Early Republic, Era of the

Early Republic, Era of the (1789–1828).Elections for the new federal government established by the Constitution were held in the winter of 1788–1789. Supporters of the Constitution, calling themselves Federalists, won control of both houses of Congress and George Washington was elected president. Even those who had opposed the Constitution, it appeared, were willing to give it a try. The First Congress gathered in New York in March 1789, and Washington was inaugurated on 30 April. The president's dress for the ceremony—a dark suit of American manufacture adorned with an elegant dress sword—bespoke his desire to retain republican simplicity while commanding respect for the office.

Establishing the New Government

. The government's first need was revenue. In May, James Madison, the Federalist party's floor leader in the House of Representatives, introduced a bill levying customs duties on imports. The rates were generally low, but a protective duty of 50 percent was placed on a few products, such as steel and cloth, to encourage their domestic manufacture.

Fleshing out the constitutional outlines for the executive and judiciary, Congress next created three executive departments: state, treasury, and war. Washington appointed Thomas Jefferson secretary of state and named thirty‐two‐year‐old Alexander Hamilton, an experienced financier who had helped organize the Bank of New York in the mid‐1780s, to head the treasury. Although courts and lawyers were unpopular among American's debt‐ridden farmers, and the Constitution mentioned only a Supreme Court, Congress nevertheless boldly established federal district courts in each state and circuit courts of appeal, capped by a six‐member Supreme Court. The centrality of the Supreme Court was established during John Marshall's long tenure as chief justice (1801–1835). In a series of landmark rulings, the Marshall court upheld the supremacy of national over state power, free economic competition, and judicial review of legislative actions.

The question of public credit proved especially troublesome. The Continental Congress, lacking the power to tax, had financed the Revolutionary War by issuing paper money and other IOUs that quickly depreciated in value, most ending in the hands of speculators. Hamilton nevertheless proposed to pay off the nation's debt at its face value, exchanging the depreciated IOUs for interest‐bearing government bonds. Only by paying its past debts in full, Hamilton argued, could the government restore its credit for future borrowing.

Hamilton further proposed a bank to help the Treasury Department fund the national debt and collect and disperse funds. The resulting Bank of the United States, chartered by Congress in 1791, allied business and government. The government owned one‐fifth of the stock, and the president appointed one‐fifth of the directors. Its notes, accepted by the government as legal tender, were intended to function as a national currency.

Hamilton believed that the support of the wealthy was essential to the new government's survival. Jefferson and Madison, however, longtime allies in Virginia politics, were increasingly uneasy about the ties Hamilton was forging between the government and northern businessmen, fearing that national policy was being shaped by a moneyed elite unconcerned about the common people. In addition, since the Constitution made no mention of banks among the delegated powers of Congress, Jefferson and Madison argued that the Bank of the United States was unconstitutional.

As a republic with an elected head, the United States stood almost alone in a world of monarchies, and many feared that the wealthy few might turn to a king to protect their interests. By 1791, Jefferson and Madison were referring to themselves and their allies as Republicans, implying that Hamilton and his Federalist supporters secretly favored a monarchy. From this developing rift emerged the first political parties. Although President Washington generally sided with Hamilton and the Federalists, the Republicans dared not criticize him, and he won reelection without opposition in 1792.

The French Revolution, which broke out in 1789, reinforced the symbolic differences between the parties in the United States. Republicans rejoiced at the formation of a fellow republic in Europe; Federalists were alarmed at the bloodshed and violence that attended the revolution. When Great Britain formed a coalition of monarchies to contain the revolution and the French declared war, Republicans in America sympathized with the French, while Federalists regarded Britain as a bastion of stability. Although both sides agreed that America must not become involved in the conflict, neutrality proved difficult to sustain. France attempted to commission warships in American ports, and Britain angered Americans by seizing any vessel caught trading with the French. Under Washington's successor, John Adams, the United States and France engaged in an undeclared naval war. Napoleon's rise to power in France in 1799 calmed relations for a time, since Napoleon's ambitions for recovering France's North American empire required mending fences with the United States. The election of Jefferson as president in 1800 also brought a change in American policy.

Jefferson, Madison, and the War of 1812

. Jefferson's philosophy of government, known to historians as “liberalism,” involved limiting the government activities; cutting costs; and, in contrast to Hamilton's approach, keeping business interests at arm's length. His ideal, as expressed in his inaugural address was “a wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” Implementing this policy, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin cut government expenses and virtually extinguished the national debt by 1806.

Although Jefferson limited the government's domestic role, he took an active part in foreign affairs. When the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean seized U.S. vessels and held American sailors for ransom, Jefferson dispatched a naval squadron to the region and after a brief, though undeclared, war wrested treaties from the North African city‐states that allowed American merchant ships to cruise the Mediterranean unmolested. Jefferson also used the powers of the federal government (and stretched the Constitution in so doing) to acquire foreign territory, notably with the Louisiana Purchase. The port of New Orleans was crucial to the commerce of the Trans‐Appalachian West, and when Spain in 1802, anticipating an imminent French takeover of New Orleans, closed the port to American shipping, western frontiersmen screamed for war. Jefferson sent James Monroe and Robert R. Livingston to France with instructions to purchase New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Napoleon, his dream of New World empire having evaporated when yellow fever wiped out a French army in the West Indies, and ever in need of money, agreed to the American proposal. Indeed, he sold not only New Orleans but the vast territory between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains for fifteen million dollars, doubling the size of the nation. Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison contended that West Florida was also included in the purchase, and in 1810, taking advantage of Spain's weakness, the United States annexed the Gulf Coast territory.

Jefferson proved less successful in pursuing America's policy of neutrality in the European war, particularly after 1805 when Great Britain and France, having battled to a draw, shifted to commercial warfare. While both sides seized U.S. ships, American wrath was primarily directed at the British, who impressed American seamen into the Royal Navy and intrigued with Indians of the interior. In 1807–1809, Jefferson and his successor, Madison, attempted an embargo that halted all American trade, but British policy remained unaffected. After the Battle of Tippecanoe in November 1811 exposed a British plot to arm American Indians, Congress declared war on Britain.

Except for several naval engagements, won by America's superbly built frigates, the War of 1812 went badly from the outset, when an American army in Detroit surrendered to a British‐Indian force and left the British and their Indian allies in possession of the western Great Lakes. American efforts in 1812 and 1813 to invade upper Canada turned into bloody fiascoes. In 1814 a British amphibious force seized Washington, D.C., burning the White House and other public buildings. However, American pride surged albeit belatedly in January 1815, when General Andrew Jackson's Tennessee volunteers repulsed a British invasion of New Orleans. The Treaty of Ghent (December 1814) ended the war, but the issues that had brought it on were resolved only by Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in June 1815 and the end of the war in Europe.

Nationalism and Sectionalism in post–1815 America

. The War of 1812, fought essentially to uphold U.S. honor, revealed flaws in the national fabric. The difficulties of transporting and supplying armies demonstrated the need for interstate roads and canals. The vexations of wartime finance showed the value of the Bank of the United States, whose charter had expired in 1811. And when the war ended, a deluge of cheap British goods threatened the American manufacturing that had sprung up during the period of embargo and war. Congress, abetted by a postwar spirit of national unity, responded with a series of measures reminiscent of the Federalist philosophy of energetic government.

In 1816, Congress chartered a Second Bank of the United States empowered to establish branches throughout the country and to issue notes that would serve as a national currency. Next came new tariffs whose rates on textiles, iron, and other imports were high enough to shield American manufacturers from foreign competition. In 1817, Congress capped its effort to promote a national economy with a bill appropriating funds for the construction of a nationwide system of roads and canals. President Madison, balking at this use of federal power, vetoed the bill as unconstitutional on his last day in office. Nevertheless, these three issues—bank, tariff, and internal improvements—would dominate the nation's domestic politics for a generation.

The postwar spirit of nationalism carried over into foreign policy where the administration of Madison's successor, James Monroe, and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, resumed the quest for westward expansion. The Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806) had strengthened America's claim to the territory (vaguely known as “Oregon”) between California and Alaska. Great Britain also claimed this region, as did Russia, which had already colonized Alaska. In 1818, Adams negotiated a convention with Britain by which the two countries would jointly occupy and govern Oregon (then inhabited by Indians and a few fur traders) until settlement resolved the question of ownership. In the 1819 Adams‐Onís Treaty with Spain, the United States purchased Florida and confined Spanish claims on the Pacific Coast to California by drawing a boundary line across the continent from the Gulf Coast of Louisiana to the forty‐second parallel (the present northern boundary of Utah, Nevada, and California). Adams's vision thus laid the foundation for a continental republic. In private discussions with British and Russian emissaries, Adams insisted on Americans' right to settle in the Pacific Northwest and made clear that the United States would eventually claim title to Oregon.

In 1823, Adams's attention was directed to South America. While Spain was distracted by the Napoleonic wars, a number of Spanish colonies in Latin America had rebelled and become independent and in 1821 Mexico won its independence. These fledgling nations presented a new market for American manufacturers and traders. Monroe and Adams were not deeply concerned that Spain might attempt to recover Latin America, but they were anxious about possible intervention by other European powers. Acting on these apprehensions, President Monroe in his annual message to Congress on 2 December 1832, in a passage drafted by Adams, reiterated the “doctrine of the spheres,” a keystone of American policy since Washington's Farewell Address in 1796. The two halves of the earth, Monroe explained, were separated by both geography and systems of government. They might exchange goods, but neither hemisphere had a right to intervene in the affairs of the other. Any European intervention in the Latin American republics, he warned, would be viewed as a “manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.” With Oregon in mind, Adams also inserted into Monroe's address an additional warning that the American continents were “henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power.” A statement of America's commercial as well as territorial ambitions, the so‐called Monroe Doctrine marked the climax of the postwar spirit of nationalism.

Even at that triumphant moment, however, a countervailing spirit of self‐conscious regionalism was spreading among southerners who saw little benefit to themselves in the federal programs established by Congress. Blessed with a magnificent river system to carry their heavy staples to market, southerners had little need for roads and canals. Southern planters eyed the Bank of the United States with deep suspicion and viewed the tariff as a parasitical drain on their cotton profits. One southerner revealed still another reason to be wary of federal power: “If Congress can make canals,” he muttered, “they can emancipate [the slaves].” This concern stemmed from an effort by northern congressmen a few years earlier to restrict slavery in the territory of Missouri. The Missouri controversy, when for the first time blunt criticism of the “peculiar institution” of slavery was expressed on the floor of Congress, generated a mood of sectional defensiveness.

The War of 1812 had diminished Indian resistance to white settlement east of the Mississippi River, and after the war settlers poured into the Ohio and Tennessee valleys. Four new states entered the Union between 1816 and 1819—Indiana and Illinois in the North, Alabama and Mississippi in the South. Pioneers, many of them southern slaveholders, had also crossed the Mississippi into the Missouri Territory. When Missouri applied for statehood in 1819, some northern congressmen proposed a prohibition on the further introduction of slaves into Missouri and the freeing of slaves already there. Northerners reasoned that Congress had the power to regulate slavery in land it had purchased. In creating the Northwest Territory in 1787, the Continental Congress had prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River, and the northern congressmen argued that the same regulatory principle should apply to the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, including the Missouri Territory.

The effort to restrict slavery in Missouri ignited a fierce debate that ended in a compromise in 1820 with the admission of Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, and a prohibition on slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36°30′ north latitude—Missouri's southern boundary. The Missouri controversy began a forty‐year sectional dispute over slavery that ended in the Civil War.

With the Federalist party's collapse after the War of 1812, the postwar decade brought a period of one‐party rule commonly called the “era of good feelings.” In fact, this misnamed era saw much ill feeling, as the Missouri controversy illustrates. By the mid‐1820s, amid growing mistrust of the federal government among southerners and westerners, the dominant Jeffersonian‐Republican party had split into two factions—National Republicans, led by such nationalists as Henry Clay and the former Federalist Daniel Webster, and Democratic Republicans, who eventually fastened onto the military hero Andrew Jackson. (The latter became the Democratic party after Jackson's election as president in 1828.) The birth of this “second party system” was attended by political instability and animosity, wreaking havoc with the presidency of Monroe's successor, John Quincy Adams, elected in 1824.

Jackson actually received the most popular votes in 1824, but with four candidates in the field, no one received a majority. In this situation the Constitution requires the House of Representatives to select a president. When Speaker of the House Henry Clay engineered the selection of fellow nationalist John Quincy Adams, Jackson was understandably outraged; when Adams named Clay secretary of state, Jackson's followers accused Adams of gaining office through a “corrupt bargain.”

As the “corrupt bargain” cry reverberated, Adams and Clay were pictured as old‐fashioned aristocrats clinging to power by backstairs bargaining that thwarted the will of the people. Jackson was thus portrayed as the leader of the “common man,” even though his political ideology remained unknown. An appeal to the “common man” resonated in the 1820s, for most states had revised their Revolutionary Era constitutions to extend the vote to all adult white males.

Politics, Society, and Culture in Jacksonian America

. The 1828 presidential campaign, which Jackson won handily, was fought not on issues but on personalities, with each candidate playing a symbolic role: Adams the eastern aristocrat, Jackson the western democrat. The contest between Jackson and Adams and the birth of the second party system was staged against a backdrop of dramatic social and economic change. The population was growing at a breathtaking pace, doubling every twenty‐three years. Although the birthrate had begun to decline (and would continue to do so into the twentieth century), a flood of immigrants ensured a rapid peopling of the land. In the economic realm, the introduction of water‐powered spinning and weaving machines in the textile industry heralded a coming industrial revolution. As mill towns sprang up at every waterfall in the northeastern states, the move from farm to city began. In 1790, more than 90 percent of Americans lived on farms or in small villages. That figure fell to 80 percent by 1820 and to 55 percent by 1860.

Rapid economic growth presented new opportunities for northern white women. Previously limited to homework or to household‐related jobs like cleaning and cooking, some young women now became school teachers or mill workers. One destination for young farm women was the Lowell mills in Massachusetts, at the falls of the Merrimac River. An unnamed rural crossroads in 1823, Lowell by 1830 boasted ten mills and three thousand operatives, nearly all of them female.

Southern agriculture burgeoned as tobacco culture spread westward, and the cotton industry boomed thanks to Eli Whitney's cotton gin and the rise of textile mills. As cotton plantations spread across the lower South, output surged from 178,000 bales in 1810 to 732,000 in 1830. This agriculture boom rested on slave labor. In 1810–1830, the number of slaves in the South grew from 1.2 million to 2 million. Post‐Revolutionary antislavery sentiment in the South, expressed in the colonization movement, faded as slavery became more important economically. As an abortive revolt in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 and Nat Turner's 1831 uprising in Virginia underscored the slaves' desire for freedom, southern states retaliated with harsh slave codes.

These decades saw efforts to achieve cultural independence to match political independence. A group of post‐Revolutionary poets known as the “Hartford Wits” produced some works of note, while the nation's first professional novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, published four flawed but ambitious gothic novels in 1798–1799. Washington Irving's The Sketch‐Book (1819–1820) included such classic tales as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” while James Fenimore Cooper launched his series of Leatherstocking novels of frontier life with The Pioneers (1823) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Noah Webster's patriotic American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) included thousands of American usages. In the visual arts, Gilbert Stuart and other post‐Revolutionary painters offered portraits of Washington, Jefferson, and other founders, while younger artists such as Thomas Cole found inspiration in the American landscape.

Irving's “Rip Van Winkle,” in which Rip awakens from a twenty‐year sleep to find his world transformed, evoked the unsettling social changes of the era. The burgeoning cities, still without professional police, fire, or public‐health departments, seethed with crime, occasional riots, and periodic epidemics. Protestant Christianity, long viewed as a pillar of stability and continuity, was in ferment, as liberal rationalists went in one direction, Evangelicals in another. Religion was becoming democratized: frontier revivals led by untutored preachers broke out in Kentucky and Tennessee in 1801–1802; Charles G. Finney conducted vastly successful urban revivals in the 1820s and 1830s; a young farmer in upstate New York, Joseph Smith, having proclaimed a new revelation from God, founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐Day Saints (Mormons) in 1830.

In 1819, the Boston minister William Ellery Channing, in a series of sermons in Baltimore, Maryland, set forth the principles of Unitarianism. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leading intellectual of his generation, left the Unitarian ministry in 1832, charging that the church had become a hollow shell. Viewing American society with a troubled eye, Emerson sought to improve it through the leadership of principled, free, and self‐reliant individuals.

Other reformers looked to benevolent societies and even government. Temperance groups sought to curb drinking and urban violence. Tax‐supported public schools arose to tame unruly youth and immigrants. The urban poor were encouraged to attend Sunday schools to learn reading, writing, and self‐improvement. The result, in the decades after 1820, was a soul‐searching reform movement intent on improving every facet of American society. It would ultimately address the greatest evil of all, human slavery.
See also African Americans; Agriculture: 1770s to 1890; Antebellum Era; Architecture; Canals and Waterways; Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge; Cholera; Demography; Depressions, Economic; Disease; Education: The Public School Movement; Education: Collegiate Education; Expansionism; Factory System; Federal Government; Foreign Relations; Immigration; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Indian Removal Act; Industrialization; Iron and Steel Industry; Labor Movements; Literature: Early National and Antebellum Eras; Marbury v. Madison; McCulloch v. Maryland; Medicine: From 1776 to the 1870s; Missouri Compromise; Monetary Policy, Federal; Mormonism; Music: Popular Music; Music: Traditional Music; Painting: To 1945; Poetry; Quasi‐War with France; Republicanism; Revolution and Constitution, Era of; Roads and Turnpikes, Early; Romantic Movement; Science: Revolutionary War to World War I; Slave Uprisings and Resistance; Taxation; Temperance and Prohibition; Textile Industry; Tobacco Industry; Tobacco Products; Urbanization; Women in the Labor Force; Unitarianism and Universalism; Work.

Bibliography

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Robert W. Tucker and and David C. Hendrickson , Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson, 1990.
Larzer Ziff , Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States, 1991.
Stanley Elkins and and Eric McKitrick , The Age of Federalism, 1993.
Peter S. Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies, 1993.
Norman K. Risjord , Jefferson's America, 1760–1815, 1993.
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Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, 1997.
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Norman K. Risjord