Growing Pains: The New Republic, 1790–1820

This is Unit Eight, part two, carrying the republic from the Sedition Act prosecutions to the end of the War of Eighteen Twelve. Part one ended with a government that had criminalised criticism of itself. This half opens with what that looked like when it was enforced. Then carry this idea through the rest. Jefferson's party came to power arguing that the federal government holds only the powers the Constitution expressly grants. Watch what that party does once it governs — an overseas war in its first year, and a purchase the Constitution does not authorise. By the end you will be able to explain what Marbury decided and what Marshall gave up to win it. To state what the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions asserted. To explain why Napoleon sold Louisiana. To say which direction the Embargo Act's damage ran. And to explain the mismatch between who held the war's grievances and who demanded the war.

Start with enforcement, because a law is what it does to people.

Who was prosecuted.

USH1 1084 The Prosecutions

Federal prosecutors convicted ten editors and printers under the Sedition Act, and the administration indicted a Republican congressman who had criticised the president. Luther Baldwin was arrested in a tavern for an intoxicated remark about Adams, imprisoned two months and fined. The Acts were enforced against opposition newspapers, which makes them a party weapon rather than a security measure.

The states' answer.

USH1 1085 The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions

Madison wrote Virginia's resolution and Jefferson wrote Kentucky's, in seventeen ninety-eight. Both argued that the national government's authority was limited to powers expressly granted by the Constitution, and both asserted that states could declare federal laws unconstitutional and null and void. That is the doctrine of states' rights in its first full statement.

And what came of it.

USH1 1086 A Doctrine Stated and Ignored

No other state joined Virginia and Kentucky, and the witness records the Resolutions as gestures of defiance at the time — a constitutional theory published, circulated, then left unused for thirty years. It would have important effects in later decades. Unit Ten picks the argument up in the nullification crisis, where a state acts on it.

Now the transfer of power, and a president who reversed Federalist policy while borrowing Federalist habits.

The election that ended Federalist rule.

USH1 1087 The Revolution of 1800

The election of eighteen hundred produced the first transfer of power between opposing parties, after a mudslinging campaign unlike any seen before. Hamilton wrote a letter attacking Adams's character, which the Democratic-Republicans obtained and republished. The peaceful transition calmed fears about violent reactions to a new party taking the reins of government.

What Jefferson meant by democracy.

USH1 1088 Jefferson in Office

Jefferson championed participatory democracy and majority rule, and extended them exclusively to White yeoman farmers. His empire of liberty was a rural republic of land-owning White men. In office he reversed Federalist policy — cheap western land, an end to all internal taxes including whiskey and rum, the rights of states, limited federal government, sharply cut military and naval spending. The word exclusively is the anchor's. His expansion of political life was real, and it was bounded by race, sex and property in ways he did not regard as exceptions. A course that reports the expansion without the boundary teaches the eighteen twenties as a puzzle instead of a consequence.

The war he fought anyway.

USH1 1089 The Barbary War

Jefferson took the country to war against the Muslim Barbary States of North Africa in eighteen oh one, which the anchor calls the first conflict fought by Americans overseas. A president committed to limited government and low military spending began an overseas war in his first year.

One entry now, and it is the most important single case in the course. Follow the sequence carefully, because the order is where students go wrong.

The case that made the courts powerful.

USH1 1090 Marbury v. Madison

Adams appointed numerous Federalists to judicial posts in his final days, and Jefferson refused to deliver their commissions. William Marbury, named a justice of the peace for the District of Columbia, petitioned the Supreme Court against Secretary of State Madison. Chief Justice John Marshall held that Marbury had the right to a legal remedy, establishing that even presidential power could not abridge individual rights. Then he held that the Judiciary Act of seventeen eighty-nine was unconstitutional, because the Constitution did not permit such cases to come directly before the Court. That holding established judicial review — the power of courts to review and possibly nullify the actions of Congress and the president. Two things get turned around. First, Marbury got no commission. He won the argument that he was entitled to one and lost the case, because the Court found it had no authority to order the remedy. Second, the statute Marshall struck down was the Judiciary Act of seventeen eighty-nine, the act that created the Court he sat on. Note what he surrendered to win it. He gave up the Court's power to issue such writs directly, a power Congress had granted by statute, in exchange for a power no statute had granted and no Congress could take back. He also declined to order a Republican administration to do anything, which denied Jefferson the chance to defy him. Establishing judicial review while losing the case was the only route by which the doctrine could survive its first use.

Four entries on the purchase that doubled the country, and the two things about it that are usually left out.

The transaction.

USH1 1091 The Louisiana Purchase

The United States bought Louisiana in eighteen oh three for fifteen million dollars, which the anchor calls a bargain price considering the amount of land involved. American territory doubled in a single transaction. The anchor calls it perhaps the greatest real estate deal in American history.

The problem with it.

USH1 1092 The Constitutional Problem

Under a strict interpretation of the Constitution, the anchor says, it remained unclear whether the president had the power to add territory in this fashion. Jefferson proceeded anyway. The strict constructionist who opposed the Bank on constitutional grounds exercised a power the Constitution does not name. Hold that beside Hamilton's implied powers.

Why France was willing to sell.

USH1 1093 Why Napoleon Sold

Napoleon had intended Louisiana and the Mississippi Valley as the source of food for Haiti, the most profitable sugar island in the world. Enslaved people in Haiti had successfully overthrown the brutal plantation regime, and with Haiti lost the plan collapsed. The largest land transfer in American history followed from a successful slave revolt.

Who was sent to look at it.

USH1 1094 Lewis and Clark

Jefferson commissioned Lewis and Clark in eighteen oh four to find the commercial possibilities of the new land and, most importantly, potential trade routes, since no one knew precisely what lay to the west. Unit Eleven covers the expedition itself. The purpose recorded here is commercial, not scientific.

Three entries on what followed politically, and the last of them opens a wound the course never closes.

The duel.

USH1 1095 Burr and Hamilton

On July eleventh, eighteen oh four, at Weehawken, New Jersey, Aaron Burr shot and mortally wounded Hamilton. Burr, Jefferson's first vice president, had lost a New York gubernatorial race and blamed Hamilton, who had long hated him and had done everything in his power to discredit him.

The election that followed.

USH1 1096 The 1804 Election

Jefferson was re-elected in eighteen oh four, taking all but fourteen of the one hundred seventy-six electoral votes cast — a margin reflecting how completely the Federalists had collapsed as a national party. The party that wrote the Constitution never won the presidency again after eighteen hundred.

And who was uneasy about the purchase.

USH1 1097 Northern Fears of New Slave States

Northerners feared the Louisiana Purchase would create additional slave states, reducing northern representation in Congress and shifting power south. A question about territory was read immediately, and correctly, as a question about sectional power. This anxiety produces the Missouri Crisis in Unit Eleven, and every territorial fight that follows it.

Now back to the grievance part one left open, and the answer that hurt the wrong country.

Impressment returns.

USH1 1098 Impressment Returns

During the Napoleonic Wars both France and England seized American merchant vessels, and the crisis peaked in eighteen oh seven when HMS Leopard fired on the USS Chesapeake off Norfolk and took four sailors. Impressment had been left unresolved by Jay's Treaty thirteen years earlier.

Jefferson's answer.

USH1 1099 The Embargo Act

The Embargo Act of eighteen oh seven was a sweeping ban prohibiting American ships from leaving port until Britain and France stopped seizing them. It devastated America rather than Britain or France. American commerce came to a near-total halt, business activity declined by seventy-five percent from eighteen oh eight to eighteen oh nine, farmers lost their markets, and seaports saw a huge increase in unemployment and an uptick in bankruptcies. Smugglers' Notch in Vermont is named for the trade the ban could not stop. Jefferson signed the Non-Intercourse Act in eighteen oh eight, lifting the ban except against Britain and France, and Madison inherited the problem. Teaching the embargo as pressure on Britain gets the direction of the damage exactly backwards.

Four entries now that assemble a war out of grievances at sea and grievances on the frontier.

The confederacy rebuilding in the west.

USH1 1100 Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa

In eighteen oh nine Tecumseh, a Shawnee war chief, rejuvenated the Western Confederacy. His brother Tenskwatawa, a prophet among the Shawnee, urged a revival of native ways and rejection of Anglo-American culture, including alcohol. A political confederacy and a religious revival ran together, which is why it drew support across nations.

The attack on it.

USH1 1101 Tippecanoe

William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory, attacked Prophetstown in eighteen eleven and destroyed the settlement. Ample evidence was found there that the British had supplied the Western Confederacy with weapons. That evidence becomes a cause of war, and Harrison's name becomes a campaign slogan in Unit Ten.

Who wanted the war.

USH1 1102 The War Hawks

The loudest calls came from the war hawks, led by Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who would not tolerate British insults to American honour. Federalists in the north-east opposed them, because their maritime commerce depended on peace. Congress authorised war in a narrow vote. The country was not united on it.

And why it happened.

USH1 1103 The Causes of the War

The anchor gives five causes together. Impressment of American sailors. British support for Native resistance to westward expansion. British arms supplied to the Western Confederacy. Seizure of American merchant ships. And repeated diplomatic failure across two decades. The war is often called the Second War of American Independence. Now notice which sections held which grievance. The maritime states suffered impressment and opposed the war. The western states wanted the frontier cleared and demanded it. A war fought over sailors was driven by men from Kentucky and South Carolina, and voted against by the shipping interest it was supposed to protect. That mismatch is examinable, and it is what produces the Hartford Convention.

Three entries on the fighting, and the last is the one everyone remembers for the wrong reason.

The first year.

USH1 1104 Detroit and Lake Erie

The United States lost Detroit in August eighteen twelve to the British and their Native allies, including a force of one thousand men led by Tecumseh, and Britain controlled half the Northwest by year's end. Perry defeated the British on Lake Erie in eighteen thirteen, and at the Battle of the Thames Tecumseh was among the dead.

The burning of the capital.

USH1 1105 Washington Burned

In July eighteen fourteen forty-five hundred hardened British soldiers sailed up the Chesapeake and burned Washington to the ground, President Madison and his wife running for their lives while British officers ate a dinner left behind. The British shelled Baltimore that summer and failed to dislodge the defenders, which inspired Francis Scott Key.

The battle fought after the peace.

USH1 1106 New Orleans

The Battle of New Orleans was fought on January eighth, eighteen fifteen, after the Treaty of Ghent had already been signed. Andrew Jackson's forces devastated the British and killed over two thousand. The war's most famous American victory could not have affected its outcome. News had not crossed the Atlantic.

Two entries to close, on what the war destroyed and what it left behind.

Hartford, and the peace.

USH1 1107 Hartford and Ghent

In December eighteen fourteen twenty-six north-eastern Federalists met in Connecticut, resenting the power of the slaveholding Virginians, and some called for New England to secede. Arguing for disunion during wartime, and condemning the government while it fought, made the Federalists appear unpatriotic and discredited the party, leading to its downfall. The Treaty of Ghent, negotiated in Flanders that same month, restored pre-war boundaries. Four consequences follow. Native resistance diminished and the west opened. The Federalist Party collapsed. American honour appeared restored despite a war that settled nothing territorially. And Jackson used New Orleans to emerge as a Democratic Party leader in the eighteen twenties, which is where Unit Ten begins.

And the song.

USH1 1108 The Star-Spangled Banner

The Baltimore defenders' survival inspired Francis Scott Key to write the verse beginning oh say can you see, by the dawn's early light, words set to a British tune that became the national anthem long afterwards — a song commemorating a fort that held, in a war that restored the pre-war boundaries and settled nothing territorially.

Look at what you can now do. You can explain Marbury: that Marbury won the argument and lost the case, that the statute Marshall struck down was the act creating his own court, and that he traded a power Congress had granted for one no Congress could take back. You can state what the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions asserted — that states could declare federal laws null and void — and that no other state joined them, until Unit Ten. You can explain why Napoleon sold Louisiana: Haiti was lost, so the plan the territory existed to feed collapsed. And you can name the constitutional problem Jefferson stepped over to buy it. You can say which direction the Embargo Act's damage ran. Inward, at a country whose business activity fell by three quarters. And you can explain the mismatch that produced the war and then the Hartford Convention: the section that suffered impressment opposed the war, and the section that demanded it wanted the frontier cleared.