Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

by Alan Axelrod

  Jefferson’s view of the Constitution became known as “strict construction.” Hamilton, in contrast, supported the constitutional view that became known as “loose construction,” arguing in support of it the doctrine of “implied powers.” Hamilton declared that the framers of the Constitution could not possibly have anticipated all eventualities and contingencies; therefore, it is impossible to list all the powers the federal government may assume. In the case of the Bank of the United States, Hamilton held, the Constitution does grant the federal government the power to tax, and taxation implies the creation of a place to keep the revenue collected—namely, a bank.

  The disagreement between Jefferson and Hamilton formed the foundation of the American two-party political system, with either party more or less defined and distinguished by its view of the nature of the federal government. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party believed in a restrained central government that allowed a great measure of power to individuals and states; Hamilton’s Federalist party stood for a relatively powerful and active central government, which claimed for itself the lion’s share of authority. The dynamic, shifting balance between these two poles of opinion has defined the lively American political scene ever since the days of the first president. Over the years, the running dialogue has sometimes erupted into ugly argument and even terrible violence—as in the Civil War. Yet the two-party system has also insured a government and society that is never stagnant and always open to change and challenge.

  The Least You Need to Know

  The key to the Constitution is a strong central government that is itself governed by a system of checks and balances.

  In addition to the nation’s first president, George Washington, the defining personalities of the early republic were Thomas Jefferson (who favored the forces of liberal democracy) and Alexander Hamilton (who favored a powerful central government).

  Word for the Day

  The eagle on the Great Seal of the United States of America holds in its beak a ribbon on which the Latin motto e pluribus unum is inscribed. The words mean “from many, one” and express the formidable nature of the task that faced the founding fathers: to forge a single nation from several states and many individuals. The motto was chosen by a committee appointed by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, and was officially adopted on June 20, 1782. The phrase is a quotation from “Moretum” by the Roman poet Vergil (70-19 B.C.) but was borrowed more immediately from Gentleman’s Magazine, a popular British periodical on whose cover the phrase had appeared for many years.

  Main Event

  In August 1786, armed mobs of beleaguered farmers began forcing the closure of courts in Massachusetts’s frontier counties. A charismatic Revolutionary War veteran, Daniel Shays (ca. 1747-1825), emerged as the leader of what came to be called Shays’s Rebellion. It was not until January 25, 1787, that a state militia force was able to disperse rebels in Springfield.

  Word for the Day

  Bicameral literally means “two-chambered” and refers to a type of legislature consisting of two groups of representatives. In the case of the British Parliament, the two houses are the House of Lords and the House of Commons; in the case of the U.S. Congress, they are the Senate and the House of Representatives.

  Word for the Day

  The framers of the Constitution wanted to avoid election of the president directly by the people. As ultimately provided in the Constitution, each state has as many electors as it has senators and representatives combined. Together, the electors constitute the Electoral College. Originally, the electors were voted into office by the state legislatures. This evolved into election by the people. (Today, we may believe that, every fourth November, we are voting for a president, but actually, we are voting for electors pledged to cast their votes for a particular candidate.)

  Stats

  Of the 85 Federalist essays, most scholars agree that Hamilton wrote 52, Madison 28, and Jay 5.

  Real Life

  George Washington (1732-99) was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, to a prosperous planter. After his father died in 1743, he was raised by his half-brother Lawrence at Mount Vernon, Lawrence’s Potomac River plantation. Washington became a surveyor—a powerful profession in colonial America—and helped lay out Belhaven, Virginia (now Alexandria). Following the death of his half-brother, Washington inherited Mount Vernon.

  He left that beloved home to serve in the French and Indian War, returning afterward to Mount Vernon and service in Virginia’s House of Burgesses.

  Washington made a happy—and opportune—marriage to a young and wealthy widow, Martha Dandridge Custis and by 1769 was a prominent leader of Virginia’s opposition to Britain’s oppressive colonial policies. During 1774-75, Washington was a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congress, and in June 17 75 was unanimously chosen as commander in chief of the Continental forces, which he led brilliantly.

  After the war, Washington headed the Virginia delegation to the Constitutional Convention and was unanimously elected presiding officer. Upon ratification of the Constitution, he was unanimously elected president in 1789 and was reelected in 1792. In March 1797, when Washington left office, he left a well-established government and a stable financial system.

  Unfortunately, the Father of His Country had little time to enjoy retirement at his beloved Mount Vernon. In mid-December 1799, he fell ill with acute laryngitis, which rapidly worsened. He died on December 14.

  Main Event

  In 1791, Congress levied a federal tax on corn liquor. In frontier Pennsylvania, farmers distilled whiskey to use up surplus corn, and the product became for them a form of currency. Farmers protested and often refused to pay the tax. In 1794, President Washington sent collectors, who were met by armed resistance in what constituted the first serious test of the new U.S. government’s ability to enforce a federal law. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton advised the president to call out the militia. In a bold exercise of federal authority, Washington did just that, and the Whiskey Rebellion collapsed.

  1812 Overture

  (1798-1812)

  In This Chapter

  The XYZ Affair and the Alien and Sedition Acts

  Marbury v. Madison

  The Louisiana Purchase

  Neutralization of the Barbary pirates

  The Embargo and its consequences

  War in the West

  When George Washington delivered his Farewell Address in March 1797, the United States was recognized by the world’s powers as a nation. That single fact was, in large part, his greatest accomplishment. In his speech, the outgoing president advised his fellow Americans to avoid “foreign entanglements,” to preserve the financial credit of the nation, and to beware of the dangers of political parties, which might fragment the nation.

  Everyone agreed that the advice was good, but the second presidential election, in 1796, had already shown that political parties were dividing the nation. John Adams, a Federalist, was elected with 71 votes in the Electoral College. In those days, the runner-up became vice president, and that was Thomas Jefferson, leader of the Democratic-Republican party, with 68 electoral votes. Thus the president and vice president were of different parties and significantly different philosophies of government. Adams would have been called a conservative in his day, a believer in a strong central government. Jefferson, a liberal, wanted more authority entrusted to states and individuals. That these sharply different views did not tear the country apart was a measure of the essential strength of the new nation; yet its recently won liberty was put to severe tests as the 18th century yielded to the 19th.

  Foreign Affairs

  During Washington’s second term of office, intense friction developed between Britain and the United States. The British government refused to evacuate the frontier forts in the Old Northwest, despite having agreed to do so in signing the Treaty of Paris. Worse, many Americans were convinced that British traders as well as crown officials were encouraging the Indians to att
ack settlers. Finally, English naval vessels had begun seizing American merchant ships and impressing American sailors into the British service to fight its war against France. The British also complained that Americans had breached the terms of the Paris treaty by failing to pay pre-Revolutionary debts owed British creditors and by refusing to compensate Loyalists for confiscated property during the Revolution.

  Anxious to avert a new war with Britain, Washington commissioned Chief justice John Jay to conclude a treaty, signed on November 19, 1794, to secure the British evacuation of the frontier forts and refer debt and boundary disputes to settlement by joint U.S.-British commissions. This amicable solution greatly alarmed the French, who feared that their former ally, the United States, would now unite with Britain against them. Certainly it was true that most Americans, especially the Federalists, recoiled in horror from the excesses of the French Revolution (1789-99). just a year before the Jay Treaty was concluded, Washington rebuffed the overtures of Edmond Charles Edouard Genet (1763-1834), a French diplomat sent to the United States to secure American aid for France in its war with England. “Citizen Genet” (as French revolutionary etiquette dictated he be addressed) defied Washington by plotting with American privateers to prey on British vessels in U.S. coastal waters. The president warned Genet that he was violating U.S. sovereignty. When Citizen Genet responded with a threat to make a direct appeal to the American people, Washington asked the French government to recall him.

  In France, however, a new revolutionary party, the Jacobins, had replaced the Girondists, the party to which Genet belonged. In contrast to the United States, where political parties could “disagree without being disagreeable,” rival factions in revolutionary France settled their differences with the guillotine. The Jacobin government asked Washington to extradite Genet, but the president refused to compel Genet to return to France, whereupon Citizen Gen& chose to become a citizen of the United States.

  As Easy as XYZ

  The Genet episode, combined with the Jay Treaty, brought Franco-American relations to the verge of war. After the French Directory high-handedly refused to receive U.S. minister Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the new president, Adams, sent a commission consisting of Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry to attempt to heal the breach by concluding a new treaty of commerce. Incredibly, French prime minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1754-1838) sent three agents to greet the American commissioners in Paris in October 1797. The agents told the commissioners that before they could even discuss a treaty, the United States would have to loan France $12 million and pay Talleyrand a personal bribe of $250,000.

  On April 3, 1798, an indignant President Adams submitted to Congress the correspondence from the commission, which designated the French agents as “X,” “Y” and “Z.” Congress, equally indignant, published the entire portfolio, and the public learned of the “XYZ Affair.” Americans of all political stripes united in outrage, the nation mobilized for war with its erstwhile ally, and, in fact, an undeclared naval war was sporadically fought from 1. 798 to 1800. Fortunately, that conflict was limited, and international tempers cooled as the French Revolution came to an end.

  Overreaction

  Yet something far more sinister than another war was brewing. In the summer of 1798, in response to the Genet episode, the XYZ Affair, and the escalating war fever, the Federalistdominated Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which included the Naturalization Act (June 18, 1798), raising the residence prerequisite for citizenship from 5 to 14 years; the Alien Act (June 25), authorizing the president to deport all aliens regarded as dangerous; and the Alien Enemies Act (July 6), authorizing the president, in time of war, to arrest, imprison, or deport subjects of an enemy power. Most tyrannical of all, the Sedition Act (July 14) prohibited assembly “with intent to oppose any measure … of the government” and forbade printing, uttering, or publishing anything “false, scandalous, and malicious” against the government. What made the dangerous Alien and Sedition Acts even more insidious in the fledgling democracy was the fact that many of the leading Anti-Federalists were recent refugees from Europe. The acts were aimed directly at neutralizing their power.

  In 1798-99, Virginia and Kentucky published resolutions (written by James Madison and Jefferson) opposing the acts as unconstitutional and, therefore, not binding on the states. Jefferson maintained that a state had the right to judge the constitutionality of acts of Congress and to “nullify” any acts that it determined to be unconstitutional. Because to the resolutions, the Alien and Sedition Acts were (for the most part) short-lived.

  The Age of Jefferson

  Public disgust with the Alien and Sedition Acts helped oust the Federalist Adams in the elections of 1800, but the Electoral College voted a tie between the two Democratic Republican candidates, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. As prescribed by the Constitution, the tied election was sent to the House of Representatives for resolution. Hamilton, the implacable enemy of Burr, convinced fellow Federalists to support Jefferson, who was elected on the 36th ballot. Runner-up Burr became vice president.

  Historians speak of an “Age of Jefferson,” but not of an Age of Adams. Perhaps the reason is that, despite Federalist objections to most of Jefferson’s policies, the people embraced them, and they became key elements of the popular American agenda. Internal taxes were reduced, the military budget was cut, the Alien and Sedition Acts were repealed or died. The climactic triumph of Jefferson’s first term was the momentous expansion of the nation through the Louisiana Purchase.

  Supreme Court Reigns Supreme

  Although Jefferson commenced his first term as president by proposing to the Federalists that they bury the hatchet, he was not above manipulating the law to prevent a group of Federalist judges, appointed by John Adams, from assuming office. After his inauguration, Jefferson discovered that, during Adams’ final days as president, the former president had signed a number of judicial appointments but had not distributed them. Not wanting to place Federalists in important circuit court and federal court positions, Jefferson decided not to distribute the signed appointments.

  When one of the appointees, William Marbury, failed to receive his commission as justice of the peace for Washington, D.C., he petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus—an order to Secretary of State James Madison to distribute the commissions. This order created a critical dilemma for Chief justice John Marshall; if he issued the writ, he would put the court in direct opposition to the president. If Marshall denied the writ, he would dilute the power of the Supreme Court by appearing to bow to the president’s wishes. Refusing to be impaled on the horns of the dilemma, Marshall found that Marbury had been wrongfully deprived of his commission, but he also declared that Section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, under which Marbury had filed his suit, was unconstitutional. Section 13 added to the Supreme Court’s “original jurisdiction” by improperly allowing into the Supreme Court a case that should be heard by a lower court. Marbury’s suit was thrown out, a political crisis averted, and-most important of all-the right of the Supreme Court to “judicial review” was established.

  Ever since the case of Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court has functioned to set aside statutes of Congress the Court judged unconstitutional. The case represented the birth of an extraordinary federal power, which made complete the definition of the system of “checks and balances” the framers of the Constitution had created among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.

  A Purchase and a Journey

  Jefferson’s first term was crowned by an action that added a vast new territory to the United States. This triumph began with a crisis. Following the French and Indian War, France ceded the Louisiana Territory to Spain. However, in 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte reacquired the territory by secret treaty in exchange for parts of Tuscany, which Napoleon pledged to conquer on behalf of Spain. Napoleon also promised to maintain Louisiana as a buffer between Spain’s North American settlements and the Un
ited States. After the secret treaty was concluded, Napoleon promptly abandoned his Tuscan campaign, and the two nations fell to disputing. During this period, beginning in 1802, Spain closed the Mississippi to American trade.

  Jefferson could not tolerate an end to western trade, but neither did he relish the notion of Napoleon at his back door. To resolve the crisis, the president dispatched James Monroe to France with orders to make an offer for the purchase of the port city of New Orleans and Florida.

  Monroe, it turned out, was in the right place at the right time. One of Napoleon’s armies was bogged down in the disease-infested West Indies. Rather than lose his forces to illness, Napoleon decided to withdraw from the hemisphere and focus his conquests on Europe. Even as Monroe was crossing the Atlantic, Napoleon’s minister Talleyrand asked U.S. foreign minister to France Robert R. Livingston bow much Jefferson would offer not just for New Orleans and Florida, but for the entire Louisiana Territory. Negotiations proceeded after Monroe arrived, and the bargain was concluded for 60 million francs.