A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  Steam also reduced shipping costs for oceanic travel, where, again, Cornelius Vanderbilt emerged as a key player. Facing a competitor who received sizable federal mail subsidies, Vanderbilt nevertheless drove down his own transatlantic costs to the point where he consistently outperformed his government-supported opponent.24

  Having won on the Hudson, then on the Atlantic, Vanderbilt next struck on the Pacific Coast, breaking into the subsidized packet-steamer trade. Vanderbilt’s competition received $500,000 in federal subsidies and charged a staggering $600 per passenger ticket for a New York to California trip, via Panama, where the passengers had to disembark and travel overland to board another vessel. After constructing his own route through Nicaragua, rather than Panama, Vanderbilt chopped passenger prices to $400 and offered to carry the mail free! Within a year, thanks to the presence of Vanderbilt, fares dropped to $150, then $100. As occurred in the Hudson competition, the commodore’s competitors finally bought his routes, but even then they found they could never return to the high ticket prices they had charged before he drove costs down. When Vanderbilt left the packet-steamer business, a ticket cost just half what could be fleeced from passengers in the pre-Vanderbilt era.25

  Steam technology also provided the basis for another booming American industry when Phillip Thomas led a group of Baltimore businessmen to found the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad in 1828. Two years later, the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company began a steam locomotive train service westward from Charleston, with its locomotive Best Friend of Charleston being the first constructed for sale in the United States. The king of American locomotive building was Matthias Baldwin, who made his first locomotive in 1832 and founded the Baldwin Engine and Locomotive works. His firm turned out more than fifteen hundred locomotives during his lifetime, including many for export.

  Within a few years, contemporaries were referring to railroad building as a fever, a frenzy, and a mania. There were enormous positive social consequences of better transportation. By linking Orange County, New York, the leading dairy county, to New York City, the railroad contributed to the reduction of milk-borne diseases like cholera by supplying fresh milk.26

  By 1840 most states had railroads, although the Atlantic seaboard states had more than 60 percent of total rail mileage. Like the canals, many railroads received state backing. Some were constructed by individual entrepreneurs. But the high capital demands of the railroads, combined with the public’s desire to link up every burg by rail, led to states taking a growing role in the financing of American railroads.27 Railroads’ size and scope of operations required huge amounts of capital compared to textile mills or iron works. This dynamic forced them to adopt a new structure in which the multiple stockholder owners selected a professional manager to run the firm. By the 1840s, banks and railroads were inexorably linked, not only through the generation of capital, but also through the new layer of professional managers (many of them put in place by the banks that owned the majority stock positions). As transportation improved, communications networks also proliferated. Banks could evaluate the quality of private bank note issues through Dillistin’s Bank Note Reporter, which was widely circulated. The Cincinnati-based Bradstreet Company provided similar evaluation of businesses themselves. Investor knowledge benefited from the expansion of the U.S. Post Office, which had over 18,000 branches by 1850—one for every 1,300 people. Congress had a direct stake in the Post Office in that congressional apportionment was based on population, and since constituents clamored for new routes, there was a built-in bias in favor of expanding the postal network. Most routes did not even bear more than 1 percent of their cost, but that was irrelevant, given the political gains they represented. In addition to their value in apportionment, the postal branches offered legislators a free election tool. Congressmen shipped speeches and other election materials to constituents free, thanks to the franking privileges. Partisan concerns also linked post office branches and the party-controlled newspapers by reducing the cost of distribution through the mails. From 1800 to 1840, the number of newspapers transmitted through the mails rose from 2 million to almost 140 million at far cheaper rates than other printed matter. Postal historian Richard John estimated that if the newspapers had paid the same rate as other mails, the transmission costs would have been 700 times higher.28

  The new party system, by 1840, had thus compromised the independence of the mails and a large part of the print media, with no small consequences. Among other defects, the subsidies created incentives to read newspapers rather than books. This democratization of the news produced a population of people who thought they knew a great deal about current events, but who lacked the theoretical grounding in history, philosophy, or politics to properly ground their opinions. As the number of U.S. Post Office branches increased, the Post Office itself came to wield considerable clout, and the position of postmaster became a political plum. The postmaster general alone controlled more than 8,700 jobs, more than three fourths of the federal civilian workforce—larger even than the army. Patronage explained the ability of companies receiving federal subsidies to repel challenges from the private sector, allowing the subsidized postal companies to defeat several private expresses in the 1830s. The remarkable thing about the competition to the subsidized mails was not that it lasted so long (and did not resurface until Fred Smith founded Federal Express in 1971), but that it even appeared in the first place.

  Setting the Table for Growth

  At the end of the War of 1812 America emerged in a strong military and diplomatic position. The end of the Franco-British struggle not only quickened an alliance between the two European powerhouses, but also, inevitably, drew the United States into their orbit (and, a century later, them into ours). American involvement in two world wars fought primarily in Europe and a third cold war was based on the premise that the three nations shared fundamental assumptions about human rights and civic responsibilities that tied them together more closely than any other sets of allies in the world. Getting to that point, however, would not have been possible without consistently solid diplomacy and sensible restraint at critical times, as in the case of Florida, which remained an important pocket of foreign occupation in the map of the United States east of the Mississippi. In 1818, Spain held onto Florida by a slender thread, for the once mighty Spanish empire was in complete disarray. Spain’s economic woes and corrupt imperial bureaucracy encouraged revolutionaries in Argentina, Columbia, and Mexico to follow the American example and overthrow their European masters. Within five years Spain lost nearly half of its holdings in the western hemisphere.

  From the point of view of the United States, Florida was ripe for the plucking. President Monroe and his secretary of state John Quincy Adams understandably wanted to avoid overtly seizing Florida from Spain, a nation with which they were at peace. Adams opened negotiations with the Spanish minister Luis de Onis. Before they could arrive at a settlement, General Andrew Jackson seized Florida for the United States. But Jackson followed a route to Pensacola that is more complex and troublesome for historians to trace today than it was for Jackson and his men to march through it in 1818.

  Jackson’s capture of Florida began when Monroe sent him south to attack Seminole Indians, allies of the reviled Creeks he had defeated at Horseshoe Bend in 1814. Some Seminole used northern Florida’s panhandle region as a base to raid American planters and harbor escaped slaves. Alabamians and Georgians demanded government action. On December 26, 1817, the secretary of war John C. Calhoun ordered Jackson to “adopt the necessary measures” to neutralize the Seminoles, but did not specify whether he was to cross the international boundary in his pursuit. In a letter to Monroe, Jackson wrote that he would gladly defeat the Seminoles and capture Spanish Florida if it was “signified to me through any channel…that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States.” Jackson later claimed he received the go-ahead, a point the administration staunchly denied.29 The general went so far as to promise that
he would “ensure you Cuba in a few days” if Monroe would supply him with a frigate, an offer the president wisely refused. (Later, when questioned about his unwillingness to rein in the expansionist Jackson, Monroe pleaded ill health.)

  Whoever was telling the truth, it mattered little to the Indians and Spaniards who soon felt the wrath of the hero of New Orleans. Between April first and May twenty-eighth, Andrew Jackson’s military accomplishments were nothing short of spectacular (indeed, some deemed them outrageous). He invaded Florida and defeated the Seminole raiders, capturing their chiefs along with two English citizens, Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Ambrister, who had the great misfortune of being with the Indians at the time. Convinced the Englishmen were responsible for fomenting Indian attacks, Jackson court-martialed and hanged both men. By mid-May, he had moved on Fort Pensacola, which surrendered to him on May 28, 1818, making Florida part of the United States by right of conquest, despite the illegality of Jackson’s invasion—all carried out without exposure to journalists. Although Monroe and Adams later disclaimed Jackson’s actions, they did not punish him, nor did they return the huge prize of his warfare—nor did Congress censure him for usurping its constitutional war power. Jackson was able to wildly supercede his authority largely because of the absence of an omnipresent media, but the United States gained substantially from the general’s actions.

  Illegal as Jackson’s exploits were, the fact was that Spain could not patrol its own borders. The Seminole posed a “clear and present danger,” and the campaign was not unlike that launched by General John Pershing in 1916, with the approval of Woodrow Wilson and Congress, to invade Mexico for the purpose of capturing the bandit Pancho Villa. Jackson set the stage for Adams to formalize the victory in a momentous diplomatic agreement. The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 settled the Florida question and also addressed three other matters crucial to America’s westward advance across the continent. First, the United States paid Spain $5 million and gained all of Florida, which was formally conveyed in July 1821. In addition, Adams agreed that Spanish Texas was not part of the Louisiana Purchase as some American expansionists had erroneously claimed. (Negotiators had formalized the hazy 1803 Louisiana Purchase boundary line all the way to the Canadian border.) Finally, Spain relinquished all claims to the Pacific Northwest—leaving the Indians, Russians, and British with the United States as the remaining claimants.

  From Santa Fe to the Montana Country

  In 1820, Monroe dispatched an army expedition to map and explore the Adams-Onis treaty line. Major Stephen H. Long keelboated up the Missouri and Platte rivers in search of (but never finding) the mouth of the Red River and a pass through the Rocky Mountains. Labeling the central Great Plains a “Great American Desert,” Long helped to perpetuate a fear of crossing, much less settling, what is now the American heartland. He also helped to foster a belief that this remote and bleak land was so worthless that it was suitable only for a permanent Indian frontier—a home for relocated eastern Indian tribes.

  Concurrent with Long’s expedition, however, a trade route opened that would ultimately encourage Americanization of the Great Plains. Following the Mexican Revolution of 1820, the Santa Fe Trail opened, bringing American traders to the once forbidden lands of New Mexico. Santa Fe, in the mountains of northernmost Mexico, was closer to St. Louis than it was to Mexico City, a fact that Missouri merchants were quick to act upon. Santa Fe traders brought steamboat cargoes of goods from St. Louis up the Missouri to Independence (founded officially in 1827). There they outfitted huge two-ton Conestoga wagons (hitched to teams of ten to twelve oxen), gathered supplies, and listened to the latest reports from other travelers. They headed out with the green grass of May and, lacking federal troop escorts, traveled together in wagon trains to fend off Kiowa and Comanche Indians. The teamsters carried American cloth, cutlery, and hardware and returned with much coveted Mexican silver, fur, and mules.30

  The Santa Fe trade lasted until 1844, the eve of the Mexican-American War, providing teamsters practice that perfected Plains wagoneering techniques, and their constant presence in the West chipped away at the great American desert myth. Moreoever, they established the Missouri River towns that would soon serve the Oregon Trail immigrant wagon trains.

  At the same time, Rocky Mountain fur traders—the “Mountain Men”—headed up the Missouri to Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado country. British and American fur companies, such as the Northwest, American, and Hudson’s Bay companies, had operated posts on the Pacific Northwest coast since the 1790s, but in the 1820s, Americans sought the rich beaver trade of the inland mountains. St. Louis, at the mouth of the Missouri, served again as a major entrepôt for early entrepreneurs like Manuel Lisa and William H. Ashley. Ashley’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company sent an exploratory company of adventurers up the Missouri to the mouth of the Yellowstone River in 1822–23, founding Fort William Henry near today’s Montana–North Dakota boundary. This expedition included Big Mike Fink, Jedediah Smith, and other independent trappers who would form the cadre of famous mountain men during the 1820s and 1830s.

  But by the 1840s, the individual trappers were gone, victims of corporate buyouts and their own failure to conserve natural resources. They had, for example, overhunted the once plentiful beaver of the northern (and southern) Rockies. Significantly, mountain men explored and mapped the Rockies and their western slopes, paving the way for Oregon Trail migrants and California Forty-niners to follow.

  Beyond the Monroe Doctrine

  Expansion into the great American desert exposed an empire in disarray—Spain—and revealed a power vacuum that existed throughout North and South America. The weak new Mexican and Latin American republics provided an inviting target for European colonialism. It was entirely possible that a new European power—Russia, Prussia, France, or Britain—would rush in and claim the old Spanish colonies for themselves. America naturally wanted no new European colony standing in its path west.

  In 1822, France received tacit permission from other European powers to restore a monarchy in Spain, where republican forces had created a constitutional government. To say the least, these developments were hardly in keeping with American democratic ideals. Monroe certainly could do little, and said even less given the reality of the situation. However, a somewhat different twist to the Europeans’ suppression of republican government occurred in the wake of the French invasion of Spain. Both Monroe and John C. Calhoun, the secretary of war, expressed concerns that France might seek to extend its power to Spain’s former colonies in the New World, using debts owed by the Latin American republics as an excuse to either invade or overthrow South American democracies.

  Britain would not tolerate such intrusions, if for no other reason than traditional balance-of-power politics: England could not allow even “friendly” former enemies to establish geostrategic enclaves in the New World. To circumvent European attempts to recolonize parts of the Western Hemisphere, British foreign minister George Canning inquired if the United States would like to pursue a joint course of resistance to any European involvement in Latin America.

  Certainly an arrangement of this type was in America’s interests: Britain wanted a free-trade zone for British ships in the Western Hemisphere, as did the United States. But Adams, who planned to run for president in 1824, knew better than to identify himself as an “ally” of England, reviving the old charges of Adams’s Anglophilia. Instead, he urged Monroe to issue an independent declaration of foreign policy.

  The resulting Monroe Doctrine, presented as a part of the message to Congress in 1823, formed the basis of American isolationist foreign policy for nearly a century, and it forms the basis for America’s relationship with Latin America to this day. Basically, the doctrine instructed Europe to stay out of political and military affairs in the Western Hemisphere and, in return, the United States would stay out of European political and military affairs. In addition, Monroe promised not to interfere in the existing European colonies in South America. Monroe’s audacity o
utraged the Europeans. Baron de Tuyll, the Russian minister to the United States, wrote that the doctrine “enunciates views and pretensions so exaggerated, and establishes principles so contrary to the rights of the European powers that it merits only the most profound contempt.”31 Prince Metternich, the chancellor of Austria, snorted that the United States had “cast blame and scorn on the institutions of Europe,” while L’Etoile in Paris asked, “By what right then would the two Americas today be under immediate sway [of the United States]?”32 Monroe, L’Etoile pointed out, “is not a sovereign.” Not all Europeans reacted negatively: “Today for the first time,” the Paris-based Constitutionnel wrote on January 2, 1824, “the new continent says to the old, ‘I am no longer land for occupation; here men are masters of the soil which they occupy, and the equals of the people from whom they came….’ The new continent is right.”33

  While no one referred to the statement as the Monroe Doctrine until 1852, it quickly achieved notoriety. In pragmatic terms, however, it depended almost entirely on the Royal Navy.

  Although the Monroe Doctrine supported the newly independent Latin American republics in Argentina, Columbia, and Mexico against Europeans, many Americans hoped to do some colonizing of their own. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the Monroe Doctrine paralleled the Adams-Onis Treaty, Long’s expedition, the opening of the Santa Fe Trail, and the Rocky Mountain fur trade. America had its eyes set west—on the weak Mexican republic and its northernmost provinces—Texas, New Mexico, and California. Nevertheless, when James Monroe left office in 1825, he handed to his successor a nation with no foreign wars or entanglements, an economy booming with enterprise, and a political system ostensibly purged of partisan politics, at least for a brief time. What Monroe ignored completely was the lengthening shadow of slavery that continued to stretch its hand across the Republic, and which, under Monroe’s administration, was revived as a contentious sectional issue with the Missouri Compromise.