Growing Pains: The New Republic, 1790–1820

This is Unit Eight, part one, covering the seventeen nineties — the decade in which a government that existed on paper had to prove it could govern. Unit Seven closed with a Constitution ratified by fewer than two thousand men, and a question left open about who this republic was for. This unit answers it in statute, in seventeen ninety. Carry one idea through what follows. Nearly every fight in this decade is the same fight: what does the Constitution permit? Hamilton reads it one way, Jefferson the other, and the parties form along that line. By the end you will be able to explain what Hamilton's programme did and what it cost. To state the constitutional argument the parties divide over. To say what the Naturalization Act established and what New Jersey took back. To explain why Jay's Treaty was unpopular although it succeeded. And to state what the Alien and Sedition Acts did.

Four entries to finish the frame — the rights, the cabinet, the courts.

The amendments, and what they were for.

USH1 1051 The Bill of Rights

Madison introduced the amendments, Congress approved them in seventeen eighty-nine, and the states adopted them in seventeen ninety-one. They wrote into the federal frame rights that state constitutions already guaranteed, which softened Anti-Federalist opposition and gave the new government greater legitimacy.

What the ten actually protect.

USH1 1052 What the Ten Amendments Do

The first protects religion, speech, assembly and petition. The fourth bars unreasonable search. The fifth guarantees due process and grand jury indictment. The sixth, a speedy jury trial. The third bars quartering soldiers in peacetime, answering a named grievance of the Revolution. The ninth reserves rights beyond those listed, the tenth undelegated powers to the states.

The government that took office.

USH1 1053 Washington's Government

Washington became president in April seventeen eighty-nine with John Adams as vice president, a Virginian paired with a Massachusetts man to symbolise national unity. Hamilton went to Treasury, Jefferson to State, Knox to War, Randolph as Attorney General. Sectional balance was a design problem from the first day.

And the courts they built by statute.

USH1 1054 The Judiciary Act of 1789

The Judiciary Act of July seventeen eighty-nine created the Supreme Court with six justices — a judiciary built by statute rather than described in detail by the Constitution. Hold on to that. Fourteen years later Marshall declares part of this same act unconstitutional.

Now the numbers, because everything that divides these men follows from them.

What the new government owed.

USH1 1055 The Debt

The federal debt exceeded fifty-three million dollars in seventeen eighty-nine, and state debts came to about twenty-five million more, in a nation European countries regarded as a poor credit risk. Everything Hamilton proposes follows from these numbers, and so does everything Jefferson objects to.

Hamilton's first answer.

USH1 1056 The Report on Public Credit

He proposed in January seventeen ninety that the federal government honour all its debts at face value, including paper issued by the Confederation and the states, with old notes converted into interest-bearing federal bonds. The purpose was to bind wealthy domestic creditors to the new government's success.

And why Madison objected.

USH1 1057 The Speculator Objection

Many of those notes had been bought by speculators at a fraction of face value from desperate veterans during the seventeen eighties. Madison objected that the scheme rewarded speculators rather than original holders. Paying face value moved public money to whoever held the paper, not whoever had earned it.

The deal that passed it anyway.

USH1 1058 The Bargain for the Potomac

Hamilton offered Jefferson and Madison relocation of the capital from New York to the Potomac, the future District of Columbia, and the two backed his plan in July seventeen ninety. The capital's location was the price of the financial system. Both were settled in one negotiation.

Three entries on what he built, and one that weighs the result honestly.

The constitutional argument underneath it.

USH1 1059 Implied Powers

Hamilton justified the programme under Article One, Section Eight, invoking implied powers rather than any enumerated authority — a reading that finds authority in what the Constitution permits as necessary to its stated ends. This is the constitutional argument the whole first party system divides over.

The institution it produced.

USH1 1060 The Bank of the United States

His Report on a National Bank of December seventeen ninety proposed a bank modelled on the Bank of England, jointly owned by stockholders and the federal government, its notes circulating as currency. Jefferson argued the Constitution did not permit a national bank. Washington backed Hamilton and signed it in seventeen ninety-one.

And the third report.

USH1 1061 The Report on Manufactures

Hamilton proposed a tax on American-made whiskey, tariffs on foreign imports to stimulate domestic manufacturing, and federal subsidies for American industry — government involvement in industrial development that the anchor calls new. That whiskey tax produces a rebellion you will meet later in this lecture.

What the whole programme accomplished.

USH1 1062 What Hamilton's Programme Achieved

All of it passed. It rescued the nation from near bankruptcy, established American capitalism, created creditworthiness and enabled a stock market to grow. Hamilton's stated aims were doing justice to the creditors of the nation and promoting the increasing respectability of the American name. Judge it by what it was for, not only by who gained. He was building a state that European lenders would deal with, and he did. The cost was that public money flowed to people holding paper they had bought cheaply, concentrated in commercial cities. Both halves are true, and the parties form around which half you weigh more.

Which brings us to the parties themselves, and what each thought the republic was for.

The man who weighed it the other way.

USH1 1063 Jefferson's Counter-Vision

Jefferson returned from France in seventeen ninety and objected to the favouritism given to commercial classes in the principal American cities. His creed was that those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, and he held that self-sufficient, property-owning yeoman farmers held the key to the republic's longevity.

What Federalists believed about rank.

USH1 1064 The Federalists

Federalists adhered to a decidedly British notion of social hierarchy, tying political participation to property and holding to distinctions in rank and intelligence. The idea that all were equal appeared to them ludicrous, and imposed equality likely to destroy the republic. The anchor puts it flatly. The United States was not created to be a democracy.

And the opposition.

USH1 1065 The Democratic-Republicans

Democratic-Republicans believed the administration's domestic policies were designed to enrich the few while ignoring everyone else, and championed limited government. Members were drawn from the ranks of artisans in Philadelphia and New York, and sponsored festivals and parades. They saw themselves continuing the Revolution against a commercial class with no interest in the public good.

How the argument was carried on.

USH1 1066 The Partisan Press

Jefferson engaged Philip Freneau to run the National Gazette against the Federalist Gazette of the United States, attacking Hamilton's programme from seventeen ninety-one, with pieces titled Rules for Changing a Limited Republican Government into an Unlimited Hereditary One. Newspapers did not aim to be objective. They broadcast the views of a party.

Two entries answering the question Unit Seven left open.

Citizenship, defined by statute.

USH1 1067 The 1790 Naturalization Act

The Naturalization Act of seventeen ninety required an immigrant be a free White person of good character — a statute excluding enslaved, free Black, Native and Asian people from citizenship. The anchor says it established the United States as a republic of White men. Unit Six's closing claim is now written into law.

And the vote.

USH1 1068 Who Could Vote

Most state constitutions limited the vote to male property owners or taxpayers. New Jersey alone extended it to unmarried women with property worth fifty pounds, from seventeen seventy-six — and then restricted the vote to free White males in eighteen oh seven. The franchise was taken back, not merely withheld.

Now the Atlantic, which turns a foreign revolution into an American quarrel.

The revolution that split American politics.

USH1 1069 The French Revolution Splits American Politics

France became a republic in seventeen ninety-two and executed the king in January seventeen ninety-three, followed by extreme violence against perceived enemies. Revolutionaries dismantled Catholicism, renamed the months of the year, and relentlessly employed the guillotine. Democratic-Republicans embraced the French struggle; Federalists saw anarchy.

The envoy who tried to recruit Americans.

USH1 1070 Citizen Genêt

France sent Edmond-Charles Genêt in seventeen ninety-three, authorised to issue letters of marque — documents authorising ships and crews to engage in piracy. He commissioned American privateers and organised volunteer militias to attack Spanish holdings. Britain then instructed its West Indies commanders to seize all ships trading with France, taking hundreds of American vessels.

The treaty sent to fix it.

USH1 1071 Jay's Treaty

John Jay went to Britain in seventeen ninety-four to secure compensation for captured ships, British withdrawal from the Northwest posts, and American trade in the West Indies. He got the posts turned over, free trade in the West Indies, and a commission on colonial debts — most of what he was sent for. The treaty was bitterly unpopular anyway.

And what it left out.

USH1 1072 Impressment Left Unresolved

Jay's Treaty did not address impressment, the British navy's practice of forcing American sailors to work and fight on British warships. That omission stays open and unresolved for the next eighteen years, and this single grievance becomes the leading cause of the war taught in part two.

Spain's answer.

USH1 1073 Pinckney's Treaty

Alarmed by Jay's Treaty, Spain negotiated its own, allowing American commerce through New Orleans. Farmers in the Ohio River Valley could ship goods down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans and on to East Coast markets. Access to New Orleans is what the Louisiana Purchase is later bought to secure permanently.

Two entries on the revolution nobody in American power welcomed.

Saint-Domingue.

USH1 1074 Haiti

The French Revolution inspired slave rebellions in the Caribbean, including an uprising in Saint-Domingue in seventeen ninety-one. Enslaved people took control of a large section of the island, burning sugar plantations and killing those who had forced them to labour. French revolutionaries abolished slavery in seventeen ninety-four.

The leader who carried it.

USH1 1075 Toussaint L'Ouverture

Toussaint L'Ouverture, born with slave status and later freed, led the fight against Spain and England for a Haiti free of slavery and further European colonialism. White Caribbean refugees arrived in the United States, heightening Federalist fears and horrifying southern slaveholders.

Three risings in five years, and one entry that assembles them into a single test.

The tax rebellion at home.

USH1 1076 The Whiskey Rebellion

Congress authorised seven and a half cents per gallon on whiskey and rum. Western Pennsylvania farmers who distilled grain because spirits were cheaper to transport rebelled in seventeen ninety-four, tarring and feathering federal officials, intercepting the federal mail and intimidating wealthy citizens. These are pre-Revolutionary tactics, used against the government the Revolution created.

How far they went.

USH1 1077 How Far the Whiskey Rebels Went

The rebels went further, negotiating with British and Spanish representatives and hoping for support for independence from the United States, with the idea of secession circulating among sympathetic neighbours in Kentucky and South Carolina. Washington raised a thirteen-thousand-man militia drawn from several states to put the rising down.

The argument made against them.

USH1 1078 Hamilton as Tully

Hamilton, writing as Tully, asked whether the majority shall govern or be governed, and whether the general will shall prevail or the will of a faction, warning that there is no road to despotism more sure than that which begins at anarchy. The Federalist case against the rebels is a majoritarian one, which sits oddly beside what Federalists said about equality.

The war on the frontier.

USH1 1079 Fallen Timbers and Greenville

A state of war existed on the Ohio frontier from seventeen eighty-five to seventeen ninety-five, with the Shawnee and Miami defending their lands. General Anthony Wayne won at Fallen Timbers in seventeen ninety-four, and the Western Confederacy gave up its claims to Ohio in the Treaty of Greenville the following year.

What the three had in common.

USH1 1080 The 1790s Uprisings, Assembled

Three risings in five years tested whether the new government could govern. Western Pennsylvania farmers took up arms against a federal excise and sounded out foreign powers about secession. The Ohio Confederacy fought a decade-long war against settlement and lost its claims at Greenville. And in Saint-Domingue, enslaved people overthrew a plantation regime and abolished slavery by force. Washington answered the first with thirteen thousand militia, the second with a standing general, and the third with anxious neutrality. The federal government proved it could compel obedience from its own citizens and from Native nations, and it discovered it had no answer at all to a successful slave revolt. That asymmetry runs through the rest of the course.

Two entries on the crisis with France, and one on what the government did to its own critics.

The bribe demand.

USH1 1081 The XYZ Affair

Adams sent envoys to France in seventeen ninety-seven to resolve tensions after Jay's Treaty, and three French emissaries demanded a bribe of two hundred fifty thousand dollars and a ten million dollar loan. The Americans code-named the officials X, Y and Z in their correspondence. The envoys refused, and when the story became public it infuriated American citizens.

The war that followed.

USH1 1082 The Quasi-War

France authorised its vessels to attack American shipping, producing an undeclared naval war fought mostly between French naval vessels and American merchant ships. Robert Goodloe Harper toasted millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute, in June seventeen ninety-eight. Charleston residents watched the horizon apprehensively, fearing a French invasion with Black troops from the Caribbean.

And the laws passed at home.

USH1 1083 What the Alien and Sedition Acts Did

In seventeen ninety-eight Congress passed measures doing three things. They extended the naturalisation period from five years to fourteen. They gave the president power to imprison or deport any foreigner believed to be dangerous. And they made it a crime to attack the government with false, scandalous or malicious statements or writings. The Alien Act was signed on July sixth, the Sedition Act on July fourteenth, and the laws expired in eighteen hundred and eighteen oh one. A government criminalised criticism of itself, seven years after adopting the First Amendment. This course teaches these Acts by what they did rather than by how many there were, and the reason is that the sources disagree. The anchor gives no count, one witness identifies two acts, and the other describes three measures without counting them. Where independent sources differ on a tally and none supports the number most reference works give, stating a number would invent a precision the evidence does not carry.

Look at what you can now do. You can explain Hamilton's programme and its cost — debts honoured at face value, a national bank, tariffs and subsidies, a government that could borrow because it had shown it would pay, and public money moving to whoever held the paper. You can state the constitutional argument the parties divide over: implied powers under Article One, Section Eight, against Jefferson's reading that the Constitution did not permit a bank. You can say that the Naturalization Act established a republic of White men, and that New Jersey took the vote away from propertied women in eighteen oh seven rather than never granting it. You can explain why Jay's Treaty was hated although Jay got most of what he was sent for, and that impressment stayed open eighteen years. And you can state what the Alien and Sedition Acts did, and why this course gives no count of them.