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The Basics from Wikipedia...Don't use this as a scholarly source!

The Trail of Tears was a series of forced relocations of Indian nations in the United States following the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The relocated people suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while on route, and more than ten thousand died before reaching their various destinations. The removal included members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations, from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to an area west of the Mississippi River that had been designated as Native Territory. The phrase "Trail of Tears" originated from a description of the removal of the Cherokee Nation in 1838.

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The Trail of Tears was a series of forced relocations of Indian nations in the United States following the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The relocated people suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while on route, and more than ten thousand died before reaching their various destinations.

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The Early 19th Century: The "Era of Good Feelings," Jacksonian America and More!

This unit covers the years 1815-1850ish and includes a variety of topics.

After the War of 1812, life in the United States changed a great deal. A shift called the "Market Revolution" as well as a period known as the "Era of Good Feelings" that wasn't actually so good, the Bank War, the Trail of Tears and westward expansion among other topics.

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This unit covers the years 1815-1850ish and includes a variety of topics. After the War of 1812, life in the United States changed a great deal. A shift called the "Market Revolution" as well as a period known as the "Era of Good Feelings" that wasn't actually so good, the Bank War, the Trail of Tears and westward expansion among other topics.

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The Lewis and Clark Expedition

Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1801, Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on an expedition from St. Louis, Missouri (1803). Their mission was to map the west, record and bring back specimens of plant and animal life in the west. They went as far as the Pacific Ocean even though the Oregon Territory was under British control (only 700 Brits lived there.) It took the expedition 2 years to get to Oregon and a little over a year to make it back east. Some of the specimens they brought back are on display at Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia. Most of the specimens were documented the first time as a result of the expedition.

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Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1801, Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on an expedition from St. Louis, Missouri (1803). Their mission was to map the west, record and bring back specimens of plant and animal life in the west.

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Sectionalism and the Road to Secession

The period between 1840 and 1860 was fraught with tension because of sectional differences related to slavery and immigration. The northeast saw an influx of immigrants from Ireland as a result of the potato famine in the 1840s. The South was increasingly isolated not only nationally but internationally as historically pro-slavery South American nations abolished the "peculiar institution." The Compromise of 1850 was a turning point on the road to Civil War as the nation moved step-by-step toward an irreconcilable difference on slavery culminating in the secession of South Carolina in December of 1860.

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The period between 1840 and 1860 was fraught with tension because of sectional differences related to slavery and immigration. The northeast saw an influx of immigrants from Ireland as a result of the potato famine in the 1840s. The South was increasingly isolated not only nationally but internationally as historically pro-slavery South American nations abolished the "peculiar institution."

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The Women's Rights Movement: biography.com

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The Women's Rights Movement: biography.com

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On July 19-20, 1848, hundreds of women and men met in Seneca Falls, New York for the very first woman's rights convention in the United States. Its purpose was "to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women." Organized by women for women, many consider the Seneca Falls Convention to be the event that triggered and solidified the women's rights movement in America. Historians and other scholars agree that the leaders of the Seneca Falls Convention played a significant role in shaping the first wave of feminism in the United States and starting the fight for women's suffrage.

Stanton and Mott

The leaders of the Seneca Falls Convention were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her friend Lucretia Mott. These two abolitionists met nearly ten years earlier at London's World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. Although they were outspoken activists against slavery and other social injustices, their voices remained unheard in a world where men's voices dominated. Together, the duo vowed to work toward a society where women's voices would resound loudly and their rights would be equal to men's.

Stanton and Mott were a likely pair from the start. Both northerners (Stanton from New York and Mott from Massachusetts), they were outspoken activists from early ages. In her 20s, Mott became a progressive Quaker minister well-known for her speeches against social injustice. At the age of 17, Stanton graduated from Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary and began her fight for abolition, temperance, and women's rights. With Stanton's eloquent writing skills and Mott's powerful speaking abilities, the two were destined to be heard.

Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances

Drafted by Stanton and introduced at the Seneca Falls Convention, the Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances was a treatise modeled closely on the Declaration of Independence. Stanton added "women" to its preamble proclaiming "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal..." She went on to describe the injustices, inequities, and invisibilities that American women felt and ended the Declaration with a call for action. Stanton wanted U.S. women to organize and fight for equality. On the second day of the convention, the Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances was ratified by the assembly which included Frederick Douglass. They also passed 12 resolutions that specifically necessitated equal rights for women including the ninth resolution that proclaimed women's right to vote. This effectively marked the beginning of the women's suffrage movement in America.

The Lasting Significance of Seneca Falls

Following the Seneca Falls Convention, many national woman's rights conventions were held annually throughout the United States with many focusing on women's suffrage. Serving as its first President, Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869 along with Susan B. Anthony. More than 70 years after the women's suffrage movement began in Seneca Falls, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote in 1920. This landmark victory changed American women's lives forever and later ushered in new waves of feminism focused on a wide range of issues including reproductive rights, sexuality, family, the workplace, immigration, and gender equality.

Commemorating the Women of Seneca Falls

In 1948, a U.S. postage stamp commemorating the Seneca Falls Convention titled "100 Years of Progress of Women" was issued. It featured Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Lucretia Mott.

In 1980, a seven-acre park was established in Seneca Falls and named "The Women's Rights National Historical Park." It includes the location of the Seneca Falls Convention (Wesleyan Methodist Church), Elizabeth Cady Stanton's home which she referred to as "the Center of the Rebellion," and the M'Clintock House where Mary Ann M'Clintock hosted a planning session on July 16, 1848 for the Convention and where the Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances was written.

In 1998, First Lady Hillary Clinton gave a speech to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention. She reflected about these events with passion and candor:

"I often wonder, when reflecting back on the Seneca Falls Convention, who of us - men and women - would have left our homes, our families, our work to make that journey one hundred and fifty years ago. Think about the incredible courage it must have taken to join that procession. Ordinary men and women, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors. And just like those who have embarked on other journeys throughout American history, seeking freedom or escaping religious or political persecution, speaking out against slavery, working for labor rights. These men and women were motivated by dreams of better lives and more just societies.... Help us imagine a future that keeps faith with the sentiments expressed here in 1848."

In 2016, the U.S. treasury announced new changes. Keeping in theme with the changes to the $20 bill which include Harriet Tubman prominently featured on its front, on the back of the newly redesigned $10 bill sit five powerful women who contributed to the women's suffrage movement including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, and Sojourner Truth.

Although these women have been celebrated in numerous ways throughout history, this is the first time Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott will be featured on U.S. cash. Their roles in the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention secured them a place in women's rights history and it is notable that they will be commemorated in this way. As pioneers in the drive for women's suffrage and anti-slavery activism, their voices at the Seneca Falls Convention continue to resound loudly.

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The Women's Rights Movement and the Women of Seneca Falls

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On July 19-20, 1848, hundreds of women and men met in Seneca Falls, New York for the very first woman's rights convention in the United States. Its purpose was "to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women."

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Seneca Falls Convention: The Constitution Center

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Seneca Falls Convention: The Constitution Center

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So this is a little outside the scope of the first 4 decades, but I wanted to include it as a part of the women's movement.

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The Seneca Falls Convention is regarded by many as the birthplace of American feminism. Heralded as the first women's rights convention in the United States, it was held at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19 and 20, 1848.

At that conference, activist and leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted The Declaration of Sentiments, which called for women's equality and suffrage. Modeled after the Declaration of Independence and named after the founding document of the American Anti-Slavery Society the document began with "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal..." Stanton referenced Jefferson's principles but explained that they are conditioned solely for men. She further described the unequal, separate spheres women are forced into and called for action. Among the resolutions were the rights to property and education.

On July 20, the Declaration was ratified by the assembly. There was a fight regarding only one resolution: the right to vote. Not all agreed that the vote was imperative and some, including Stanton's husband, disagreed with the notion entirely. However, Stanton, along with abolitionist Frederick Douglass, argued the necessity of the vote and adopted the resolution. Signed by 68 women and 32 men, including Douglass, the Declaration, and the Seneca Falls Convention remain landmarks in the history of women's rights.

Stanton's father was New York State Supreme Court Justice Daniel Cady and she was familiar with legal concepts. She also was inspired by Lucretia Mott, whom she met almost eight years earlier in London at the World Anti-Slavery Convention. There, the two were brought to the women's only section and were not allowed to sit or speak at the event. This event and the outrage it inspired led to the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.

Though some scholars debate the historical significance of the convention, Seneca Falls remains a potent symbol of equality.

The now-accepted narrative of Seneca Falls as the beginning of the women's movement in the United States began after the Civil War, as a form of leverage against the abolitionist movement. Historian Lisa Tetrault explains in her book The Myth of Seneca Falls that at the time of the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, suffragettes such as Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were angered by the idea of the vote going to black men before it went to women. Thus, there was a need to remember how the women's movement began, and Stanton and Anthony commissioned The History of Women's Suffrage, a three-volume participant history of the movement.

Beginning in 1873, women began holding anniversary events for the Seneca Falls Convention. With each anniversary, the story became more elaborated and complex, creating a false narrative that the event was more than it seemed. Though the entire convention excluded poor women and black women, among other minorities, it was groundbreaking that women could hold this event at all.

Over 70 years after the convention in Seneca Falls, the nation ratified the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote in 1920. This victory led to the work of prominent feminist leaders in the 1950s and 60s, ushering in a new age and new hope for women's rights.

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On this day, the Seneca Falls Convention begins

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The Seneca Falls Convention is regarded by many as the birthplace of American feminism. Heralded as the first women's rights convention in the United States, it was held at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19 and 20, 1848.

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As no presidential candidate had received a majority of the total electoral votes in the election of 1824, Congress decides to turn over the presidential election to the House of Representatives, as dictated by the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In the November 1824 election, 131 electoral votes, just over half of the 261 total, were necessary to elect a candidate president. Although it had no bearing on the outcome of the election, popular votes were counted for the first time in this election. On December 1, 1824, the results were announced. Andrew Jackson of Tennessee won 99 electoral and 153,544 popular votes; John Quincy Adams-the son of John Adams, the second president of the United States-received 84 electoral and 108,740 popular votes; Secretary of State William H. Crawford, who had suffered a stroke before the election, received 41 electoral votes; and Representative Henry Clay of Kentucky won 37 electoral votes.
READ MORE: What Happens If There's a Tie in a US Presidential Election?
As dictated by the Constitution, the election was then turned over to the House of Representatives. The 12th Amendment states that if no electoral majority is won, only the three candidates who receive the most electoral votes will be considered in the House. Representative Henry Clay, who was disqualified from the House vote as a fourth-place candidate, agreed to use his influence to have John Quincy Adams elected. Clay and Adams were both members of a loose coalition in Congress that by 1828 became known as the National Republicans, while Jackson's supporters were later organized into the Democratic Party.

Thanks to Clay's backing, on February 9, 1825, the House elected Adams as president of the United States. When Adams then appointed Clay to the top cabinet post of secretary of state, Jackson and his supporters derided the appointment as the fulfillment of a corrupt agreement.

With little popular support, Adams' time in the White House was largely ineffectual, and the so-called Corrupt Bargain haunted his administration. In 1828, he was defeated in his reelection bid by Andrew Jackson, who received more than twice as many electoral votes than Adams.
READ MORE: The Complete List of U.S. Presidential Elections

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Presidential election goes to the House of Representatives

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As no presidential candidate had received a majority of the total electoral votes in the election of 1824, Congress decides to turn over the presidential election to the House of Representatives, as dictated by the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In the November 1824 election, 131 electoral votes, just over half of the 261 [...]

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Printable Version The Election of 1828

"J. Q. Adams who can write" squared off against "Andy Jackson who can fight" in the election of 1828, one of the most bitter campaigns in American history. Jackson's followers repeated the charge that Adams was an "aristocrat" who had obtained office as a result of a "corrupt bargain." The Jackson forces also alleged that the president had used public funds to buy personal luxuries and had installed gaming tables in the White House. They even charged that Mrs. Adams had been born out of wedlock.

Adams's supporters countered by digging up an old story that Jackson had begun living with his wife before she was legally divorced from her first husband (which was technically true, although neither Jackson nor his wife Rachel knew her first husband was still living). They called the general a slave trader, a gambler, and a backwoods buffoon who could not spell more than one word out of four correctly. One Philadelphia editor published a handbill picturing the coffins of 12 men allegedly murdered by Jackson in numerous duels.

The Jackson campaign in 1828 was the first to appeal directly for voter support through a professional political organization. Skilled political organizers, like Martin Van Buren of New York, Amos Kendall of Kentucky, and Thomas Ritchie of Virginia, created an extensive network of campaign committees and subcommittees to organize mass rallies, parades, and barbecues, and to erect hickory poles, Jackson's symbol.

For the first time in American history, a presidential election was the focus of public attention, and voter participation increased dramatically. Twice as many voters cast ballots in the election of 1828 as in 1824, four times as many as in 1820. As in most previous elections, the vote divided along sectional lines. Jackson swept every state in the South and West and Adams won the electoral votes of every state in the North except Pennsylvania and part of New York.

Contemporaries interpreted Jackson's resounding victory as a triumph for political democracy. Jackson's supporters called the vote a victory for the "farmers and mechanics of the country" over the "rich and well born." Even Jackson's opponents agreed that the election marked a watershed in the nation's political history, signaling the beginning of a new democratic age. One Adams supporter said bluntly, "a great revolution has taken place."

Who Was Andrew Jackson?

In certain respects, Jackson was truly a self-made man. Born in 1767 in a frontier region along the North and South Carolina border, he was the first president to be born in a log cabin. His father, a poor farmer from Northern Ireland, died two weeks before his birth, while his mother and two brothers died during the American Revolution. At the age of 13, Jackson volunteered to fight in the American Revolution. He was taken prisoner and a British officer severely slashed Jackson's hand and head when the boy refused to shine the officer's shoes.

Jackson soon rose from poverty to a career in law and politics, becoming Tennessee's first congressman, a senator, and judge on the state supreme court. Although he would later gain a reputation as the champion of the common people, in Tennessee he was allied by marriage, business, and political ties to the state's elite. As a land speculator, cotton planter, and attorney, he accumulated a large personal fortune and acquired more than 100 slaves. His candidacy for the presidency was initially promoted by speculators, creditors, and elite leaders in Tennessee who hoped to exploit Jackson's popularity in order to combat anti-banking sentiment and fend off challenges to their dominance of state politics.

Expanding the Powers of the Presidency

In office, Jackson greatly enhanced the power and prestige of the presidency. While each member of Congress represented a specific regional constituency, only the president, Jackson declared, represented all the people of the United States.

Jackson convinced many Americans that their votes mattered. He espoused a political ideology of "democratic republicanism" that stressed the common peoples' virtue, intelligence, and capacity for self-government. He also expressed a deep disdain for the "better classes," which claimed a "more enlightened wisdom" than common men and women.

Endorsing the view that a fundamental conflict existed between working people and the "nonproducing" classes of society, Jackson and his supporters promised to remove any impediments to the ordinary citizen's opportunities for economic improvement. According to the Jacksonians, inequalities of wealth and power were the direct result of monopoly, favoritism, and special privileges, which made "the rich richer and the powerful more potent." Only free competition in an open marketplace would ensure that wealth would be distributed in accordance with each person's "industry, economy, enterprise, and prudence." The goal of the Jacksonians was to remove all obstacles that prevented farmers, artisans, and small shopkeepers from earning a greater share of the nation's wealth.

Nowhere was the Jacksonian ideal of openness made more concrete than in Jackson's theory of rotation in office, known as the spoils system. In his first annual message to Congress, Jackson defended the principle that public offices should be rotated among party supporters in order to help the nation achieve its republican ideals.

Performance in public office, Jackson maintained, required no special intelligence or training, and rotation in office would ensure that the federal government did not develop a class of corrupt civil servants set apart from the people. His supporters advocated the spoils system on practical political grounds, viewing it as a way to reward party loyalists and build a stronger party organization. As Jacksonian Senator William Marcy of New York proclaimed, "To the victor belongs the spoils."

The spoils system opened government positions to many of Jackson's supporters, but the practice was neither as new nor as democratic as it appeared. During his first 18 months in office, Jackson replaced fewer than 1,000 of the nation's 10,000 civil servants on political grounds, and fewer than 20 percent of federal officeholders were removed during his administration. Moreover, many of the men Jackson appointed to office had backgrounds of wealth and social eminence. Jackson did not originate the spoils system. By the time he took office, a number of states, including New York and Pennsylvania, practiced political patronage.

Copyright 2021 Digital History

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Printable Version The Election of 1828 "J. Q. Adams who can write" squared off against "Andy Jackson who can fight" in the election of 1828, one of the most bitter campaigns in American history. Jackson's followers repeated the charge that Adams was an "aristocrat" who had obtained office as a result of a "corrupt bargain."

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Introduction

When Alexander Hamilton called for a Bank of the United States in his Report on a National Bank, he envisioned a central bank that would sustain a developing national economy. The bank would, through the creation of bank "notes," replace some of the gold and silver money in circulation. This would allow for the growth in business activity without the need to rely solely on exports to increase money supply. Additionally, Hamilton argued that the bank would strengthen the national government by lending money to its treasury. As it turned out, the First Bank of the United States brought more stability to the nation's currency and expansion to the economy than was probably expected even by its strongest promoters. Still, there continued to be considerable opposition to it as an institution. Many congressmen argued that the bank was unconstitutional, possessed a monopoly on money, and favored the commercial North over the agricultural South. In 1811 these opponents refused to renew the charter of the First Bank of the United States.

Facing financial woes and inflation accompanying the War of 1812, Congress sought to revive the central bank. As the charter for the Second Bank of the United States was patterned after the first, it faced the same strenuous scrutiny and a long and difficult fight. Finally, in 1816, economic instability facilitated its recharter for twenty years. Over time the role of the Second Bank in the economy increased. Perhaps most importantly, it became the de facto bank regulator and lender to state banks.

Andrew Jackson's disaffection with the powerful central bank and its "paper money" can be traced as far back as the First Bank of the US. Jackson lost everything during the time when the market expansion and the availability of western lands should have offered safe opportunities for economic improvement to more and more individuals. Jackson blamed the banking system for his personal financial misfortunes (all involving land speculation and worthless bank notes). With overwhelming support of the masses, Jackson was elected president in 1828 and given power to seek change. In 1829, he warned Congress in his first annual address that "both the constitution and the expediency of the law creating this are well questioned by a large portion of our fellow citizens." With this statement President Jackson declared war on the Second Bank of the United States.

Sources

Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition. New York: Random House, Vintage Books Edition, 1989.

Rockoff, Hugh, and Gary M. Walton. History of the American Economy. Ohio: Thomson South Western, 2005.

Objectives

Students will examine primary documents and secondary sources to analyze the life and presidency of Andrew Jackson in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Students will be able to identify assumptions and biases that they bring to historical analysis.

Students will be able to identify the major social, political, and economic trends of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Students will be able to examine the effects of the Market Revolution.

Students will be engaged in historical research and the critical analysis of documents related to the Market Revolution and the role of the federal government.

Students will be engaged in historical research and critical analysis of Andrew Jackson.

Lesson Activities

Activity One: Setting the Stage for the Bank War-Cooperative Research

The rise and fall of a national bank in the United States took place at a particular time in our history. It is important to fully understand the context of both the creation and the demise of the institution.
Divide the class into six groups. Assign each group one of the following topics:

1. The Market Revolution

2. Biography of Andrew Jackson

3. The First Bank of the United States

4. The Panic of 1819

5. The Second Bank of the United States

6. Effects of the veto on the economy

Have each group share its research on the assigned topic with the class. The following sites will be helpful:

The Market Revolution

Brief definition of the Market Revolution, Prentice Hall
Notes on Charles Sellers's research on the topic, Mount Holyoke College

Biographical Information: Andrew Jackson

Biography, The White House
Politics and Elections, NC State Library

Andrew Jackson Quotations

"The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government . . . are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it."

"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves."
Additional Quotes
The First Bank of the United States

Brief description of the First Bank of the US, USHistory.org
Substantive discussion of the First Bank of the United States, Economic History Association

The Panic of 1819

A brief description of the Panic of 1819, U-S-History.com
A history of the Panic, Ohio History Central
A history of both banks and the veto, U-S-History.com

The Second Bank of the United States

McColloch v. Maryland, Oyez.org
Political battles of the Jacksonian era, Gilder Lehrman Institute
President Jackson's veto message, Yale University, The Avalon Project
Narrative on Jackson's opposition to the Second Bank of the United States, NEH

Effects of the Veto on the Economy

Brief description of the Panic of 1837, U-S-History.com
Further description of the Panic of 1837, Miller Center
Martin Van Buren's role following the Panic of 1837, PresidentProfiles.com

Activity Two: Panel Discussion on the Second Bank of the United States

Select six panelists-three to speak in favor of the Bank and three to speak against it. Select a student moderator as well.

The panelists will:

1. Prepare an opening speech on the group's analysis of and position on the Second Bank of the United States. Each of the panelists should participate in the speech. The historical context and the group's position on the Bank should be included in the speech.

2. Respond to questions about the Bank and the contents of their presentation.

The moderator will:

1. Introduce the issue for the panel discussion.

2. Prepare questions for panelists and deliver them after the presentations.

3. Direct questions from the audience (all non-panelist members of the class) to the panelists.

Extension

Essay: To what extent did Andrew Jackson's veto of the Second Bank of the United States reflect the values and beliefs of the Jacksonian Democrats?

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When Alexander Hamilton called for a Bank of the United States in his Report on a National Bank, he envisioned a central bank that would sustain a developing national economy. The bank would, through the creation of bank "notes," replace some of the gold and silver money in circulation.

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Background

Banking, currency and monetary policy was a source of great controversy in the early United States. In 1791, Congress established the original Bank of the United States, masterminded by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.

Conflict over the Bank caused a split within George Washington's administration that would later widen into the formation of the nation's first two political parties: Hamilton's Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson.

With Jeffersonians in control, the charter for the original Bank expired in 1811. But the nation's financial struggles during the War of 1812 led Congress to charter the Second Bank of the United States for 20 years starting in 1816 and fund it with $35 million, a gigantic sum at the time.

After struggling in its early years, the Bank built a solid reputation by the end of the 1820s under the leadership of its third president, Nicholas Biddle.
WATCH VIDEO: The Bank War
Jackson and Distrust of the National Bank

Among those who distrusted the Second Bank of the United States was Andrew Jackson, the Tennessee war hero who was elected president in 1828. As the champion of the common man, Jackson opposed the concentration of power in the hands of the powerful few-like Biddle, who was from a prominent Philadelphia family-at the expense of ordinary farmers and workers.

As president, Jackson made no secret of the fact that he opposed the Bank's upcoming recharter in 1836. The Bank was popular with many Americans, however, and Jackson's opponents-including Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky -convinced Biddle to seek an early recharter before the election of 1832, betting that Jackson would not veto the recharter if Congress passed it.

Both houses of Congress did pass the bill, which extended the charter of the Bank for an additional 15 years. One week later, on July 10, 1832, Jackson returned the bill unsigned, along with a message to Congress in which he announced his veto, declaring that the Bank was "unauthorized by the Constitution, subversive to the rights of States, and dangerous to the liberties of the people."

Impact of Jackson's Veto

In his veto message, Jackson directly contradicted the 1819 Supreme Court ruling in McCulloch v. Maryland, which held that the Bank of the United States was constitutional. He claimed the right for himself as president to judge its constitutionality, independent of Congress or the courts.

The Bank's charter gave the institution too much power over the nation's financial markets, he argued-power that enabled it to generate huge profits for its stockholders, most of whom were "foreigners" and "our own opulent citizens."

"If we must have a bank with private stockholders, every consideration of sound policy and every impulse of American feeling admonishes that it should be purely American," Jackson wrote.

But the real evil of the Bank, Jackson claimed, was its creation of a privileged class of Americans with too much money and political power. "It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes," he wrote.

This was unjust and dangerous to "the humble members of society-the farmers, mechanics and laborers-who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves."

The recharter bill went back to Congress, where despite steadfast support from Clay and Daniel Webster, it did not have the two-thirds majority support necessary to override Jackson's veto. The battle over the Bank became a central issue in the presidential campaign that year, in which Jackson soundly defeated Clay to win a second term.

Aftermath of the Bank War

To weaken the Bank before its charter ran out, Jackson ordered that all U.S. government deposits be withdrawn and deposited in various state-chartered banks. In response, Biddle restricted the Bank's loans, tightening the nation's money supply in an effort to inspire public outrage toward Jackson's policies and force the recharter.

Instead, Biddle's plan backfired, and the ensuing financial distress inspired greater suspicion of the Bank's power.

As the Bank War continued, Jackson's opponents organized the Whig Party, named after the British term for opponents of monarchical power. In 1834, the Whig-dominated Senate formally censured Jackson for removing the federal deposits, an action that Jackson's supporters-who now called themselves Democrats -voted to remove from the Senate record as soon as they gained control in 1837.

Panic of 1837

The charter of the Second Bank of the United States expired in 1836, and a defeated Biddle accepted an offer from Pennsylvania to turn it into a state-chartered bank. With the removal of the Bank as a regulating force, state banks began printing currency and lending money in exorbitant amounts.

The resulting high inflation, and Jackson policies favoring hard currency (gold or silver) led many investors to panic and many banks to close due to insufficient reserves, in a financial crisis known as the Panic of 1837.

Jackson's Democratic successor, Martin Van Buren, proposed the establishment of a new independent treasury system, which would fulfill Jackson's goal of separating the nation's finances from its government.

Repealed by Whigs in 1841 after Van Buren's loss to William Henry Harrison, the Independent Treasury Act was signed back into law by Democratic President James K. Polk in 1846. This independent treasury system would function until 1914, when it was replaced by today's Federal Reserve.
READ MORE: Why Andrew Jackson's Legacy is So Controversial
Sources

Daniel Feller. "King Andrew and the Bank." Humanities, January/February 2008.
Marsha Mullin. "Andrew Jackson and the Bank War." Andrew Jackson's Hermitage.
K.C. Tessendorf. "Nicholas Biddle & Andrew Jackson in the Case of the Strangled Bank." Financial History, Issue 65 (1999).

Fact Check

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Bank War: Andrew Jackson & 1832 - HISTORY

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The Bank War of 1832 was the political struggle that ensued over the fate of the Second Bank of the United States during the presidency of Andrew Jackson.

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Both blacks and women began to participate in evangelical revivals associated with the Second Great Awakening at the end of the 18th century. From these revivals grew the roots of the both the feminist and abolitionist movements.

The American Revolution had largely been a secular affair. The Founding Fathers clearly demonstrated their opposition to the intermingling of politics and religion by establishing the separation of church and state in the first amendment to the Constitution.

In part because religion was separated from the control of political leaders, a series of religious revivals swept the United States from the 1790s and into the 1830s that transformed the religious landscape of the country. Known today as the Second Great Awakening, this spiritual resurgence fundamentally altered the character of American religion. At the start of the Revolution the largest denominations were Congregationalists (the 18th-century descendants of Puritan churches), Anglicans (known after the Revolution as Episcopalians), and Quakers. But by 1800, Evangelical Methodism and Baptists, were becoming the fasting-growing religions in the nation.

The Second Great Awakening is best known for its large camp meetings that led extraordinary numbers of people to convert through an enthusiastic style of preaching and audience participation. A young man who attended the famous 20,000-person revival at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1802, captures the spirit of these camp meetings activity:

The noise was like the roar of Niagara. The vast sea of human beings seemed to be agitated as if by a storm. I counted seven ministers, all preaching at one time, some on stumps, others on wagons ... Some of the people were singing, others praying, some crying for mercy. A peculiarly strange sensation came over me. My heart beat tumultuously, my knees trembled, my lips quivered, and I felt as though I must fall to the ground.

This young man was so moved that he went on to become a Methodist minister. As this quotation suggests, evangelical ministers reached their audience at an emotional level that powerfully moved large crowds.

In 1839, J. Maze Burbank presented this image to the Royal Society in London with the caption: "A camp meeting, or religious revival in America, from a sketch taken on the spot."

The evangelical impulse at the heart of the Second Great Awakening shared some of the egalitarian thrust of Revolutionary ideals. Evangelical churches generally had a populist orientation that favored ordinary people over elites. For instance, individual piety was seen as more important for salvation than the formal university training required for ministers in traditional Christian churches.

The immense success of the Second Great Awakening was also furthered by evangelical churches innovative organizational techniques. These were well suited to the frontier conditions of newly settled territories. Most evangelical churches relied on itinerant preachers to reach large areas without an established minister and also included important places for lay people who took on major religious and administrative roles within evangelical congregations.

Religion was a central theme of the 1830s; American Protestants branched off into many different denominations, holding in common the need for meetings and revivals.

The Second Great Awakening marked a fundamental transition in American religious life. Many early American religious groups in the Calvinist tradition had emphasized the deep depravity of human beings and believed they could only be saved through the grace of God. The new evangelical movement, however, placed greater emphasis on humans' ability to change their situation for the better. By stressing that individuals could assert their "free will" in choosing to be saved and by suggesting that salvation was open to all human beings, the Second Great Awakening embraced a more optimistic view of the human condition. The repeated and varied revivals of these several decades helped make the United States a much more deeply Protestant nation than it had been before.

Finally, the Second Great Awakening also included greater public roles for white women and much higher African-American participation in Christianity than ever before.

Evangelicalism as a Social Movement
Why did so many people flock to evangelicalism in the early 19th century? The Second Great Awakening was more than just a religious movement; it provided a new social outlet. There was an excitement to it, and a sense of belonging. People even changed denomination if they felt one preacher was more interesting than the last. This essay puts a social twist on early evangelicalism.

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Peter Cartwright on Cane Ridge and the New Lights
No matter whether they were saints or sinners, they would be taken under a warm song or sermon and seized with a convulsive jerking all over, which they could not by any possibility avoid... -from Autobiography of Peter Cartwright. What were revivals really like? Find out from someone who was there! Peter Cartwright was about 16 years old when he went to the Cane Ridge Camp Meeting. He went on to become a Methodist preacher and lead his own revivals.

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What makes Methodism different from other Christian denominations? Find out at the homepage of the United Methodist Church.
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Jonathan Edwards was a big name in the First Great Awakening, which began in the 1740s. His writings were also instrumental in the Second Great Awakening, more than 30 years after his death.
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religious transformation and the second great awakening

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Religious Transformation and the Second Great Awakening [ushistory.org]

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Both blacks and women began to participate in evangelical revivals associated with the Second Great Awakening at the end of the 18th century. From these revivals grew the roots of the both the feminist and abolitionist movements. The American Revolution had largely been a secular affair.

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The development of an Abolition Movement: The Abolition of Slavery Project

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The status of people who were enslaved in the West Indies and then travelled to Britain with the people who had enslaved them, raised questions over the legality of slavery in England and whether these people could be removed from the country against their will.

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The American Anti-Slavery Society was established in 1833, but abolitionist sentiment antedated the republic. For example, the charter of Georgia prohibited slavery, and many of its settlers fought a losing battle against allowing it in the colony, Before independence, Quakers, most black Christians, and other religious groups argued that slavery was incompatible with Christ's teaching. Moreover, a number of revolutionaries saw the glaring contradiction between demanding freedom for themselves while holding slaves. Although the economic center of slavery was in the South, northerners also held slaves, as did African Americans and Native Americans. Moreover, some southerners opposed slavery. Blacks were in the vanguard of the anti-slavery movement. Abolitionist literature began to appear about 1820. Until the Civil War, the anti-slavery press produced a steadily growing stream of newspapers, periodicals, sermons, children's publications, speeches, abolitionist society reports, broadsides, and memoirs of former slaves.

The Library of Congress has a wealth of material that demonstrates the extent of public support for and opposition to abolition. Broadsides advertise fairs and bazaars that women's groups held to raise money for the cause. Other publications advertise abolitionist rallies, some of which are pictured in prints from contemporaneous periodicals. To build enthusiasm at their meetings, anti-slavery organizations used songs, some of which survive. The Library also has many political and satirical prints from the 1830s through the 1850s that demonstrate the rising sectional controversy during that time.

Although excellent studies of the abolition movement exist, further research in the Library's manuscripts could document the lesser known individuals who formed the movement's core. Other promising topics include the roles of women and black abolitionists and the activities of state and local abolitionist societies.

Abolition as a Social Movement

Anti-Slavery Publication for Children

The American Anti-Slavery Society produced The Slave's Friend, a monthly pamphlet of abolitionist poems, songs, and stories for children. In its pages, young readers were encouraged to collect money for the anti-slavery cause. Here a picture of the coffle- yoke used to chain groups of slaves together illustrates a dialogue about the horrors of slavery between a girl named Ellen and her father, Mr. Murray. A shocked Ellen concludes that "I will never boast of our liberty while there is a slave in this land."

Anti-Colonization Song

Anti-colonization sentiment was common in abolitionist publications such as The Anti-Slavery Picknick, a collection of speeches, poems, dialogues, and songs intended for use in schools and anti-slavery meetings. A song called the "Colored Man's Opinion of Colonization" denounces plans to transport free blacks out of the United States. Many African-Americans opposed colonization, and, in 1831, a convention of free blacks meeting in New York asserted, "This is our home, and this is our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers; for it some of them fought, bled, and died. Here we were born, and here we will die."

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The American Anti-Slavery Society was established in 1833, but abolitionist sentiment antedated the republic. For example, the charter of Georgia prohibited slavery, and many of its settlers fought a losing battle against allowing it in the colony, Before independence, Quakers, most black Christians, and other religious groups argued that slavery was incompatible with Christ's teaching.

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This site is published by Yale University for teachers to use. BUT there is a lot of valuable historical background on the site too.

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Students will study two communities for comparison: (1) a purely secular community (Owen s experiment in New Harmony, Ohio); and (2) a strictly religious one (Noyes community in Oneida, New York). Though both communities were communistically organized, i.e., both shared property and wealth, they were quite different in goals, methods and achievements.

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5 19th-Century Utopian Communities in the United States | HISTORY

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From group marriage to restrictions on hot baths, explore the surprising practices of five utopian communities in 19th-century America.

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Virginia Commonwealth University

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Prohibition/Ken Burns

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Roots of Prohibition

By 1830, the average American over 15 years old consumed nearly seven gallons of pure alcohol a year - three times as much as we drink today - and alcohol abuse (primarily by men) was wreaking havoc on the lives of many, particularly in an age when women had few legal rights and were utterly dependent on their husbands for sustenance and support.

The Temperance Movement

The country's first serious anti-alcohol movement grew out of a fervor for reform that swept the nation in the 1830s and 1840s. Many abolitionists fighting to rid the country of slavery came to see drink as an equally great evil to be eradicated - if America were ever to be fully cleansed of sin. The temperance movement, rooted in America's Protestant churches, first urged moderation, then encouraged drinkers to help each other to resist temptation, and ultimately demanded that local, state, and national governments prohibit alcohol outright.

Excerpt from "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" by Daniel Okrent: "THE STREETS OF San Francisco were jammed. A frenzy of cars, trucks, wagons, and every other imaginable form of conveyance crisscrossed the town and battled its steepest hills. Porches, staircase landings, and sidewalks were piled high with boxes and crates delivered on the last possible day before transporting their contents would become illegal. The next morning, the Chronicle reported that people whose beer, liquor, and wine had not arrived by midnight were left to stand in their doorways "with haggard faces and glittering eyes." Just two weeks earlier, on the last New Year's Eve before Prohibition, frantic celebrations had convulsed the city's hotels and private clubs, its neighborhood taverns and wharfside saloons. It was a spasm of desperate joy fueled, said the Chronicle, by great quantities of "bottled sunshine" liberated from "cellars, club lockers, bank vaults, safety deposit boxes and other hiding places." Now, on January 16, the sunshine was surrendering to darkness." View longer excerpt (pdf) | Last Call book available at ShopPBS

Women's Christian Temperance Union

After the Civil War, as millions of immigrants - mostly from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and other European countries - crowded into the nation's burgeoning cities, they worked hard to assimilate while simultaneously retaining cherished habits and customs from their homelands. The brewing business boomed as German-American entrepreneurs scaled up production to provide the new immigrants with millions of gallons of beer. In the 1870s, inspired by the rising indignation of Methodist and Baptist clergymen, and by distraught wives and mothers whose lives had been ruined by the excesses of the saloon, thousands of women began to protest and organize politically for the cause of temperance. Their organization, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), became a force to be reckoned with, their cause enhanced by alliance with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other women battling for the vote.

By the late 19th century the WCTU, led by the indomitable Frances Willard, could claim some significant successes - it had lobbied for local laws restricting alcohol and created an anti-alcohol educational campaign that reached into nearly every schoolroom in the nation. Its members viewed alcohol as the underlying source of a long list of social ills and found common cause with Progressives trying to ameliorate the living conditions of immigrants crowded into squalid slums, protect the rights of young children working in mills and factories, improve public education, and secure women's rights. But the WCTU's ultimate goal, a prohibition amendment to the constitution, still seemed impossibly out of reach. It would take the emergence of a new organization, the Anti-Saloon League, for the drys' dream to enter the realm of the possible.

The Anti-Saloon League

The ASL, under the shrewd and ruthless leadership of Wayne Wheeler, became the most successful single issue lobbying organization in American history, willing to form alliances with any and all constituencies that shared its sole goal: a constitutional amendment that would ban the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol. They united with Democrats and Republicans, Progressives, Populists, and suffragists, the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP, the International Workers of the World, and many of America's most powerful industrialists including Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Andrew Carnegie - all of whom lent support to the ASL's increasingly effective campaign.

With the ratification of the income tax amendment in 1913, and the federal government no longer dependent on liquor taxes to fund its operations, the ASL moved into high gear. As anti-German fervor rose to a near frenzy with the American entry into the First World War, ASL propaganda effectively connected beer and brewers with Germans and treason in the public mind. Most politicians dared not defy the ASL and in 1917 the 18th amendment sailed through both houses of Congress; it was ratified by the states in just 13 months.

At 12:01 A.M. on January 17, 1920, the amendment went into effect and Prohibitionists rejoiced that at long last, America had become officially, and (they hoped) irrevocably, dry. But just a few minutes later, six masked bandits with pistols emptied two freight cars full of whiskey from a rail yard in Chicago, another gang stole four casks of grain alcohol from a government bonded warehouse, and still another hijacked a truck carrying whiskey.

Americans were about to discover that making Prohibition the law of the land had been one thing; enforcing it would be another.

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PROHIBITION is a three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary film series on PBS directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed.

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Reform Movements and the News · News in Antebellum America · The News Media and the Making of America, 1730-1865

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Private enterprise drove much of the growth of publishing in early nineteenth-century America. Book, magazine, and newspaper publishers in New York, Philadelphia, and other major cities transformed their firms into large-scale businesses, with designs on expanding regional and national markets.

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The Second Great Awakening: Khan Academy

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The Second Great Awakening: Khan Academy

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- [Instructor] Okay, so we've been talking about The Second Great Awakening and its context in early 19th century America. The Second Great Awakening was this period of religious revival that was kind of at its hot point in 1820 to 1840 and in the last couple of videos, we've been talking about just the nature of this society that produced The Second Great Awakening, particularly how they responded to changes in how people related to each other in business and also just broader social changes like the expansion of American democracy and the expansion of American territory west. So in this last video, I want to talk about some of the outgrowths of The Second Great Awakening. So why do we care so much that there was this period of religious revival? What did it lead to in American life? There are two major things that were directly related to The Second Great Awakening in this early 19th century. New religious movements in the United States, some of which are still with us today and even more importantly for the time period, major reform movements, including the Movement for Abolition, the end of slavery, which is going to lead to the outbreak of The Civil War. So let's look a little bit closer at these two things. So as we've talked about, The Second Great Awakening promoted both the idea that one should try to create heaven on earth and also, a more democratic approach to religion in general, that it didn't matter who you were. If you were a man, a woman, white, black, enslaved, free, you were still entitled to a personal relationship with God and a chance at salvation. So one of the things this meant in this time period is that there's just a lot of religious experimentation. A lot of new American religions emerge at this time period, some of which are still with us today, some of which are not. This here is a representation of the Shakers, which were a religious community of, they embrace kind of simplicity. They separated the sexes. They practiced celibacy. Just as kind of trying to make their daily lives more pure and unfortunately, the celibacy part meant that they more or less died out by the 1940s, although there are a handful of Shakers who are still alive today and they were called the Shakers because they would have these kind of ecstatic religious experiences, which you can see are kind of similar to what happened in the camp meetings. So even though they didn't have sex, they would kind of get out their ecstasy in this process of these big circle dances, which people looked at and they said they seemed like they were shaking, so they were the Shakers. On the other side of the spectrum, there was the Oneida community, which was led by a man named John Humphrey Noyes and they preached the idea that one should have no earthly attachments basically and that meant also to a spouse, so they believed in what was called complex marriage or what we would really call free love. There was no such thing as an individual marriage, that women and men could have sex with whomever they pleased. It's interesting that approaches to sex were very central to these religious movements. Probably the most important religious movement to come out of this time period was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormons, who were founded by Joseph Smith in Rochester, New York and Smith had a vision that he was visited by an angel who presented him with gold plates and on these gold plates was a new Scripture called The Book of Mormon and Smith's followers really continued to be devoted to the religion, even though they faced a lot of persecution, particularly over their early practice of polygamy until they continued to move west under the leadership of a second man, Brigham Young, who took over after Smith was murdered by an angry crowd in Illinois who then led the Mormons to Utah where they continue to be a major religious group to this day. Oh, and one other interesting thing about this is the Oneida community. Although, it itself did not survive, one of the ways that they made money as a community was by making silverware and so Oneida Silverware is actually the descendant company of this really interesting communal experiment and they lasted, I believe, until 2006, so if you ever had Oneida Silverware, you were looking at an artifact of a 19th century religious movement. So the last and probably the most important part of The Second Great Awakening that I wanna talk about is its influence on reform movements. So let me give myself a little bit more space to write here. There are several 19th century reform movements that are tied in to The Second Great Awakening. One of these would be The Temperance Movement, which hoped to reduce and or eliminate people's consumption of alcohol and you can kinda tie this back to the idea of heaven on earth, right? How can you have a stable family home, how can you have a godly society if everybody's drunk all the time? But I would say the most important reform movement associated with The Second Great Awakening was the Abolitionist Movement and remember that Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was one of the greatest abolition or anti-slavery advertisements in the world, was the daughter of Lyman Beecher, one of the greatest preachers of The Second Great Awakening and so as people came to believe that everyone's life was equally valuable, they became more and more involved in the idea that slavery should not exist, that people who were enslaved had souls that were just as worthy of salvation as anyone who was already free and so they also saw this as one of the perversions of God's word and a perversion of the family, which they saw as the central unit of American democracy and Republicanism. So slavery should not exist. People who were really motivated by their faith in God and their faith in trying to create heaven on earth and a better society campaigned really strenuously for the end of slavery and ultimately, were successful. So this is a really complex topic, The Second Great Awakening. If we look back at our web again, we can see that this wave of religious revival was connected in all sorts of interesting ways to the economic and political changes of the time period and in its way, led to all sorts of different social changes, so I think it's a good example of how it's sometimes really hard to separate things that happened in the past into really neat boxes, right? That, oh, there was politics. There was religion. There was culture. There were economics, but in many ways, they're all bound together in a larger culture, within which everyday individuals navigated their lives and it's also good to show us that sometimes we don't exactly know why things happened in the past. We know that people got really interested in religion in this time period, but historians have differing ideas about why that might have been. Some say that it was a form of trying to control people as it was more and more important to have a dutiful workforce for a factory-based industrial society and some people say that maybe, it was just about demographic and political shifts in who had power, who had money, and who got to vote, but we do know that The Second Great Awakening and these ideas of trying to improve America, to improve the world, and to create heaven on earth led to all sorts of interesting things that are still with us today, including religious movements and the end of slavery.

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The Second Great Awakening - reform and religious movements (video) | Khan Academy

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The Second Great Awakening played a role in major reform movements of the nineteenth century, including temperance and abolition. In the last video in this series, Kim discusses some of the new religious movements and reform movements that grew out of the Second Great Awakening.

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"In the history of the world," Ralph Waldo Emerson declared in 1841, "the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour."[1] Not much a joiner of causes himself, Emerson had in mind a remarkable flowering of reform movements from roughly 1815 until the Civil War that were striking to observers at the time and to historians ever since for their energy, variety, and occasional strangeness.

Even the role of a "reformer" that emerged before the Civil War was relatively new. With some exceptions, earlier American do-gooders were mostly people like the Puritan minister Cotton Mather or Ben Franklin, for whom reform was part of a wider range of occupations and activities. By the 1830s there were men and women like Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who devoted most of their adult lives to reform causes.

Three of these movements remain especially well known. The first in time, as well as the largest nineteenth-century reform movement, was a diverse assault on alcoholic beverages arising shortly after 1800. It is commonly called the temperance movement, although by the 1830s, the goal usually was not moderation in drinking, but rather total abstinence from alcohol. By the 1840s a portion of the movement advocated a legal ban on alcoholic beverages.

The second of this trio of best-known antebellum reforms was a new, more radical anti-slavery movement that emerged by the early 1830s. Its program for ending slavery stood in stark contrast to the "colonizationist" position earlier advocated by some prominent Americans and embodied in the American Colonization Society (1816-1964). Colonizationists maintained that the right way to end slavery was gradually, either voluntarily by masters or with some compensation, and by sending freed African Americans to the ACS's colony in Africa, Liberia. Some colonizationists (including the few African American ones) genuinely disliked slavery and believed black people had no future in the United States; others were more concerned about eliminating a growing free black population in the South and North. Although relatively small in numbers, post-1830 abolitionists included African Americans and whites, and women and men, and were generally less distinguished than the leaders of the ACS. They rejected every aspect of colonization. For them slavery had to be ended immediately, not gradually, without compensation to masters and with freed slaves remaining in the United States. Where colonizationists placated slaveholders (and included them in their ranks), abolitionists condemned them as sinners. This position had little appeal outside the free states, and even there abolitionists faced enormous hostility, especially in the 1830s, but their passionate rhetoric and deeds helped shape political debates as the nation headed toward secession and civil war.

The third of the best-remembered antebellum reforms was a women's rights movement, its arrival signaled by a stirring "Declaration of Sentiments" issued in 1848 by a convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Modeled after the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments condemned men for the oppression of women and put forward a broad platform for women's emancipation. The latter's most controversial plank-and the only one not passed unanimously-called for full voting rights for women. A high proportion of those present at Seneca Falls were abolitionists. In that sense, the women's rights movement owed much to the anti-slavery movement; but it also foreshadowed what would become, after the Civil War, a powerful and eventually successful campaign for women's suffrage.

To focus only upon the antebellum reform movements that attract the most attention in textbooks, however, is to slight the explosion of reform movements Emerson had in mind. From a present-day perspective, some of these seem more like fads than reforms, but that can be misleading. Consider the case of Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer, who, by 1832, had become convinced that bad diets, alcohol, and poor hygiene threatened the body and spirit. A terrible cholera epidemic in 1832 gave him an audience for his belief that a plain vegetarian diet without stimulating spices, coffee, or tea was the key to good health and ensured immunity from destructive impulses (including sexual ones). Graham's regimen-memorialized in a cracker-promised individuals that they could perfect themselves physically. For him, the focus of reform was not on the condition of others, such as slaves and drunkards, but on one's self.

Among those who differed with Graham in that respect were men and women who dealt with issues that remain troublesome today-poverty, juvenile delinquency, prostitution, and world peace, for example. Those reformers often addressed the issues in ways radically different from twenty-first-century approaches. In the name of reform, for instance, antebellum states built new-style prisons and asylums. The initial goal was not to isolate criminals and the insane from society, although they certainly did that, but to remake them into model citizens. In the twentieth century, later generations attacked these institutions, again in the name of reform.

As one might expect from the diversity of antebellum reforms, they had different points of origin and different trajectories, but there were some common patterns. They most frequently looked less like a unified movement than a shifting collection of organizations with occasional schisms and different constituencies and agendas. The majority of reforms also rested on a base of "voluntary associations," local groups-sometimes loosely affiliated with a national organization-dedicated to a common purpose. European observers, including the most famous of them all, Alexis de Tocqueville, noted with some bemusement an American penchant for joining voluntary associations. These associations could serve a number of different purposes, from religious to purely social, or anything in between. They were, nonetheless, effective tools for sustaining reform movements on the local level.

There was also a degree of overlapping membership within antebellum reform. Enough existed that a former abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, looking back after the Civil War, could speak fondly of a "Sisterhood of Reforms" interconnected by common supporters and shared beliefs. (Abolitionists, for instance, tended to endorse temperance, although temperance-one of the few reforms strong in the South-did not necessarily mark one as an abolitionist.) Finally, reform movements were all subject to economic and political fluctuations. A devastating financial panic and subsequent depression beginning in 1837, for example, made funding scarce for reform organizations generally. And territorial expansion in the 1840s, which triggered controversies over slavery, directly affected abolitionism and less directly affected other movements, including women's rights and temperance.

Explaining why reform movements emerged in antebellum America is no simple task. Their proliferation was the product of a convergence of multiple changes in American life, none of which necessarily caused the explosion of reforms, but all of which, taken together, enabled and shaped it. At the most basic level, reform movements require people who believe that human effort can-and should-change things. That has not always been the case. In their optimism about change, antebellum reformers were heirs of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century shifts in secular and religious thought. On the secular side was a new faith in human reason and its power to remake the world, a faith manifested in the American and French revolutions. Antebellum reform also drew heavily on an early nineteenth-century wave of Protestant revivalism, often called the Second Great Awakening. In complicated ways this form of evangelical Christianity encouraged some believers (not all) to engage in reform movements. That is not to say all reformers were evangelicals-non-evangelical sects like the Quakers and Unitarians were well represented among their numbers and southern evangelicals were markedly unenthusiastic about anti-slavery and women's rights. Religion, nonetheless, gave antebellum reform its moral urgency, just as secular languages of reason and rights also molded it.

Economic, demographic, and technological changes likewise inspired and shaped antebellum reform. Although America remained predominately a rural and small-town nation into the twentieth century, its cities were growing after 1820. Urban areas provided some of the problems reformers addressed, but they and small towns also had the critical mass of people and resources reform organizations required. Urban growth and an expanding economy, moreover, produced a new middle class with a level of financial comfort and leisure time necessary to engage in reform. Among its members were educated women denied much of a public voice except in religious and reform activities. They were the backbone of many causes. Finally, by the 1830s improvements in printing technology and in transportation-notably canals, steamboats, and eventually railroads-made it far less expensive for reformers and their messages to circulate over wider distances. Especially striking, in fact, is how reformers used an extraordinary range of oral, print, and visual media to make their case to the public-among them, speeches, newspapers, plays, poetry, novels, children's literature, songs, demonstrations, and cartoons. Antebellum reform propaganda aimed broadly at public opinion, not just elites, and used new media in ways that look modern.

The diversity of antebellum reformers' tactics-like the diversity of their causes-masks a choice they all faced: If I want to change the world, where do I start? A common response would have been "with 'moral suasion,'" a term that would be revived in the twentieth century to refer to ways of influencing economic behavior. Before the Civil War, however, it meant persuading people to do the right thing. Behind it was something of a religious conversion model of reform: change begins, and proceeds, one person at a time. Another notion of how to implement reform relied on coercion, not just persuasion-legislation, social pressure, or incarceration in corrective institutions, for example. In 1840, abolitionists split over several issues, among them whether to engage in partisan politics or stick to moral suasion. At about the same time some temperance advocates similarly moved from encouraging abstinence from alcohol to using state legislators to ban it.

A third answer to "Where to begin?" was a minority one: create a model community, a concrete example of how society ought to be organized, and hope the rest of the world follows. Between the Revolution and the Civil War more than a hundred of these small utopian communities materialized, some religious in origin, some based on secular ideologies. Most were ephemeral, but all represented yet another way of imagining how to achieve social change and what the world would look like after it occurred. The fourth answer was likewise a minority one and the polar opposite of moral suasion. It was "with violence against evil." Its most famous proponent was the abolitionist John Brown. The blow he struck against slavery in a raid on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859, was a fateful step toward the Civil War. It was also deeply disturbing for many reformers because it posed a question that would haunt subsequent generations: "Is it right to use immoral means in a just cause?"

From the perspective of the longer history of reform in America, there were continuities, shifts, and discontinuities after the Civil War. The temperance movement gained strength in the second half of the nineteenth century and achieved its greatest victory in 1920 with the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" within the United States. The women's rights movement came to focus more sharply-but not exclusively-on voting rights after the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1868) guaranteed suffrage for male citizens, but not for women. That campaign culminated in the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1920), long advocated by reformers with roots in the antebellum years like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Many abolitionists retired from the field after the Civil War ended slavery, while others-notably Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips-remained faithful to a broad vision of human rights and economic opportunity that included women, African Americans, and immigrants. After the war, however, new approaches to achieving social change emerged. At one end of the spectrum there arrived from Europe a variety of anarchism advocating revolutionary violence. Toward the other end was the late nineteenth-century notion, associated with Progressivism, that professional expertise, science, and social science could lead to positive social change. Since the early nineteenth century, ways of thinking about how to achieve reform have evolved as dynamically as have ways of thinking about what needs to be reformed.

Beyond their successes and failures, insights and blind spots, antebellum reform movements put on the table a question of enduring relevance: In a political system like ours, with many layers and much inertia, what is the role of social movements that try to push the country one way or another? Are they safety valves that release discontent without necessarily addressing its root causes? Do they mark the outer limits of what is conceivable within the political system? Do they force into the open issues mainstream politicians prefer to ignore? Are they social clubs for cranks and fanatics, as critics claim? Are they the nation's conscience and an essential part of American democracy? The men and women Emerson had in mind in 1841 would have answered "yes" to the latter.

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"In the history of the world," Ralph Waldo Emerson declared in 1841, "the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour."[1] Not much a joiner of causes himself, Emerson had in mind a remarkable flowering of reform movements from roughly 1815 until the Civil War that were striking to observers at the time and to historians ever since for their energy, variety, and occasional strangeness.

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Women and Reform Movements of the 19th Century

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Women and Reform Movements of the 19th Century

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Women and Reform

Women were a major part of several reform movements of the 1800s and early 1900s. These reform movements sought to promote basic changes in American society, including the abolition of slavery, education reform, prison reform, women's rights, and temperance (opposition to alcohol). A National Temperance Circular (ca. 1850) outlined the problems of drunkenness:

"...Our country is now harboring a fatal enemy; cherishing a plague of dreadful malignity; submitting to a tax which brings no increase to our treasury, while it perpetuates poverty, misery and crime. To prove this, let us state a few facts which may be relied on. Whatever may be said in favor of the temperate use of ardent spirits, (if that indefinite line could ever be drawn,) facts will show incontestibly, that the excessive use of them is the severest scourge with which our nation is visited: and you know that all drunkenness commences in the moderate use of them. Ardent spirit destroys health: ardent spirit creates idleness: ardent spirit ruins character: ardent spirit makes paupers: ardent spirit makes criminals: ardent spirit brutalizes men: ardent spirit destroys domestic happiness: ardent spirit ensures premature death: ardent spirit makes three-fourths of the business and expense of our criminal courts, jails and alms-houses: ardent spirit throws an immense tax on a christian community to support vice: ardent spirit unfits thousands and tens of thousands for the duties of this life and exposes them to the lawful retribution of the next...."

From " National Circular of the Several State Temperance Societies"

Read the circular and then find other documents on the topic of temperance:

According to the temperance movement, what problems did alcohol cause for individuals? For society?

What actions did the advocates of temperance urge to solve the problems caused by alcohol?

What strategies did the advocates of temperance use to advance their ideas? What evidence can you find that they achieved any success?

As the Grimke letter quoted earlier suggested, women were active in the abolitionist movement. Some cite the fact that women were not allowed to participate in the debates at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention as the event that launched the women's rights movement. In 1848, the first American convention focused on women's rights was held in Seneca Falls, New York. Approximately 200 women and 40 men met and adopted the "Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments" (modeled on the Declaration of Independence), which called for political and economic rights for women. The effort to gain the vote for women took 70 years and engaged thousands of women. An American Time Capsule contains a number of documents on the question of women's suffrage; the following are a few examples from people on both sides of the issue:

Read several of the documents listed above or others that you locate using a Keyword Search.

Identify several arguments for and against suffrage for women. Write a sentence that summarizes how the opponents of suffrage viewed the ideal relationship between women and the larger society. Write a sentence that summarizes how the advocates of suffrage viewed the ideal relationship between women and the larger society.

Choose the three strongest arguments on each side. Which side is most persuasive? Why? Is it possible for you to evaluate the arguments objectively given that you live in a society in which women have voted for more than 80 years? Why or why not?

Prepare a broadside featuring the strongest arguments either for or against women's suffrage. Write the broadside as it might have been written in 1900.

Learn about another reform movement in the late 1800s or early 1900s by searching the collection. What problem was the reform movement trying to solve? To what extent was the reform movement successful? From the documents in the collection, can you discern whether women were active participants in the reform movement?

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An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera History

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Women were a major part of several reform movements of the 1800s and early 1900s. These reform movements sought to promote basic changes in American society, including the abolition of slavery, education reform, prison reform, women's rights, and temperance (opposition to alcohol). A National Temperance Circular (ca.

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New Echota: Capital of the Cherokee Nation

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Ranger Frankie Mewborn guides visitors on a tour of the New Echota Historic Site in Gordon County, which preserves what is left of the Cherokee capital. In 1835 Cherokee leaders signed the Treaty of New Echota requiring the Cherokees to leave the southeast.

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Field Trip Information
" Pet Notice:
› Leashed pets are allowed on historic site trails, however, they are not allowed in buildings. Please view our Park Rules page for more information.

Celebrate the cultural legacy of the Cherokee People while discovering the innovations, political sophistication and the daily life of the residents of New Echota, Capital of the Cherokee Nation, where the Cherokee removal on the Trail of Tears officially began.

New Echota is one of the most significant Cherokee Indian sites in the nation and was where the tragic "Trail of Tears" officially began. In 1825, the Cherokee national legislature established a capital called New Echota at the headwaters of the Oostanaula River. During its short history, New Echota was the site of the first Indian language newspaper office, a court case which carried to the U.S. Supreme Court, one of the earliest experiments in national self government by an Indian tribe, the signing of a treaty which relinquished Cherokee claims to lands east of the Mississippi River, and the assembly of Indians for removal west on the infamous Trail of Tears.

Today, visitors can see 12 original and reconstructed buildings, including the Council House, Court House, Print Shop, Missionary Samuel Worcester's home, and an 1805 store, as well as outbuildings such as smoke houses, corn cribs and barns. In the visitor center, guest can purchase souvenirs, books, music, plus view interpretive exhibits and a 17 minute film. Nature trails leads visitors to New Town Creek and a small beaver pond.

Facilities

Visitor Center & Film

Reconstructed Buildings

Bus Parking

Coosawattee River Boat Ramp

Things To Do & See

Nearby Attractions

Learn More
Site Accessibility

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Events Photos Site Map Historic Site Feedback Pass

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Remember and commemorate the survival of the Cherokee people, forcefully removed from their homelands in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee to live in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. They traveled by foot, horse, wagon, or steamboat in 1838-1839. Read More

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Trail Of Tears National Historic Trail (U.S. National Park Service)

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Remember and commemorate the survival of the Cherokee people, forcefully removed from their homelands in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee to live in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. They traveled by foot, horse, wagon, or steamboat in 1838-1839.

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click image for close-up

In 1838 and 1839, as part of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee people called this journey the "Trail of Tears," because of its devastating effects. The migrants faced hunger, disease, and exhaustion on the forced march. Over 4,000 out of 15,000 of the Cherokees died.

This picture, The Trail of Tears, was painted by Robert Lindneux in 1942. It commemorates the suffering of the Cherokee people under forced removal. If any depictions of the "Trail of Tears" were created at the time of the march, they have not survived.

Image Credit: The Granger Collection, New York

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click image for close-up In 1838 and 1839, as part of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee people called this journey the "Trail of Tears," because of its devastating effects.

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National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

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During Parton's visit, Hannah gave him a tour of Jackson's Nashville home, The Hermitage, which had fallen into disrepair. Parton recorded in his research notebook that Hannah thought highly of her former owner. He "was more a father to us than a master," Parton recorded her saying, "and many's the time we've wished him back again, to help us out of our troubles." Hannah became "fired up" when she believed that Jackson was being spoken about "disrespectfully."

"We black folks is bound to speak high for old Mawster," she reportedly said. "He was good to us. You know what he was to you, and must speak accordin'. But we is bound to speak high for him."

In addition to being a source for Parton's biography, Hannah was the subject of two other interviews following the Civil War. In these newspaper interviews, one with the Cincinnati Commercial in 1880, the second with the Nashville Daily American in 1894, she covered a number of different subjects: Andrew Jackson's treatment of her and other slaves, Andrew and Rachel Jackson's deaths, and other anecdotes about life at The Hermitage.

Hannah recalled the special treatment that Jackson gave her from the very earliest days of her servitude, which began around 1808. She told one reporter that Jackson received her and her mother as payment for legal services rendered in east Tennessee. On the trip back to Nashville, Hannah remembered being carried "in his arms" and promised a ginger cake if she adjusted his stirrup. She also told the reporter that she "used often to be employed by Gen. Jackson to comb his hair," with the promise of "some trifling present in payment for her services." Because Hannah was "a favorite servant," Jackson allowed Hannah's wedding to Aaron to take place in The Hermitage's dining hall. Hannah was also trusted enough to supervise The Hermitage household for Jackson while he was away in Washington for his second presidential term (1833-1837). Jackson never sold members of her family, Hannah pointed out. "He was mighty good to us all."

One of the most dramatic accounts that Hannah discussed was Jackson's final hours of life. She was present in his bedroom when he died on that Sunday afternoon in June 1845. According to her, some of Jackson's last words were, "I hope to meet you all in Heaven, both black and white." (Other witnesses in the room, including Jackson's doctor, his niece, and his son all recorded those words or a close variation of that sentiment.) One of the newspaper reporters observed that

[o]n the subject of slavery, Aunt Hannah's views are different from those of most of her race. Having had an indulgent master and mistress, she has always insisted that the years spent in slavery were the happiest of her life. To labor for those who were benefactors was no slavery to her.

He (presumably, the reporter was a man) underscored Hannah's satisfaction with her lot in life by including her assessment as she looked ahead to her pending one-hundredth birthday: "Everybody is good to me, both white and colored, and I have no reason to complain."

It was true that Jackson did not divide Hannah from her children, except to bequeath them among the members of his own family. And the records show that as late as March 1860, Hannah was busy with the upkeep of The Hermitage. But with the Civil War came a rupture that casts Hannah's feelings in a rather different light.

In June 1863, Sarah Jackson reported that Hannah had "gone over to the Yankees," having "been very insolent for some time." Rachel Jackson Lawrence, Jackson's granddaughter, announced that Hannah was "making 20 dollars a month" and blamed her abandonment of the Jacksons on "the Yankees." Having emancipated herself, Hannah worked as a midwife and lived with family in Nashville until her death in 1895.

The two newspaper interviews she gave, along with the time spent with James Parton in 1859, constituted Hannah's public reminiscences of her former owner and substantively shaped the memory of Old Hickory, particularly regarding his attitude toward, and treatment of, slaves. The Jackson of her memory was paternalistic, indulgent, and kind, and, while he did not practice racial equality, certainly seemed to believe that whites and blacks were spiritually equal in the eyes of God. But can Hannah's assessment of Jackson and his relationship with his slaves be trusted?

Historians have mostly overlooked the slave experience at The Hermitage. It is possible, however, to outline generally what it was like to live there. Some slaves lived in yard cabins, as close as ninety feet away from the main house. One of those slaves, for example, was a man named Charles, who served as Jackson's personal slave and carriage driver. Other slaves lived much farther away, in quarters close to the fields in which they worked. Like on many Southern plantations, these slaves would have labored at the plantation's main focus: agricultural production, primarily cotton, but also corn, hemp, and tobacco. Additionally, slaves raised livestock and ran the cotton gin and grain mill on the property. One final responsibility was tending to Jackson's stable of racehorses. Jackson had a longtime trainer, an enslaved man named Dinwiddie, who trained Old Hickory's equestrian stock. As an elite Southern planter, Jackson recognized the importance of slave property to his financial security and, when he could, sought to increase the number of slaves he owned. Between 1812 and 1820, Jackson's enslaved population increased from twenty to forty-four. By the time he was president, he owned nearly one hundred slaves; an estate inventory following Jackson's death counted 161 slaves, split between The Hermitage and a Mississippi plantation.

Ignored in Hannah's recollections was the violence visited upon The Hermitage slave community, such as when Jackson ordered runaway male slaves whipped upon capture. In 1804, for example, Jackson placed a newspaper advertisement describing a runaway slave named Tom Gid. He promised "ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred" if Tom were captured outside of the state. (Tom does not appear to have been captured.) In the case of one repeat offender named Gilbert, running away cost him his life. In August 1827, Jackson's overseer, Ira Walton, determined to whip Gilbert in front of the other slaves to send a message; instead, the slave fought back and ended up dead from a knife wound.

Female slaves were not immune to violence either. In 1815, one of Jackson's nephews informed him that "[y]our wenches as usual commenced open war" against the overseer. This familiar behavior stopped after the slave women were "brought to order by Hickory oil," a reference to being whipped. In 1821, the Jacksons were living in Florida while Andrew served as territorial governor. During one of his absences, Rachel wrote to her husband that her slave, Betty, "has been putting on some airs, and been guilty of a great deal of impudence." Her sin was washing clothes for individuals in the neighborhood without Rachel's "express permission." Jackson instructed several of the men who formed part of their Pensacola household to punish Betty with fifty lashes at "the public whipping post" if she refused to obey his wife. Betty was "capable of being a good & valluable servant," he wrote one of the men, "but to have her so, she must be ruled with the cowhide."

At the same time, the paternalistic Jackson that Hannah described also appeared to exist. When, in 1810, a neighbor, William Purnell, accused Dinwiddie of poisoning one of his horses, Jackson defended his horse trainer. He demanded that Purnell either provide detailed evidence implicating Dinwiddie or prepare to be punished himself. On another occasion, in 1838, relatives accused four of Jackson's male slaves of causing a riot at a holiday party and murdering another slave. Jackson hired a legal team to defend his slaves, arguing "it was a constitutional right, that all men by law [are] presumed to be innocent until guilt was proven."

One should not read too much into these paternalistic examples, however. While it is certainly possible to argue that they represented Jackson's concern for his slaves, what was at stake in both of these instances was not only the slaves' complicity in criminal activity but also Jackson's honor as a Southern gentleman. The question of his slaves' guilt or innocence reflected on his reputation: What kind of master could Jackson be if he was unable to keep his slaves from poisoning other people's horses and starting riots? Jackson's prickliness about his public face, which resulted in several duels and violent assaults, suggests that whatever sympathy he may have had for his accused slaves, what mattered most was protecting his honor.

One of Hannah's memories hints at a possible internal struggle taking place within Jackson, that, if true, must have jeopardized his reputation. She recalled that a white officer "who used to stay for weeks at our house led one of the young colored girls off." When Jackson found out, he "said nothing that I know of," but when Rachel caught wind of the liaisons, she was "mad, mad, MAD [with rising inflection], and she was always mad about it."

This anecdote is particularly intriguing in light of the suggestion by Hannah's descendants that she and Jackson had, at the very least, a sexual, if not a romantic, relationship that produced children. In her "novel based on fact," Unholiest Patrimony: "Great Is the Truth and It Must Prevail," Dorothy Price-Haskins, one of Hannah's descendants, argues that Jackson had a sexual relationship with her ancestor, resulting in the birth of their daughter, Charlotte. She claims that Charlotte documented this relationship in her journal, which, along with other evidence of Jackson's paternity, has remained in family hands because of harassment and threats. If Price-Haskins is right about Andrew Jackson and Hannah, then Rachel Jackson may have been projecting her anger toward her husband onto the male houseguest suspected of fraternizing with the female slave.

Price-Haskins's argument underscores how little attention historians have paid to Jackson's slave ownership. The slaves of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, even James K. Polk, have all been studied in greater depth than those of Jackson. Why have historians cared so little about Jackson's relationship with his slaves, especially given the claim that he fathered a child with Hannah? One reason-as Jennifer James, a professor of English at George Washington University who is working on a book about Jackson's legacy among African Americans, pointed out in conversation with me-is that there is no DNA evidence available to corroborate the oral tradition of the relationship, as was the case with Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman whom most historians agree bore children for the third president. At the same time, unlike Jefferson's case, no allegations about Jackson's involvement with Hannah (or slave women in general) made during his lifetime have surfaced. This lack of genetic and contemporaneous evidence makes it unlikely that a Jackson-Hannah relationship will ever grab the historical profession's attention, much less that of the public.

Another factor at work is Hannah's image as a non-threatening African-American woman. While photographic evidence demonstrates that she did not physically resemble the stereotypical "Mammy" character common in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American popular culture, the 1880 and 1894 interviewers describe Hannah as what one scholar has called an "Aunt Jemima" character.

Aunt Jemimas were, writes Donald Bogle in the book Black Beginnings, "blessed with religion . . . [able to] wedge themselves into the dominant white culture. Generally, they are sweet, jolly, and good-tempered." Hannah's two interviews are infused with religious references and indicate her knowledge of, and participation in, the private world of the Jacksons. Terrell even described Hannah as wearing "a 'kerchief turban-fashion," a familiar accoutrement historically associated with "Aunt Jemima."

A closer reading of Parton and the two newspaper interviews, however, reveals an African-American woman who may have proved desirable to someone such as Jackson. Parton described Hannah as looking younger than her approximately sixty years of age and "yellow," implying a mixed racial heritage. Terrell, the 1880 interviewer, made a similar comparison when he called her "a cinnamon-colored mulatto." The unnamed 1894 interviewer alluded to several characteristics that set Hannah apart from the familiar racist Jim Crow-era stereotypes. She possessed "unusual intelligence for a colored woman" who lacked a formal education and "a certain sprightliness of manner, comeliness of features, and much good, sound common sense." Hannah's "honesty and truthfulness have ever been unimpeachable, her unselfishness and benevolence worthy of imitation," in his assessment.

Even if it were somehow provable that Jackson and Hannah were sexually involved, it seems likely that the relationship would simply become another black mark on Jackson's legacy, as Professor James said to me. Unlike Washington or Jefferson, Jackson no longer resides in the American pantheon of great presidents. He was not the author of the Declaration of Independence or the "Father of Our Country." Instead, like some of Jackson's contemporaries, many Americans today seem to believe that he was a tyrant who disgraced the executive office with his uncouthness, destroyed the national bank (and, with it, the nation's economy), and attempted to wipe out several Native American groups. With that kind of reputation, it perhaps does not seem that significant if he had a relationship or produced a child with a slave woman.

For decades, biographers knowingly or unknowingly relied on Hannah's memory of Jackson to understand him as a slave owner. For example, in his 1860s biography, Parton referred to Jackson as "the most indulgent, patient, and generous of masters," whose slaves "loved him, and revere his memory." (The present tense of "revere" suggests that he may have had the descriptions that Hannah gave him during his 1859 visit specifically in mind while writing this assessment.) Marquis James's Pulitzer Prize-wining Life of Andrew Jackson (1938) called Old Hickory the "ideal slave-owner" who shared a "genuine and reciprocal attachment" with his slaves. Even Robert V. Remini, who was widely regarded as the preeminent Jackson-era historian prior to his death in 2013, fell victim to perpetuating Hannah's image. While he admitted that Jackson "could be exceedingly cruel, if not barbaric," he also argued, without supporting evidence, that Jackson's "abominable disposition toward recalcitrant slaves had softened" by the time of his second presidential term. Remini also suggested that the demise of Jackson's slaves "genuinely disturbed him-and not on account of the financial loss." Recently, biographers such as Hendrik Booraem, Andrew Burstein, and Jon Meacham have taken a more realistic view of Jackson that recognizes his desire to own slaves in order to maintain social status and remain wealthy.

For a number of decades, Hannah's memory also influenced public perceptions of Jackson at his home in Nashville. When I worked as an interpreter at The Hermitage during the summer of 1995, an older docent overheard me giving a tour in which I referred to Jackson's slaves. She pulled me aside and instructed me to call the slaves "servants," because that is what "the General" would have called them. In recalling that conversation recently, I was struck by its irony: At the very same time that I was being told to ignore slavery's reality at Jackson's home, The Hermitage was the site of an extended archaeological project focusing on uncovering slaves' lives. Reflecting on her role in that project, anthropologist Whitney Battle-Baptiste noted that the local African-American community had long viewed The Hermitage as "a segregated place," in large part because of "the continued invisibility ascribed to the descendants of enslaved Africans at the museum."

That invisibility no longer exists. In 2005, The Hermitage created an exhibit on the plantation's enslaved people that continues to be displayed in the visitor center and may be expanded in the future. Guests cannot miss reading the biographies of several slaves, including Hannah, as they walk the hallway leading to the museum. In the several times that I have visited The Hermitage since 2008, it is clear from listening to the audio recordings that guests can use on the tour, and from interacting with the docents, that serious attention is being given to help the public understand the centrality of slave labor to the home and lifestyle that they are encountering. Hannah, then, is still influencing the ways in which Americans think about Jackson, but in a very different way than before.
*On April 13, 2015, this article was updated to credit Jennifer James's contributions to the author's thinking about why historians have not been more interested in reports that Hannah had a sexual relationship with Jackson, and to credit Donald Bogle as the source of a quotation that, because of an editorial error, had been omitted from the published version.

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During Parton's visit, Hannah gave him a tour of Jackson's Nashville home, The Hermitage, which had fallen into disrepair. Parton recorded in his research notebook that Hannah thought highly of her former owner. He "was more a father to us than a master," Parton recorded her saying, "and many's the time we've wished him back again, to help us out of our troubles."

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John Ross and Major Ridge tried diplomatic and legal strategies to maintain autonomy, but the new president had other plans

John Ross made an unlikely looking Cherokee chief. Born in 1790 to a Scottish trader and a woman of Indian and European heritage, he was only one-eighth Cherokee by blood. Short, slight and reserved, he wore a suit and tie instead of deerskin leggings and a beaver-skin hat. His trading post made him more prosperous than most Indians-or white men. But his mother and grandmother raised him in a traditional household, teaching him the tribe's customs and legends. When the Cherokees embraced formal education-they were adapting quickly to a world they knew was changing-he attended school with their children. After his mother died, in 1808, Ross worked at his grandfather's trading post near present-day Chattanooga, an important way station on the road to the West. There he encountered white settlers moving onto Cherokee land.

To a degree unique among the five major tribes in the South, the Cherokees used diplomacy and legal argument to protect their interests. With the help of a forward-looking warrior named Major Ridge, Ross became the tribe's primary negotiator with officials in Washington, D.C., adept at citing both federal law and details from a dozen treaties the Cherokees signed with the federal government between 1785 and 1819. In the 1820s, as they enjoyed one of the most promising periods in their history-developing a written language, adopting a constitution and building a capital city-Ross became the Cherokees' principal chief, and Ridge was named his counselor.

All the while, white settlers kept coming.

The state governments did little to discourage them, ignoring federal treaties and even abetting the taking of Indian land through bribery, fraud and coercion. When the tribes turned to Washington for redress, federal officials proved ineffectual or hostile, depending on the administration. One by one the other major Southern tribes-the Chickasaws, the Choctaws, the Creeks and the Seminoles-signed treaties that required them to uproot to the far side of the Mississippi River. But the Cherokees held out.

They finally succumbed in 1838, when they were marched 800 miles into an extremely bitter winter. The survivors of the journey to what is now Oklahoma would call it the Trail of Tears. The exodus was a communal tragedy, as it had been for the other tribes. But in the case of the Cherokees, their resistance and defeat were reflected as well in the rise and collapse of the extraordinary partnership between Ross and Ridge.

The two had met in 1813, the year Ross had a political awakening while on a trading trip through what would become Alabama. A Creek chief named Big Warrior told him a faction of his tribe had become openly hostile to European customs and settlers. These Red Sticks, as the faction called itself, were threatening civil war. Ross, only 22, recognized a hazard to the Cherokees: such a war would likely endanger white settlers, and given that whites scarcely distinguished between tribes, any retaliatory move they made would threaten every Indian. So he wrote an urgent note to the local U.S. Indian agent: "The intelligence received from the Creek Nation at this present crisis is very serious. The hostile party is said to be numerous and if assistance is not given to the Big Warrior and his party by the U.S. it is apprehensive that they will be conquered from the Superior force of the rebels."

When Tennessee militiamen intervened that fall, the Cherokees joined them, both to protect their own interests and to curry favor with whites. Ross, whose early record shows not even a fistfight, was among the 500 Cherokees who enlisted. So was Ridge, already a renowned warrior.

The Cherokees called him "the man who walks on the mountaintop," for his preferred means of traversing the woods; white men interpreted that as "ridge." He would appropriate the rank he was given during the Creek War as a first name. Born in 1770 or 1771, Ridge straddled two generations: in his youth he had fought white settlers, but as a man he welcomed European traditions. "He appears very anxious that all his people should receive instruction, and come into the customs of the whites," the missionary William Chamberlin would write in 1822. Indeed, Ridge was one of the first Cherokees to send his children to missionary schools.

Ridge's embrace of change was initially unpopular among his tribesmen, but few questioned his loyalty. In 1807 he had helped kill the powerful Cherokee chief Doublehead for selling tribal hunting grounds for personal profit. And in 1808, when white U.S. Indian agents enticed principal chief Black Fox into proposing that the tribe move west, Ridge had been the first to protest. "As a man he has a right to give his opinion," Ridge declared before the Cherokees' ruling council, "but the opinion he has given as the chief of this nation is not binding; it was not formed in council in the light of day, but was made up in a corner-to drag this people, without their consent, from their own country, to the dark land of the setting sun."

By 1813, Ridge had seen enough of politics to understand the diplomatic advantage to be gained from joining the Tennesseans against the Red Sticks. The Cherokees might even have realized that advantage had it not been for the militia leader they fought under: Andrew Jackson.

As a boy in the 1770s, Jackson had listened to stories of Indian violence toward settlers, and with no apparent understanding of their motives, he developed prejudices that he-like many Americans of his day-held throughout his life. He routinely called Indians "savages" and people of mixed heritage "half-breeds," and he was unshakable in his conviction that Indians should be removed from the South. When news that the Red Sticks were attacking settlers reached him in Nashville, he asked: "Is a citizen of the United States, to remain under the barbarous lash of cruel and unrelenting savages?"

In March 1814, Jackson tracked the Red Sticks to Horseshoe Bend, a peninsula formed by the Tallapoosa River in what is now Alabama, and launched a frontal assault on their breastworks. His troops might have been repulsed had the Cherokees not crossed the river and attacked from the rear. Caught between two attacking forces, the Red Sticks lost nearly 900 warriors in what proved to be the decisive battle of the war.

That day, a Cherokee named Junaluska saved Jackson from an attacker, prompting the Tennessean to declare, "As long as the sun shines and the grass grows, there shall be friendship between us." But in the peace treaty he negotiated with the Creeks, Jackson confiscated 23 million acres of land in Alabama and Georgia-some of which belonged to the Cherokees.

In 1816, the Cherokees' principal chief, Pathkiller, sent a delegation to Washington to reclaim that land. The delegates, who included Ross and Ridge, made quite an impression while mingling with the city's elite. Ridge sang a Cherokee song so raunchy his interpreter declined to translate it. ("It's just like a white man's song," Ridge joked in his limited English, "all about love and whiskey.") Even so, a reporter from one newspaper, the National Intelligencer, wrote that "their appearance and deportment are such to entitle them to respect and attention."

Because of his fluency in English, Ross became one of the Cherokees' lead negotiators, and he proved more than a match for Secretary of War William Crawford. "It is foreign to the Cherokee principle to feign friendship where it does not exist," Ross said, implying a contrast with Washington bureaucrats. "You have told us that your Government is determined to do justice to our nation and will never use oppressive means to make us act contrary to our welfare and free will." The treaties the Cherokees had signed generally required them to give up large tracts of land but guaranteed their rights to whatever remained. Now they wanted those rights enforced.

After more than a month of back-and-forth debate, Crawford finally relented: the United States would restore the bulk of the land the Cherokees claimed. In return, the Cherokees agreed to sell a small tract in South Carolina for $5,000 (the 2011 equivalent of $78,800) to the state government.

In a move intended to prevent local chiefs from accepting bribes to sell off Cherokee land, the Cherokee council in 1817 established a national committee to handle all tribal business. When Ross arrived at the council meeting as a spectator, Ridge led him into a private conference and told him that he would be one of 13 members of the committee. Ross was only 26-a young man in a community where leadership traditionally came with age. Just a month later, he would have to confront Andrew Jackson directly.

Jackson had been serving as a federal Indian commissioner when he launched his first effort to remove the Cherokees en masse. In 1817, he appeared with two other agents at the Cherokees' council in Calhoun, just northeast of what is now Cleveland, Tennessee, to inform the tribe that if it refused to move west, it would have to submit to white men's laws, no matter what any treaties might say. The chiefs dismissed the agents without hesitation. "Brothers, we wish to remain on our land, and hold it fast," their signed statement said. "We appeal to our father the president of the United States to do us justice. We look to him for protection in the hour of distress."

Through threats and bribery, Jackson eventually persuaded a few thousand Cherokees to leave Tennessee; Ross became the spokesman of those who remained-some 16,000 resolved to hold their ground. After years of trading land for peace, the council in 1822 passed a resolution vowing never to cede a single acre more. "If we had but one square mile left they would not be satisfied unless they could get it," Ross wrote to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun that October, referring to state Indian commissioners who regularly tried to buy out the tribe. "But we hope that the United States will never forget her obligation to our nation."

In 1823, Georgia officials, recognizing Ross' growing power, dispatched a Creek chief to personally offer him $2,000 (about $42,300 today) to persuade the Cherokees to move. Ross asked for the offer in writing-then took it to Ridge. Together they exposed the bribery attempt in front of the tribal council and sent the emissary packing.

At the same time, what historians would call the Cherokee Renaissance was bringing the tribe more fully into the 19th century. Sequoyah, a mixed-blood Cherokee, distilled the Cherokee oral language into a set of 86 symbols; soon, the tribe enjoyed a higher rate of literacy than the settlers who called them savages. They started a newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. In 1825-after new president John Quincy Adams promised to honor the federal government's obligations to Indians-the Cherokees began their largest public works project, building a council house, courthouse and public square in northwestern Georgia, near present-day Calhoun. They named it New Echota, in honor of a village lost to settlers years earlier.

Ridge could not hide his pride. "It's like Baltimore," he told a visiting missionary, comparing it to the largest city he'd ever seen.

In 1827, the Cherokees adopted a written constitution that defined a government with executive, legislative and judicial branches. That same year, they acquired new leadership: Pathkiller died, and Charles Hicks, his assistant and logical successor, followed him two weeks later. The council appointed an interim chief, but Ross and Ridge were making the decisions-when to hold council, how to handle law enforcement, whether to allow roads to be built through tribal land. The two men so relied on each other that locals called the three-mile trail between their homes the Ross Ridge Road.

If Ross aspired to be principal chief, he never spoke of it. But Ridge promoted his protégé's candidacy without naming him, dictating an essay to the Cherokee Phoenix that described removal as the tribe's most pressing issue and warning against electing leaders who could be manipulated by white men. Until then, every principal chief had been nearly full-blooded Cherokee. When the council voted in the fall of 1828, Ross-who was only 38-was elected principal chief by a vote of 34 to 6. The council named Ridge his counselor.

A month later, Andrew Jackson was elected president of the United States. He would test the Cherokees' leadership soon enough, but even before Jackson was inaugurated, Georgia presented a more immediate threat, passing laws that annexed Cherokee land and extended state laws to that territory. Within two years, the state would require any whites living among the Indians-such as missionaries-to sign an oath of allegiance to the state or get out.

Ross spent much of those two years in Washington, trying to overturn the new laws. Jackson's secretary of war, John Eaton, told Ross the tribe's troubles had been self-inflicted: by adopting a constitution, it had insulted Georgia's sovereignty. As the months passed and Georgia's deadline loomed, some 500 Cherokees abandoned their homes and headed west to join earlier emigrants. Major Ridge grew alarmed: the fewer Cherokees who remained, the easier they would be to displace. He set out on a speaking tour intended to calm tribe members inclined to flee. He told large crowds that they had been targeted not because they were weak, but because they were strong and had "unexpectedly become civilized."

"It is too much for us now to be honest, and virtuous, and industrious," he noted sarcastically, "because then are we capable of aspiring to the rank of Christians and Politicians, which renders our attachment to the soil more strong."

When Ross returned from Washington, he joined Ridge's campaign, rousing crowds with his defiant oratory. He told a missionary friend that his "hopes of success were never greater."

But more trouble was on the way: gold had been discovered on tribal land in Georgia, drawing a new wave of settlers, and President Jackson was not about to stop them. In February 1830, the tribe exercised its legal right to evict squatters; Ridge, then 60, led a two-day raid in which Cherokees burned settlers' houses and outbuildings. After Georgia authorities sent a posse after the Cherokees, gunfire rang out through northern Georgia.

The timing could hardly have been worse: at that very moment, Congress was hotly debating the Indian removal bill, a measure Jackson had introduced to establish an "ample district" west of the Mississippi to which the Indians of the South could move. On one hand, he had said in his inaugural address, Indian emigration "should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land." On the other, he made it clear that Indians could not live as independent peoples within the United States: "surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization" they would be doomed "to weakness and decay." They had either to submit to state laws or go.

Congress passed the removal bill that May, and by September Jackson had begun negotiating with the Chickasaws, the Choctaws and the remaining Creeks to move west. Within four years they would be under land cession treaties or on the move. Some Seminoles also left in the early 1830s, and others fought the Army in Florida for several years. But Ross refused even to meet with Jackson. Instead, he turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to invalidate Georgia's removal law.

As the court's spring session opened in March 1831, Georgia officials roamed the Capitol to rally states' rights advocates to the idea of stripping the justices of their power to review the acts of state governments. The justices-in an act that historians would say reflected their worry over the talk coming out of Congress-ruled that they lacked jurisdiction over the Cherokees' claims against Georgia. Chief Justice John Marshall offered their only hope when he wrote that "the Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionable...right to the lands they occupy."

Ross used that opinion to bring another suit, this time challenging the arrests of white missionaries who had refused to swear allegiance to Georgia. Now faced with a case involving U.S. citizens, the court was forced to act. On March 3, 1832, the justices declared the arrests unconstitutional and said Georgia could not extend its laws to Cherokee land. They also ruled that the federal government, by treaty, had the authority to protect Indian tribes from state intrusions. Taking aim at removal, Marshall wrote, "Protection does not imply the destruction of the protected."

Ross wrote to some Cherokee delegates in Washington, "[T]here are great rejoicings throughout the [Cherokee] nation."

But Jackson declared the ruling "stillborn."

A month later, Major Ridge's son John and two other Cherokees were in Washington, trying to determine whether the federal government would enforce the court's decision. Jackson met with them only to send them home to tell their people "that their only hope of relief was in abandoning their country and removing to the West."

Jackson's resolve unnerved the younger Ridge. Gradually, he realized that court victory or not, his people were losing ground. But he could not relay that message to the tribe for fear of being branded a traitor, or killed. He was even hesitant to confide in his father, believing Major Ridge would be ashamed of him.

But the son underestimated his father. Major Ridge judged his people's prospects by their suffering, and he knew the situation was far worse than anyone had dared to admit. Forbidden to meet by Georgia law, the Cherokees had abandoned New Echota in 1831. Settlers were confiscating their homesteads and livestock. By sharing his thoughts on Jackson, John Ridge helped his father come to the conclusion that the tribe had to at least consider going west.

But Major Ridge kept his feelings private, believing he needed to buy time to persuade his people to think about uprooting. At the same time, he began to wonder how Ross could remain so strident in his resistance. Couldn't he see that his strategy was bearing no fruit?

Ross met twice with Jackson at the White House, to no avail. When Jackson offered $3 million to move the Cherokees west, arguing that Georgia would not give up its claims to Cherokee land, Ross suggested he use the money to buy off the Georgia settlers.

By spring 1833, the Cherokees were split between a National Party, opposed to removal, and a Treaty Party, in favor of it. As factional violence flared, some of the most influential Cherokees signed a letter to Ross saying their ongoing "course of policy" would "not result in the restoration of those rights" that had been taken from them. In signing the letter, Ridge acknowledged that he had softened on removal. In a closed meeting, the chiefs gave Ross until fall to resolve the impasse with the government before they made the letter public.

Under so much pressure-from the state of Georgia, the federal government and a stream of settlers-the tribe began to disintegrate. Some Cherokees-including Ross' brother Andrew-set out for Washington to broker their own deals. John Ridge quietly continued to recruit members to the Treaty Party and make overtures to Jackson. When Ross learned of these efforts, he tried to pre-empt them, proposing to cede Cherokee land in Georgia and to have Cherokees in other states become U.S. citizens.

By then, the rift between Ross and Major Ridge was widening: when Ridge heard of the chief's offer, he saw it not just as a bargaining ploy but as an abuse of power. Without the blessing of the other chiefs, Ridge said, Ross had no more power to make a treaty than his traitorous brother.

The majority of the tribe members remained opposed to removal, but the Ridges began advocating the idea more openly-and when they broached it at a council meeting in Red Clay, Tennessee, in August 1834, one Cherokee spoke of shooting them. Father and son slipped away unharmed, but by the end of the summer the Cherokees were trading rumors-false-that Ross and Major Ridge had each hired someone to kill the other.

In September 1834, Ridge visited Ross at his home to put the rumors to rest. They tried to talk as they once had, but the only thing they could agree on was that all talk of murder had to stop. Ridge believed Ross' intransigence was leading the Cherokees to destruction. Ross thought his oldest friend had become soft, unduly influenced by his son.

By January 1835, the council had sent Ross back to Washington with instructions to again seek federal protection, and the Treaty Party had sent John Ridge to broker a deal. Afraid of being outflanked by the Treaty Party, Ross told Jackson the Cherokees would leave their land for $20 million. He was stalling; he knew the federal government would never pay that much. When Jackson rejected him, Ross proposed that the Senate come up with an offer. When the Senate named its price as $5 million, Ross said he would take the offer to the council but wouldn't be bound by that figure. By then Jackson had lost his patience. In late 1835, he dispatched a commissioner to Georgia to seal an agreement with the Treaty Party leaders.

They met in New Echota, the deserted Cherokee capital. The terms were simple: the Cherokees would receive $5 million for all their land east of the Mississippi. The government would help them move and promise never to take their new land or incorporate it into the United States. The Cherokees would have two years to leave.

It was Major Ridge who outlined the final argument to those present. "They are strong and we are weak," he said. "We are few, they are many....We can never forget these homes, I know, but an unbending, iron necessity tells us we must leave them. I would willingly die to preserve them, but any forcible effort to keep them will cost us our lands, our lives and the lives of our children. There is but one path to safety, one road to future existence as a Nation."

On December 29, a small group of Cherokees gathered at the home of Ridge's nephew Elias Boudinot to sign the Treaty of New Echota. After Ridge made his mark, he paused and said, "I have signed my death warrant."

John Ross tried to overturn the treaty for two years but failed. In May 1838, U.S. troops herded more than 16,000 Cherokees into holding camps to await removal to present-day Oklahoma. Indians who tried to flee were shot, while those who waited in the camps suffered from malnutrition, dysentery and even sexual assault by the troops guarding them. Within a month, the first Cherokees were moved out in detachments of around a thousand, with the first groups leaving in the summer heat and a severe drought. So many died that the Army delayed further removal until the fall, which meant the Cherokees would be on the trail in winter. At least a quarter of them-4,000-would perish during the relocation.

Ridge headed west ahead of his tribesmen and survived the journey, but on the morning of June 22, 1839, separate groups of vengeful Cherokees murdered him, John Ridge and Boudinot. Ross, appalled, publicly mourned the deaths. "Once I saved Major Ridge at Red Clay, and would have done so again had I known of the plot," he told friends.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story referred erroneously to events having taken place in the Alabama Territory in 1813 and 1814. The territory was not organized until 1817
John Ross served as principal chief for 27 more years. He oversaw the construction of schools and a courthouse for the new capital, and spent years petitioning the federal government to pay the $5 million it owed his people. (It wasn't fully paid until 1852.) Even as his health failed, Ross would not quit. In 1866, he was in Washington to sign yet another treaty-one that would extend Cherokee citizenship to freed Cherokee slaves-when he died on August 1, two months shy of his 76th birthday. More than three decades later, the federal government appropriated Indian property in the West and forced the tribes to accept land reservations. Today, many of the country's 300,000 Cherokees still live in Oklahoma.

Adapted from Toward the Setting Sun: John Ross, the Cherokees, and the Trail of Tears, by Brian Hicks. Copyright © 2011. With the permission of the Atlantic Monthly Press.

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John Ross made an unlikely looking Cherokee chief. Born in 1790 to a Scottish trader and a woman of Indian and European heritage, he was only one-eighth Cherokee by blood. Short, slight and reserved, he wore a suit and tie instead of deerskin leggings and a beaver-skin hat.

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by State Library of North Carolina. Edited and updated by Steven Case, 2009.

March 15, 1767 - June 8, 1845.

Without union our independence and liberty would never have been achieved; without union they never can be maintained. ... The loss of liberty, of all good government, of peace, plenty, and happiness, must inevitably follow a dissolution of the Union.

---Andrew Jackson, Second Inaugural Address, 1833

Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, was born in the Waxhaws area near the border between North and South Carolina on March 15, 1767. Jackson's parents lived in North Carolina but historians debate on which side of the state line the birth took place.

Jackson was the third child and third son of Scots-Irish parents. His father, also named Andrew, died as the result of a logging accident just a few weeks before the future president was born. Jackson's mother, Elizabeth ("Betty") Hutchison Jackson, was by all accounts a strong, independent woman. After her husband's death she raised her three sons at the South Carolina home of one of her sisters.

The American Revolution

The Declaration of Independence was signed when young Andrew was nine years old and at thirteen he joined the Continental Army as a courier. The Revolution took a toll on the Jackson family. All three boys saw active service. One of Andrew's older brothers, Hugh, died after the Battle of Stono Ferry, South Carolina in 1779, and two years later Andrew and his other brother Robert were taken prisoner for a few weeks in April 1781. While they were captives a British officer ordered them to clean his boots. The boys refused, the officer struck them with his sword and Andrew's hand was cut to the bone. Because of his ill treatment Jackson harbored a bitter resentment towards the British until his death.

Both brothers contracted smallpox during their imprisonment and Robert was dead within days of their release. Later that year Betty Jackson went to Charleston to nurse American prisoners of war. Shortly after she arrived Mrs. Jackson fell ill with either ship fever or cholera and died. Andrew found himself an orphan and an only child at fourteen. Jackson spent most of the next year and a half living with relatives and for six of those months was apprenticed to a saddle maker.

Public Career

After the war Jackson taught school briefly, but he didn't like it and decided to practice law instead. In 1784, when he was seventeen, he went to Salisbury, North Carolina where he studied law for several years. He was admitted to the North Carolina Bar in September 1787 and the following spring began his public career with an appointment as prosecuting officer for the Superior Court in Nashville, Tennessee, which at that time was a part of the Western District of North Carolina.

In June 1796 Tennessee was separated from North Carolina and admitted to the Union as the sixteenth state. Jackson was soon afterward elected the new state's first congressman. The following year the Tennessee legislature elected him a U.S. senator, but he held his senatorial seat for only one session before resigning. After his resignation Jackson came home and served for six years as a judge on the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Jackson's military career, which had begun in the Revolution, continued in 1802 when he was elected major general of the Tennessee militia. Ten years later Tennessee Governor Willie Blount (of the North Carolina Blount family) gave him the rank of major general of U.S. forces. In 1814, after several devastating campaigns against Native Americans in the Creek War, he was finally promoted to major general in the regular army. Jackson also later led troops during the First Seminole War in Florida.

General Jackson emerged a national hero from the War of 1812, primarily because of his decisive defeat of the British at the Battle of New Orleans. It was during this period he earned his nickname of "Old Hickory." Jackson had been ordered to march his Tennessee troops to Natchez, Mississippi. When he got there he was told to disband his men because they were unneeded. General Jackson refused and marched them back to Tennessee. Because of his strict discipline on that march his men began to say he was as tough as hickory and the nickname stuck.

Politics and Elections

All his life Jackson was a loyal friend and a fierce enemy. This was never more true than during his years in politics at the national level beginning with the 1824 presidential election.

Jacksonians often referred to the 1824 election as the "Stolen Election" because while Jackson swept the popular vote hands down, he did not have enough electoral votes to automatically win the presidency. Therefore the election had to be decided by the House of Representatives.

Jackson's opponents were Henry Clay of Kentucky, John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, and William H. Crawford of Georgia who were respectively speaker of the house, secretary of state, and secretary of the treasury. Adams was horrified at the thought of Jackson becoming president. The patrician New Englander thought this parvenu from the west was a badly educated bumpkin with little preparation for high office. Because Clay's opinion of Jackson was similar, the Kentuckian threw his support to Adams on the first ballot and Adams was elected. Jackson never forgave either one of them, especially after Adams named Clay his secretary of state in what seemed to be a payoff for Clay's votes.

In the years leading up to the 1828 election Jackson and his followers continually criticized the Adams administration. Jackson took the position he was the people's candidate and never lost an opportunity to point out that the people's choice in 1824 had been disregarded by the elite. This tactic proved successful and Jackson defeated Adams in the 1828 election and four years later defeated Clay in the election of 1832.

Loss of the "Stolen Election" was not the only thing Jackson held against Adams. During the 1828 campaign the Adams camp charged Jackson and his wife with adultery. The claims grew out of naivete on the Jacksons' part. Rachel Donelson had a first, unhappy marriage with Lewis Robards. In 1790 the Kentucky legislature passed a resolution granting Robards permission to sue for divorce, though he did not do so at the time.

Andrew and Rachel confused the permission to sue with an actual declaration of divorce. They married in 1791, not realizing Rachel was still legally married. Robards finally sued for divorce in 1793 citing Rachel's "adultery" with Jackson. The Jacksons remarried in 1794, but the embarrassing and often malicious gossip persisted. Rachel Jackson died a few weeks before her husband's inauguration and Jackson blamed her early death on stress caused by the public discussion of their supposed immorality during the campaign.

The Presidency

Andrew Jackson may have been our seventh president, but he was first in many ways. He was the first populist president who did not come from the aristocracy, he was the first to have his vice-president resign ( John C. Calhoun), he was the first to marry a divorcee, he was the first to be nominated at a national convention (his second term), the first to use an informal "Kitchen Cabinet" of advisers, and the first president to use the " pocket veto" to kill a congressional bill (legislation fails to become law if Congress adjourns and the president has not signed the bill in question).

Jackson believed in a strong presidency and he vetoed a dozen pieces of legislation, more than the first six presidents put together. Jackson also believed in a strong Union and this belief brought him into open opposition with Southern legislators, especially those from South Carolina. South Carolina thought the 1832 tariff signed by President Jackson was much too high. In retaliation, the South Carolina legislature passed an Ordinance of Nullification, which rejected the tariff and declared the tariff invalid in South Carolina. Jackson , always a strong Unionist, issued a presidential proclamation against South Carolina. On the whole Congress supported Jackson's position on the issue and a compromise tariff was passed in 1833. The immediate crisis passed, but the incident was a precursor of the positions that would lead almost thirty years later to the War Between the States.

Another major issue during Jackson's presidency was his refusal to sanction the recharter of the Bank of the United States. Jackson thought Congress had not had the authority to create the Bank in the first place, but he also viewed the Bank as operating for the primary benefit of the upper classes at the expense of working people. Jackson used one of his dozen vetoes, and the Bank's congressional supporters did not have enough votes to override him. The Bank ceased to exist when its charter expired in 1836, but even before that date the president had weakened it considerably by withdrawing millions of dollars of federal funds.

Jackson's record regarding Native Americans was not good. He led troops against them in both the Creek War and the First Seminole War and during his first administration the Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830. The act offered the Indians land west of the Mississippi in return for evacuation of their tribal homes in the east. About 100 million acres of traditional Indian lands were cleared under this law.

Two years later Jackson did nothing to make Georgia abide by the Supreme Court's ruling in Worcester vs. Georgia in which the Court found that the State of Georgia did not have any jurisdiction over the Cherokees. Georgia ignored the Court's decision and so did Andrew Jackson. In 1838-1839 Georgia evicted the Cherokees and forced them to march west. About twenty-five percent of the Indians were dead before they reached their new lands in Oklahoma. The Indians refer to this march as the " Trail of Tears" and even though it took place after Jackson's presidency, the roots of the march can be found in Jackson's failure to uphold the legal rights of Native Americans during his administration.

During Jackson's presidential years two states were admitted to the Union (Arkansas in 1836 and Michigan in 1837) and the rulings of Roger Taney, one of his Supreme Court appointments, had an impact on American life long after Jackson's retirement. In 1836 Taney succeeded John Marshall as chief justice. One of Taney's early rulings gave permission for states to restrict immigration, while another destroyed a transportation monopoly in Massachusetts, establishing for the first time the principle in U.S. law that the public good is superior to private rights. But Taney is best known for his pro-slavery position in the Dred Scott case in 1857. Chief Justice Taney authored the majority opinion which refused to recognize that Congress had the authority to ban slavery in territory areas. In addition he said Blacks were "inferior" beings who had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

Retirement

Jackson's health was never good and there were times during his presidency when it seemed he would not live to complete his term. But complete it he did and in 1837 retired to his home near Nashville which he and Rachel had named The Hermitage. When the Hermitage was first built it was little more than a small cabin, but by Jackson's retirement it had been expanded, remodeled, and rebuilt into a spacious plantation house.

Jackson remained a force in politics in his latter years. For example it was very much Jackson's behind the scenes maneuvering which secured the presidency for his successor Martin Van Buren and in 1840 he actively campaigned for Van Buren in Van Buren's unsuccessful candidacy for re-election. Jackson also worked for the annexation of Texas and remained loyal to future President James K. Polk (another North Carolina native). Polk had been one of Jackson's strongest supporters in Congress as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

In his last few years Jackson's health deteriorated badly and he died at the Hermitage on June 8, 1845.

Andrew and Rachel Jackson did not have any children of their own, but adopted one of Rachel's nephews and gave him the name of Andrew Jackson, Jr. Jackson willed the Hermitage to Andrew Jr., but young Jackson's debts forced the sale of the property to the State of Tennessee in 1886. The Hermitage is today open to the public as an historic site.

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by State Library of North Carolina. Edited and updated by Steven Case, 2009. March 15, 1767 - June 8, 1845. Without union our independence and liberty would never have been achieved; without union they never can be maintained. ... The loss of liberty, of all good government, of peace, plenty, and happiness, must inevitably follow a dissolution of the Union.

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The Hermitage: Andrew Jackson's Plantation

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The Hermitage: Andrew Jackson's Plantation

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Andrew Jackson | Orphan, General, President, Legend

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Learn about Andrew Jackson the orphan, general, president, family man and legend. Andrew Jackson's life shows his patriotism for America and democracy.

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Andrew Jackson was the seventh President of the United States from 1829 to 1837, seeking to act as the direct representative of the common man.

More nearly than any of his predecessors, Andrew Jackson was elected by popular vote; as President he sought to act as the direct representative of the common man.

Born in a backwoods settlement in the Carolinas in 1767, he received sporadic education. But in his late teens he read law for about two years, and he became an outstanding young lawyer in Tennessee. Fiercely jealous of his honor, he engaged in brawls, and in a duel killed a man who cast an unjustified slur on his wife Rachel.

Jackson prospered sufficiently to buy slaves and to build a mansion, the Hermitage, near Nashville. He was the first man elected from Tennessee to the House of Representatives, and he served briefly in the Senate. A major general in the War of 1812, Jackson became a national hero when he defeated the British at New Orleans.

In 1824 some state political factions rallied around Jackson; by 1828 enough had joined "Old Hickory" to win numerous state elections and control of the Federal administration in Washington.

In his first Annual Message to Congress, Jackson recommended eliminating the Electoral College. He also tried to democratize Federal officeholding. Already state machines were being built on patronage, and a New York Senator openly proclaimed "that to the victors belong the spoils. . . . "

Jackson took a milder view. Decrying officeholders who seemed to enjoy life tenure, he believed Government duties could be "so plain and simple" that offices should rotate among deserving applicants.

As national politics polarized around Jackson and his opposition, two parties grew out of the old Republican Party-the Democratic Republicans, or Democrats, adhering to Jackson; and the National Republicans, or Whigs, opposing him.

Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and other Whig leaders proclaimed themselves defenders of popular liberties against the usurpation of Jackson. Hostile cartoonists portrayed him as King Andrew I.

Behind their accusations lay the fact that Jackson, unlike previous Presidents, did not defer to Congress in policy-making but used his power of the veto and his party leadership to assume command.

The greatest party battle centered around the Second Bank of the United States, a private corporation but virtually a Government-sponsored monopoly. When Jackson appeared hostile toward it, the Bank threw its power against him.

Clay and Webster, who had acted as attorneys for the Bank, led the fight for its recharter in Congress. "The bank," Jackson told Martin Van Buren, "is trying to kill me, but I will kill it!" Jackson, in vetoing the recharter bill, charged the Bank with undue economic privilege.

His views won approval from the American electorate; in 1832 he polled more than 56 percent of the popular vote and almost five times as many electoral votes as Clay.

Jackson met head-on the challenge of John C. Calhoun, leader of forces trying to rid themselves of a high protective tariff.

When South Carolina undertook to nullify the tariff, Jackson ordered armed forces to Charleston and privately threatened to hang Calhoun. Violence seemed imminent until Clay negotiated a compromise: tariffs were lowered and South Carolina dropped nullification.

In January of 1832, while the President was dining with friends at the White House, someone whispered to him that the Senate had rejected the nomination of Martin Van Buren as Minister to England. Jackson jumped to his feet and exclaimed, "By the Eternal! I'll smash them!" So he did. His favorite, Van Buren, became Vice President, and succeeded to the Presidency when "Old Hickory" retired to the Hermitage, where he died in June 1845.

Learn more about Andrew Jackson's spouse, Rachel Donelson Jackson.

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Andrew Jackson was the seventh President of the United States from 1829 to 1837, seeking to act as the direct representative of the common man.

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James Monroe's 1817 goodwill tour kicked off a decade of party-less government - but he couldn't stop the nation from dividing again

smithsonian.com

James Monroe rode into Boston Common astride a borrowed horse, wearing a blue coat, knee-buckled breeches and a Revolutionary triangular hat. A cheering crowd of 40,000 people greeted him.

But it wasn't the 1770s, and the founding father was no longer young. It was July 1817, and the new nation was 41 years old. The clothing worn by the nation's fifth president was now out of fashion. He wasn't in Boston to drum up support for a new nation-he was there to keep it from falling apart.

Monroe, a Democratic-Republican, had won a landslide victory against the collapsing Federalist Party in the 1816 election. Now, he was touring the nation, ostensibly to visit military installations, but also in hopes of stirring up a patriotic outpouring that would bring about the end of political parties in the United States.

He wanted to heal the wounds of the War of 1812, hurry along the Federalist collapse, and bring about the party-less government George Washington had envisioned in his farewell address. And he succeeded, for a while. Monroe's presidency marks the last time the United States didn't have a two-party system.

Monroe swept into the presidency as an American war hero and a symbol of the young nation's history. He'd joined the Continental Army in 1776, was wounded at the Battle of Trenton and survived the brutal winter of 1778 at Valley Forge. He was elected to the Virginia legislature, the Continental Congress, and the U.S. Senate. He served twice as an American diplomat in France and was governor of Virginia. In 1811, President James Madison named him secretary of state.

During the War of 1812, Monroe stepped up to rally the nation he'd helped form. In August 1814, the British captured Washington, D.C., and burned nearly all its public buildings, including the White House. Returning to the wrecked capital after a British retreat, the overwhelmed Madison, whose cerebral temperament left him ill-prepared to lead in wartime, handed Monroe a second title: acting secretary of war. He took charge of the war effort, reinforcing Washington and Baltimore, ordering Andrew Jackson to defend New Orleans, and convincing state governors to send more militiamen to the battle zones.

By the war's end, the partisan conflict that had defined American politics for two decades was sputtering out. Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans, who believed in limited powers for the federal government, had held the presidency for 16 years, since Jefferson's 1800 defeat of Federalist John Adams. But war had scrambled the parties' old roles. Federalists in New England had largely opposed the War of 1812. Many gathered at the secret Hartford Convention of 1814-15, where the most radical delegates called for New England to secede from the Union. Instead, the convention voted to send negotiators to Washington to demand changes in the Constitution, including limits on the president's power to make war. But news of the war's end reached Washington before the Federalist delegates did, leaving them looking like near-traitors who had schemed in secrecy.

Monroe won the 1816 election in a landslide and developed a plan to, in his words, "prevent the re-organization and revival of the federal party" and "exterminate all party divisions in our country." His motives were mixed. Like Washington, he believed that political parties were unnecessary to good government, but he was also furious at the wartime Federalist secessionist movement. He froze out the Federalists, gave them no patronage, and didn't even acknowledge them as members of a party. But publicly, Monroe made no partisan comments, instead appealing to all Americans on the basis of patriotism. "Discord does not belong to our system," he declared in his inaugural address. "Harmony among Americans... will be the object of my constant and zealous attentions."

Emulating Washington's tours of the nation as president, Monroe set out on his first goodwill tour on June 1, 1817. He spent all summer touring the nation, traveling by steamboat and carriage and on horseback. Like politicians today, he shook hands with aging veterans and kissed little kids. He toured farms, hobnobbed with welcoming committees, and patiently endured endless speeches by local judges.

Boston was the biggest test of Monroe's goodwill. Massachusetts was the nation's citadel of Federalism, and it had voted for Monroe's opponent, Rufus King, in 1816. But Boston seized the chance for reconciliation, greeting Monroe with boys clothed in mini-versions of Revolutionary attire and 2,000 girls in white dresses, decorated with either white or red roses, to symbolize the reconciliation of the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans.

The night of his victorious appearance on Boston Common, Monroe attended a dinner hosted by Massachusetts Governor John Brooks. To his surprise, other guests included John Adams, the Federalist ex-president, and Timothy Pickering, the former Federalist secretary of state who had recalled Monroe from his diplomatic post in Paris in 1796. "People now meet in the same room who would before scarcely pass the same street," marveled Boston's Chronicle and Patriot newspaper.

Boston swooned. On July 12, the Columbian Centinel, an ardent Federalist newspaper, published a headline, "Era of Good Feelings," that would define Monroe's presidency. "During the late Presidential Jubilee," the story began, "many persons have met at festive boards, in pleasant converse, whom party politics had long severed."

The origin of The Era of Good Feelings in the Columbian Centinel 12 July 1817! pic.twitter.com/7jET2BL3TH
- James Monroe Museum (@JMonroeMuseum) July 12, 2017

Returning to Washington in September 1817, Monroe extended the good feelings into national policy. He convinced Congress to abolish all of the federal government's internal taxes in the U.S., including property taxes-confident that customs tariffs and the sale of public land could fund the federal government. Yet he still paid off the nation's $67 million war debt within two years. (Tariffs continued to pay for the federal government's budget until the Civil War, when the federal government founded its department of internal revenue.) He supported Andrew Jackson's 1819 invasion of Florida, then had John Quincy Adams negotiate a treaty with Spain that ceded Florida to the U.S. The Monroe administration built up the nation's defenses and strengthened West Point into an elite military academy. Pioneers flooded westward. In his 1823 message to Congress, he articulated what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, warning European powers that any future attempt to colonize the Western Hemisphere would be considered a threat to the United States.

Even the great regional battles over extending slavery westward didn't scuttle Monroe's efforts to create a new political era. In March 1820, three weeks after signing the Missouri Compromise, Monroe set out on a four-month, 5,000-mile tour of the South, where his success at getting the Spanish out of Florida was wildly popular. Charleston and Savannah, especially, celebrated Monroe with such zeal that a Georgia newspaper declared Savannah was "in danger of overdoing it." Monroe visited Jackson at his Tennessee home, The Hermitage, and spoke at the Nashville Female Academy, the country's largest school for women, before swinging back to Washington in August.

Of course, the "Good Feelings" nickname only applied to those who could enjoy the rights enshrined in the Constitution. Native Americans, enslaved persons and other besieged groups would have had little "good" to say about the era. Nor would the huge number of Americans impoverished in the Panic of 1819.

Still, as Monroe had hoped, the Federalist Party died away. "A few old Federalists still moved around the capital, like statues or mummies," wrote George Dangerfield in his 1952 book The Era of Good Feelings, but "all ambitious men called themselves Republicans, or sought, without undergoing a public conversion, to attach themselves to whatever Republican faction would best serve their interests."

In 1820, Monroe won a second term essentially unopposed, with an Electoral College vote of 231 to 1. He felt he had carried out "the destruction of the federal party," he wrote to Madison in 1822. "Our government may get on and prosper without the existence of parties."

But the good feelings didn't last. The U.S. forsook parties, but it couldn't forsake politics.

Though historians disagree on when the era closed - some say it only lasted two years, ending with the Panic of 1819 -- ill feelings defined America's mood by the end of Monroe's second term. Without party discipline, governing got harder. By the early 1820s, it was every man for himself in Congress and even in Monroe's cabinet: Secretary of State Adams, Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford, and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun all jockeyed to succeed Monroe as president.

The incident that best proves the Era of Good Feelings was over occurred in winter 1824. Crawford, furious at Monroe for not protecting his cronies during Army budget cuts, confronted him at the White House. "You infernal scoundrel," the treasury secretary hissed, raising his cane at the president. Monroe grabbed fireplace tongs to defend himself, Navy Secretary Samuel L. Southard stepped between the men, and Crawford apologized and left the White House, never to return.

The 1824 presidential election, held without parties, attracted four candidates: Jackson, Adams, Crawford, and House Speaker Henry Clay. After none won an Electoral College majority, the House of Representatives elected Adams, the second-place finisher, as president - passing over Jackson, who'd won the most electoral votes and popular votes. That election provoked American politics to reorganize into a new two-party system-Jacksonian Democrats versus Adams' Whigs.

Monroe died on July 4, 1831, with a substantial legacy in American history, from the Monroe Doctrine's influence on foreign policy to his role in the nation's westward expansion. But the nation never again neared his ideal of a party-free government. For better and for worse, through battles over economics and war, slavery and immigration, the two-party system he inadvertently spawned has defined American politics ever since.

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The Brief Period, 200 Years Ago, When American Politics Was Full of "Good Feelings"

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smithsonian.com James Monroe rode into Boston Common astride a borrowed horse, wearing a blue coat, knee-buckled breeches and a Revolutionary triangular hat. A cheering crowd of 40,000 people greeted him. But it wasn't the 1770s, and the founding father was no longer young. It was July 1817, and the new nation was 41 years old.

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In the early years of the nineteenth century, Americans' endless commercial ambition-what one Baltimore paper in 1815 called an "almost universal ambition to get forward "-remade the nation. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, an old subsistence world died and a new more-commercial nation was born. Americans integrated the technologies of the Industrial Revolution into a new commercial economy. Steam power, the technology that moved steamboats and railroads, fueled the rise of American industry by powering mills and sparking new national transportation networks. A "market revolution" remade the nation.

The revolution reverberated across the country. More and more farmers grew crops for profit, not self-sufficiency. Vast factories and cities arose in the North. Enormous fortunes materialized. A new middle class ballooned. And as more men and women worked in the cash economy, they were freed from the bound dependence of servitude. But there were costs to this revolution. As northern textile factories boomed, the demand for southern cotton swelled, and American slavery accelerated. Northern subsistence farmers became laborers bound to the whims of markets and bosses. The market revolution sparked explosive economic growth and new personal wealth, but it also created a growing lower class of property-less workers and a series of devastating depressions, called "panics." Many Americans labored for low wages and became trapped in endless cycles of poverty. Some workers, often immigrant women, worked thirteen hours a day, six days a week. Others labored in slavery. Massive northern textile mills turned southern cotton into cheap cloth. And although northern states washed their hands of slavery, their factories fueled the demand for slave-grown southern cotton and their banks provided the financing that ensured the profitability and continued existence of the American slave system. And so, as the economy advanced, the market revolution wrenched the United States in new directions as it became a nation of free labor and slavery, of wealth and inequality, and of endless promise and untold perils.

The growth of the American economy reshaped American life in the decades before the Civil War. Americans increasingly produced goods for sale, not for consumption. Improved transportation enabled a larger exchange network. Labor-saving technology improved efficiency and enabled the separation of the public and domestic spheres. The market revolution fulfilled the revolutionary generation's expectations of progress but introduced troubling new trends. Class conflict, child labor, accelerated immigration, and the expansion of slavery followed. These strains required new family arrangements and transformed American cities.

American commerce had proceeded haltingly during the eighteenth century. American farmers increasingly exported foodstuffs to Europe as the French Revolutionary Wars devastated the continent between 1793 and 1815. America's exports rose in value from $20.2 million in 1790 to $108.3 million by 1807. But while exports rose, exorbitant internal transportation costs hindered substantial economic development within the United States. In 1816, for instance, $9 could move one ton of goods across the Atlantic Ocean, but only thirty miles across land. An 1816 Senate Committee Report lamented that "the price of land carriage is too great" to allow the profitable production of American manufactures. But in the wake of the War of 1812, Americans rushed to build a new national infrastructure, new networks of roads, canals, and railroads. In his 1815 annual message to Congress, President James Madison stressed "the great importance of establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under national authority." State governments continued to sponsor the greatest improvements in American transportation, but the federal government's annual expenditures on internal improvements climbed to a yearly average of $1,323,000 by Andrew Jackson's presidency..

Economic growth, however, proceeded unevenly. Depressions devastated the economy in 1819, 1837, and 1857. Each followed rampant speculation in various commodities: land in 1819, land and enslaved laborers in 1837, and railroad bonds in 1857. Eventually the bubbles all burst. The spread of paper currency untethered the economy from the physical signifiers of wealth familiar to the colonial generation, namely land. Counterfeit bills were endemic during this early period of banking. With so many fake bills circulating, Americans were constantly on the lookout for the "confidence man" and other deceptive characters in the urban landscape. Prostitutes and con men could look like regular honest Americans. Advice literature offered young men and women strategies for avoiding hypocrisy in an attempt to restore the social fiber. Intimacy in the domestic sphere became more important as duplicity proliferated in the public sphere. Fear of the confidence man, counterfeit bills, and a pending bust created anxiety in the new capitalist economy. But Americans refused to blame the logic of their new commercial system for these depressions. Instead, they kept pushing " to get forward."

The so-called Transportation Revolution opened the vast lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. In 1810, before the rapid explosion of American infrastructure, Margaret Dwight left New Haven, Connecticut, in a wagon headed for Ohio Territory. Her trip was less than five hundred miles but took six weeks to complete. The journey was a terrible ordeal, she said. The roads were "so rocky & so gullied as to be almost impassable." Ten days into the journey, at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Dwight said "it appeared to me that we had come to the end of the habitable part of the globe." She finally concluded that "the reason so few are willing to return from the Western country, is not that the country is so good, but because the journey is so bad." Nineteen years later, in 1829, English traveler Frances Trollope made the reverse journey across the Allegheny Mountains from Cincinnati to the East Coast. At Wheeling, Virginia, her coach encountered the National Road, the first federally funded interstate infrastructure project. The road was smooth and her journey across the Alleghenies was a scenic delight. "I really can hardly conceive a higher enjoyment than a botanical tour among the Alleghany Mountains," she declared. The ninety miles of the National Road was to her "a garden."

If the two decades between Margaret Dwight's and Frances Trollope's journeys transformed the young nation, the pace of change only accelerated in the following years. If a transportation revolution began with improved road networks, it soon incorporated even greater improvements in the ways people and goods moved across the landscape.

New York State completed the Erie Canal in 1825. The 350-mile-long human-made waterway linked the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean. Soon crops grown in the Great Lakes region were carried by water to eastern cities, and goods from emerging eastern factories made the reverse journey to midwestern farmers. The success of New York's "artificial river" launched a canal-building boom. By 1840 Ohio created two navigable, all-water links from Lake Erie to the Ohio River.

Robert Fulton established the first commercial steamboat service up and down the Hudson River in New York in 1807. Soon thereafter steamboats filled the waters of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Downstream-only routes became watery two-way highways. By 1830, more than two hundred steamboats moved up and down western rivers.

The United States' first long-distance rail line launched from Maryland in 1827. Baltimore's city government and the state government of Maryland provided half the start-up funds for the new Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Rail Road Company. The B&O's founders imagined the line as a means to funnel the agricultural products of the trans-Appalachian West to an outlet on the Chesapeake Bay. Similar motivations led citizens in Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, and Charleston, South Carolina to launch their own rail lines. State and local governments provided the means for the bulk of this initial wave of railroad construction, but economic collapse following the Panic of 1837 made governments wary of such investments. Government supports continued throughout the century, but decades later the public origins of railroads were all but forgotten, and the railroad corporation became the most visible embodiment of corporate capitalism.

By 1860 Americans had laid more than thirty thousand miles of railroads. The ensuing web of rail, roads, and canals meant that few farmers in the Northeast or Midwest had trouble getting goods to urban markets. Railroad development was slower in the South, but there a combination of rail lines and navigable rivers meant that few cotton planters struggled to transport their products to textile mills in the Northeast and in England.

Such internal improvements not only spread goods, they spread information. The transportation revolution was followed by a communications revolution. The telegraph redefined the limits of human communication. By 1843 Samuel Morse had persuaded Congress to fund a forty-mile telegraph line stretching from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Within a few short years, during the Mexican-American War, telegraph lines carried news of battlefield events to eastern newspapers within days. This contrasts starkly with the War of 1812, when the Battle of New Orleans took place nearly two full weeks after Britain and the United States had signed a peace treaty.

The consequences of the transportation and communication revolutions reshaped the lives of Americans. Farmers who previously produced crops mostly for their own family now turned to the market. They earned cash for what they had previously consumed; they purchased the goods they had previously made or gone without. Market-based farmers soon accessed credit through eastern banks, which provided them with the opportunity to expand their enterprise but left also them prone before the risk of catastrophic failure wrought by distant market forces. In the Northeast and Midwest, where farm labor was ever in short supply, ambitious farmers invested in new technologies that promised to increase the productivity of the limited labor supply. The years between 1815 and 1850 witnessed an explosion of patents on agricultural technologies. The most famous of these, perhaps, was Cyrus McCormick's horse-drawn mechanical reaper, which partially mechanized wheat harvesting, and John Deere's steel-bladed plow, which more easily allowed for the conversion of unbroken ground into fertile farmland.

Most visibly, the market revolution encouraged the growth of cities and reshaped the lives of urban workers. In 1820, only New York had over one hundred thousand inhabitants. By 1850, six American cities met that threshold, including Chicago, which had been founded fewer than two decades earlier. New technology and infrastructure paved the way for such growth. The Erie Canal captured the bulk of the trade emerging from the Great Lakes region, securing New York City's position as the nation's largest and most economically important city. The steamboat turned St. Louis and Cincinnati into centers of trade, and Chicago rose as it became the railroad hub of the western Great Lakes and Great Plains regions. The geographic center of the nation shifted westward. The development of steam power and the exploitation of Pennsylvania coalfields shifted the locus of American manufacturing. By the 1830s, for instance, New England was losing its competitive advantage to the West.

Meanwhile, the cash economy eclipsed the old, local, informal systems of barter and trade. Income became the measure of economic worth. Productivity and efficiencies paled before the measure of income. Cash facilitated new impersonal economic relationships and formalized new means of production. Young workers might simply earn wages, for instance, rather than receiving room and board and training as part of apprenticeships. Moreover, a new form of economic organization appeared: the business corporation.

States offered the privileges of incorporation to protect the fortunes and liabilities of entrepreneurs who invested in early industrial endeavors. A corporate charter allowed investors and directors to avoid personal liability for company debts. The legal status of incorporation had been designed to confer privileges to organizations embarking on expensive projects explicitly designed for the public good, such as universities, municipalities, and major public works projects. The business corporation was something new. Many Americans distrusted these new, impersonal business organizations whose officers lacked personal responsibility while nevertheless carrying legal rights. Many wanted limits. Thomas Jefferson himself wrote in 1816 that "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." But in Dartmouth v. Woodward (1819) the Supreme Court upheld the rights of private corporations when it denied the attempt of the government of New Hampshire to reorganize Dartmouth College on behalf of the common good. Still, suspicions remained. A group of journeymen cordwainers in New Jersey publically declared in 1835 that they "entirely disapprov[ed] of the incorporation of Companies, for carrying on manual mechanical business, inasmuch as we believe their tendency is to eventuate and produce monopolies, thereby crippling the energies of individual enterprise."

Slave labor helped fuel the market revolution. By 1832, textile companies made up 88 out of 106 American corporations valued at over $100,000. These textile mills, worked by free labor, nevertheless depended on southern cotton, and the vast new market economy spurred the expansion of the plantation South.

By the early nineteenth century, states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had taken steps to abolish slavery. Vermont included abolition as a provision of its 1777 state constitution. Pennsylvania's emancipation act of 1780 stipulated that freed children must serve an indenture term of twenty-eight years. Gradualism brought emancipation while also defending the interests of northern enslavers and controlling still another generation of Black Americans. In 1804 New Jersey became the last of the northern states to adopt gradual emancipation plans. There was no immediate moment of jubilee, as many northern states only promised to liberate future children born to enslaved mothers. Such laws also stipulated that such children remain in indentured servitude to their mother's enslaver in order to compensate the enslaver's loss. James Mars, a young man indentured under this system in Connecticut, risked being thrown in jail when he protested the arrangement that kept him bound to his mother's enslaver until age twenty-five.

Quicker routes to freedom included escape or direct emancipation by enslavers. But escape was dangerous and voluntary manumission rare. Congress, for instance, made the harboring of a freedom-seeking enslaved person a federal crime as early as 1793. Hopes for manumission were even slimmer, as few northern enslavers emancipated their own enslaved laborers. Roughly one fifth of the white families in New York City owned enslaved laborers, and fewer than eighty enslavers in the city voluntarily manumitted their enslaved laborers between 1783 and 1800. By 1830, census data suggests that at least 3,500 people were still enslaved in the North. Elderly enslaved people in Connecticut remained in bondage as late as 1848, and in New Jersey slavery endured until after the Civil War.

Emancipation proceeded slowly, but proceeded nonetheless. A free Black population of fewer than 60,000 in 1790 increased to more than 186,000 by 1810. Growing free Black communities fought for their civil rights. In a number of New England locales, free African Americans could vote and send their children to public schools. Most northern states granted Black citizens property rights and trial by jury. African Americans owned land and businesses, founded mutual aid societies, established churches, promoted education, developed print culture, and voted.

Nationally, however, the enslaved population continued to grow, from less than 700,000 in 1790 to more than 1.5 million by 1820. The growth of abolition in the North and the acceleration of slavery in the South created growing divisions. Cotton drove the process more than any other crop. Eli Whitney's cotton gin, a simple hand-cranked device designed to mechanically remove sticky green seeds from short staple cotton, allowed southern planters to dramatically expand cotton production for the national and international markets. Water-powered textile factories in England and the American Northeast rapidly turned raw cotton into cloth. Technology increased both the supply of and demand for cotton. White southerners responded by expanding cultivation farther west, to the Mississippi River and beyond. Slavery had been growing less profitable in tobacco-planting regions like Virginia, but the growth of cotton farther south and west increased the demand for human bondage. Eager cotton planters invested their new profits in more enslaved laborers.

The cotton boom fueled speculation in slavery. Many enslavers leveraged potential profits into loans used to purchase ever increasing numbers of enslaved laborers. For example, one 1840 Louisiana Courier ad warned, "it is very difficult now to find persons willing to buy slaves from Mississippi or Alabama on account of the fears entertained that such property may be already mortgaged to the banks of the above named states."

New national and international markets fueled the plantation boom. American cotton exports rose from 150,000 bales in 1815 to 4,541,000 bales in 1859. The Census Bureau's 1860 Census of Manufactures stated that "the manufacture of cotton constitutes the most striking feature of the industrial history of the last fifty years." Enslavers shipped their cotton north to textile manufacturers and to northern financers for overseas shipments. Northern insurance brokers and exporters in the Northeast profited greatly.

While the United States ended its legal participation in the global slave trade in 1808, slave traders moved one million enslaved people from the tobacco-producing Upper South to cotton fields in the Lower South between 1790 and 1860. This harrowing trade in human flesh supported middle-class occupations in the North and South: bankers, doctors, lawyers, insurance brokers, and shipping agents all profited. And of course it facilitated the expansion of northeastern textile mills.

While industrialization bypassed most of the American South, southern cotton production nevertheless nurtured industrialization in the Northeast and Midwest. The drive to produce cloth transformed the American system of labor. In the early republic, laborers in manufacturing might typically have been expected to work at every stage of production. But a new system, piecework, divided much of production into discrete steps performed by different workers. In this new system, merchants or investors sent or "put out" materials to individuals and families to complete at home. These independent laborers then turned over the partially finished goods to the owner to be given to another laborer to finish.

As early as the 1790s, however, merchants in New England began experimenting with machines to replace the putting-out system. To effect this transition, merchants and factory owners relied on the theft of British technological knowledge to build the machines they needed. In 1789, for instance, a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, contracted twenty-one-year-old British immigrant Samuel Slater to build a yarn-spinning machine and then a carding machine. Slater had apprenticed in an English mill and succeeded in mimicking the English machinery. The fruits of American industrial espionage peaked in 1813 when Francis Cabot Lowell and Paul Moody re-created the powered loom used in the mills of Manchester, England. Lowell had spent two years in Britain observing and touring mills in England. He committed the design of the powered loom to memory so that, no matter how many times British customs officials searched his luggage, he could smuggle England's industrial know-how into New England.

Lowell's contribution to American industrialism was not only technological, it was organizational. He helped reorganize and centralize the American manufacturing process. A new approach, the Waltham-Lowell System, created the textile mill that defined antebellum New England and American industrialism before the Civil War. The modern American textile mill was fully realized in the planned mill town of Lowell in 1821, four years after Lowell himself died. Powered by the Merrimack River in northern Massachusetts and operated by local farm girls, the mills of Lowell centralized the process of textile manufacturing under one roof. The modern American factory was born. Soon ten thousand workers labored in Lowell alone. Sarah Rice, who worked at the nearby Millbury factory, found it "a noisy place" that was "more confined than I like to be." Working conditions were harsh for the many desperate "mill girls" who operated the factories relentlessly from sunup to sundown. One worker complained that "a large class of females are, and have been, destined to a state of servitude." Female workers went on strike. They lobbied for better working hours. But the lure of wages was too much. As another worker noted, "very many Ladies . . . have given up millinery, dressmaking & school keeping for work in the mill." With a large supply of eager workers, Lowell's vision brought a rush of capital and entrepreneurs into New England. The first American manufacturing boom was under way.

The market revolution shook other industries as well. Craftsmen began to understand that new markets increased the demand for their products. Some shoemakers, for instance, abandoned the traditional method of producing custom-built shoes at their home workshops and instead began producing larger quantities of shoes in ready-made sizes to be shipped to urban centers. Manufacturers wanting increased production abandoned the old personal approach of relying on a single live-in apprentice for labor and instead hired unskilled wage laborers who did not have to be trained in all aspects of making shoes but could simply be assigned a single repeatable aspect of the task. Factories slowly replaced shops. The old paternalistic apprentice system, which involved long-term obligations between apprentice and master, gave way to a more impersonal and more flexible labor system in which unskilled laborers could be hired and fired as the market dictated. A writer in the New York Observer in 1826 complained, "The master no longer lives among his apprentices [and] watches over their moral as well as mechanical improvement." Masters-turned-employers now not only had fewer obligations to their workers, they had a lesser attachment. They no longer shared the bonds of their trade but were subsumed under new class-based relationships: employers and employees, bosses and workers, capitalists and laborers. On the other hand, workers were freed from the long-term, paternalistic obligations of apprenticeship or the legal subjugation of indentured servitude. They could theoretically work when and where they wanted. When men or women made an agreement with an employer to work for wages, they were "left free to apportion among themselves their respective shares, untrammeled . . . by unwise laws," as Reverend Alonzo Potter rosily proclaimed in 1840. But while the new labor system was celebrated throughout the northern United States as "free labor," it was simultaneously lamented by a growing powerless class of laborers.

As the northern United States rushed headlong toward commercialization and an early capitalist economy, many Americans grew uneasy with the growing gap between wealthy businessmen and impoverished wage laborers. Elites like Daniel Webster might defend their wealth and privilege by insisting that all workers could achieve "a career of usefulness and enterprise" if they were "industrious and sober," but labor activist Seth Luther countered that capitalism created "a cruel system of extraction on the bodies and minds of the producing classes . . . for no other object than to enable the 'rich' to 'take care of themselves' while the poor must work or starve."

Americans embarked on their Industrial Revolution with the expectation that all men could start their careers as humble wage workers but later achieve positions of ownership and stability with hard work. Wage work had traditionally been looked down on as a state of dependence, suitable only as a temporary waypoint for young men without resources on their path toward the middle class and the economic success necessary to support a wife and children ensconced within the domestic sphere. Children's magazines-such as Juvenile Miscellany and Parley's Magazine -glorified the prospect of moving up the economic ladder. This "free labor ideology" provided many northerners with a keen sense of superiority over the slave economy of the southern states.

But the commercial economy often failed in its promise of social mobility. Depressions and downturns might destroy businesses and reduce owners to wage work. Even in times of prosperity unskilled workers might perpetually lack good wages and economic security and therefore had to forever depend on supplemental income from their wives and young children.

Wage workers-a population disproportionately composed of immigrants and poorer Americans-faced low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. Class conflict developed. Instead of the formal inequality of a master-servant contract, employer and employee entered a contract presumably as equals. But hierarchy was evident: employers had financial security and political power; employees faced uncertainty and powerlessness in the workplace. Dependent on the whims of their employers, some workers turned to strikes and unions to pool their resources. In 1825 a group of journeymen in Boston formed a Carpenters' Union to protest their inability "to maintain a family at the present time, with the wages which are now usually given." Working men organized unions to assert themselves and win both the respect and the resources due to a breadwinner and a citizen.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, families in the northern United States increasingly participated in the cash economy created by the market revolution. The first stirrings of industrialization shifted work away from the home. These changes transformed Americans' notions of what constituted work and therefore shifted what it meant to be an American woman and an American man. As Americans encountered more goods in stores and produced fewer at home, the ability to remove women and children from work determined a family's class status. This ideal, of course, ignored the reality of women's work at home and was possible for only the wealthy. The market revolution therefore not only transformed the economy, it changed the nature of the American family. As the market revolution thrust workers into new systems of production, it redefined gender roles. The market integrated families into a new cash economy. As Americans purchased more goods in stores and produced fewer at home, the purity of the domestic sphere-the idealized realm of women and children-increasingly signified a family's class status.

Women and children worked to supplement the low wages of many male workers. Around age eleven or twelve, boys could take jobs as office runners or waiters, earning perhaps a dollar a week to support their parents' incomes. The ideal of an innocent and protected childhood was a privilege for middle- and upper-class families, who might look down upon poor families. Joseph Tuckerman, a Unitarian minister who served poor Bostonians, lamented the lack of discipline and regularity among poor children: "At one hour they are kept at work to procure fuel, or perform some other service; in the next are allowed to go where they will, and to do what they will." Prevented from attending school, poor children served instead as economic assets for their destitute families.

Education equipped young women with the tools to live sophisticated, genteel lives. After sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Davis left home in 1816 to attend school, her father explained that the experience would "lay a foundation for your future character & respectability." After touring the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville praised the independence granted to the young American woman, who had "the great scene of the world . . . open to her" and whose education prepared her to exercise both reason and moral sense. Middling young women also used their education to take positions as schoolteachers in the expanding common school system. Bristol Academy in Taunton, Massachusetts, for instance, advertised "instruction . . . in the art of teaching" for female pupils. In 1825, Nancy Denison left Concord Academy with references indicating that she was "qualified to teach with success and profit" and "very cheerfully recommend[ed]" for "that very responsible employment."

And so, during the early nineteenth century, opportunities for education and employment often depended on a given family's class. In colonial America, nearly all children worked within their parent's chosen profession, whether it be agricultural or artisanal. During the market revolution, however, more children were able to postpone employment. Americans aspired to provide a "Romantic Childhood"-a period in which boys and girls were sheltered within the home and nurtured through primary schooling. This ideal was available to families that could survive without their children's labor. As these children matured, their early experiences often determined whether they entered respectable, well-paying positions or became dependent workers with little prospects for social mobility.

Just as children were expected to be sheltered from the adult world of work, American culture expected men and women to assume distinct gender roles as they prepared for marriage and family life. An ideology of "separate spheres" set the public realm-the world of economic production and political life-apart as a male domain, and the world of consumers and domestic life as a female one. (Even nonworking women labored by shopping for the household, producing food and clothing, cleaning, educating children, and performing similar activities. But these were considered "domestic" because they did not bring money into the household, although they too were essential to the household's economic viability.) While reality muddied the ideal, the divide between a private, female world of home and a public, male world of business defined American gender hierarchy.

The idea of separate spheres also displayed a distinct class bias. Middle and upper classes reinforced their status by shielding "their" women from the harsh realities of wage labor. Women were to be mothers and educators, not partners in production. But lower-class women continued to contribute directly to the household economy. The middle- and upper-class ideal was feasible only in households where women did not need to engage in paid labor. In poorer households, women engaged in wage labor as factory workers, pieceworkers producing items for market consumption, tavern- and innkeepers, and domestic servants. While many of the fundamental tasks women performed remained the same-producing clothing, cultivating vegetables, overseeing dairy production, and performing any number of other domestic labors-the key difference was whether and when they performed these tasks for cash in a market economy.

Domestic expectations constantly changed and the market revolution transformed many women's traditional domestic tasks. Cloth production, for instance, advanced throughout the market revolution as new mechanized production increased the volume and variety of fabrics available to ordinary people. This relieved many better-off women of a traditional labor obligation. As cloth production became commercialized, women's home-based cloth production became less important to household economies. Purchasing cloth and, later, ready-made clothes began to transform women from producers to consumers. One woman from Maine, Martha Ballard, regularly referenced spinning, weaving, and knitting in the diary she kept from 1785 to 1812. Martha, her daughters, and her female neighbors spun and plied linen and woolen yarns and used them to produce a variety of fabrics to make clothing for her family. The production of cloth and clothing was a year-round, labor-intensive process, but it was for home consumption, not commercial markets.

In cities, where women could buy cheap imported cloth to turn into clothing, they became skilled consumers. They stewarded money earned by their husbands by comparing values and haggling over prices. In one typical experience, Mrs. Peter Simon, a captain's wife, inspected twenty-six yards of Holland cloth to ensure that it was worth the £130 price. Even wealthy women shopped for high-value goods. While servants or enslaved people routinely made low-value purchases, the mistress of the household trusted her discriminating eye alone for expensive or specific purchases.

Women might also parlay their skills into businesses. In addition to working as seamstresses, milliners, or laundresses, women might undertake paid work for neighbors or acquaintances or combine clothing production with management of a boardinghouse. Even enslaved laborers with particular skill at producing clothing could be hired out for a higher price or might even negotiate to work part-time for themselves. Most enslaved people, however, continued to produce domestic items, including simpler cloths and clothing, for home consumption.

Similar domestic expectations played out in the slave states. Enslaved women labored in the fields. Whites argued that African American women were less delicate and womanly than white women and therefore perfectly suited for agricultural labor. The southern ideal meanwhile established that white plantation mistresses were shielded from manual labor because of their very whiteness. Throughout the slave states, however, aside from the minority of plantations with dozens of enslaved laborers, most white women by necessity continued to assist with planting, harvesting, and processing agricultural projects despite the cultural stigma attached to it. White southerners continued to produce large portions of their food and clothing at home. Even when they were market-oriented producers of cash crops, white southerners still insisted that their adherence to plantation slavery and racial hierarchy made them morally superior to greedy northerners and their callous, cutthroat commerce. Southerners and northerners increasingly saw their ways of life as incompatible.

While the market revolution remade many women's economic roles, their legal status remained essentially unchanged. Upon marriage, women were rendered legally dead by the notion of coverture, the custom that counted married couples as a single unit represented by the husband. Without special precautions or interventions, women could not earn their own money, own their own property, sue, or be sued. Any money earned or spent belonged by law to their husbands. Women shopped on their husbands' credit and at any time husbands could terminate their wives' access to their credit. Although a handful of states made divorce available-divorce had before only been legal in Congregationalist states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut, where marriage was strictly a civil contract rather than a religious one-it remained extremely expensive, difficult, and rare. Marriage was typically a permanently binding legal contract.

Ideas of marriage, if not the legal realities, began to change. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century marked the beginning of the shift from "institutional" to "companionate" marriage. Institutional marriages were primarily labor arrangements that maximized the couple's and their children's chances of surviving and thriving. Men and women assessed each other's skills as they related to household production, although looks and personality certainly entered into the equation. But in the late eighteenth century, under the influence of Enlightenment thought, young people began to privilege character and compatibility in their potential partners. Money was still essential: marriages prompted the largest redistributions of property prior to the settling of estates at death. But the means of this redistribution was changing. Especially in the North, land became a less important foundation for matchmaking as wealthy young men became not only farmers and merchants but bankers, clerks, or professionals. The increased emphasis on affection and attraction that young people embraced was facilitated by an increasingly complex economy that offered new ways to store, move, and create wealth, which liberalized the criteria by which families evaluated potential in-laws.

To be considered a success in family life, a middle-class American man typically aspired to own a comfortable home and to marry a woman of strong morals and religious conviction who would take responsibility for raising virtuous, well-behaved children. The duties of the middle-class husband and wife would be clearly delineated into separate spheres. The husband alone was responsible for creating wealth and engaging in the commerce and politics-the public sphere. The wife was responsible for the private-keeping a good home, being careful with household expenses, and raising children, inculcating them with the middle-class virtues that would ensure their future success. But for poor families, sacrificing the potential economic contributions of wives and children was an impossibility.

More than five million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1860. Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants sought new lives and economic opportunities. By the Civil War, nearly one out of every eight Americans had been born outside the United States. A series of push and pull factors drew immigrants to the United States.

While the Irish settled mostly in coastal cities, most German immigrants used American ports and cities as temporary waypoints before settling in the rural countryside. Over 1.5 million immigrants from the various German states arrived in the United States during the antebellum era. Although some southern Germans fled declining agricultural conditions and repercussions of the failed revolutions of 1848, many Germans simply sought steadier economic opportunity. German immigrants tended to travel as families and carried with them skills and capital that enabled them to enter middle-class trades. Germans migrated to the Old Northwest to farm in rural areas and practiced trades in growing communities such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee, three cities that formed what came to be called the German Triangle.

Catholic and Jewish Germans transformed regions of the republic. Although records are sparse, New York's Jewish population rose from approximately five hundred in 1825 to forty thousand in 1860. Similar gains were seen in other American cities. Jewish immigrants hailing from southwestern Germany and parts of occupied Poland moved to the United States through chain migration and as family units. Unlike other Germans, Jewish immigrants rarely settled in rural areas. Once established, Jewish immigrants found work in retail, commerce, and artisanal occupations such as tailoring. They quickly found their footing and established themselves as an intrinsic part of the American market economy. Just as Irish immigrants shaped the urban landscape through the construction of churches and Catholic schools, Jewish immigrants erected synagogues and made their mark on American culture.

The sudden influx of immigration triggered a backlash among many native-born Anglo-Protestant Americans. This nativist movement, especially fearful of the growing Catholic presence, sought to limit European immigration and prevent Catholics from establishing churches and other institutions. Popular in northern cities such as Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities with large Catholic populations, nativism even spawned its own political party in the 1850s. The American Party, more commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party, found success in local and state elections throughout the North. The party even nominated candidates for president in 1852 and 1856. The rapid rise of the Know-Nothings, reflecting widespread anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment, slowed European immigration. Immigration declined precipitously after 1855 as nativism, the Crimean War, and improving economic conditions in Europe discouraged potential migrants from traveling to the United States. Only after the American Civil War would immigration levels match and eventually surpass the levels seen in the 1840s and 1850s.

In industrial northern cities, Irish immigrants swelled the ranks of the working class and quickly encountered the politics of industrial labor. Many workers formed trade unions during the early republic. Organizations such as Philadelphia's Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers or the Carpenters' Union of Boston operated within specific industries in major American cities. These unions worked to protect the economic power of their members by creating closed shops-workplaces wherein employers could only hire union members-and striking to improve working conditions. Political leaders denounced these organizations as unlawful combinations and conspiracies to promote the narrow self-interest of workers above the rights of property holders and the interests of the common good. Unions did not become legally acceptable until 1842 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of a union organized among Boston bootmakers, arguing that the workers were capable of acting "in such a manner as best to subserve their own interests." Even after the case, unions remained in a precarious legal position.

In the 1840s, labor activists organized to limit working hours and protect children in factories. The New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workingmen (NEA) mobilized to establish a ten-hour workday across industries. They argued that the ten-hour day would improve the immediate conditions of laborers by allowing "time and opportunities for intellectual and moral improvement." After a citywide strike in Boston in 1835, the Ten-Hour Movement quickly spread to other major cities such as Philadelphia. The campaign for leisure time was part of the male working-class effort to expose the hollowness of the paternalistic claims of employers and their rhetoric of moral superiority.

Women, a dominant labor source for factories since the early 1800s, launched some of the earliest strikes for better conditions. Textile operatives in Lowell, Massachusetts, "turned out" (walked off) their jobs in 1834 and 1836. During the Ten-Hour Movement of the 1840s, female operatives provided crucial support. Under the leadership of Sarah Bagley, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association organized petition drives that drew thousands of signatures from "mill girls." Like male activists, Bagley and her associates used the desire for mental improvement as a central argument for reform. An 1847 editorial in the Voice of Industry, a labor newspaper published by Bagley, asked, "who, after thirteen hours of steady application to monotonous work, can sit down and apply her mind to deep and long continued thought?" Despite the widespread support for a ten-hour day, the movement achieved only partial success. President Martin Van Buren established a ten-hour-day policy for laborers on federal public works projects. New Hampshire passed a statewide law in 1847, and Pennsylvania followed a year later. Both states, however, allowed workers to voluntarily consent to work more than ten hours per day.

Male workers sought to improve their income and working conditions to create a household that kept women and children protected within the domestic sphere. But labor gains were limited, and the movement remained moderate. Despite its challenge to industrial working conditions, labor activism in antebellum America remained largely wedded to the free labor ideal. The labor movement later supported the northern free soil movement, which challenged the spread of slavery in the 1840s, simultaneously promoting the superiority of the northern system of commerce over the southern institution of slavery while trying, much less successfully, to reform capitalism.

During the early nineteenth century, southern agriculture produced by enslaved labor fueled northern industry produced by wage workers and managed by the new middle class. New transportation, new machinery, and new organizations of labor integrated the previously isolated pockets of the colonial economy into a national industrial operation. Industrialization and the cash economy tied diverse regions together at the same time that ideology drove Americans apart. By celebrating the freedom of contract that distinguished the wage worker from the indentured servant of previous generations or the enslaved laborer in the southern cotton field, political leaders claimed the American Revolution's legacy for the North. But the rise of industrial child labor, the demands of workers to unionize, the economic vulnerability of women, and the influx of non-Anglo immigrants left many Americans questioning the meaning of liberty after the market revolution.
1. James Madison asks Congress to support internal improvements, 1815 After the War of 1812, Americans looked to strengthen their nation through government spending on infrastructure, or what were then called internal improvements. In his seventh annual address to congress, Madison called for public investment to create national roads, canals, and even a national seminary. He also called for a tariff, or tax on certain imports, designed to make foreign goods more expensive, giving American producers an advantage in domestic markets. 2. A traveler describes life along the Erie Canal, 1829 Basil Hall, a British visitor traveled along the Erie Canal and took careful notes on what he found. In this excerpt, he described life in Rochester, New York. Rochester, and other small towns in upstate New York, grew rapidly as a result of the Erie Canal. 3. Blacksmith apprentice contract, 1836 The factories and production of the Market Revolution eroded the wealth and power of skilled small business owners called artisans. This indenture contract illustrated the former way of doing things, where a young person would agree to serve for a number of years as an apprentice to a skilled artisan before venturing out on his own. 4. Maria Stewart bemoans the consequences of racism, 1832
Maria Stewart electrified audiences in Boston with a number of powerful speeches. Her most common theme was the evil of slavery. However, here she attacks the soul-crushing consequences of racism in American capitalism, claiming that the lack of social and economic equality doomed Black Americans to a life of suffering and spiritual death.
5. Rebecca Burlend recalls her emigration from England to Illinois, 1848 Rebecca Burlend, her husband, and children emigrated to Illinois from England in 1831. These reflections describe her reaction to landing in New Orleans, sailing up the Mississippi to St. Louis, and finally arriving at her new home in Illinois. This was her first experience encountering American slavery, the American landscape, and the rugged living conditions of her new home. 6. Harriet H. Robinson remembers a mill workers' strike, 1836 The social upheavals of the Market Revolution created new tensions between rich and poor, particularly between the new class of workers and the new class of managers. Lowell, Massachusetts was the location of the first American factory. In this document, a woman reminisces about a strike that she participated in at a Lowell textile mill. 7. Alexis de Toqueville, "How Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes," 1840
The French political thinker Alexis de Toqueville travelled extensively through the United States in gathering research for his book Democracy In America. In this excerpt, he described the belief that American men and women lived in "separate spheres:" men in public, women in the home. This expectation justified the denial of rights to women. All women were denied political rights in nineteenth century America, but only a small number of wealthy families could afford to remove women from economic production, like de Toqueville claimed.
8. Abolitionist sheet music cover page, 1844 The "transportation revolution" shaped economic change in the early 1800s, but the massive construction of railroads also had a profound impact on American politics and culture. This sheet music title page shows how abolitionists used railroad imagery to advocate for the immediate emancipation of enslaved people and to promote their political platform before the 1844 presidential election. 9. Anti-Catholic cartoon, 1855 Irish immigration transformed American cities. Yet many Americans greeted the new arrivals with suspicion or hostility. Nathanial Currier's anti-Catholic cartoon reflected the popular American perception that Irish Catholic immigrants posed a threat to the United States. This chapter was edited by Jane Fiegen Green, with content contributions by Kelly Arehart, Myles Beaurpre, Kristin Condotta, Jane Fiegen Green, Nathan Jeremie-Brink, Lindsay Keiter, Brenden Kennedy, William Kerrigan, Christopher Sawula, David Schley, and Evgenia Shayder Shoop.
Recommended citation: Kelly Arehart et al., "Market Revolution," Jane Fiegen Green, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Recommended Reading

Balleisen, Edward J. Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Blewett, Mary H. Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Dublin, Thomas. Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Faler, Paul G. Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1760-1860. Albany: SUNY Press, 1981.

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Greenberg, Joshua R. Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. Yale University Press, 1982.

Hartigan-O'Connor, Ellen. The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Innes, Stephen, ed. Work and Labor in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Jabour, Anya. Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Larson, John Lauritz. The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Levy, Jonathan. Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Luskey, Brian P. On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 2010.

Matson, Cathy, and Wendy A. Woloson. Risky Business: Winning and Losing in the Early American Economy, 1780-1850. Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia, 2003.

McNeur, Catherine. Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Mihm, Stephen. A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Murphy, Teresa Anne. Ten Hours' Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Rice, Stephen P. Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Rothenberg, Winifred Barr. From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Ryan, Mary P. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Sellers, Charles Grier. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Tucker, Barbara M. Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790-1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Notes

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In the early years of the nineteenth century, Americans' endless commercial ambition-what one Baltimore paper in 1815 called an "almost universal ambition to get forward "-remade the nation. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, an old subsistence world died and a new more-commercial nation was born.

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The Market Revolution Learning Guide. The Market Revolution analysis by PhD students from Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley

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In the 1820s and 1830s, a market revolution was transforming American business and global trade. Factories and mass production increasingly displaced independent artisans. Farms grew and produced goods for distant, not local, markets, shipping them via inexpensive transportation like the Erie Canal. Government policies fostered the growth of capitalism.

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Smithsonian.com:  10 Things You Didn't Know: War of 1812

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Smithsonian.com:  10 Things You Didn't Know: War of 1812

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An American Perspective | War of 1812 | PBS

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by Donald Hickey

The War of 1812 is probably our most obscure conflict. Although a great deal has been written about the war, the average American is only vaguely aware of why we fought or who the enemy was. Even those who know something about the contest are likely to remember only a few dramatic moments, such as the writing of "The Star-Spangled Banner," the burning of the nation's capital, or the Battle of New Orleans.

Why is this war so obscure? One reason is that no great president is associated with the conflict. Although his enemies called it "Mr. Madison's War," James Madison was shy and deferential, hardly measuring up to such war leaders as Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, or Franklin Roosevelt. Moreover, the best American generals in this war - Andrew Jackson, Jacob Brown, and Winfield Scott - were unable to turn the tide because each was confined to a one or two theaters in a war that had seven or eight theaters. No one like George Washington, Ulysses Grant, or Dwight Eisenhower emerged to put his stamp on the war and to carry the nation to victory.

Another reason for the obscurity of this war is that its causes are complex and little understood today. Most scholars agree that the war was fought over maritime issues, particularly the Orders in Council, which restricted American trade with the European Continent, and impressment, which was the Royal Navy's practice of removing seamen from American merchant vessels. In contemporary parlance, the war was fought for "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights." These issues seem arcane today. Moreover, the only way that the United States to strike at Great Britain was by attacking Canada, and that made it look like a war of territorial aggression. Even today Canadians are likely to see the war in this light, and who can blame them? A war fought to secure maritime rights by invading Canada strikes many people as curious.

The Consequences of the War

If the causes of the war are obscure, so too are the consequences. The United States has won most of its wars, often emerging with significant concessions from the enemy. But the War of 1812 was different. Far from bringing the enemy to terms, the nation was lucky to escape without making extensive concessions itself. The Treaty of Ghent (which ended the conflict) said nothing about the maritime issues that had caused the war and contained nothing to suggest that America had achieved its aims. Instead, it merely provided for returning to the status quo ante bellum - the state that had existed before the war.

The prosecution of the war was marred by considerable bungling and mismanagement. This was partly due to the nature of the republic. The nation was too young and immature - and its government too feeble and inexperienced - to prosecute a major war efficiently. Politics also played a part. Federalists vigorously opposed the conflict, and so too did some Republicans. Even those who supported the war feuded among themselves and never displayed the sort of patriotic enthusiasm that has been so evident in other American wars. The advocates of war appeared to support the conflict more with their heads than their hearts, and more with their hearts than their purses. As a result, efforts to raise men and money lagged far behind need.
Despite the bungling and half-hearted support that characterized this conflict, the War of 1812 was not without its stirring moments and splendid victories. American success at the Thames in the Northwest, the victories at Chippewa and Fort Erie on the Niagara front, the rousing defense of Baltimore in the Chesapeake, and the crushing defeat of the British at New Orleans - all these showed that with proper leadership and training American fighting men could hold their own against the well-drilled and battle-hardened regulars of Great Britain. Similarly, the naval victories on the northern lakes and the high seas and the success of privateers around the globe demonstrated that, given the right odds, the nation's armed ships matched up well against even the vaunted and seemingly invincible Mistress of the Seas.

The war also produced its share of heroes-people whose reputations were enhanced by military or government service. The war helped catapult four men into the presidency - Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, and William Henry Harrison - and three men into the vice-presidency - Daniel D. Tompkins, John C. Calhoun, and Richard M. Johnson. The war also gave a significant boost to the political or military careers of other men. Indeed, for many young men on the make, the war offered an excellent launching pad for a career.

In some ways, the War of 1812 looked more to the past than to the future. As America's second and last war against Great Britain, it echoed the ideology and issues of the American Revolution. It was the second and last time that America was the underdog in a war and the second and last time that the nation tried to conquer Canada. It was also the last time that Indians played a major role in determining the future of the continent. In this sense, the War of 1812 was the last of the North American colonial wars. The war was unusual in generating such vehement political opposition and nearly unique in ending in a stalemate on the battlefield. Although most Americans pretended they had won the war - even calling it a "Second War of Independence"-they could point to few concrete gains - certainly none in the peace treaty - to sustain this claim.

It is this lack of success that may best explain why the war is so little remembered. Americans have characteristically judged their wars on the basis of their success. The best-known wars - the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II - were all clear-cut successes. Although many people remembered the War of 1812 as a success, it was in a very real sense a failure, and perhaps this is why it attracts so little attention today.

The obscurity of this war, however, should not blind us to its significance, for it was an important turning point, a great watershed, in the history of the young republic. It concluded almost a quarter of a century of troubled diplomacy and partisan politics and ushered in the Era of Good Feelings. It marked the end of the Federalist party but the vindication of Federalist policies, many of which were adopted by Republicans during or after the war. The war also broke the power of American Indians and reinforced the powerful undercurrent of Anglophobia that had been spawned by the Revolution a generation before. In addition, it promoted national self-confidence and encouraged the heady expansionism that lay at the heart of American foreign policy for the rest of the century. Finally, the war gave the fledgling republic a host of sayings, symbols, and songs that helped Americans define who they were and where their young republic was headed. Although looking to the past, the war was fraught with consequences for the future, and for this reason it is worth studying today.
Donald R. Hickey is a professor of history at Wayne State College, Wayne, Nebraska. He is the author of Don't Give Up the Ship: Myths of the War of 1812 and The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict.

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An American Perspective | War of 1812 | PBS

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by Donald Hickey The War of 1812 is probably our most obscure conflict. Although a great deal has been written about the war, the average American is only vaguely aware of why we fought or who the enemy was.

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War of 1812 - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of War of 1812, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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UNDERSTANDABLY, Pierre Clément de Laussat was saddened by this unexpected turn of events. Having arrived in New Orleans from Paris with his wife and three daughters just nine months earlier, in March 1803, the cultivated, worldly French functionary had expected to reign for six or eight years as colonial prefect over the vast territory of Louisiana, which was to be France's North American empire. The prospect had been all the more pleasing because the territory's capital, New Orleans, he had noted with approval, was a city with "a great deal of social life, elegance and goodbreeding." He also had liked the fact that the city had "all sorts of masters-dancing, music, art, and fencing," and that even though there were "no book shops or libraries," books could be ordered from France.

But almost before Laussat had learned to appreciate a good gumbo and the relaxed Creole pace of life, Napoléon Bonaparte had abruptly decided to sell the territory to the United States. This left Laussat with little to do but officiate when, on a sunny December 20, 1803, the French tricolor was slowly lowered in New Orleans' main square, the Placed'Armes, and the American flag was raised. After William C.C. Claiborne and Gen. James Wilkinson, the new commissioners of the territory, officially took possession of it in the name of the United States, assuring all residents that their property, rights and religion would be respected, celebratory salvos boomed from the forts around the city. Americans cried "Huzzah!" and waved their hats, while French and Spanish residents sulked in glum silence. Laussat, standing on the balcony of the town hall, burst into tears.

The Louisiana Purchase, made 200 years ago this month, nearly doubled the size of the United States. By any measure, it was one of the most colossal land transactions in history, involving an area larger than today's France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Holland, Switzerland and the British Isles combined. All or parts of 15 Western states would eventually be carved from its nearly 830,000 square miles, which stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, and from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. And the price, $15 million, or about four cents an acre, was a breathtaking bargain. "Let the Land rejoice," Gen. Horatio Gates, a prominent New York state legislator, told President Thomas Jefferson when details of the deal reached Washington, D.C. "For you have bought Louisiana for a song."

Rich in gold, silver and other ores, as well as huge forests and endless lands for grazing and farming, the new acquisition would make America immensely wealthy. Or, as Jefferson put it in his usual understated way, "The fertility of thecountry, its climate and extent, promise in due season importantaids to our treasury, an ample provision for our posterity, and a wide-spread field for the blessings of freedom."

American historians today are more outspoken in their enthusiasm for the acquisition. "With the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, this is one of the threethings that created the modern United States," says Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies in New Orleans and coauthor with the late Stephen E. Ambrose of The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation. Charles A. Cerami, author of Jefferson's Great Gamble, agrees. "If we had not made this purchase, it would have pinched off the possibility of our becoming a continental power," he says. "That, in turn, would have meant our ideas on freedom and democracy would have carried less weight with the rest of the world. This was the key to our international influence."

The bicentennial is being celebrated with yearlong activities in many of the states fashioned from the territory. But the focal point of the celebrations is Louisiana itself. The most ambitious event opens this month at the New Orleans Museum of Art. "Jefferson's America & Napoléon's France" (April 12-August 31), an unprecedented exhibition of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, memorabilia and rare documents, presents a dazzling look at the arts and leading figures of the two countries at this pivotal time in history. "What we wanted to do was enrich people's understanding of the significance of this moment," says Gail Feigenbaum, lead curator of the show. "It's about more than just a humdinger of a real estate deal. What kind of world were Jefferson and Napoléon living and working in? We also show that our political and cultural relationship with France was extraordinarily rich at the time, a spirited interchange that altered the shape of the modern world."

The "Louisiana territory" was born on April 9, 1682, when the French explorer Robert Cavelier, Sieur (Lord) de La Salle, erected a cross and column near the mouth of the Mississippi and solemnly read a declaration to a group of bemused Indians. He took possession of the whole Mississippi River basin, he avowed, in the name of "the most high, mighty, invincible and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by Grace of God king of France and Navarre, 14th of that name." And it was in honor of Louis XIV that he named the land Louisiana.

In 1718, French explorer Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded a settlement near the site of La Salle's proclamation, and named it la Nouvelle Orléans for Philippe, Duke of Orléans and Regent of France. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, its population of whites, slaves of African origin and "free persons of color" was about 8,000. A picturesque assemblage of French and Spanish colonial architecture and Creole cottages, New Orleans boasted a thriving economy based largely on agricultural exports.

For more than a century after La Salle took possession of it, the Louisiana Territory, with its scattered French, Spanish, Acadian and German settlements, along with those of Native Americans and American-born frontiersmen, was traded among European royalty at their whim. The French were fascinated by America-which they often symbolized in paintings and drawings as a befeathered Noble Savage standing beside an alligator-but they could not decide whether it was a new Eden or, as the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon declared, a primitive place fit only for degenerate life-forms. But the official view was summed up by Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac, whom Louis XIV named governor of the territory in 1710: "The people are aheap of the dregs of Canada," he sniffed in a 42-page report to the king written soon after he arrived. The soldiers there were untrained and undisciplined, he lamented, and the whole colony was "not worth a straw at the present time." Concluding that the area was valueless, Louis XV gave the territory to his Bourbon cousin Charles III of Spain in 1763. But in 1800, the region again changed hands, when Napoléon negotiated the clandestine Treaty of San Ildefonso with Spain's Charles IV. The treaty called for the return of the vast territory to France in exchange for the small kingdom of Etruria in northern Italy, which Charles wanted for his daughter Louisetta.

When Jefferson heard rumors of Napoléon's secret deal, he immediately saw the threat to America's Western settlements and its vital outlet to the Gulf of Mexico. If the deal was allowed to stand, he declared, "it would be impossible that France and the United States can continue long as friends." Relations had been relaxed with Spain while it held New Orleans, but Jefferson suspected that Napoléon wanted to close the Mississippi to American use. This must have been a wrenching moment for Jefferson, who had long been a Francophile. Twelve years before, he had returned from a five-year stint as American minister to Paris, shipping home 86 cases of furnishings and books he had picked up there.

The crunch came for Jefferson in October 1802. Spain's King Charles IV finally got around to signing the royal decree officially transferring the territory to France, and on October 16, the Spanish administrator in New Orleans, Juan Ventura Morales, who had agreed to administer the colony until his French replacement, Laussat, could arrive, arbitrarily ended the American right to deposit cargo in the city duty-free. He argued that the three-year term of the 1795 treaty that had granted America this right and free passage through Spanish territory on the Mississippi had expired. Morales' proclamation meant that American merchandise could no longer be stored in New Orleans warehouses. As a result, trappers' pelts, agricultural produce and finished goods risked exposure and theft on open wharfs while awaiting shipment to the East Coast and beyond. The entire economy of America's Western territories was in jeopardy. "The difficulties and risks . . . are incalculable," warned the U.S. vice-consul in New Orleans, Williams E. Hulings, in a dispatch to Secretary of State James Madison.

As Jefferson had written in April 1802 to the U.S. minister in Paris, Robert R. Livingston, it was crucial that the port of New Orleans remain open and free for American commerce, particularly the goods coming down the Mississippi River. "There is on the globe one single spot," Jefferson wrote, "the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market." Jefferson's concern was more than commercial. "He had a vision of America as an empire of liberty," says Douglas Brinkley. "And he saw the Mississippi River not as the western edge of the country, but as the great spine that would hold the continent together."

As it was, frontiersmen, infuriated by the abrogation of the right of deposit of their goods, threatened to seize New Orleans by force. The idea was taken up by lawmakers such as Senator James Ross of Pennsylvania, who drafted a resolution calling on Jefferson to form a 50,000-man army to take the city. The press joined the fray. The United States had the right, thundered the New York Evening Post, "to regulate the future destiny of North America," while the Charleston Courier advocated "taking possession of the port . . . by force of arms." As Secretary of State James Madison explained, "The Mississippi is to them everything. It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic States, formed into one stream."

With Congress and a vociferous press calling for action, Jefferson faced the nation's most serious crisis since the American Revolution. "Peace is our passion," he declared, and expressed the concern that hotheaded members of the opposition Federalist Party might "force us into war." He had already instructed Livingston in early 1802 to approach Napoléon's foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, to try to prevent the cession of the territory to France, if this had not already occurred, or, if the deal was done, to try to purchase New Orleans. In his initial meeting with Napoléon after taking up his Paris post in 1801, Livingston had been warned about Old World ways. "You have come to a very corrupt world," Napoléon told him frankly, adding roguishly that Talleyrand was the right man to explain what he meant by corruption.

A wily political survivor who held high offices under the French Revolution, and later under Napoléon's empire and the restored Bourbon monarchy, Talleyrand had spent the years 1792 to 1794 in exile in America after being denounced by the revolutionary National Convention, and had conceived a virulent contempt for Americans. "Refinement," he declared, "does not exist" in the United States. As Napoléon's foreign minister, Talleyrand customarily demanded outrageous bribes for diplomatic results. Despite a clubfoot and what contemporaries called his "dead eyes," he could be charming and witty when he wanted-which helped camouflage his basic negotiating tactic of delay. "The lack of instructions and the necessity of consulting one's government are always legitimate excuses in order to obtain delays in political affairs," he once wrote. When Livingston tried to discuss the territory, Talleyrand simply denied that there was any treaty between France and Spain. "There never was a government in which less could be done by negotiation than here," a frustrated Livingston wrote to Madison on September 1, 1802. "There is no people, no legislature, no counselors. One man is everything."

But Livingston, although an inexperienced diplomat, tried to keep himself informed about the country to which he was ambassador. In March 1802, he warned Madison that France intended to "have a leading interest in the politics of our western country" and was preparing to send 5,000 to 7,000 troops from its Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) to occupy New Orleans. But Napoléon's troops in Saint Domingue were being decimated by a revolution and an outbreak of yellow fever. In June, Napoléon ordered Gen. Claude Victor to set out for New Orleans from the French controlled Netherlands. But by the time Victor assembled enough men and ships in January 1803, ice blocked the Dutchport, making it impossible for him to set sail.

That same month Jefferson asked James Monroe, a former member of Congress and former governor of Virginia, to join Livingston in Paris as minister extraordinary with discretionary powers to spend $9,375,000 to secure New Orleans and parts of the Floridas (to consolidate the U.S. position in the southeastern part of the continent). In financial straits at the time, Monroe sold his china and furniture to raise travel funds, asked a neighbor to manage his properties, and sailed for France on March 8, 1803, with Jefferson's parting admonition ringing in his ears: "The future destinies of this republic" depended on his success.

By the time Monroe arrived in Paris on April 12, the situation had, unknown to him, radically altered: Napoléon had suddenly decided to sell the entire Louisiana Territory to the United States. He had always seen Saint Domingue, with a population of more than 500,000, producing enough sugar, coffee, indigo, cotton and cocoa to fill some 700 ships a year, as France's most important holding in the Western Hemisphere. The Louisiana Territory, in Napoléon's view, was useful mainly as a granary for Saint Domingue. With the colony in danger of being lost, the territory was less useful. Then, too, Napoléon was gearing up for another campaign against Britain and needed funds for that.

Napoléon's brothers Joseph and Lucien had gone to see him at the Tuileries Palace on April 7, determined to convince him not to sell the territory. For one thing, they considered it foolish to voluntarily give up an important French holding on the American continent. For another, Britain had unofficially offered Joseph a bribe of £100,000 to persuade Napoléon not to let the Americans have Louisiana. But Napoléon's mind was already made up. The First Consul happened to be sitting in his bath when his brothers arrived. "Gentlemen," he announced, "think what you please about it. I have decided to sell Louisiana to the Americans." To make his point to his astonished brothers, Napoléon abruptly stood up, then dropped back into the tub, drenching Joseph. A manservant slumped to the floor in a faint.

French historians point out that Napoléon had several reasons for this decision. "He probably concluded that, following American independence, France couldn't hope to maintain a colony on the American continent," says Jean Tulard, one of France's foremost Napoléon scholars. "French policy makers had felt for some time that France's possessions in the Antilles would inevitably be 'contaminated' by America's idea of freedom and would eventually take their own independence. By the sale, Napoléon hoped to create a huge country in the Western Hemisphere to serve as a counterweight to Britain and maybe make trouble for it."

On April 11, when Livingston called on Talleyrand for what he thought was yet another futile attempt to deal, the foreign minister, after the de rigueur small talk, suddenly asked whether the United States would perchance wish to buy the whole of the Louisiana Territory. In fact, Talleyrand was intruding on a deal that Napoléon had assigned to the French finance minister, François de Barbé-Marbois. The latter knew America well, having spent some years in Philadelphia in the late 1700s as French ambassador to the United States, where he got to know Washington, Jefferson, Livingston and Monroe. Barbé-Marbois received his orders on April 11, 1803, when Napoléon summoned him. "I renounce Louisiana," Napoléon told him. "It is not only New Orleans that I will cede, it is the whole colony without reservation. I renounce it with the greatest regret. . . . I require a great deal of money for this war [with Britain]."

Thierry Lentz, a Napoléon historian and director of the Fondation Napoléon in Paris, contends that, for Napoléon, "It was basically just a big real estate deal. He was in a hurry to get some money for the depleted French treasury, although the relatively modest price shows that he was had in that deal. But he did manage to sell something that he didn't really have any control over-there were few French settlers and no French administration over the territory-except on paper." As for Jefferson, notes historian Cerami, "he actually wasn't out to make this big a purchase. The whole thing came as a total surprise to him and his negotiating team in Paris, because it was, after all, Napoléon's idea, not his."

Showing up unexpectedly at the dinner party Livingston gave on April 12 for Monroe's arrival, Barbé-Marbois discreetly asked Livingston to meet him later that night at the treasury office. There he confirmed Napoléon's desire to sell the territory for $22,500,000. Livingston replied that he"would be ready to purchase provided the sum was reduced to reasonable limits." Then he rushed home and worked until 3 a.m. writing a memorandum to Secretary of State Madison, concluding: "We shall do all we can to cheapen the purchase; but my present sentiment is that we shall buy."

On April 15, Monroe and Livingston proposed $8 million.

At this, Barbé-Marbois pretended Napoléon had lost interest. But by April 27, he was saying that $15 million was as low as Napoléon would go. Though the Americans then countered with $12.7 million, the deal was struck for $15 million on April 29. The treaty was signed by Barbé-Marbois, Livingston and Monroe on May 2 and backdated to April 30. Although the purchase was undeniably a bargain, the price was still more than the young U.S. treasury could afford. But the resourceful Barbé-Marbois had an answer for that too. He had contacts at Britain's Baring & Co. Bank, which agreed, along with several other banks, to make the actual purchase and pay Napoléon cash. The bank then turned over ownership of the Louisiana Territory to the United States in return for bonds, which were repaid over 15 years at 6 percent interest, making the final purchase price around $27 million. Neither Livingston nor Monroe had been authorized to buy all of the territory, or to spend $15 million-transatlantic mail took weeks, sometimes months, each way, so they had no time to request and receive approval of the deal from Washington. But an elated Livingston was aware that nearly doubling the size of America would make it a major player on the world scene one day, and he permitted himself some verbal euphoria: "We have lived long, but this is the noblest work of our whole lives," he said. "From this day the United States take their place among the powers of the first rank."

It wasn't until July 3 that news of the purchase reached U.S. shores, just in time for Americans to celebrate it on Independence Day. A Washington newspaper, the National Intelligencer, reflecting how most citizens felt, referred to the "widespread joy of millions at an event which history will record among the most splendid in our annals." Though we have no historical evidence of how Jefferson felt about the purchase, notes Cerami, reports from those in his circle like Monroe refer to the president's "great pleasure," despite his fear that the deal had gone beyond his constitutional powers. Not all Americans agreed, however. The Boston Columbian Centinel editorialized, "We are to give money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much." And Congressman Joseph Quincy of Massachusetts so opposed the deal that he favored secession by the Northeastern states, "amicably if they can; violently if they must."

The favorable majority, however, easily prevailed and New England remained in the Union. As for the ever-succinct Thomas Jefferson, he wasted little time on rhetoric. "The enlightened government of France saw, with just discernment," he told Congress, with typical tact, on October 17, 1803, "the importance to both nations of such liberal arrangements as might best and permanently promote the peace, friendship, and interests of both." But, excited by the commercial opportunities in the West, Jefferson, even before official notice of the treaty reached him, had already dispatched Meriwether Lewis to lead an expedition to explore the territory and the lands beyond. All the way to the Pacific.
JEFFERSON'S AMERICA, NAPOLEON'S FRANCE
"We have tried to capture the suspense and fascination of a story whose outcome is known, yet was not foreordained," says Gail Feigenbaum, curator of the Jefferson-Napoléon show on view in New Orleans April 12 to August 31, "and to tell it through a rich variety of objects." The variety includes three important documents: a copy of the treaty, which bears Jefferson's signature; a document covering payment of claims by American citizens against France, signed by Napoléon; and the official report of transfer of the Louisiana Territory signed by a bereaved prefect, Pierre de Laussat. The exhibition points up how intertwined the two nations were at the time. A seascape portrays the Marquis de Lafayette's ship La Victoire setting sail to carry him across the Atlantic in 1777 to fight in the American Revolution. (There is also a portrait of the marquis himself and a 1784 painting by French artist Jean Suau, Allegory of France Liberating America.) A mahogany and gilded bronze swan bed that belonged to the famous French beauty Juliette Récamier is also on display. Fashion-conscious American ladies reportedly imitated Récamier's attire, but not her custom of receiving visitors in her bedroom. And John Trumbull's huge painting The Signing of the Declaration of Independence documents the historic American event that so greatly impressed and influenced French revolutionary thinkers. It hangs not far from a color engraving of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was composed in 1789 by Lafayette with the advice of his American friend Thomas Jefferson.

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How the Louisiana Purchase Changed the World

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When Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, he altered the shape of a nation and the course of history

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Table of Contents

1. France in the New World

2. Louisiana Territory Changes Hands

3. Louisiana Purchase Negotiations

4. Legacy of the Louisiana Purchase

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 brought into the United States about 828,000 square miles of territory from France, thereby doubling the size of the young republic. What was known at the time as the Louisiana Territory stretched from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west and from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to the Canadian border in the north. Part or all of 15 states were eventually created from the land deal, which is considered one of the most important achievements of Thomas Jefferson's presidency.

France in the New World

Beginning in the 17th century, France explored the Mississippi River valley and established scattered settlements in the region.

By the middle of the 18th century, France controlled more of the present-day United States than any other European power: from New Orleans northeast to the Great Lakes and northwest to modern-day Montana.

In 1762, during the French and Indian War, France ceded French Louisiana west of the Mississippi River to Spain and in 1763 transferred nearly all of its remaining North American holdings to Great Britain. Spain, no longer a dominant European power, did little to develop Louisiana during the next three decades.

Louisiana Territory Changes Hands

In 1796, Spain allied itself with France, leading Britain to use its powerful navy to cut off Spain from America. And in 1801, Spain signed a secret treaty with France to return the Louisiana Territory to France.

Reports of the retrocession caused considerable unease in the United States. Since the late 1780s, Americans had been moving westward into the Ohio River and Tennessee River valleys, and these settlers were highly dependent on free access to the Mississippi River and the strategic port of New Orleans.

U.S. officials feared that France, resurgent under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte, would soon seek to dominate the Mississippi River and access to the Gulf of Mexico. In a letter to U.S. minister to France Robert Livingston, President Thomas Jefferson stated, "The day that France takes possession of New Orleans...we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation."

Livingston was ordered to negotiate with French Finance Minister Barbé-Marbois for the purchase of New Orleans.

Louisiana Purchase Negotiations

France was slow in taking control of Louisiana, but in 1802 Spanish authorities, apparently acting under French orders, revoked a U.S.-Spanish treaty that granted Americans the right to store goods in New Orleans.

In response, Jefferson sent future U.S. president James Monroe to Paris to aid Livingston in the New Orleans purchase talks. In mid-April 1803, shortly before Monroe's arrival, the French asked a surprised Livingston if the United States was interested in purchasing all of Louisiana Territory.

It's believed that the failure of France to put down a slave revolution in Haiti, the impending war with Great Britain and probable British naval blockade of France - combined with French economic difficulties - may have prompted Napoleon to offer Louisiana for sale to the United States.

Negotiations moved swiftly, and at the end of April the U.S. envoys agreed to pay $11,250,000 and assume claims of American citizens against France in the amount of $3,750,000. In exchange, the United States acquired the vast domain of Louisiana Territory, some 828,000 square miles of land.

The treaty was dated April 30 and signed on May 2. In October, the U.S. Senate ratified the purchase, and in December 1803 France transferred authority over the region to the United States.

Legacy of the Louisiana Purchase

The acquisition of the Louisiana Territory for the bargain price of less than three cents an acre was among Jefferson's most notable achievements as president. American expansion westward into the new lands began immediately, and in 1804 a territorial government was established.

Jefferson soon commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to explore the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase.

On April 30, 1812, exactly nine years after the Louisiana Purchase agreement was made, the first state to be carved from the territory - Louisiana - was admitted into the Union as the 18th U.S. state.
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Louisiana Purchase - Definition, Facts & Importance | HISTORY

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The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 introduced about 828,000,000 square miles of territory from France into the United States, thereby doubling the size of the young republic. Explore the facts about this important acquisition and its lasting legacy on Thomas Jefferson's presidency.

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Seizing on what Jefferson later called "a fugitive occurrence," Monroe and Livingston immediately entered into negotiations and on April 30 reached an agreement that exceeded their authority - the purchase of the Louisiana territory, including New Orleans, for $15 million. The acquisition of approximately 827,000 square miles would double the size of the United States.