Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

by Alan Axelrod

  The nation ultimately weathered the Panic of 1819, but it created lasting resentment against the Bank of the United States (called “The Monster” by Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton). The panic deepened sectional rivalries, chipping away at the solidarity of the Union. The West and the South mightily resented the economic stranglehold of the Northeast.

  Compromise

  The deepening gulf between the northern and southern states gaped its widest in 1818-19. At that point, the United States Senate consisted of 22 Senators from northern states and 22 from southern states. Since the era of the Revolution, the balance between the nonslaveholding North and the slaveholding South had been carefully and precariously preserved with the addition of each state. Now, the territory of Missouri petitioned Congress for admission to the Union as a slaveholding state. The balance threatened suddenly to shift, like a heavy burden on the back of a weary laborer.

  Representative James Tallmadge of New York responded to Missouri’s petition by introducing an amendment to the statehood bill calling for a ban on the further introduction of slavery into the state (but persons who were slaves in the present territory would remain slaves after the transition to statehood). The amendment also called for the emancipation of all slaves born in the state when they reached 25 years of age. Thus, gradually, slavery would be eliminated from Missouri. The House passed the Tallmadge amendment, but the Senate rejected it—and then adjourned without reaching a decision on Missouri statehood.

  When the Senate reconvened, a long and tortured debate began. Northern Senators held that Congress bad the right to ban slavery in new states, whereas the Southerners asserted that new states had the same right as the original 13, to determine whether they would allow slavery or not. Not until March 1820 was a complex compromise reached on this issue, which, in reality, could admit of no satisfactory compromise. Missouri, it was agreed, would be allowed to join the Union as a slave state, but simultaneously, Maine (hitherto a part of Massachusetts) would be admitted as a free state. By this means, the slave state/free state balance was maintained.

  Then, looking toward the future, the Missouri Compromise provided that a line would be drawn across the Louisiana Territory at a latitude of 36 Degrees 30’. North of this line, slavery would be forever banned, except in the case of Missouri. Nobody was really pleased with the Missouri Compromise, but it did manage to hold together the increasingly fragile Union for another three decades.

  Age of Jackson

  The single strongest candidate in the presidential election of 1824 was Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), “Old Hickory,” “The Hero of New Orleans,” the candidate of the people. However, Jackson did not win the election. As the facade of the Era of Good Feelings crumbled away, no party had replaced the Federalists to oppose the Democratic-Republicans. Within the Democratic-Republican camp, however, a host of candidates emerged, each reflecting deep regional divisions. The Tennessee and Pennsylvania state legislatures nominated Jackson, Kentucky nominated Henry Clay, Massachusetts nominated John Quincy Adams, and Congress presented William H. Crawford.

  In the subsequent election, Jackson received 99 electoral votes, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37. Because none of the candidates had a majority, the election was sent to the House of Representatives to choose from among the top three. Illness forced Crawford out of the running, and the choice was between Adams and Jackson. Because Adams had supported the American System, Henry Clay threw his support in Congress behind him. The House voted Adams into office over Jackson, who had received the greater number of electoral votes. Charging that a corrupt bargain had been made, Jackson’s supporters split from the Democratic-Republican party and became Democrats. Supporters who remained loyal to Clay were known as National Republicans.

  Adams bad a tough time as a “minority president,” but he nevertheless boldly submitted a nationally based program to a Congress and a public that had become increasingly splintered into regional and other special interests. Adams’s support of canals and other internal improvements, his call for the establishment of a national university, and his advocacy of scientific explorations—all for the common, national good—were largely rejected by Congress. Instead, Congress focused on laissez-faire expansionism and frontier individualism. This attitude, which prevailed through the nation, swept Jackson into office in 1828.

  Common Man or King Andrew?

  Jackson, seventh president of the United States, was the first who had not been born in patrician Virginia or New England. Although he was, in fact, a wealthy man who lived in a magnificent mansion, the Hermitage, outside of Nashville, Tennessee, Jackson was also a self-made son of the Carolina back country. By the political geography of the day, he was a “westerner.”

  There can be no doubt that Andrew Jackson’s two terms as president-from 1829 to 1837-brought a greater degree of democracy to American government. Jackson’s contemporaries, as well as subsequent generations of historians, have debated whether the kind of democracy his administration fostered was always a good thing. During the Jackson years, most states abandoned property ownership as a prerequisite for the right to vote. This move broadened the electorate and made elected officials act in a way that was more fully representative of the people who had put them in office. While this transformation nurtured democracy, it also encouraged demagoguery.

  Although Jackson introduced a policy of equitable rotation in federal jobs—the forerunner of the modern civil service system—he also brought with him the so-called “spoils system,” boldly rewarding his supporters with lucrative and secure government jobs (known today as political patronage). Jackson also engineered the defeat of a program of internal improvements that was sponsored by Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams. Jackson argued that the plan favored the wealthy; yet, in defeating it, he retarded the development of commerce in the West—the very territory of his constituency. A believer in the paramount importance of preserving the Union, Jackson worked vigorously to silence the growing abolitionist movement, fearing that those who wanted to end slavery would tear the nation apart.

  The Monster

  Jackson reserved his strongest venom for the Second Bank of the United States. Never persuaded of the bank’s constitutionality, Jackson was also acutely aware that his supporters hated the institution. When the bank’s charter came up for renewal, Jackson opposed it, vetoing a recharter bill. After winning reelection in 1832, he issued an executive order withdrawing all federal deposits from the bank. That was a fatal blow, and the bank fizzled, finally closing its doors when its charter expired in 1836. With the demise of the Second. Bank of the United States, credit became more plentiful, and westward settlement proceeded more rapidly. But for the rest of the 19th century, the American economy—especially in the rough-and-tumble West-was doomed to a punishing roller-coaster ride, repeatedly rising to “boom” only to plummet to “bust.”

  The Least You Need to Know

  Monroe was a popular leader, who nevertheless presided over a period of great economic hardship and bitter sectional rivalries.

  The “Age of Jackson” brought with it a vast expansion of the concept of democracy. However, this period also sacrificed some of the reason and restraint that had characterized the nation under the “Founding Fathers.”

  Word for the Day

  A tariff, as the word was used during the era of Monroe, is a tax on imported goods. Tariffs produce significant revenues for the government, and they “protect” certain domestic industries by giving their goods an artificial price advantage over imports. However, tariffs also result in higher prices to domestic purchasers because the higher costs are ultimately passed on to them.

  Word for the Day

  Specie payments are payments in gold and silver rather than paper money.

  Voice from the Past

  John Quincy Adams, recoiling from the bitter debate, called the Missouri Compromise the “title page to a great tragic volume,” and the aged Thomas Jefferson said that the clamor over Missouri, “like a
fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.”

  Word for the Day

  Laissez-faire, French for “let it happen,” describes both a general political attitude of not interfering or intervening in the actions of others and, more specifically, an economic doctrine opposed to government regulation of commerce beyond the bare minimum.

  Trails of Tears

  (1817-1842)

  In This Chapter

  The Nullification Crisis

  Wars with the Seminoles and with Black Hawk

  Indian “removal” to the West

  Democracy seems logical and sounds simple—a matter of giving the people what they want. But just who are the American people? In Andrew Jackson’s time, they were rich, poor, easterners, westerners, northerners, southerners, whites and blacks, slaves and masters, Indians, and everyone else. All, of course, are people, but most of them wanted entirely different things.

  The “Age of Jackson,” like Jackson the man, was full of contradiction and Paradox. Bringing to the United States its first full measure of true democracy, “Old Hickory” was also derided as “King Andrew,” a tyrant. A believer in individual rights, Jackson made the federal government more powerful than ever. A frontier southerner, he didn’t want to disturb the institution of slavery, yet he turned against the South when that region threatened the authority of his government. A military hero who had built his reputation in large part by killing Indians, he espoused what was considered, in his day, the most enlightened approach to the so-called “Indian problem”—relocation from the East (“removal”) to new lands in the West. Enlightened? The great “removal” opened the darkest chapter of Indian-white relations in the United States and forever stained the administration of Andrew Jackson.

  Liberty and Union, Now and Forever

  In 1828, as the administration of John Quincy Adams drew to a close, Congress passed the latest in a long series of tariff laws designed to foster American manufacturing industries by levying a hefty duty on manufactured goods imported from abroad. These laws were warmly embraced by the rapidly industrializing Northeast, but they were deeply resented in the South. The southern economy thrived on trade in raw materials, such as rice, indigo, and cotton. Among the South’s best customers were the nations of Europe, especially England, which would buy the raw goods, turn them into manufactured products (such as fine fabric), and export them to the United States. If tariffs made it too costly for Americans to buy European goods, then Europe would have reduced need for the South’s raw materials, and the region’s export business would dry up.

  Southerners called the 1828 measure the “Tariff of Abominations.” Led by John C. Calhoun, U.S. Senator from South Carolina, Southerners charged that the act was both discriminatory in economic terms and unconstitutional. Calhoun wrote the South Carolina Exposition and Protest in 1828, arguing that the federal tariff could be declared “null and void” by any state that deemed it unconstitutional.

  Calhoun could point to an impressive precedent for his bold position. Two founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, had introduced the concept of nullification when they wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, which declared that the Alien and Sedition Acts violated the Bill of Rights. But a major showdown over the Tariff of Abominations was temporarily deferred by the 1828 election of Andrew Jackson, who pledged tariff reform. Southerners, however, were soon disappointed by the limited scope of Jackson’s reforms, and when the Tariff Act of 1832 was signed into law, South Carolina called a convention. On November 24, 1832, the convention passed an Ordinance of Nullification forbidding collection of tariff duties in the state.

  Calhoun gambled that Jackson’s loyalty as a “son of the South” would prompt him to back down on the tariff. But Jackson responded on December 10 with a declaration upholding the constitutionality of the tariff, denying the power of any state to block enforcement of a federal law, and threatening armed intervention to collect duties. To show that he meant business, Jackson secured from Congress passage of a Force Act, which might well have ignited a civil war right then and there. However, the same year that the Force Act was passed, 1833, also saw passage of a compromise tariff. Although Calhoun’s South Carolina stubbornly nullified the Force Act, it did accept the new tariff, which rendered nullification moot. Civil war was averted—for the time being—but the theory of nullification remained a profound influence on Southern political thought and provided a key rationale for the breakup of the Union less than three decades later.

  War with the Seminoles

  The political fabric was not the only aspect of the Union showing signs of wear during the Age of Jackson. Violence between settlers and Indians had reached epidemic proportions during the War of 1812 and never really subsided thereafter. During the war, General Jackson had scored a major triumph against the “Red Stick” Creeks in the lower Southeast, extorting from them the cession of vast tracts of tribal lands. Closely allied with the Creeks were the Seminoles, who lived in Florida and Alabama. The Creek land cessions made the Seminoles all the more determined to hold their own homelands. When the British withdrew in 1815 from the fort they had built at Prospect Bluff, Florida, it was taken over by a band of Seminoles and a group of fugitive slaves. Now known as “‘Negro Fort,” it posed a military threat to navigation on key water routes in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Moreover, slaveholders were angered that the fort sheltered their escaped “property.”

  In 1816, General Jackson ordered Brigadier General Edmund P. Gaines to build Fort Scott on the Flint River fork of the Apalachicola in Georgia, In July of that year, Jackson dispatched Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Lamont Clinch, with 116 army regulars and 150 white-allied Coweta Creeks, to attack Negro Fort. Ordered to recover as many fugitive slaves as possible, Clinch attacked the fort on July 27 and was supported by a pair of riverborne gunboats. The skipper of one of these vessels decided that bombardment would be most effective if he heated the cannonballs red hot and fired them with an extra-heavy charge. The first projectile launched in this way landed in the fort’s powder magazine, setting off a spectacular explosion that has been described as the biggest bang produced on the North American continent to that date. Three hundred fugitive slaves and 30 Seminoles were blown to bits, and the Indian tribe was propelled to the brink of war.

  Late in 1817, a Seminole chief named Neamathla warned General Gaines to keep whites out of his village, Fowl Town. In response, Gaines sent a force of 250 to arrest Neamathla. The chief escaped, but the troops attacked the town, and the First Seminole War was underway.

  Andrew Jackson led 800 regulars, 900 Georgia militiamen, and a large contingent of friendly Creeks through northern Florida, bringing destruction to the Seminole villages he encountered and high-handedly capturing Spanish outposts in the process. The taking of Pensacola on May 26, 1818, created a diplomatic crisis, which was resolved, however, when Spain decided to abandon Florida and cede the territory to the United States. With that, many more settlers rushed into the region, overwhelming the battered Seminoles and their remaining Creek allies. A minority of these tribes signed treaties in 1821, 1823, and 1825, turning over 25 million acres to the United States. The Seminoles were ordered to a reservation inland from Tampa Bay; few actually went to it. A majority of the Creeks repudiated the land cessions but were mercilessly persecuted under the policies of Georgia governor George Troup. When the Creeks appealed to Andrew Jackson (now president) for help, he advised them to move to “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi. Ultimately they did just that.

  The Rise and Fall of Black Hawk

  In the meantime, the so-called Old Northwest was racked with violence as well. The end of the War of 1812 and the death of Tecumseh failed to bring peace as white settlement pushed farther and farther west, through present-day Ohio and Indiana, and into Illinois. A group of determined Indian militants rallied behind Black Hawk (1767-1838), charismatic chief of the closely allied Sac and Fox tribes.

  Black Hawk had
fought at the side of Tecumseh during the War of 1812, after a minority of Sac and Fox warriors signed away tribal lands in Illinois to William Henry Harrison. After the war, a flood of settlers rushed onto the now-disputed Sac and Fox lands. Tensions mounted, but the government managed to persuade Black Hawk to move to Iowa, across the Mississippi. However, the winter hunt proved meager, and in desperation, Black Hawk and the British Band moved back into Illinois, where officials responded with militia and army regulars. Black Hawk bested the troops during the early encounters but was soon betrayed by English traders in the region and by the Winnebagos, both of which failed to deliver promised aid. Worse, a Sac and Fox chief named Keokuk, believing that the Indians’ best hope for the future lay in cooperating with the whites, tipped off an Indian agent to Black Hawk’s whereabouts. Keokuk also dissuaded a large number of Sac and Fox from participating in what had come to be called Black Hawk’s War.

  On August 1, 1832, Black Hawk tried to persuade his band to travel up the Mississippi to seek refuge among the Winnebagos. Only a minority agreed; the rest started cobbling together makeshift rafts and canoes for a dash westward across the river. A few had made it across when the steamboat Warrior hove into sight, bearing troops and a six-pounder cannon. The boat anchored, and the British Band raised a white flag of truce, but a nervous commander opened fire with the six-pounder. Twenty-three of the British Band were slain, and the others were stranded on the east bank of the river. Black Hawk himself, together with his closest followers, had escaped northward and were on their way to Wisconsin.