History of the United States I / Unit 17 USH1 2413 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Federal Government Grew Steadily
The idea
The second cross-theme twin is that federal power grew steadily across this period. It did not. It moved in both directions, and the reversals matter as much as the growth. In the eighteen twenties and thirties the constitutional objection to federal internal improvements was strong enough to constrain what Congress would fund, and South Carolina's Ordinance of Nullification in eighteen thirty-two denied that a federal tariff bound a state at all, which Unit 10 entry 1379 covers. Jackson answered with the Force Bill. Thirty years later the Union government conscripted men, taxed incomes, printed legal-tender paper, suspended habeas corpus and closed three hundred newspapers, and the Confederate government did more of all of it. By eighteen seventy-seven federal troops had been withdrawn from the South and federal enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments had effectively ended. That is a rise and a retreat inside fifty years, not a steady climb at all.
In practice
A government too constrained to fund a road in the eighteen twenties, conscripting and taxing by eighteen sixty-three, and already in retreat by eighteen seventy-seven.
Where people slip
The shape to remember is a spike, not a slope. War produces central power because war requires it, and the Confederate case at Unit 15 entry 2135 proves the point in the hardest possible form, since the government founded on states' rights built the more centralised of the two. What follows the spike is the part students miss. The retreat of the eighteen seventies was argued on grounds of economy and corruption rather than race, which Unit 16 entry 2301 covers, and the enforcement that had held the Klan in check was inside what got cut. Federal power did not shrink back to where it started. Three of the war's measures outlast it entirely.
Your place on the trail
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