to France.

C.

Dutch Settlements

Another contender for influence in North America was the Dutch, inhabitants of the leading commercial nation in the early 17th century. Sailing for the Dutch in 1609, Henry Hudson explored the river that now bears his name. The Dutch established a string of agricultural settlements between New Amsterdam (New York City) and Fort Orange (Albany, New York) after 1614. They became the chief European traders with the Iroquois, supplying them with firearms, blankets, metal tools, and other European trade goods in exchange for furs. The Iroquois used those goods to nearly destroy the Huron and to push the Algonquins into Illinois and Michigan. As a result, the Iroquois gained control of the Native American side of the fur trade.

The Dutch settlements, known as New Netherland, grew slowly at first and became more urban as trade with the indigenous peoples outdistanced agriculture as a source of income. The colony was prosperous and tolerated different religions. As a result, it attracted a steady and diverse stream of European immigrants. In the 1640s the 450 inhabitants of New Amsterdam spoke 18 different languages. The colony had grown to a European population of 6,000 (double that of New France) on the eve of its takeover by England in 1664.

D.

First English Settlements

The Spanish, French, and Dutch wanted to find precious metals in the Americas, to trade with the indigenous peoples, and to convert them to Christianity. Their agricultural colonies in the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America were worked by African slaves and by unwilling native peoples, and relatively few Europeans settled permanently in those places. In contrast, England, a latecomer to New World colonization, sent more people to the Americas than other European nations—about 400,000 in the 17th century—and established more permanent agricultural colonies.

English migrants came to America for two main reasons. The first reason was tied to the English Reformation. King Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church in the 1530s. Through a series of political and religious twists and turns, the new Church of England developed a Protestant theology, but it retained much of Catholic liturgy and ritual forms. Within the Church of England, radical Protestants, later called Puritans, wanted to suppress the remaining Catholic forms. The fortunes of the Puritans depended on the religious preferences of English monarchs. Queen Mary I, who ruled from 1553 to 1558, was a committed Catholic who tried to roll back the tide of religious change; she executed hundreds of Protestants and chased many more into exile. Her successor, Elizabeth I, invited the exiles back and tried to resolve differences within the English church. The Stuart kings who followed her, James I and Charles I, again persecuted Puritans. As a result, Puritans became willing to immigrate to America.

The second reason for English colonization was that land in England had become scarce. The population of England doubled from 1530 to 1680. In the same years, many of England’s largest landholders evicted tenants from their lands, fenced the lands, and raised sheep for the expanding wool trade. The result was a growing number of young, poor, underemployed, and often desperate English men and women. It was from their ranks that colonizers recruited most of the English population of the mainland colonies.

IV.

Growth of the English Colonies

Permanent English settlement began in the Chesapeake Bay area in 1607 and in Massachusetts in 1620. The histories of the two regions during their first century and a half are almost opposite. Virginia began as a misguided business venture and as a disorderly society of young men. Massachusetts settlers were Puritans. They arrived as whole families and sometimes as whole congregations, and they lived by laws derived from the Old Testament. Over time, however, Virginia was transformed into a slave-based tobacco colony where slaves were carefully disciplined, where most white families owned land, and where a wealthy and stable planter-slaveholder class provided much of the leadership of revolutionary and early national America. New England, on the other hand, evolved into a more secularized and increasingly overpopulated society based on family farms and inherited land—land that was becoming scarce to the point that increasing numbers of whites were slipping into poverty.

A.

The Chesapeake

A.1.

Virginia

Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America, began as a business venture that failed. The Virginia Company of London, a joint stock company organized much like a modern corporation, sent 104 colonists to Chesapeake Bay in 1607. The company wanted to repeat the successes of the Spanish: The colonists were to look for gold and silver, for a passage to Asia, and for other discoveries that would quickly reward investors. If the work was heavy, the colonists were to force indigenous peoples to help them. The composition of the group sent to Jamestown reflected the company’s expectations for life in the colony. Colonists included silversmiths, goldsmiths, even a perfumer, and far too many gentlemen who were unprepared for rugged colonial life.

The colonists found a defensible spot on low ground and named it Jamestown. None of their plans worked out, and the settlers began to die of dysentery and typhoid fever. At the end of the first year, only about one-third remained alive. The Native Americans were troublesome, too. Organized into the large and powerful Powhatan confederacy, they grew tired of demands for food and launched a war against the settlers that continued intermittently from 1609 to 1614.

In 1619 the Virginia Company reorganized. The colony gave up the search for quick profits and turned to growing tobacco. Under the new plan, colonists received 50 acres from the company for paying a person’s passage to Virginia. The new settlers were indentured servants who agreed to work off the price of their passage. Thus settlers who could afford it received land and labor at the same time. In 1624 King James I of England made Virginia the first royal colony. He revoked the Virginia Company’s charter and appointed a royal governor and council, and established a House of Burgesses elected by the settlers. Despite fights with the Powhatan confederacy (about 350 settlers died in one attack in 1622), the Virginia colony began to prosper. It had found a cash crop, a source of labor, and a stable government.

A.2.

Maryland

In 1634 Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, founded Maryland under a royal charter, which made the colony Baltimore’s personal property. Baltimore, a Catholic nobleman, hoped to establish a refuge for English Catholics and sell large estates to individuals who would operate as feudal lords.

Neither the plans for feudalism nor for a Catholic refuge worked out, however. More Protestants than Catholics immigrated to Maryland. In 1649 Baltimore granted religious toleration to all Christians, but Protestants did not stop opposing him. They even overthrew Baltimore’s government on several occasions. Baltimore’s dreams of feudalism failed as well. Freed servants preferred farming on their own to staying on as tenants, and the colony quickly evolved as Virginia had: Planters (many of them former servants) imported servants from England and grew tobacco.

A.3.

Mortality Rate

Chesapeake tobacco growers needed able–bodied servants. Most of those imported to Virginia and Maryland were young, poor, single men. Disease, bad water, and hostile native peoples produced a horrific death rate. In 1618 there were 700 English settlers in Virginia. The reorganized Virginia Company sent 3,000 more before 1622. A headcount that year found only about 1,200 still alive. Still, surviving planters continued to import servants. Some servants lived long enough to end their indentures, but many others died. In addition, there were too few women in the Chesapeake to enable surviving men to build families and produce new Virginians. More than two-thirds of men never married, and the white population of Virginia did not begin to sustain itself until at least the 1680s. Before that, the colony survived only by importing new people to replace those who died.

A.4.

Introduction of Slavery

White servants worked Chesapeake tobacco farms until the late 17th century. But earlier in the century, English tobacco and sugar planters in the Caribbean had adopted African slavery, long the chief labor system in Portuguese and Spanish sugar colonies in the Caribbean. By 1700 the English islands were characterized by large plantations and by populations that were overwhelmingly African. These African slaves were victims of a particularly brutal and unhealthy plantation system that killed most of them. It was not a coincidence that these islands produced more wealth for England than its other colonies. See also Slavery in the United States: Introduction of Slavery.

Before the 1680s, Chesapeake planters purchased few African slaves, and the status of Africans in Virginia and Maryland was unclear. Some were slaves, some were servants, some were free, and no legal code defined their standing. The reasons for the slow growth of slavery in the Chesapeake were not moral but economic. First, slave traders received high prices for slaves in the Caribbean—higher than Virginians could afford, particularly when these expensive laborers were likely to die. White indentured servants cost less, and planters lost little when they died. But Chesapeake colonists—both English and African—grew healthier as they became “seasoned” on their new continent. At the same time, the English economic crisis that had supplied servants to the colonies diminished. These changes made African slaves a better long–term investment: The initial cost was higher, but the slaves lived and reproduced.

Beginning around 1675, Virginia and Maryland began importing large numbers of African slaves. By 1690 black slaves outnumbered white servants in those colonies. Virginia now gave white servants who survived their indentures 50 acres of land, thus making them a part of the white landholding class. At the same time, the House of Burgesses drew up legal codes that assumed a lifetime of bondage for blacks. In the early 18th century, the Chesapeake emerged as a society of planters and small farmers who grew tobacco with the labor of African slaves. There had been slaves in Virginia since 1619. But it was not until nearly 100 years later that Virginia became a slave society.

B.

The Beginnings of New England

New England began as a refuge for religious radicals. The first English settlers were the Pilgrims. They were Separatists—Protestants who, unlike the Puritans, seceded from the Church of England rather than try to reform it. They sailed for the New World in 1620. After difficult early years, they established a community of farms at Plymouth that was ultimately absorbed by the Massachusetts Bay Company.

B.1.

Religion in the New England Colonies

A much larger Puritan migration began in 1630. The Puritans objected to the corruption and extravagance of the Stuart kings, who considered alliances with Catholic monarchs and paid no attention to Puritan demands for religious reform. The Puritans came to believe that God would destroy England for these sins. They obtained a charter from the Massachusetts Bay Company and made plans to emigrate—not to hide in the wilderness from God’s wrath, but to preserve Protestant beliefs and to act as a beacon of truth for the world. A thousand Puritans migrated to Massachusetts in 1630. But this Great Migration ended in 1642, when the Puritans became involved in a civil war against the Stuart kings. The Puritans eventually won and ruled England until 1660. When the migration ended, Massachusetts had 13,000 European inhabitants.

The Puritans left England because of religious persecution, but they, too, were intolerant. In Massachusetts they established laws derived from the Bible, and they punished or expelled those who did not share their beliefs. The Puritans established a governor and a general court (an assembly elected by adult male church members) and governed themselves. Although they refused to secede from the Church of England, they did away with bishops and church hierarchy and invented congregationalism. In this type of Protestantism, each congregation selected its own minister and governed its own religious life (although outside authority sometimes intervened to punish heresy).

Government officials were expected to enforce godly authority, which often meant punishing religious heresy. Roger Williams was a Separatist who refused to worship with anyone who, like nearly all Puritans, remained part of the Church of England. Massachusetts banished him, and he and a few followers founded Providence in what is now Rhode Island. Anne Hutchinson was a merchant’s wife and a devout Puritan, but she claimed that she received messages directly from God and was beyond earthly authority. This belief was a heresy, a belief contrary to church teachings, known as Antinomianism. She, too, was banished and she moved to Rhode Island. Puritan magistrates continued to enforce religious laws: In the 1650s they persecuted Quakers, and in the 1690s they executed people accused of witchcraft.

B.2.

Growth of New England’s Population

Once the Puritan migration to New England stopped in 1642, the region would receive few immigrants for the next 200 years. Yet the population grew dramatically, to nearly 120,000 in 1700. Two reasons explain this. First, in sharp contrast to the unhealthy Chesapeake, Massachusetts streams provided relatively safe drinking water, and New England’s cold winters kept dangerous microbes to a minimum. Thus disease and early death were not the problems that they were farther south. Second (again in contrast to the Chesapeake) the Puritans migrated in families, and there were about two women for every three men, even in the early years. Nearly all colonists married (typically in their mid–20s for men and early 20s for women), and then produced children at two-year intervals. With both a higher birth rate and a longer life expectancy than in England, the Puritan population grew rapidly almost from the beginning.

C.

The Restoration Colonies

By 1640 England had founded 6 of the 13 colonies that would become the original United States. In 1660, after the end of Puritan rule, Charles II was crowned king of England, an event known as the Restoration. Charles founded or took over six more colonies: New York (taken from the Dutch in 1664), New Jersey, Pennsylvania (including what became Delaware), and North and South Carolina. All were proprietary colonies—huge land grants to individuals or small groups who had been loyal to the king during the civil war.

These colonies shared other similarities as well. None of them was well–funded; they could ill afford to import colonists from overseas. Thus they tried to attract settlers from other colonies as much as from the Old World. These colonies made it easy to own land, and they tended to grant religious toleration to all Christians. The result (even though Pennsylvania began as a Quaker colony under the wealthy proprietor William Penn) was a more ethnically mixed and religiously pluralistic European population than had come to New England or to the Chesapeake. These new colonies were populated not only by the English, but also by the Dutch and eventually by Scots, Scots–Irish, and Germans. Their populations included Quakers and other religious dissenters.

D.

Settlers and Native Americans

The French and Spanish came to the New World to trade with the indigenous peoples, to convert them to Christianity, and sometimes to turn them into a labor force for mining and agriculture. In contrast, the English settlers wanted farmland. Thus they posed a far greater threat to the Native Americans. Wars were the result. In New England a Wampanoag chief named Metacomet (the English called him King Philip) became worried about English intrusion on his land and ordered attacks on the settlements in 1675. For the next year Metacomet and his allies destroyed 12 of 90 Puritan towns and attacked 40 others, capturing or killing one in ten adult male English settlers. The Puritans counterattacked in the summer of 1676. They killed Metacomet, sold his wife and chief supporters into slavery in the West Indies, and scattered his coalition. With that, the power of coastal Native Americans in New England was broken.

In the same years (1675 to 1676) in Virginia, land–hungry settlers led by a planter named Nathaniel Bacon picked a fight with the Susquehannock people. The settlers’ goal was simply to end Native American occupation of lands that whites wanted. When Governor William Berkeley objected, the rebellious settlers forced the House of Burgesses to back their war (see Bacon’s Rebellion). Later, they marched on Jamestown and burned the colonial capital. Shortly after that, Bacon died of disease, and his rebellion sputtered out. But a new treaty signed with the Native Americans in 1677 made much of their land available to white settlers.

E.

The English and their Empire

The English had colonies before they had a colonial policy or an empire. The English government had little interest in directly governing its colonies. The government was, however, mercantilist: It wanted colonial economic activity to serve England. The Navigation Act of 1651 stipulated that imports into British harbors and colonies could be carried only in British ships or those of the producing country. A second Navigation Act in 1660 decreed that colonial trade could be carried only in English ships and that crucial commodities such as tobacco and sugar could be sent only to England or another English colony. Further Navigation Acts in 1663 and 1696 regulated the shipment of goods into the colonies and strengthened the customs service. For the most part, the Navigation Acts succeeded in making colonial trade serve England. They also made the colonists accustomed to and dependent upon imported English goods. But the acts did not amount to a colonial administration. Private companies, wealthy proprietors, and the settlers themselves did what they wanted without official English interference.

King James II tried to change that. In 1684 he revoked the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Then in 1686 he created the Dominion of New England from the colonies of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Plymouth, and Connecticut (all colonies that had been derived from the original Massachusetts Bay colony), along with New York and New Jersey. The king sent Sir Edmund Andros to be royal governor of this huge area. However, the king had problems at home. He was a Catholic, and he threatened to leave the throne in the hands of his Catholic son. In 1688 England’s ruling elites deposed James II and replaced him with his daughter Mary and her husband, a militant Dutch Protestant, William of Orange. As part of the agreement that made him king, William issued the English Bill of Rights that ended absolutist royal government in England. The ascension of William and Mary is known in English history as the Glorious Revolution.

American colonists staged smaller versions of the Glorious Revolution. Massachusetts and New York revolted against the Dominion of New England. At the same time, the Protestant majority in Maryland revolted against Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, and his Catholic elite. William could have punished all these rebels and re–established the Dominion of New England. Instead, he reorganized Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland as royal colonies with elected legislative assemblies and royally appointed governors. By 1720 the crown had transformed all the mainland colonies along these lines except for Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. The Glorious Revolution ended absolutism in England, and it ensured that government in the mainland colonies would be both royal and representative.

F.

Colonial Society

The colonies over which the English were beginning to exercise control were growing rapidly. In 1700 approximately 250,000 Europeans and Africans were living in what would become the United States. In 1775 there were approximately 2.5 million. Much of the increase was due to immigration: the forced migration of enslaved Africans, and the willing migration of English, Scots-Irish, and Germans. See also United States (People): European and African Immigration in the Colonies.

The middle colonies were much more diverse than the northern colonies. The English majority contended with a variety of European settlers, with a large Native American presence on the western edges, and with a significant minority of African slaves. In Maryland and Virginia, the early English settlers had been joined, particularly in the western counties, by Scots, Scots–Irish, and Germans. In the eastern counties, African slaves—many of them natives of Africa—often outnumbered whites.

South Carolina and Georgia had white populations as diverse as those in the Chesapeake, and their slave populations were African–born and ethnically diverse. One historian has noted that a slave would have met more different kinds of Africans in one day in South Carolina rice fields than in a lifetime in Africa.

By far the greatest source of population growth, however, was a phenomenal birth rate and a relatively low death rate. Americans in the 18th century had many children, who in turn survived to have children of their own. American population growth in these years may have been unprecedented in human history. See also United States (People): Birthrates in Native America and Colonial America.

The household was the central institution of colonial society. In Puritan society in particular, families were the cornerstone of godly government. As one historian put it, Puritans experienced authority as a hierarchy of strong fathers—beginning with God, descending down through government officials and ministers, and ending with the fathers of families. These families were patriarchal: Fathers ruled households, made family decisions, organized household labor, and were the representatives of God’s authority within the family. Fathers passed that authority on to their sons. Puritan magistrates inspected families to ensure that they were orderly, and it was a capital crime (at least in the law books) to commit adultery or to strike one’s father.

Households in other 18th–century colonies may have been less godly, but they were almost equally dominated by fathers, and most white men had the opportunity to become patriarchs. Land was relatively abundant, and Americans seldom practiced primogeniture and entail, which gave oldest sons their fathers’ full estates and prevented men from dividing their land. Fathers tended to supply all of their sons with land (daughters received personal property as a dowry). Thus most American white men eventually owned their own land and headed their own households.

As populations grew and as colonial economies developed, however, that independence based on property ownership was endangered. Good farmland in the south came to be dominated by a class of planters, while growing numbers of poor whites became tenants. The pressure of a growing population on the supply of farmland made tenancy even more common in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (research puts the proportion at about 25 percent by mid-century), while in New England more and more fathers found themselves unable to provide for their sons. On the eve of the American Revolution (1775-1783), American white men prided themselves on a widespread liberty that was based on economic independence. Meanwhile, the land ownership that upheld that independence was being undermined.

G.

18th-Century Slavery

In the first half of the 18th century, the mainland colonies grew dramatically but in very different ways. The Chesapeake and the Carolinas grew plantation staples for world markets—tobacco in the Chesapeake and North Carolina, rice and indigo in the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia—and they were committed to African slave labor. Fully 70 percent of South Carolina’s population was black; nearly all Africans were imported directly to the colony in the 18th century. The numbers were so huge and the malarial wetlands they worked on were so unhealthy that masters encouraged slaves to organize their own labor and to work unsupervised. Because so many slaves lived and worked relatively unsupervised in this area, African cultures—language, handicrafts, religious experience and belief, and more—survived most fully among American slaves in South Carolina. Rice planters of South Carolina permitted this cultural independence because it was easier and because the slaves made them lots of money. South Carolina’s lowland planters were the wealthiest group in the mainland colonies.

Further north, the tobacco colonies of Virginia and Maryland were equally committed to slave labor, but slaves led somewhat different lives here than in the deep South. The African population in these colonies began to replace itself through reproduction as early as 1720 (compared with 1770 in South Carolina). Still, Chesapeake planters continued to import new slaves from Africa; about 70,000 went to Virginia in the 18th century and about 25,000 to Maryland. Slaves in these colonies tended to live and work in smaller, more closely supervised groups than slaves farther south, and their cultural memory of Africa, although often strong, was less pervasive than that of Carolina slaves. In addition, white Virginians and Marylanders were turning to wheat as a secondary crop, a development that required mills and towns, and thus slave labor in construction, road building, and some of the skilled crafts.

H.

Northern Agriculture

Around the middle of the 18th century, a heavily populated and increasingly urbanized Europe lost the capacity to feed itself, providing an important market for North American farmers. The middle colonies, particularly Pennsylvania, became the breadbasket of America. After Pennsylvania farmers provided for their families from their farms and by trading with neighbors, they sent their surplus production of corn and wheat, as much as 40 percent of what they produced, on to the Atlantic market. New England farmers worked soil that was poor and rocky, but used the same system.

Economists call this system safety–first or subsistence–plus agriculture: Farmers provided for household and neighborhood needs before risking their surplus in distant and unpredictable markets. In profitable years, farmers were able to buy finished cloth, dishes and crockery, tea and coffee, and other goods that colonial trade with England provided—goods on which more and more Americans depended by 1770.

I.

Religion

British North America in the 18th century was a religiously and ethnically diverse string of settlements. New England’s population was overwhelmingly English, descended from the Great Migration of the 1630s. New England had a reputation for poor land and intolerance of outsiders, and immigrants avoided the region. New Englanders continued to practice congregationalism, although by the 18th century they seldom thought of themselves as the spearhead of the Reformation. A wave of revivals known as the Great Awakening swept New England beginning in the 1720s, dividing churchgoers into New Light (evangelical Calvinists) and Old Light (more moderate) wings. An increasing minority were calling themselves Baptists.

Nearly all Europeans in these colonies were Protestants, but individual denominations were very different. There were Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, Anglicans, Dutch Reformed, Mennonites, and Quakers. While the Church of England was the established church (the official, government–supported church) in the Chesapeake colonies, German and Scottish non-Anglicans were migrating south from the middle colonies, and Baptists were making their first southern converts. Although most Chesapeake slaves were American–born by the late 18th century, they practiced what they remembered of African religions, while some became Christians in 18th-century revivals. See also United States (People): Religion in the Colonies.

V.

Resistance and Revolution

A.

The Wars for North America, 1689–1763

Seventeenth–century colonists fought wars with the coastal Native American peoples upon whom they had intruded. Eighteenth-century colonial wars, in contrast, usually began in Europe, and they pitted the English colonies against French and Spanish empires in North America. These empires posed a number of problems for English colonists. Spanish Florida offered refuge to runaway slaves from the southeastern colonies. The French built an interior arc of settlements from Québec to New Orleans; they also made trading agreements with Native Americans. The French trading empire impeded the expansion of English settlements, and the strength of the French and their Native American allies was a constant concern to the British and to American settlers.

The English and French fought frequently: in King William’s War (1689-1697; known in Europe as the War of the League of Augsburg), in Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713; the War of the Spanish Succession), in King George’s War (1744-1748; War of the Austrian Succession), and in the French and Indian War (the Seven Years’ War), which began in America in 1754 and ended in Europe in 1763. In all of these wars, the French had the assistance of most Native Americans of the interior.

During the course of these wars, the English gained strength in relation to their French and Spanish rivals, and in the French and Indian War, with strong help from colonial militias, they expelled the French from mainland North America. In 1763 Britain became the lone European imperial power in North America between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River. (The Spanish, allies of the French, gave up Florida but took over French claims in New Orleans and in lands west of the Mississippi as compensation.) Within 20 years the British would lose most of what they had gained.

Victory in the French and Indian War gave the British an enlarged mainland empire but also brought new problems. First, the war had been expensive: The interest alone on Britain’s debt required half the government’s revenues, and the overtaxed British people could not be asked to pay more. Second, the acquisition of French and Spanish territory gave the British new administrative tasks. They acquired not only vast tracts of land, but also the French settlers and indigenous peoples who lived there.

The difficulties became clear in early 1763, when an Ottawa chief named Pontiac became worried about losing the French allies who had helped keep British settlers out of the interior. Pontiac led an uprising of a broad Native American coalition that included Seneca, Wyandots, Delawares, Shawnee, Miami, Ottawa, and other nations. They attacked British forts and frontier settlements in Pennsylvania and Virginia. During the summer of 1763 they killed as many as 2,000 settlers, but they could not dislodge the British from their fortified strongholds at Detroit, Niagara, and other places in the interior. Settlers responded by murdering Native Americans, most of whom had done nothing. The British government realized that it needed not only more revenue but also a military presence and a colonial administrative policy to establish British authority and keep the peace in North America.

B.

Break with Britain

B.1.

Constitutional Understandings: Britain

British officials believed that the British government—and Parliament in particular—had the constitutional power to tax and govern the American colonies. The rulers of Parliament assumed what they called parliamentary sovereignty. Parliament, they insisted, was dominant within the British constitution. Parliament was a brake against arbitrary monarchs; Parliament alone could tax or write legislation, and Parliament could not consent to divide that authority with any other body. As Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of Massachusetts, put it, there could be no compromise “between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies. It is impossible there should be two independent legislatures in one and the same state.”

B.2.

Constitutional Understandings: America

The Americans, however, had developed a very different opinion of how they should be governed. By the 1720s all but two colonies had an elected assembly and an appointed governor. Contests between the two were common, with governors generally exercising greater power in the northern colonies and assemblies wielding more power in the south.

Governors technically had great power. Most were appointed by the king and stood for him in colonial government. Governors also had the power to make appointments, and thus to pack the government with their followers.

The assemblies, however, had the “power of the purse”: Only they could pass revenue (tax) bills. Assemblies often used that power to gain control over appointments, and sometimes to coerce the governor himself. This was particularly true during the French and Indian War, when governors often asked assemblies to approve revenue bills and requisitions to fund the fighting. Assemblies used their influence over finances to gain power in relation to governors.

Colonists tended to view their elected assemblies as defenders against the king, against Parliament, and against colonial governors, who were attempting to increase their power at the expense of popular liberty. Thus when the British Parliament asserted its right to tax and govern the colonies (something it had never done before), ideals clashed. The British elite’s idea of the power that its Parliament had gained since 1689 collided with the American elite’s idea of the sovereignty of its own parliaments. The British assumed that their Parliament legislated for the whole empire. The Americans assumed that while the parts of the empire shared British liberties and the British king, the colonies could be taxed and governed only by their own elected representatives. The British attempt to tax the colonies was certain to start a fight.

B.3.

Toward Independence

Parliament passed the Sugar and Currency acts in 1764. The Sugar Act strengthened the customs service, and on the surface it looked like the old Navigation Acts. The Sugar Act was different, however, because it was designed not so much to regulate trade (a power that colonists had not questioned) but rather to raise revenue (a power that colonists denied to Parliament). The Currency Act forbade colonies to issue paper money—a move that many colonies saw as an unconstitutional intervention in their internal affairs. Individual colonies petitioned against these measures, but a unified colonial response to British colonial reform did not come until 1765.

B.3.a.

The Stamp Act Crisis

That year, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which required all legal documents, licenses, commercial contracts, newspapers, pamphlets, dice, and playing cards to carry a tax stamp. The Stamp Tax raised revenue from thousands of daily transactions in all of the colonies. In addition, those accused of violating the act would be tried in Vice–Admiralty Courts—royal tribunals without juries that formerly heard only cases involving maritime law. The colonial assemblies petitioned the British, insisting that only they could tax Americans. The assemblies also sent delegates to a Stamp Act Congress, which adopted a moderate petition of protest and sent it to England. Other Americans took more forceful measures. Before the Act went into effect, in every large colonial town, mobs of artisans and laborers, sometimes including blacks and women, attacked men who accepted appointments as Stamp Act commissioners, usually forcing them to resign. American merchants also organized nonimportation agreements, which put pressure on English merchants, who in turn pressured the British government.

In spring 1766 a newly elected Parliament repealed the Stamp Tax, believing it had been unwise. Parliament did not, however, doubt its right to tax the colonies. When it repealed the Stamp Act, Parliament passed the Declaratory Act, which reaffirmed Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”

B.3.b.

Townshend Acts

In 1767 a new ministry led by chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend addressed the North American situation. Townshend drew up new taxes on imports (tea, lead, paper, glass, paint) that Americans could receive only from Britain. More ominously, he earmarked the revenue from these duties for the salaries of colonial governors and judges, thus making them independent of the colonial assemblies. He also strengthened the organization responsible for enforcing customs duties and located its headquarters in Boston, the center of opposition to the Stamp Act. Finally, he moved many units of the British army away from the frontier and nearer the centers of white population.

Clearly, the Townshend Acts were meant not only to tax the colonies but also to exert British authority. When colonial assemblies protested the duties, Townshend dissolved the assemblies. Americans rioted. They also agreed to boycott all imported British goods—particularly tea. The British responded by landing troops at Boston (the center of resistance) in October 1768. Tensions between townspeople and soldiers were constant for the next year and a half. On March 5, 1770, tensions exploded into the Boston Massacre, when British soldiers fired into a mob of Americans, killing five men.

In Britain on the day of the Boston Massacre, Parliament repealed all of the Townshend Duties except the one on tea—a powerful reminder that it would never relinquish its right to tax and govern Americans. The Americans, in turn, resumed imports of other goods, but continued to boycott tea.

B.3.c.

Other British Measures

The Tea Act of 1773 maintained the tax on tea and gave the English East India Company a monopoly on the export of that commodity. The company’s tea ships ran into trouble in American ports, most notably in Boston, where on December 16, 1773, colonials dressed as Native Americans dumped a shipload of tea into the harbor (see Boston Tea Party).

Britain responded to this Boston Tea Party with the Intolerable Acts of 1774, which closed the port of Boston until Bostonians paid for the tea. The acts also permitted the British army to quarter its troops in civilian households, allowed British soldiers accused of crimes while on duty in America to be tried in Britain or in another colony, and revised the Massachusetts Charter to abolish its elected legislature.

At the same time, the Québec Act organized a British government in Canada that frightened many Protestant, libertarian Americans: It allowed the Catholic Church to remain established in French Canada, and it established a government with fewer liberties than Americans enjoyed. Some Americans saw the act as a model for what the British had in mind for them. Along with the Intolerable Acts and the Québec Act came clear signs that Britain would use whatever military force it needed to subdue the Americans.

B.3.d.

Continental Congress

In September 1774 every colony but Georgia sent delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Congress refused to recognize the authority of Parliament and instead sent a petition to the king. The petition stated the principle that Parliament could not legislate for the colonies without their consent and extended this principle beyond taxation to any legislation.

While the British army occupied Boston, Massachusetts established a provincial congress that met in Concord. The new congress became the de facto government of Massachusetts. The British responded by sending an army out from Boston to seize arms and American leaders at Concord. They were met by Massachusetts militiamen, and colonial protest turned into revolutionary war at the battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. A Second Continental Congress met the following month and proclaimed the militia that had routed the British in the countryside a Continental Army, with George Washington as its leader. In August, King George III proclaimed the colonies to be in rebellion. The British army, after a costly victory at the Battle of Bunker Hill, left Boston and sailed for Nova Scotia. With that, there was virtually no British military presence in the rebellious 13 colonies.

Through 1775 and into 1776, the Americans fought without agreeing on what the fight was about: Many wanted independence, while others wanted to reconcile with the king but not with Parliament. The pamphlet Common Sense by Anglo-American philosopher Thomas Paine presented powerful arguments opposing kings and supporting a pure republic. It changed the minds of many colonists.

The British hired about 30,000 German mercenaries (Hessians) to help put down the Americans, and that, too, convinced some Americans that there could be no reconciliation. Congress appointed a committee to draft a declaration of independence. Thomas Jefferson, a congressman from Virginia, took on the job of writing the first draft. Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, and signed the formal declaration two days later.

The Declaration of Independence was primarily a list of grievances against the king. But the opening paragraphs amounted to a republican manifesto. The preamble declared (and committed future generations of Americans to the proposition) that “all men are created equal,” and that they possess natural rights that include “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Perhaps most important, the declaration insisted that governments derive their powers only by consent of the governed. Protest against British colonial rule had been transformed into a republican revolution.

C.

The American Revolution

In 1776 the prospects for American victory seemed small. Britain had a population more than three times that of the colonies, and the British army was large, well–trained, and experienced. The Americans, on the other hand, had undisciplined militia and only the beginnings of a regular army or even a government. But Americans had powerful advantages that in the end were decisive. They fought on their own territory, and in order to win they did not have to defeat the British but only to convince the British that the colonists could not be defeated.

The British fought in a huge, hostile territory. They could occupy the cities and control the land on which their army stood, but they could not subdue the American colonists. Two decisive battles of the war—Saratoga and Yorktown—are cases in point. At Saratoga, New York, a British army descending on the Hudson Valley from Canada outran its supply lines, became tangled in the wilderness, and was surrounded by Americans. The Americans defeated a British detachment that was foraging for food near Bennington, Vermont, then attacked the main body of the British army at Saratoga. The British surrendered an army of about 5,800 (see Battles of Saratoga).

More important, the American victory at Saratoga convinced France that an alliance with the Americans would be a good gamble. The French provided loans, a few troops, and, most importantly, naval support for the Americans. The French alliance also turned the rebellion into a wider war in which the British had to contend not only with the colonials but also with a French navy in the Caribbean and on the American coast.

In the battle of Yorktown, the climactic campaign of the war, the vastness of America again defeated the British. In 1781 Lord Charles Cornwallis led an army through Virginia almost without opposition, then retreated to a peninsula at Yorktown. There he was besieged by George Washington’s army and held in check by the French navy. Unable to escape or to get help, Cornwallis surrendered an entire British army. His defeat effectively ended the war. In the Treaty of Paris of 1783, the British recognized the independence of the United States and relinquished its territory from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

D.

The Revolution: Winners and Losers

Colonial elites—large landholders and plantation masters—benefited most from American independence: They continued to rule at home without outside interference. Below them, property–holding white men who became full citizens of the American republic enjoyed the “life, liberty, and property” for which they had fought. White women remained excluded from public life, as did most white men without property. But the Americans for whom the legacy of revolution proved disastrous—or at best ambiguous—were Native Americans and African American slaves.

In 1760 the British defeated the French in North America, and Native Americans lost the French alliance that had helped protect and strengthen them for 150 years. In the Revolution, they tended to side with the British or to remain neutral, knowing that an independent republic of land–hungry farmers posed a serious threat. The six Iroquois nations divided on this question, splitting a powerful confederacy that had lasted more than 200 years. When some Iroquois raided colonial settlements, Americans responded by invading and destroying the whole Iroquois homeland in 1779. Further south, the Cherokee people sided with the British and lost heavily. Up and down the frontier, Native Americans and backcountry militia kept up unsettling and sporadic fighting throughout the war. After the British ceded territory on both sides of the Appalachians to the Americans in 1783, Native Americans—who had not been defeated—ignored maps drawn by whites and continued to fight through the 1790s. Native American military power east of the Mississippi was not broken until 1815. The key to that defeat was the fact that the independent American republic was now expanding without opposition from either France or Britain.

The results of the American Revolution for American slaves were ambiguous. Early in the war, the governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, had promised freedom to any Virginia slave who joined the British army. Thousands took the offer, and many more thousands seized wartime opportunities to disappear. (When Colonel Banastre Tarleton raided Charlottesville, Virginia, many of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves cheered the British as liberators.) On the other hand, thousands of blacks (primarily in the North) fought on the patriot side.

American independence had differing effects on blacks. On the one hand, it created an independent nation in which slaveholders wielded real power—something that slaves would remember in the 1830s, when Parliament freed slaves in the British Caribbean without asking the planters. On the other hand, the ideology of natural rights that was fundamental to the Revolution was difficult to contain. Many whites, particularly in the North, came to see emancipation as a logical outcome of the Revolution. Vermont outlawed slavery in its constitution, and in the 1780s and 1790s most Northern states took steps to emancipate their slaves. Even Chesapeake planters flirted seriously with emancipation. Perhaps most important, slaves themselves absorbed revolutionary notions of natural rights. Following the Revolution, slave protests and slave rebellions were drenched in the rhetoric of revolutionary republicanism. Thus American independence was a short–term disaster for the slaves, but at the same time, it set in motion a chain of events that would destroy American slavery.

VI.

Forging a New Nation

A.

State Constitutions

In May 1776, even before declaring national independence, the Second Continental Congress told the states to draw up constitutions to replace their colonial regimes. A few ordered their legislatures to draw up constitutions. By 1777, however, the states had recognized the people as the originators of government power. State constitutions were written by conventions elected by the voters (generally white men who held a minimum amount of property), and in a few states the finished constitutions were then submitted to voters for ratification. The Americans (white men who owned property, that is) were determined to create their own governments, not simply to have them handed down by higher authorities.

Without exception, the states rejected the unwritten constitution of Britain—a jumble of precedents, common law, and statutes that Americans thought had led to arbitrary rule. The new American states produced written constitutions that carefully specified the powers and limits of government. They also wrote the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence into bills of rights that protected freedom of speech and of the press, guaranteed trial by jury, forbade searching without specific warrants, and forbade taxation without consent. Seven states appended these to their constitutions; some of the other states guaranteed these rights through clauses within their constitutions.

These first state constitutions, although all republican and all demonstrating distrust of government power—particularly of the executive—varied a great deal. In Pennsylvania, radicals wrote the most democratic constitution, in 1776. It established a unicameral (one–house) legislature to be chosen in annual secret-ballot elections that were open to all male taxpayers; the executive was a 12–man committee without real power. Nearly all of the other states adopted constitutions with two–house legislatures, usually with longer terms and higher property qualifications for the upper house. They had elective governors who could veto legislation, but who lacked the arbitrary powers of prerevolutionary executives. They could not dissolve the legislature, they could not corrupt the legislature by appointing its members to executive office, and the legislature could override their vetoes.

In these revolutionary constitutions—drawn up hurriedly in the midst of war—Americans were groping toward written constitutions with clearly specified powers. These constitutions featured limits for legislatures, executives, and the courts, with a clear separation of power among the three. They also guaranteed the citizens certain inalienable rights and made them the constituent power. On the whole, state constitutions reflected fear of government (and particularly executive) tyranny more than they reflected the need to create forceful, effective government.

B.

The Articles of Confederation

Americans began their revolution without a national government, but the Continental Congress recognized the need for a government that could conduct the war, form relations with other countries, borrow money, and regulate trade. Eight days after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a committee headed by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania submitted a blueprint for a powerful national government. Among other things, Dickinson’s plan gave all the states’ western land claims to the national government, and it created a congress in which states were represented equally rather than by population. The plan shocked delegates who considered the new nation a loose confederation of independent states, and they rejected it.

The Articles of Confederation, which included a strong affirmation of state sovereignty, went into effect in March 1781. They created a unicameral legislature in which each state had one vote. The articles gave the confederation jurisdiction in relations with other nations and in disputes between states, and the articles won control of western lands for the national government. In ordinances passed in 1784, 1785, and 1787 the Confederation Congress organized the new federal lands east of the Mississippi and between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes as the Northwest Territory. This legislation organized the land into townships six miles square, provided land to support public schools, and organized the sale of land to developers and settlers. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 guaranteed civil liberties in the territory and banned the importation of slaves north of the Ohio River. The creation of the territory was among the solid accomplishments of the Confederation government. Still, the government lacked important powers. It could not directly tax Americans, and the articles could be amended only by a unanimous vote of the states. Revolutionary fear of centralized tyranny had created a very weak national government.

The weakness of the national government made resolving questions of currency and finance particularly difficult. Neither the national government nor the states dared to tax Americans. To pay the minimal costs of government and the huge costs of fighting the war, both simply printed paper money. While this money was honored early in the war, citizens learned to distrust it. By 1780 it took 40 paper dollars to buy one silver dollar. When the Confederation Congress requisitioned funds from the states, the states were very slow in paying. And when the Congress asked permission to establish a 5 percent tax on imports (which would have required an amendment to the articles), important states refused. Under these circumstances the national government could neither strengthen the currency nor generate a stable income for itself.

The Confederation also had problems dealing with other countries. In the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolution, for instance, Americans agreed to pay prerevolutionary debts owed to British merchants, and to restore confiscated property to colonists who had remained loyal to the king (Loyalists). States refused to enforce these provisions, giving the British an excuse to occupy forts in what was now the Northwest Territory of the United States. In 1784 Spain closed the port of New Orleans to Americans, thus isolating farmers in the western settlements whose only access to the rest of the world was through the Mississippi River that ended below that port. The Confederation Congress could do little about these developments. These problems also extended to international trade. In the 1780s Britain, France, and Spain all made it difficult for Americans to trade with their colonies; at the same time, the British flooded American ports with their goods. Gold and silver flowed out of the country. The result was a deep depression throughout most of the 1780s. The Confederation Congress could do nothing about it.

The Confederation also had trouble dealing with Native Americans. The Confederation Congress negotiated doubtful land–cession treaties with the Iroquois in New York and with the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw nations in the South. The Creeks (as well as many of the Native Americans supposedly represented at the negotiations) resisted the onslaught of white settlers, and the Confederation was powerless to do anything about the wars that resulted.

The Confederation had internal problems as well. The economic disruptions of the Revolution and the 1780s left many farmers unable to keep up with their mortgages and other debts. State governments had often met this problem by printing paper money and by passing stay laws that prevented creditors from seizing the property of their debtors. In Massachusetts, however, the upper house of the legislature protected the investments of creditors by voting down debtor–relief legislation. In 1786 farmers in the western counties, led by revolutionary veteran Daniel Shays, held conventions to demand the abolition of the upper house. They then mobbed county courthouses and destroyed the records of many of their debts. They then marched on a federal arsenal at Springfield, where they were repulsed and scattered by the militia (see Shays’ Rebellion). Yet Shays’ rebels retained enough support to elect a legislature that in the following year enacted a stay law.

C.

The Constitutional Convention

International troubles, the postwar depression, and the near–war in Massachusetts (as well as similar but less spectacular events in other states) led to calls for stronger government at both the state and national levels. Supporters wanted a government that could deal with other countries, create a stable (deflated) currency, and maintain order in a society that some thought was becoming too democratic. Some historians call the citizens who felt this way cosmopolitans. They tended to be wealthy, with their fortunes tied to international trade. They included seaport merchants and artisans, southern planters, and commercial farmers whose foreign markets had been closed. Most of their leaders were former officers of the Continental (national) army and officials of the Confederation government—men whose wartime experiences had given them a political vision that was national and not local.

In the 1780s cosmopolitans were outnumbered by so-called locals, who tended to be farmers living in isolated, inland communities with only marginal ties to the market economy, and who tended to be in debt to cosmopolitans. In the Revolution, most locals had served in militias rather than in the national army, and they preserved a localist, rather than nationalist, view of politics. They also preserved a distrust of any government not subject to direct oversight by citizens. The new state governments had often reapportioned legislative districts to give new, fast-growing western counties greater representation. Locals tended to control legislatures and (as in Shays’ Massachusetts) promote debtor relief, low taxes, and inactive government—a situation that caused cosmopolitans to fear that the republic was degenerating into democracy and chaos.

In September 1786 delegates from several states met at Annapolis, Maryland, to discuss ways to improve American trade. They decided instead, with the backing of the Confederation Congress, to call a national convention to discuss ways of strengthening the Union. In May 1787, 55 delegates (representing every state but Rhode Island, whose legislature had voted not to send a delegation) convened in Philadelphia and drew up a new Constitution of the United States. The delegates were cosmopolitans who wanted to strengthen national government, but they had to compromise on a number of issues among themselves. In addition, the delegates realized that their Constitution would have to be ratified by the citizenry, and they began compromising not only among themselves but also on their notions of what ordinary Americans would accept. The result was a Constitution that was both conservative and revolutionary.

The biggest compromise was between large and small states. States with large populations favored a Virginia Plan that would create a two–house legislature in which population determined representation in both houses. This legislature would then appoint the executive and the judiciary, and it would have the power to veto state laws. The small states countered with a plan for a one–house legislature in which every state, regardless of population, would have one vote. In the resulting compromise, the Constitution mandated a two-house legislature (see Congress of the United States). Representatives would be elected to the lower house based on population, but in the upper house two senators would represent each state, regardless of population. Another compromise settled an argument over whether slaves would be counted as part of a state’s population (if they were counted, Southern representation would increase). The convention agreed to count each slave as three–fifths of a person.

The president would be selected by an electoral college, in which each state’s number of votes equaled its congressional representation. Once elected, the president would have important powers: The president appointed other officers of the executive department as well as federal judges. Commander-in-chief of the military, the president also directed foreign affairs, and could veto laws passed by Congress. These powers, however, were balanced by congressional oversight.

Congress, or just the Senate, had to ratify major appointments and treaties with foreign countries, and only Congress could declare war. Congress also had the power to impeach the president or federal judges, and Congress could override a president’s veto. The Constitution also declared itself the supreme law of the land, and listed powers that the states could not exercise. See also United States (Government).

Thus the Constitution carefully separated and defined the powers of the three branches of the national government and of the national and state governments. It established checks and balances between the branches—and put it all in writing. The stated purpose of the document was to make a strong national government that could never become tyrannical.

D.

Ratification

The proceedings of the Constitutional Convention were kept secret until late September 1787. The Confederation Congress sent the completed Constitution out for ratification by state conventions elected for that purpose—not by state legislatures, many of which were hostile to the new document. Thus the Constitution—which began “We the people”—created a government with the people, and not the state legislatures, as the constituent power.

The Federalists, as proponents of the Constitution called themselves, were cosmopolitans who were better organized than their opponents. Particularly in the beginning of the ratification effort, they made greater use of pamphlets and newspapers. In New York, Federalist leaders Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison composed the powerful and enduring Federalist papers to counter doubts about the proposed new government. By January 1788 conventions in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut had ratified the Constitution.

Opponents of the Constitution, who called themselves Anti–Federalists, were locals who feared a strong national government that would be run by educated and wealthy cosmopolitans who operated far away from most citizens. They were particularly distrustful of a Constitution that lacked a bill of rights protecting citizens from government attacks on their liberties.

Ratification contests in the remaining states were close, but by July 1788, 11 states had ratified, often with promises that the new government would enact a bill of rights. (North Carolina eventually ratified in 1789. The last state, Rhode Island, did not send delegates to the Constitutional Convention and did not ratify the Constitution until 1790.)

VII.

Launching the Nation: Federalists and Jeffersonians

George Washington was unanimously elected the first president of the United States in 1789. He presided over a revolutionary republic that was overwhelmingly rural. The country’s 4 million people filled the nation’s territory at only 1.7 per square km (4.5 per square mile; the comparable figure for 1998 was 29.5 per square km, or 76.4 per square mile).

A.

Americans and their Government, 1790–1815

Most Americans lived in rural, self–sufficient neighborhoods. Farm families produced a variety of plants and animals, consumed much of what they produced, and traded much of the rest within their neighborhoods. Since the mid–18th century Americans had been sending surpluses to Europe and to the slave islands of the Caribbean; in return they received molasses, rum, crockery, tea and coffee, ready–made cloth, and other European (primarily British) manufactured goods.

Two groups were more heavily dependent on international trade, and both had tended to support the new Constitution. The plantation slave–masters of the South grew staple crops for world markets: rice and indigo in South Carolina and Georgia, tobacco in North Carolina and the Chesapeake. The markets for these goods were in Europe (again, primarily England). Northeastern seaport merchants also had a vital stake in overseas trade.

From the 1790s to 1820, southern farms and slavery changed dramatically. In the Chesapeake, tobacco had worn out much of the soil, and world markets for the crop were down. Chesapeake planters began growing less tobacco and more grain, a change that required fewer slaves. Many planters trained their slaves as carpenters, blacksmiths, and other craftsmen and rented them to employers in the towns. Other planters, believing that the natural rights philosophy of the revolution left little moral room for slavery, freed their slaves; but many more simply sold their slaves at high prices to cotton planters farther south and west.

In the 1790s planters south of Virginia had found that they could make money by growing cotton, thanks to the cotton gin invented by American Eli Whitney to separate sticky seeds from the cotton fibers. The result was a stunning boom in cotton. The United States produced only 3,000 bales of cotton in 1790; that figure jumped to 335,000 by 1820. The cotton boom created a brisk market in slaves. From 1778 to 1808 the United States imported as many African slaves as it had imported during the whole previous history of the slave trade. Nearly all of these slaves entered the country through Charleston or Savannah and ended up working the cotton plantations of the Deep South. Another reason for the rise in slave imports was a promise in the Constitution that the national government would not end the nation’s participation in the international slave trade until 1808, and planters wished to stock up before the market closed. The slave–driven economy of the late 18th and early 19th centuries produced huge amounts of plantation staples, nearly all of them sold to international (primarily English) buyers.

In 1790 there were few cities. Only 5 percent of the population lived in towns with more than 2,500 inhabitants. And only five communities (Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston) had more than 10,000 inhabitants. Each of these five cities was an Atlantic seaport and handled the exporting of American farm staples and the importing of Old World manufactured goods. They performed very little manufacturing of their own. After 1793, when Britain and France entered a long period of war, American seaports handled increased exports as war–torn Europe bought a lot of American food. They also began to handle more of the trade between European countries and their island colonies in the Caribbean.

Thus the work of the plantations, the seaport towns, and (to a lesser extent) the farms of the United States was tied to foreign trade. The new government of the United States worked to foster and protect that trade, and these efforts led the new nation into the War of 1812.

A.1.

Growth of Democracy

Another potential problem for members of the new government who prized order was the rapid growth and increasing democracy of American society. The revolutionary rhetoric of equality and natural rights seeped into every corner of American life. Even the poorest white men demanded the basic dignity that republics promised their citizens. Some women began to dream in that direction, as did slaves. In 1800 a slave named Gabriel led a slave revolt in Richmond, Virginia. His small army marched into the state capital under the banner “Death or Liberty.”

Religious change also contributed to the new democratic character of the republic. The established churches of colonial days (Congregationalists in New England, Anglicans—now renamed Episcopalians—further south) declined, in part because they were relatively cold and formal, and also because their status as established churches aroused democratic resentment. At the same time, a great revival among the common people made Baptists and Methodists the largest American churches. Baptists grew from 400 to 2,700 congregations between 1783 and 1820; Methodists grew from 50 to 2,700 churches in the same years. These churches emphasized preaching over ritual, stressed Bible–reading congregations over educated ministers, favored spiritual freedom over old forms of hierarchical discipline, and encouraged conversions. Of crucial importance to the revival was the conversion of slaves and, in turn, the slaves’ transformation of Christianity into a religion of their own. By the second decade of the 19th century, most American slaves were Christians—primarily Baptists and Methodists. Slaves and free blacks participated in the revival and were taken into white churches. But white prejudice and blacks’ desire for autonomy soon resulted in separate African American congregations. By the early 19th century black Methodist and Baptist congregations had become fundamental to a growing African American cultural identity.

Finally, at the western edges of this increasingly disorderly and democratic republic were Native American peoples who remained free and on their own land. The Shawnee, Delaware, and other peoples north of the Ohio River in particular had not been defeated in the Revolution and did not accept the jurisdiction of the United States over their land. These northwestern tribes could also rely on help from the British in Canada.

Thus at the edges of the republic—in the forests of the interior and on the Atlantic Ocean—the new government faced important problems of diplomacy, problems that sometimes degenerated into war. Within the republic, the government had to contend with a democratic citizenry, many of whom deeply distrusted law and authority that came from a distant capital.

A.2.

The Bill of Rights

The new government of the United States convened in New York City in early 1789. The First Congress immediately passed a tariff on imports that would provide 90 percent of the government’s revenue. It also created a system of federal courts. Congressmen then turned to the bill of rights that some of the state ratifying conventions had promised their citizens. Congress ultimately passed 12 amendments to the Constitution. Ten of these were ratified by the states and became the Bill of Rights.

The First Amendment protected the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and religion from federal legislation. The Second and Third amendments guaranteed the right to bear arms and made it difficult for the government to house soldiers in private homes—provisions favoring a citizen militia over a professional army. The Fourth through Eighth amendments defined a citizen’s rights in court and when under arrest. The Ninth Amendment stated that the enumeration of these rights did not endanger other rights, and the Tenth Amendment said that powers not granted the national government by the Constitution remained with the states and citizens.

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.

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.

B.

Expansion: Northwest Territory

In the 1780s there were few white settlers in the Northwest Territory (the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and eastern Minnesota). By 1860 more than one in five Americans lived in the Northwest, and the geographic center of the population of the United States was near Chillicothe, Ohio. Nearly all white migrants were farmers, and they reached the area in two streams.

Before 1830 most migrants were Southerners, mainly poor and middling farmers from Kentucky, Tennessee, and western Virginia. In the southern regions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, they settled near rivers that empty into the Ohio River, providing access to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.

Southern migrants in the Northwest worked their land Southern style. They planted cornfields but left most of their land wooded, allowing hogs to roam freely and fend for themselves. In this way farmers subsisted (within their h