United States of America
In addition to cross-references contained in the following account of U.S. history, the reader is referred, for supplementary materials, to the history sections of articles on the individual states and to separate articles on U.S. presidents.
Colonial Developments
The United States did not emerge as a nation-state until near the end of the 18th century, but national history is properly introduced with a brief survey of the chief events leading to the formation of the Union. The voyages, in the last years of the 15th century, of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot, pioneer navigators who helped to open the European era of exploration and colonial expansion, were the decisive initial developments. On the strength of Columbus's explorations and those of later Spanish navigators, Spain staked out a vast domain in North, Central, and South America. Cabot, sailing in the service of Henry VII, king of England, reached the North American mainland in 1497. On the basis of this voyage, England later claimed the entire continent. Among other early voyagers to North America were Giovanni da Verrazzano of Italy and Jacques Cartier of France. Sailing under the flag of France, they initiated a protracted period of French colonial activity.
The lands these navigators "discovered" had actually been inhabited for at least 20,000 years before Columbus's arrival. In 1492 the indigenous population of the continent numbered more than 90 million, of whom about 10 million lived in America north of present-day Mexico. Contact with Europeans precipitated a demographic disaster for these varied Native Americans. Because they lacked natural immunity to European diseases, influenza, typhus, measles, and smallpox reduced native populations in the more densely settled regions of Central and South America by up to 95 percent within the first 150 years after contact. In North America, where the aboriginal cultures tended to be seminomadic and populations less dense, the population collapse was more protracted, but no less devastating. Once European colonists established permanent settlements in North America, they introduced not only diseases but also cattle and horses that displaced game animals and invaded Native American agricultural lands, altering the environment so drastically that indigenous populations declined to a fraction of precontact levels. Even in the absence of warfare, European colonization signaled the wholesale destruction of native cultures. (For a detailed discussion of the original inhabitants of the United States, See Native Americans and articles on individual peoples.)
The First Settlements
The founding of Saint Augustine (in what is now Florida) by the Spanish in 1565 marked the beginning of European colonization within the present boundaries of the United States. At the time of this settlement, England and Spain were engaged in warfare on the high seas, which in 1588 would culminate in the virtual annihilation of Spanish naval power (see Armada, Spanish). After this defeat, Spain no longer figured as a potent rival of England for possession of the Atlantic seaboard of North America. Before that time, however, these same military pressures helped inhibit English efforts at colonization.
In 1585 an expedition sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh settled on Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina. The colony soon failed, in part because the settlers were more concerned with hunting for gold than with learning how to sustain their colony by agriculture. In 1587 Raleigh dispatched a larger group led by John White to the region, which he had named Virginia to honor Elizabeth I, known as the Virgin Queen. About a month after the colonists landed, Virginia Dare was born, the first birth to English parents in America. John White soon sailed back to England for additional supplies. The war with Spain prevented his returning to Roanoke until 1590, by which time the settlers had disappeared. The mystery of what happened to Raleigh's Lost Colony has never been solved.
The first permanent English settlement in North America was Jamestown. Established in 1607, Jamestown was a project of the Virginia Company of London, a joint-stock corporation chartered in 1606 by King James I of England for the purpose of trading in and colonizing North America. After a series of catastrophic misadventures, in which thousands of immigrants died because of disease, starvation, and a war in 1622 with Native Americans, the Crown revoked the company's charter in 1624 and took control of the colony as a royal province. Executive power in the new regime was vested in appointees of the Crown, but the colonists were eventually permitted to retain the representative assembly, called the House of Burgesses, that had been founded in 1619.
After the colonial government removed controls on the production of tobacco, there was a major expansion in the economy and in the English population of the Chesapeake Bay region. The incessant demand for labor to grow tobacco created a harsh system of indentured servitude. In the last quarter of the 17th century, when it became prohibitively expensive to import English laborers, English colonists in the United States followed the lead of European nations and began importing Africans kidnapped from their native countries. These African slaves emerged as the predominant agricultural labor force in the southern mainland.
French and Dutch Activities
During the decade following the settlement of Jamestown, France and the Netherlands-the other leading maritime nations of Europe-actively entered the contest for territory in North America. The French quickly recognized the importance of controlling the Saint Lawrence River, the best available route to the interior. In 1608, as the first step in their strategic design, they founded Québec. The brilliant achievements of such explorers as Jacques Marquette, Louis Jolliet, and René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle brought vast areas of the interior, including the entire Mississippi River valley, under nominal French ownership during the next 75 years. Consolidation of this enormous American dominion was impossible for various reasons, but stemmed especially from the French desire to trade with Native Americans for furs and skins, rather than to try forcing them off their lands, as the English did. In addition, the French had exported to America the absolutist institutions and traditions of the homeland. Their colonial policies, centrally directed and diametrically opposed to those of the English, discouraged large-scale immigration and the settlement of enduring communities with responsible local authority. As a consequence, French colonial populations remained small throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, enabling them to cultivate military alliances with Native American tribes, who rightly saw them as less threatening than the English settlers.
The Dutch based their claims to North American territory on the explorations of Henry Hudson. An English mariner in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, Hudson had, in 1609, entered present-day New York Bay and explored the river that now bears his name. During the next few years the Dutch dispatched several trading vessels to the region, which they named New Netherland. Trading posts were founded on Manhattan Island and near the site of modern Albany in 1613 and 1614. Because of the profitable fur trade, the Dutch made no immediate attempt to colonize New Netherland. Permanent colonists began to arrive in 1624, and New Amsterdam (now New York City) was founded the following year. New Netherland grew slowly. Constant friction or warfare with the Native Americans, administrative incompetence, and internal unrest were characteristic, and the colony never attained the stability and vigor of Virginia or of the English colonies later founded in America.
The New England Colonies
English colonizing activity resumed in 1620 when a party of English Separatists, a dissident sect that had previously withdrawn from the Church of England, acquired the right to settle in Virginia. Whether by accident or design, their ship, the Mayflower, entered Massachusetts Bay and dropped anchor in what is now the harbor of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Recognizing that they were outside the bounds of any organized government, 41 of the men in the group, better known as the Pilgrims, gathered aboard ship on November 21, 1620, and signed an agreement called the Mayflower Compact, the first written American constitution. Later they founded Plymouth Colony, on a site near the head of Cape Cod.
The organization of Plymouth Colony inaugurated the colonization of New England, a region peopled mainly by religious dissenters. In this phase, the most significant development was the founding in 1629 to 1630 of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, just north of Plymouth, by a joint-stock company that used its corporate charter to develop a complete system of self-government. The Massachusetts Bay colonists were followers of Puritanism. Soon after the establishment of Massachusetts, dissidents expelled from the colony formed the nucleus of a settlement from which Rhode Island grew; in 1636 settlers from the Bay Colony looking for better land on which to raise cattle migrated westward to found Connecticut. Both of these colonies created governments modeled on that of Massachusetts, with an elected legislative body, or general court, and an elected governor. Growing political turmoil in England prevented the king from reining in these nearly independent colonies; not until 1676 would the English government attempt to establish control over Massachusetts and its neighbors. Meanwhile they grew, prospered, and developed their own distinctive traditions of government.
Proprietary Colonies
After the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the English crown issued no more corporate charters for colonization projects in America. Beginning with Maryland, which was chartered in 1632 as a refuge for Roman Catholics and others, all the new colonies were organized according to the provisions of proprietary charters. In general the people of the proprietary provinces received qualified legislative privileges, but administrative authority was vested in the charter grantees, who received from the king virtually complete freedom to establish any form of government, as well as the right to dispose of all lands within the boundaries of their colonies.
With the exception of Georgia, which was chartered in 1732, all these English proprietary colonies in North America were organized before the end of the 17th century. In 1663 a company of eight English nobles was granted what is now North Carolina and South Carolina. New Netherland, lying across the lines of communication between the northern and southern possessions of England, was forcibly annexed in 1664 and renamed New York. New Jersey, mainly comprising territory that the Dutch had previously seized from Sweden, was formed in the same year. New Hampshire, consisting of settlements formerly under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, was organized 15 years later. In 1681 William Penn received a charter for the region that he named Pennsylvania.
Political Developments
In terms of political development, this period was notable for many reasons. The persecution of Puritans in England by Charles I drove numerous refugees to America, but also precipitated the English Revolution in 1642, which seven years later led to the king's execution and the formation of the Commonwealth. Gradually, Parliament emerged as the ruler of the country and its colonies. The first manifestation of parliamentary authority over the colonies was the Navigation Act of 1651, which required that colonial imports and exports be shipped in English-flag vessels. The first of a long series of increasingly elaborate enactments designed to regulate colonial commerce, this act sought to guarantee the benefits theoretically inherent in mercantilism. The Navigation Acts prohibited commercial relations between the colonies and non-English nations. Although colonial merchants freely ignored the provisions when it suited their purposes, the laws created a trading environment that generally benefited colonies and mother country alike. Because of lax enforcement, smuggling and illicit trade were common and, over the next century, became an accepted part of American colonial mores.
In 1660, after the death of Oliver Cromwell and the end of the protectorate, Charles II was restored to the English throne. Although he took little active interest in the colonies, his brother (and later his successor as James II) was determined to impose stricter control over England's American possessions. The new English regime broadened the navigation laws and transformed New Hampshire and Massachusetts into royal provinces. The revocation of the Massachusetts charter in 1684 reflected royal hostility to the trade violations, autonomous status, and generally independent attitude of the colony. In 1686 James II decreed the unification of New York, New Jersey, and the New England colonies into a single royal province, the Dominion of New England. Colonial resistance to the change assumed various forms. Connecticut and Rhode Island refused to yield their charters to Sir Edmund Andros, the royal governor. In Massachusetts armed rebellion broke out in 1689 following the Glorious Revolution in England. The Boston populace arrested Andros, seized control of the colonial government, and dispatched emissaries and greetings to William III and Mary II, the new English sovereigns. New York City also became the scene of rebellion in the new rulers' name led by the merchant Jacob Leisler.
The Struggle for North America
The accession of William and Mary in 1689 occasioned a complete reversal of English diplomatic policy, which under Charles II and James II had been pro-French. As a result of the change, which had immediate and long-lasting repercussions in North America, the English government now challenged the military power of France, its chief rival for colonial empire. The accession of Anne and the formation of Great Britain politically united Scotland, England, and Wales by the Act of Union (1707), thus intensifying the conflict.
The British-French Wars
The ensuing struggle, extending in successive phases for nearly a century, was fought in many parts of the world. Probably the most fiercely contested battleground in this global conflict was in North America. Here the successive phases of the conflict were known collectively as the French and Indian wars and included King William's War (1689-1697), Queen Anne's War (1702-1713), King George's War (1744-1748), and the French and Indian War (1754-1763). The French regime in North America possessed various advantages in these wars. It was highly centralized, had a well-disciplined military, and numbered most eastern Native American tribes among its allies. The British colonies by contrast rarely cooperated with one another (see Albany Congress), enjoyed few reliable alliances with the Native Americans, and demonstrated little military prowess. On the other hand, the British had vast numerical superiority from the outset; by the 1750s they had a population advantage of nearly 30 to 1 over the French.
The first three of the wars were indecisive, largely because of the diplomacy of the Iroquois, a confederation of five (later six) Native American nations located in New York, which occupied the critical middle ground between New France and the northern British colonies. The Iroquois at first pursued a policy of neutrality while offering limited military alliances to both sides; their activities helped limit the amount of land that changed hands in North America before 1750. Only the Peace of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession (known as Queen Anne's War in the colonies) in 1713, obliged the French to relinquish considerable territory, including Acadia, Newfoundland, and the region surrounding Hudson Bay.
A lapse in the Iroquois policy of neutrality brought on the last and most decisive colonial war. The Iroquois had claimed sovereignty over the Ohio River valley and had long succeeded in keeping both the French and English from establishing a permanent presence there. After 1748, however, Pennsylvania traders and Virginia land speculators gained footholds in the valley; this caused the French to build forts there to protect their access, via the river, to French settlements in the Mississippi Valley. The confrontation between England and France over control of the Ohio basin led to the final phase of the struggle, the French and Indian War.
From its modest beginnings in 1754, this war quickly escalated into a contest for domination of the continent. Although the first half of the war brought a series of disasters for the British and their colonies, after 1757 Great Britain and its allies in the European theater of the conflict dealt stunning blows to France (see Seven Years' War). In North America, the fighting in this second phase of the war was carried on mainly by the British army, aided by colonial auxiliaries. In 1759 British and colonial forces seized Québec; the following year they conquered Montréal, destroying French power in America. The remainder of the war, fought in Europe, the West Indies, India, Africa, and elsewhere, brought an almost unbroken sequence of British colonial victories that led to France's capitulation in 1763. Under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, France lost all its possessions on the North American mainland. The entire region east of the Mississippi and all the French holdings in what is now Canada were ceded to Great Britain. Spain, an ally of France during the war, surrendered Florida but was granted control of French territories west of the Mississippi.
The British colonies in America emerged from the French and Indian War with a very high regard both for the British empire and for their own military capabilities, which had been proved on the field of battle. Thus, the colonists were puzzled and anxious when the British government, in the aftermath of the war, began treating them with what they felt was unjustifiable harshness.
The Rise of Colonial Resistance
The victory over France created enormous problems for the British government. The war had virtually doubled the national public debt, and the accession of half the territory in North America had vastly compounded the problems of controlling the empire. These circumstances required new revenues, and the ruling circles in Britain believed that the colonists were best able to provide the necessary funds. Accordingly, measures to secure enforcement of the Navigation Acts were adopted by the British Parliament in 1764. In order to obtain additional revenue, Parliament also adopted, in 1765, a Stamp Act, requiring Americans to validate various documents, transactions, and purchases by buying and applying stamps issued by the royal government.
Passage of the Stamp Act aroused widespread indignation and opposition among the American colonists, especially in Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts. Protest meetings, riotous demonstrations, and other manifestations of popular hostility occurred in practically every urban center. Nearly all officials responsible for execution of the Stamp Act were forced to resign, and many of the stamps were seized and destroyed. Secret societies of patriots calling themselves Sons of Liberty were formed in numerous communities. The intercolonial upsurge against taxation without representation culminated in October 1765 in the Stamp Act Congress, the first important demonstration of American political unity. Although Parliament refused to recognize the adoption by the congress of a petition of rights, privileges, and grievances, the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766.
After a change in leadership in the British government, the policy of imposing direct taxes on the American colonies was revived in 1767. Parliament approved a series of measures, known as the Townshend Acts, which among other things, levied modest customs duties on tea, paper, lead, paint, and glass. Colonial resistance to the Townshend Acts included boycotts of British goods, intercolonial expressions of condemnation, and, in Massachusetts, open defiance of the British government by the town of Boston and the General Court. In 1768 Great Britain transferred two regiments of troops to Boston in response to the seditious sentiments prevalent in Massachusetts. However, this action merely served to intensify anti-British feelings there. Finally, on March 5, 1770, a contingent of British soldiers fired into a hostile crowd, producing the first bloodshed of the struggle. See Boston Massacre.
Primarily due to changed political circumstances in Britain, Parliament in 1770 repealed all the Townshend duties except the tax on tea, which was retained to uphold Britain's right to levy taxes on its subjects. The Americans then dropped all nonimportation measures except for a tea boycott, kept up to maintain their objections to taxation without representation. Relations returned to normal until 1773, when Parliament tried to save the English East India Company from bankruptcy by granting it a monopoly on tea sold to America. Known as the Tea Act, this measure precipitated a new crisis. The colonists, regarding the Tea Act as a measure to induce them to submit to parliamentary taxation, not only intensified the boycott but, in Boston, destroyed cargoes of tea. See Boston Tea Party.
The American Revolution
Parliamentary reaction to the events in Boston was swift and harsh. By enactments adopted in March 1774, Parliament closed the port of Boston, prohibited town meetings everywhere in Massachusetts, and imposed other odious penalties. Intercolonial indignation over this legislation, popularly known as the Intolerable Acts, paved the way for convocation, in September 1774, of the First Continental Congress. The Congress to assemble drafted a petition to the British sovereign, George III, for a redress of grievances, called for intensification of the boycott on trade with Great Britain, and completed plans for a new Congress to assemble in May 1775, in the event of British refusal to grant its demands.
The king rejected the Congress's petition and characterized the colonial protest movement as rebellion. Less than four months after that news was received in America, armed conflict broke out in Massachusetts when the royal governor, General Thomas Gage, dispatched troops against Concord, where the leaders of the resistance had concentrated arms and ammunition. On April 19, British regulars fired on a formation of patriot militia at Lexington, precipitating the first battle of the American Revolution (see Lexington, Battle of; See Also Concord, Battle of).
The Second Continental Congress convened at Philadelphia on May 10, 1775. Although it was a purely extralegal institution, the Congress proclaimed American determination to resist British aggression with armed force, provided for establishment of a Continental Army, appointed George Washington commander in chief, authorized the issuance of paper money, and assumed other prerogatives of executive authority over the colonies. Congress also appealed to the British government for a peaceful solution of the crisis, but in August, George III responded with a proclamation exhorting his "loyal subjects" to "suppress rebellion and sedition" in North America. Meanwhile, British-held Fort Ticonderoga had fallen to Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, and American troops had inflicted severe casualties on a large force of British regulars at Charlestown, Massachusetts. (See Bunker Hill, Battle of). Sentiment for a complete break with Great Britain and for national independence did not begin to emerge in the colonies until after the events at Bunker Hill. More than a year later, on July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress declared independence, and two days afterward adopted a formal statement of principle written by Thomas Jefferson justifying that action.
The Growth of the Nation
Between 1776 and 1865 the American confederation would grow from 13 to 36 component states; earn the respect of foreign nations; and greatly increase in territory, population, and wealth. The young nation would also confront serious social, economic, and political problems; the two most important were whether the authority of the federal government or that of the individual states was to prevail, and to what extent the institution of slavery should be permitted to grow in the nation. The controversy over these issues became more acute as time passed and divided the country into two antagonistic sections, the North and the South. In the mid-19th century the conflict of interests, opinions, and ideals became violent enough to threaten the very existence of the Union. Diplomacy and compromise failed, and only after a four-year civil war between the North and the South were the issues finally settled.
The Articles of Confederation
By winning the war of independence, the United States emerged successfully from its first severe test as a nation. With the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783), ending the war with Great Britain, the nation was confronted with new problems, chief of which was devising a form of government that would bind the 13 states into a strong and efficient union.
From 1776 to 1781 the states had been governed by the Continental Congress, which assumed certain executive powers-such as raising an army, borrowing money from foreign countries, and concluding treaties-in order to carry on the struggle against Great Britain. These powers in effect made the Congress a replacement for the king; they were codified shortly after independence, in an agreement known as the Articles of Confederation. The articles were approved by the Congress in 1777 and were ratified successively by the various states, concluding with Maryland in 1781. Maryland was slow to ratify because it lacked a colonial charter that conferred western lands upon it, and feared that other states (especially Virginia) that claimed vast western reserves would dominate the union. It agreed to enter the confederation only if all the states concerned ceded to the Union their western claims. The states involved agreed, and beginning with New York in 1781 and ending with Georgia in 1802, all made the necessary cessions.
The Lack of Central Power
Under the Articles of Confederation, the states explicitly retained their sovereign power, which meant that their individual legislatures remained supreme in matters of taxation and administration of justice, as provided by their own constitutions. Congress was a body in which only the states, not the people, were represented; it functioned as a large plural executive, not as a legislature. Thus, Congress could only ask the states for money to run the government, and the states might contribute or withhold funds at their pleasure. Although Congress had power to issue its own currency and to borrow money on behalf of the United States, it had no authority over the internal finances of the states, which issued currency and borrowed money on their own. In the unstable financial climate of postrevolutionary America, these limitations on its power prevented the Congress from keeping domestic peace or inspiring respect abroad.
During the period in which the articles were in force, nationalists, such as Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, worried that rivalries between the states and social conflicts within them threatened the ability of the United States to survive as a political entity. Some states, such as Rhode Island, inflated their currencies to ease the condition of their farmers, who were suffering in the depression that had followed the Revolution; others, such as Massachusetts, refused to ease the plight of the debtor class and raised taxes as a way of protecting from inflation the merchants who dominated their legislatures. In Massachusetts, this deflationary, high-tax policy led directly to a revolt by farmers, who initially resisted the authority of the state by closing the county courts, and later took up arms under the nominal leadership of a Continental Army veteran, Captain Daniel Shays.
The state government put down the uprising, but Shays' Rebellion convinced nationalists that there could be no security for people or property without a central government to exert authority over, and within, the states. The Confederation Congress was capable of governing within the sphere it had been permitted-as demonstrated by the Ordinance of 1787, which organized the national domain, known as the Northwest Territory, between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. In the aftermath of Shays' Rebellion, nationalists agitated for revision of the articles in order to expand the government's authority.
The Constitution
The more ardent nationalists, including Madison and Hamilton, believed that the Articles of Confederation would have to be discarded, but it was with the intention of revising them that Congress agreed in 1787 to permit a convention of delegates from all the states to propose amendments to the system. Meeting at Philadelphia from May to September, with George Washington as its president, the convention drew up the Constitution of the United States. Much conflict took place during the convention and immediately afterward, and important compromises had to be worked out among the contending parties before the Constitution was finally adopted by the convention. In general, the Constitution laid the foundations for an efficient national union by making the people, not the states, the parties to the agreement. Largely the work of Madison, James Wilson, Roger Sherman, and other nationalist delegates, the Constitution substituted a fully articulated government of three branches-executive, legislative, and judicial-for the weak, quasi-governmental Confederation Congress.
The Constitution became the law of the land in 1788, after 9 states (the required two-thirds) had ratified it; 12 states ratified the document by the end of 1788. On March 4, 1789, the first Congress of the United States elected under the Constitution assembled in New York City, then the national capital. On April 30, George Washington, who had been unanimously elected the first president of the United States, was inaugurated in New York City. (Rhode Island, which had sent no delegates to the Philadelphia convention, did not join the union until it ratified the Constitution in May 1790.
Financial Policies
The most outstanding achievements during Washington's first administration belonged to his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. At his prompting, Congress agreed to "fund" (that is, to pay interest in perpetuity on) the debt the United States had incurred during the American Revolution, as well as to assume responsibility for paying off the remaining debts owed by the states. These measures established the creditworthiness of the United States and left no doubt that the federal government was more important than any of the component states. He established the first Bank of the United States as a central financial authority, which, although privately owned, acted as fiscal agent for the government. Also as a result of Hamilton's efforts, Congress levied a tariff on imported goods and passed an excise tax on the production of whiskey, measures that provided revenues to carry his financial plans into effect.
The First Party Conflict
Hamilton's financial policies aroused opposition from those who felt the measures neglected the agricultural class and favored the bankers and manufacturers. The debates in Congress and elsewhere in 1790 and 1791 over Hamilton's measures revealed a distinct cleavage in the political and economic ideas of the nation, and this division soon was manifested in the formation of the first two important political parties in U.S. history: the Federalists and the Republicans (see Federalist Party; Political Parties in the United States).
Basic Differences
The Federalists advocated a strong federal government existing to serve the national interest, guided by the educated and wealthy classes. The Republicans, whose outstanding leaders were James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, believed in the ability of the common people to function as their own governmental officers and advocated strict limitation of federal powers and protection of states' rights. The Federalist Party was supported by the moneyed and commercial interests, especially merchants in the northeastern cities; the Republicans were supported mainly by farmers, particularly in the South and West, and by artisans and other urban workers.
The two parties also disagreed strongly on U.S. foreign policy. Republicans sympathized with the ideology of the French Revolution, regarding it as a notable example of people striving against tyranny, and generally favored France over Great Britain. Federalists saw the French Revolution as an example of chaotic subversion of established law and order, and favored strict neutrality. President Washington inclined toward the Federalist viewpoint and in 1793 proclaimed a policy of U.S. neutrality in the ongoing wars between Great Britain and France. Washington and his successor in the presidency, John Adams, adhered to the policy of neutrality, although both France and Britain violated U.S. neutral rights and aroused the Federalists to demand war on France and the Republicans to advocate war on Great Britain. Disputes between Great Britain and the United States arising from the French-British wars were temporarily settled by Jay's Treaty, ratified in 1795, and Adam's representatives negotiated a convention with France in September 1800 that ensured peace between that country and the United States.
Federalists Repudiated
In domestic matters, antagonism between Federalists and Republicans built up steadily after Federalist suppression of the so-called Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. Tensions finally climaxed in 1798, when the Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. These laws, designed to silence all Republican criticism of Federalist policy, struck Republicans as unconstitutional infringements on the rights of free speech and press. The Kentucky Resolutions, written by Jefferson and passed by the legislature of Kentucky, promulgated the theory of states' rights by strictly limiting the powers of the federal government and reserving to the states all powers not explicitly forbidden to them by the Constitution (see Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions). The Alien and Sedition Acts provided one of the main issues in the presidential election of 1800. Jefferson's victory over Adams signified a repudiation of the Federalist theory that government should be conducted by the "rich, the well born, and the able" and a triumph for the idea that ordinary people were fit to govern themselves. The Federalist Party, although it nominated presidential candidates through 1816, never again won a national election.
Jefferson's Presidency
Despite Federalist fears of radical reform, Jefferson left undisturbed many of the laws and institutions, such as the tariff and the Bank of the United States, that his followers had criticized. His program of simplicity and frugality in government, however, in effect dismantled the comparatively imposing national structure the Federalists had tried to construct. Under Jefferson's secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, strict economy in national expenditures was introduced; military and naval appropriations were severely cut, and 70 percent of the national revenue was applied to reducing the national debt. The most important event in Jefferson's first administration was the acquisition by the United States of the Louisiana territory, a vast realm encompassing the lands between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. Ceded to Spain in 1762 during the French and Indian War, the land had been reacquired by France in 1800 through a secret treaty. Although one of Jefferson's cardinal political principles was that the powers of the president were strictly limited by the Constitution, and the Constitution nowhere empowers the president to purchase foreign territory, Napoleon Bonaparte's offer to sell the region for a mere $15 million was of such obvious benefit to the United States that in 1803 Jefferson concluded a treaty purchasing Louisiana from France. By this act, he doubled the area of the United States. Subsequently, 14 states were wholly or partly created out of the Louisiana territory, and they added immensely to the wealth and power of the nation. See Louisiana Purchase.
Jefferson was reelected in 1804. His second administration was marked chiefly by growing tension in foreign affairs. In their intensifying wars against each other, both Great Britain and France adopted restrictive economic measures that injured neutral commerce, especially that of the United States. To force withdrawal of these measures, Jefferson had Congress pass a number of acts designed to deprive Great Britain and France of U.S. goods and to exclude their products from the United States; the most important of these measures were the Non-Importation Act (1806), the Embargo Acts (1807, 1808), and the Non-Intercourse Act (1809) (see Embargo Act).
The War of 1812
These acts, and similar measures taken in the administration of Jefferson's successor, James Madison, also a Republican, failed to change the policies of Great Britain and France and resulted in severe financial loss to U.S. merchants and shipowners. Great Britain aroused special animosity, not only because its policies damaged U.S. commerce and its officials treated U.S. diplomats rudely, but because the Royal Navy routinely stopped American merchant ships on the pretext of searching for naval deserters, and impressed many U.S. citizens into service aboard British warships. These actions aroused fervent demands for war, especially among young nationalist politicians in Congress. Reports that Britain had aided the Shawnee chief Tecumseh in his efforts to resist the territorial expansion of the United States only intensified the war fever. President Madison hoped to resolve the crisis by diplomacy, but by June 1812 he could no longer resist congressional pressure. He sent Congress a message describing the outrages committed by Great Britain, and Congress responded with a declaration of war.
The War of 1812 settled none of the issues that had brought it about; the Treaty of Ghent, which brought the war to a close in 1815, merely restored prewar conditions between the belligerents. The war nevertheless had three important results in the United States: It created a strong feeling of national union and pride; it destroyed the national political influence of the Federalists; and it ended the dominance of American political affairs by European events.
Era of Good Feeling
The strong nationalism engendered by the War of 1812 manifested itself in many ways. Congress had levied a high tariff in 1812 to raise money for the war; in 1816 it increased the already high duties of the tariff to protect the growing manufacturing industries of the nation from the great quantities of low-priced goods being imported from Great Britain. The Republican Party had always been antagonistic to the Bank of the United States, and refused to renew the bank's charter after it expired in 1811. Banking as conducted by state-chartered banks, however, proved thoroughly unsound during the War of 1812, and in 1816, in order to put an end to the chaotic financial conditions then prevailing, the Republican-dominated Congress issued a charter for the second Bank of the United States. In the decade following the War of 1812, the powers of the federal government were augmented by several important decisions of the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall, that limited various legislative and executive powers of the states. The national territory also expanded during the decade, when Spain ceded (1819) Florida (then East Florida) to the United States; West Florida, a strip of land along the Gulf of Mexico extending westward from East Florida to the mouth of the Mississippi River, had been forcibly annexed by the United States in 1810. In foreign affairs, the strong national spirit was demonstrated chiefly in the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine, a statement of policy by President James Monroe that announced the determination of the United States to prevent any further colonization by European nations in either South or North America. The statement thus implied the United States would aid the South American republics, formed in the first quarter of the 19th century by revolt from Spain, in defense of their independence.
Sectional Rivalries
This period of strong national unity, often referred to as the Era of Good Feeling, was, however, a prelude to an era of strife between various sections of the nation over economic, social, and political issues that was destined to continue for four decades and culminate in the American Civil War (1861-1865). Initially, three sections of the United States-the West, the South, and the Northeast-which had each developed different types of economic and social life and political ideas, began to struggle with one another for control of the presidency and Congress in order to secure national policies that would promote their sectional welfare. By mid-century, however, fundamental divisions between North and South about slavery overshadowed all other issues.
Westward Migration
The West, the region lying west of the Allegheny Mountains, had by this time (1824) been settled by people from the seaboard colonies or states in two successive waves of migration. The first began after the region was secured to Great Britain from the French by its victory in 1763 in the French and Indian War, and then won from Great Britain during the American Revolution chiefly by the victories of American forces under George Rogers Clark; it continued to the end of the 18th century. By the last decade of the century many sections of the frontier territories had become sufficiently populated to enter the Union. Vermont, a frontier region settled chiefly by New Englanders, became a state in 1791; Kentucky, in 1792; Tennessee, in 1796; and Ohio, in 1803. The westward movement slackened during Jefferson's first administration, which was characterized by business prosperity in the East. When restrictions on business-brought about by Jefferson's prohibitive trade acts and the War of 1812-caused economic troubles in the East, beginning about 1806, the westward movement was resumed and a second wave of migration took place. It resulted in the addition to the Union of the states of Louisiana (1812), Indiana (1816), Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818), and Alabama (1819).
Life in the frontier territories and states was laborious and dangerous. The effort to establish farms and homes on uncleared land, to subdue Native Americans, and to form communities, local governments, and finally states demanded courage, self-reliance, initiative, a belief in manifest destiny, and endurance. In the frontier regions, people were valued not for their ancestry or education but for their ability and willingness to work with their hands.
Cotton and the South
The economy and social life of the South, also an agricultural region, differed considerably from that of the West. The South was principally devoted to the growing of one crop, cotton, on large plantations with black slave labor. In contrast to the hardy, vigorous, and crude life of the people on the western frontier, the southern planters led lives characterized by aristocratic social grace and culture. Nevertheless, the West and the South, both devoted largely to agriculture, had similar interests and leaders in the early period of sectional conflict. But as time passed, the conflict between North and South over the issue of slavery and the preservation of the Union overshadowed every other sectional conflict; in this fundamental difference, the various western states took the side of the section, North or South, in which they were geographically situated.
Manufacturing and the Northeast
The economic life of the Northeast, comprising the New England states, New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania, was marked in the first two decades of the 19th century by a decrease in agricultural activity, caused largely by the migration of farmers to the cheaper and more fertile lands of the West. In addition, the shipbuilding industry and foreign trade had both been nearly ruined by the economic warfare waged by Presidents Jefferson and Madison against Great Britain and by the War of 1812. Stimulated also by the new inventions and processes of the Industrial Revolution, the Northeast became a great manufacturing center. Everywhere in the region, home industries employing manual power gave way to factories using machinery driven at first by waterpower and then by steam power; and numerous small farming towns, such as Lowell, Massachusetts, rapidly grew into industrial cities. The large cities-Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore-also began to grow at an unprecedented rate. Important to their growth were the canals and railroads that were built at the time between West and East, giving the great trading centers easier access to the products of the West. These new means of transportation replaced the crude roads that had been almost the only means of east-west travel in the first quarter of the 19th century. The Erie Canal was completed in New York State in 1825. Railroads included the Baltimore and Ohio (started in 1828) and the Mohawk and Hudson (1830; later part of the New York Central). The Northeast was conservative in politics and social life; financial and political power in the section was held by the manufacturing and mercantile classes.
The Election of 1824
The conflict between the mercantile aristocracy of the Northeast, the agricultural aristocracy of the South, and the frontier democracy of the West was first manifest in the presidential election of 1824. The three principal candidates, all members of the Republican Party, were John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, representing the conservative elements of the party; Andrew Jackson, born in South Carolina but at the time a U.S. senator from Tennessee, leader of the democratic western frontier element and the border and southern faction; and Henry Clay, born in Virginia and at the time a U.S. representative from Kentucky and the Speaker of the House, who was Jackson's rival for leadership of the West and South.
After a bitter campaign no candidate had received the required majority of electoral votes, and the House of Representatives chose Adams as president, principally because Clay exerted his influence in Adams's favor. Because Jackson had received the plurality of electoral votes, his followers claimed that the election of Adams was contrary to the will of the people, and the Republican Party split into two sections. One, the National Republican Party, followed Adams and Clay; the other, the Democratic-Republican Party, was led by Jackson, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and William H. Crawford of Georgia. During Adams's administration, the supporters of Jackson maintained a campaign of criticism of the president's policies, thereby laying a foundation for the election of Jackson in 1828.
The Tariff and Nullification
The principal controversy in the Adams administration involved the tariff question. The North favored a protective tariff. The South, which had advocated it in 1816, now opposed it. Since that year the exportation of cotton had increased so greatly (from 27 million kg/60 million lb in 1816 to 91 million kg/200 million lb in 1824) that the South had given up the idea of developing manufacturing industries in order to devote itself almost entirely to the cultivation of cotton. With no manufactures of its own that might benefit from a high tariff, the South objected to the high prices it would have to pay for manufactured goods under a high tariff. Southern leaders held that the levying of such a tariff taxed the economy of one section of the nation for the benefit of another section and asserted that this procedure was unconstitutional. The North, however, with its larger population, controlled Congress. In 1824, toward the close of James Monroe's second administration, Congress passed a tariff raising the average duty from 20 percent (already in effect per the Tariff of 1816) to 36 percent; in 1828, in Adams's administration, it passed a tariff levying even higher duties. The 1828 tariff, the so-called Tariff of Abominations, excited extreme anger in the South. Various southern leaders reiterated their claim that the law was unconstitutional and reaffirmed their belief in the right of any state to disobey any laws passed by Congress in excess of its constitutional powers, as first stated in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798.
The South did nothing, however, during the Adams administration to implement its declared right to nullify acts of Congress, hoping that Jackson would be elected president in 1828 and would favor a low tariff. Jackson did defeat Adams in 1828, but he disappointed the South by declaring that Congress was within its rights in levying a protective tariff. Then in 1832 Congress passed a new tariff bill that was again highly protective in character. Indignation over the tariff immediately precipitated drastic action by South Carolina. A convention summoned by the legislature of that state ordered its citizens not to pay the duties imposed by the tariff law and informed the federal government that it would secede from the Union if the federal government attempted to enforce the law. Jackson refused to be intimidated. He proclaimed that no state had the right to nullify a law of the United States, and he threatened military action in South Carolina to enforce the Tariff of 1832. Military conflict between South Carolina and the Union seemed imminent, but the issue was settled by compromise: Congress passed a new tariff law providing for a gradual reduction of duties over a period of ten years, until the rates were no higher than the 1816 levels, and South Carolina canceled its Ordinance of Nullification. See Nullification; Tariffs, United States.
Jackson and the Bank
Another violent sectional controversy in Jackson's first administration involved the second Bank of the United States, which had been established in 1816. Jackson was hostile to the bank, charging that it unduly favored the commercial interests of the northeastern states and was inimical to those of the state-chartered banks of the West. The West supported Jackson's point of view; the Northeast and the National Republicans, in general, supported the bank. Although the charter of the bank would not expire until 1836, the bank in 1832 applied to Congress for a renewal.
The application was a political maneuver by Henry Clay, who expected Jackson to oppose the renewal and then to be repudiated by the people in the forthcoming election. Congress passed a bill granting the renewal and Jackson did veto it. However in the election of 1832, in which the bank was the principal issue, Jackson overwhelmingly defeated Clay, the candidate of the National Republican Party. Jackson then immediately moved to destroy the bank by transferring federal funds from it to favored, or "pet," state banks. In the administration of Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren, Congress finally made the national government independent of the privately owned banking system of the country by the passage of the Independent Treasury Bill in 1840. The measure provided that government funds were thereafter to be deposited not in privately owned banks but in government subtreasuries created in important cities. The act was repealed in 1841, but a new measure with essentially the same provisions was passed in 1846.
The Whigs and the Democrats
Jackson's partisans managed his election and reelection amid great popular enthusiasm. Jackson, however, was an autocratic and arbitrary executive; he exercised such power over his cabinet and Congress that the period of his administrations is sometimes referred to as the "reign" of Andrew Jackson. Between 1834 and 1836 his enemies-including the National Republicans, northerners whom he had offended by his action against the bank, and southerners whose enmity he had incurred by his stand against nullification in South Carolina-joined to create a new political party, the Whig Party. Several years earlier, the Democratic-Republicans, led by Jackson, had dropped the second half of the party name to become the Democratic Party, still in existence today. The Democratic Party was strong enough to elect Van Buren in 1836 but was hurt by the financial panic of 1837.
Although the panic was engendered before Van Buren's administration and was caused chiefly by overspeculation in land, canals, and railroads, the ensuing business depression lasted through Van Buren's administration and so discredited the Democrats that in 1840 the Whigs elected their candidate, William Henry Harrison. Harrison died, however, a few weeks after he was inaugurated in 1841, and the vice president, John Tyler, became president. The chief aims of the Whig Party, led by Clay, were to restore the Bank of the United States and to promote a high tariff. Tyler, however, had joined the Whigs not because of his belief in their political principles but because of his enmity toward Jackson. After Congress in 1841 passed a bill to recharter the bank, Tyler vetoed it, whereupon he was ostracized by the Whig Party, some members of which tried to impeach him.
By this time, however, issues such as the tariff and the bank, which had been the cause of sectional controversy for two decades, had been superseded by a far more fundamental sectional issue, that of black slavery. The problem had been the cause of sharp controversy since the founding of the nation, and from the fourth decade of the century to the middle of the sixth, it dominated all phases of American life.
The Debate Over Slavery
The first black slaves in North America were the 20 introduced into the Virginia Colony at Jamestown in 1619. During the 17th century about 25,000 African blacks were brought into the country, and slavery was legal in all the colonies. Climatic conditions in the South were most conducive to growing the crops best suited to slave labor. The demand for cheap labor to raise cotton, the principal southern crop, caused a great increase in the number of slaves in the South, especially after the production of cotton was stimulated by the invention (1793) of the cotton gin. The North gradually united in finding the institution of slavery obnoxious on both ethical and economic grounds, and by the end of the 18th century all the states north of Maryland, except New Jersey, had provided for the abolition of slavery.
The U.S. Constitution, however, recognized the institution. Congress in its early days sometimes acted for and sometimes against slavery. By the Ordinance of 1787 it prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory; in 1793 it passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which permitted a slave owner to reclaim, from any locality in the United States and on mere proof of ownership, any slave who had escaped custody (see Fugitive Slave Laws); and in 1808 Congress forbade the further importation of slaves into the United States. Between 1791 and 1812 the Union admitted three states in which slavery was legal (Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana) and two in which slavery was prohibited (Vermont and Ohio). See Also Slavery.
Slavery and Western Expansion
Members from northern states had expressed little opposition in Congress to the admission of the above-mentioned slave states. The first serious sectional controversy over slavery took place when the Missouri Territory, in which slavery was legal, applied for statehood in 1818. The Missouri application for the first time aroused strong northern opposition to the admission of a slave state. Because Missouri was to be the first state lying entirely west of the Mississippi created from territory added to the Union since its formation, the opponents of slavery feared its admission as a slave state would serve as a precedent for admission of all future states. After a lengthy and violent controversy in Congress and throughout the country, Congress enacted the Missouri Compromise. Under this law, Missouri was to be admitted as a slave state, but slavery was to be prohibited in all other states to be created out of territory of the Louisiana Purchase above latitude 36°30' north. Accordingly, Missouri was admitted to the Union in 1821. In the previous year, Maine had been admitted as a free state to placate the opponents of slavery. Maine had been part of Massachusetts since the 17th century but a movement for separate statehood had begun in 1785.
The controversy preceding the enactment of the Missouri Compromise focused the attention of the entire country on the problem of slavery. After 1820 northern sentiment, based chiefly on ethical grounds, grew for the abolition of slavery. Proposals in the North ranged from gradual emancipation with compensation for the slave owners to immediate, unconditional emancipation. The South, feeling that the very basis of its economic and social order was threatened, passed stringent laws to keep its slaves under control. In 1840 it secured passage by Congress of the so-called gag resolution, providing that Congress would no longer consider any petition presented to it on the subject of slavery. The South also tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress mail circulation of antislavery literature, and it bitterly objected to the North's criticism of slavery.
The division of national opinion on the slavery issue grew more violent through the third decade of the century and rose to a crisis in the fourth. At that time the United States acquired large new areas of territory in the West, and a struggle at once began between North and South over whether slavery should be permitted in those regions. The new territory comprised Texas, the Oregon region, California, and New Mexico (which then consisted of the area between California on the west and Texas on the east) and extended from the Mexican border to the southern border of Oregon.
Texas and Oregon
Texas was a province of Mexico until 1836, when its inhabitants, for the most part settlers from the United States who had migrated there in large numbers since the beginning of the 19th century, concluded a successful revolt and established the Republic of Texas. The new nation desired annexation to the United States. The South, openly favoring enlargement of the national territory in which slavery was permitted, strongly advocated the annexation of Texas, where slavery was legal; the North opposed the annexation. President Tyler favored annexation, but Congress refused to ratify the agreement concluded between Texas and the United States by the secretary of state, John C. Calhoun.
The question of the annexation of Texas then became involved with that of the annexation of Oregon. By virtue of exploration and settlement, both the United States and Great Britain claimed this region, which extended northward from latitude 42° and westward from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Agreement had been made between the two nations in 1818 (renewed in 1827) to share authority over the region. In the 1840s strong sentiment arose in the United States for a division of Oregon that would give the United States undisputed possession of all the territory south of latitude 49°, while some Americans insisted on the acquisition of all land south of 54°40'. The idea of annexing Oregon at this time was particularly favored by those who desired the annexation of Texas; they felt that by the addition of Oregon, in which slavery had taken no hold, the North might be won over to the annexation of Texas, a slave region.
The presidential campaign of 1844 was fought largely on the issue of the annexation of Texas and Oregon. The Democrats favored the annexations, while the Whigs took an indefinite stand, especially on the annexation of Texas. Also active in this campaign was a third party, the Liberty Party, formed in 1839 and advocating abolition of slavery in the South. The Liberty Party attracted enough Whig votes in New York and Michigan to give these two states and the election to the Democratic candidate, James K. Polk, a strong annexationist. Action on the annexations soon followed. In December 1845 Texas was admitted to the Union; in June 1846 Great Britain and the United States concluded a treaty extending the parallel of latitude 49° North (already the boundary between the United States and Canada east of the Rocky Mountains) west from the Rockies to the Pacific, thus bringing under sole U.S. ownership all of Oregon south of the 49th parallel.
The Mexican War
The annexation of Texas brought about a dispute between the United States and Mexico, which had never recognized the independence of Texas. Mexico, insisting that it still expected to subdue its rebellious province, in 1846 refused to discuss with the United States the question of the southern boundaries of Texas and a number of other controversial matters. Feeling grew strong in both countries; each massed troops along the Río Grande, and a raid by American troops into Mexican territory led directly to war between Mexico and the United States. In this war the United States was victorious. By terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 2, 1848), Mexico, in return for $15 million, ceded California and New Mexico to the United States and agreed to recognize the Río Grande as the boundary between Texas and Mexico. By a treaty negotiated in 1853 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1854, the United States purchased from Mexico an additional strip of territory in southern Arizona; this acquisition, known as the Gadsden Purchase, completed the western territorial expansion of the conterminous United States.
The struggle between South and North to introduce or prohibit slavery in the newly acquired regions had begun even before the peace treaty with Mexico was signed. In 1846 David Wilmot, a U.S. representative from Pennsylvania, proposed an amendment, or proviso, to the appropriation bill for the expenses of the peace negotiations. He called for the prohibition of slavery in any territory to be acquired from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso was several times passed by the House but each time defeated by the Senate; although it did not become law, it served to crystallize and attract nationwide attention to the demands of the antislavery forces regarding the status of slavery in the new territories. In retaliation, the slavery interests proposed an amendment permitting slavery for the bill organizing Oregon into a national territory; the amendment was defeated, and in 1848 Oregon became a territory in which slavery was prohibited.
California and New Mexico
The next important controversy over slavery took place when President Polk in 1848 urged the civil organization of California and New Mexico, which had been under U.S. military rule since 1846. Three plans concerning slavery in these areas were advanced: to permit slavery throughout California and New Mexico; to prohibit slavery throughout the two regions; or to divide each of the two into a free and a slave section by the parallel latitude 36°30' north, as all of the Louisiana Purchase except Missouri had been divided. The discussion became so acrimonious that in the presidential election of 1848 the two principal political parties avoided committing themselves definitely on the issue. The Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass, advocated permitting each territory when it applied for statehood to determine for itself whether it wished to be slave or free; Cass called his doctrine popular sovereignty. The Whigs nominated General Zachary Taylor, a southerner who had never urged the extension of slavery. The balance of power in the election was held by a new party, the Free-Soil Party, to which most members of the Liberty Party had transferred their allegiance. The Free-Soil Party, like the Liberty Party, opposed slavery, but unlike the latter, which urged the abolition of slavery everywhere in the United States, it opposed only the extension of slavery into the territory west of the Mississippi.
The Preservation of the Union
In the election of 1848 the Free-Soilers drew away a sufficient number of votes from the Democratic Party in New York State to enable Taylor to win the state and the election. In the year following the election, the slavery and antislavery groups in Congress were so evenly divided that no solution to the problem of slavery in the newly acquired regions could be reached. At this juncture Henry Clay, in January 1850, introduced legislation that proposed a series of compromises between the demands of the two groups. After a notable series of debates in the Senate, from January to July 1850, the propositions made by Clay were passed; in their enacted form they are known as the Compromise Measures of 1850. They provided principally for California to be admitted to the Union as a free state; for the entire region ceded by Mexico east of California to be opened to settlement by both slaveholders and antislavery advocates; and for a new fugitive slave law, making much more effective the measures that could be taken by a slave owner to reclaim an escaped slave.
Passage of the Compromise Measures of 1850 was followed by a four-year truce in the slavery controversy. The belief grew throughout the country that the measures had permanently settled the problem of slavery. Although support for the compromise was stronger among Democrats than among Whigs, the Democrats' overwhelming victory in the presidential election of 1852, in which Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire was elected, was as much a result of the fragmentation of the Whig Party as it was a popular vote of confidence in the compromise. The one notable exception to its acceptance was the refusal of many people in the North to obey the fugitive slave laws and their persistence in helping fugitive slaves who reached the North to escape to Canada through secret routes known as the Underground Railroad. The northern abolitionists also kept up propaganda against slavery during the period of the truce; Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1850-1852), which powerfully presented the evils of slavery, was particularly influential in creating sentiment against the institution (see Stowe, Harriet Beecher).
The years of the truce were marked by great commercial prosperity in the United States. Principal factors contributing to this prosperity were the discovery in 1848 of gold in California; the growth in wheat production through the extension of wheat planting in Iowa, which became a state in 1846, in Wisconsin, which became a state in 1848, and in Minnesota, which became a territory in 1849; the increase of cotton production in the South and of manufactured goods in the North; and the rapid growth of railroads, which connected the northern Mississippi River basin and the eastern states. Despite general acceptance of the compromise, however, the controversy over slavery still smoldered. In 1854 it flared up again in a new form.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
In 1854 the organization of the central part of the Louisiana Purchase arose as a pivotal issue. In January Stephen A. Douglas, a U.S. senator from Illinois and a leader of the Democratic Party in the North, introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This act provided that the central part of the Louisiana Purchase be divided into two territories, Nebraska to the north, and Kansas to the south. Following the doctrine of popular sovereignty, the bill also stipulated that the territories' inhabitants would decide for themselves whether they desired the institution of slavery. Because this division contradicted the Missouri Compromise, provisions of that law would be repealed.
Many in the North felt that Douglas had sponsored the extension of slavery into hitherto inviolable territory because he hoped to gain the South's support as the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the 1856 election. Douglas, however, sought to organize the Kansas territories primarily because this would facilitate construction of a transcontinental railroad through his home state of Illinois, and repeal of the Missouri Compromise was necessary in order to gain the support of southern congressmen. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed in May 1854, it aroused the bitterest criticism and opposition to slavery that had yet appeared in the North. It increased resistance to the fugitive slave laws. It also destroyed the Whig Party by creating bitter antagonism between southern members who had supported the measure, and northern members who had opposed it. The act also brought about violent conflict in Kansas between abolitionist settlers who had emigrated from New England for the purpose of making Kansas a free state, and proslavery forces who invaded Kansas from the neighboring slave state of Missouri to vote in favor of slavery. The proslavery forces sacked and burned the antislavery town of Lawrence in May 1856, and in retaliation John Brown, a fanatical abolitionist, led a group who killed five proslavery adherents at Pottawatomie Creek.
Most importantly, the Kansas-Nebraska Act led directly to the formation of the Republican Party. The founders of the party denounced slavery as an unmitigated evil and opposed its extension; they specifically demanded the repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Fugitive Slave Law. The new party won adherents by capitalizing on the increasingly prevalent belief that the small number of wealthy slave owners, referred to as the "Slave Power," controlled the national government. The Republicans also took advantage of the northern belief that their free labor system was inherently superior to the slave labor system of the South. The new party, however, was dominated not by abolitionists, who sought an immediate end to the institution of slavery, but by Free-Soilers, who sought merely to confine slavery to its existing boundaries.
The Election of 1856
The Republican Party held its first national convention in 1856 and nominated John C. Frémont of California for president. The Democratic Party chose James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, the state that many observers believed would decide the election. A third candidate, former President Millard Fillmore, was nominated by the American Party, whose campaign stressed Fillmore's ability to restore sectional harmony. During the campaign the Republicans tried to focus public attention on Kansas, but the Democrats succeeded in portraying the Republicans as radicals bent on destroying the Union. Consequently, Buchanan carried the election. Even so, in its first national campaign the Republican Party made a remarkably good showing.
Slavery Sanctioned
President Buchanan hoped to end the agitation over the slavery question, but events in his administration brought the issue to its final crisis. The South won two important victories in the controversy. The Dred Scott decision (see Dred Scott Case) issued in 1857 by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the obiter dictum opinion of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney of Maryland, sanctioned the institution of slavery by declaring that slaves were property and not citizens and that Congress had no right to prohibit slavery in the territories. In December of the same year the proslavery element in Kansas managed by fraud to have the state adopt the proslavery Lecompton Constitution, and although a majority of the citizens of the territory opposed the constitution, President Buchanan recommended to the Senate that Kansas be admitted as a state under its provisions. The bill to bring this about was passed by the Senate but defeated by the House. (Kansas was finally admitted to the Union as a free state in 1861.) A series of debates in 1858 between the two aspirants for the office of senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, centered the attention of the entire country as never before on the political and moral aspects of the problem of slavery. In these debates, Douglas advocated popular sovereignty, while Lincoln stood for congressional control of slavery in the territories. Douglas won the election, but the debates established Lincoln as the leader of the Republican Party in the West.
Lincoln Elected
By this time the South was no longer satisfied with the doctrine of popular sovereignty; its leaders demanded that Congress protect slavery wherever it existed in the country and in all the territories where it did not yet exist. Southern Democrats insisted on the endorsement of this sentiment at the party's April 1860 convention at Charleston, South Carolina. Northern Democrats led by Douglas won the adoption of a platform advocating popular sovereignty in the territories, however, whereupon the southern group bolted the convention. In June the regular Democrats nominated Douglas, while the southern wing nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. The Republicans, with a platform hostile to slavery in the territories, nominated Abraham Lincoln. A fourth party, the Constitutional Union Party, sought sectional reconciliation by taking no position on slavery and declaring support only for the Constitution, the Union, and law enforcement; its candidate was John Bell of Tennessee. Lincoln won the election, although he received less than 40 percent of the popular vote.
Secession and War
The election of 1860 proved that the commanding position in national affairs now belonged to the North, and the South felt that henceforth all important economic and social issues would be settled according to the principles and needs of the North. The South was especially fearful for the future of slavery. Although the Republican Party declared it had no intention of interfering with slavery in the southern states, the South felt that nothing would prevent the party from becoming controlled by abolitionists intent on eliminating slavery from the Union. The election convinced the leaders of the South that thereafter the welfare of their section would not be satisfactorily protected if the southern states remained a part of the federal Union, and they immediately acted to withdraw from it. On December 20, 1860, by action of the convention called by the state legislature, South Carolina seceded from the Union. A few days later military forces of the state laid siege to the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor. The lead of South Carolina was followed within a month by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia and later by Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
On February 4, 1861, delegates from six of the seceding states met at Montgomery, Alabama, and formed a provisional government under the title of the Confederate States of America. Subsequently, several unsuccessful attempts were made to resolve by compromise the issues that were steadily driving North and South to war. Lincoln, in his inaugural address on March 4, 1861, made his position clear: He did not intend to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed; at the same time, he declared that no state had the right to leave the Union as and when it pleased. On April 12, the besiegers of Fort Sumter began a bombardment of the fort, which surrendered two days later. On April 15 Lincoln called upon the loyal states for 75,000 volunteers to defend the Union. The American Civil War, often referred to in the postbellum period as the War of the Rebellion and, in the South, as the War Between the States, had begun. For a detailed account of the war's progress, See Civil War, American.
The Postwar Period
The Civil War settled the two great problems that had been agitating the nation almost since its foundation. The North's victory assured permanent union based on the supremacy of the nation over the states. In addition, although the war was fought primarily to preserve the Union, as the conflict proceeded, the North also included in its war aims the abolition of slavery. Acts passed by Congress in 1862 abolished slavery in the territories. Calling abolition a military necessity, President Lincoln, on January 1, 1863, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared free all the slaves in the rebellious states. Finally on December 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery in all the states and territories of the United States, was ratified.
Supremacy of the Republican Party
The dominance of Republicans in national affairs marked the postwar period. The party remained in control of both houses of Congress until 1875 and of the presidency from 1869 until 1885. (President Andrew Johnson was a border-state Democrat who had been elected vice president on Lincoln's Union ticket in 1864.) The war hero Ulysses S. Grant won the White House as a Republican in 1868 and 1872. He was followed by Republicans Rutherford B. Hayes, president from 1877 to 1881, James A. Garfield (1881), and Chester A. Arthur (1881-1885). Their policies generally favored the interests of big business and, especially in the Grant administration, were tolerant of corruption.
Reconstruction
The first issue that the nation faced after the Civil War was determining how to bring the seceded states back into the Union. The question, which had emerged even during the war, at once became a matter of contention between the president and the Congress. Lincoln's wartime plan for Reconstruction of the southern states was to readmit them on liberal and easy terms, but the conditions that Congress wished to impose were much more severe. Andrew Johnson, who became president on April 15, 1865, after the assassination of Lincoln, initially espoused views on Reconstruction similar to those that Lincoln had voiced during the war. However, his attempt to put them into effect without consulting Congress, as well as his tolerance of southern violence against the freed slaves, brought about a series of bitter disputes between the executive and legislative branches of the national government. The quarrel was won by Congress, which overrode the president's veto and passed its own plan, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. By this plan, most of the South was divided into five military districts, each supervised by a Union major general in command of a detachment of troops. Suffrage was granted to the black male population; and by the third section of the 14th Amendment (adopted 1868) to the Constitution, the former political leaders of the South were denied participation in the various state governments set up by the Reconstruction Acts.
The resulting Reconstruction governments provoked great resentment in the South. Most white southerners claimed that the blacks who won office during Reconstruction were incapable of running the government. Southerners also contended that the white northerners who had moved to the South and earned positions in the Reconstruction governments sought only to plunder southern treasuries (see Carpetbaggers). These charges, however, were generally untrue. Although economic opportunism and official corruption were certainly facts of life in the South, they were no more prevalent than elsewhere in the nation. Southerners simply were unwilling to accept any form of government in which blacks and northerners played a significant role. They attempted to disrupt the Reconstruction governments with outbreaks of violence and through intimidation, orchestrated principally by the secret society known as the Ku Klux Klan. The North eventually grew tired of imposing Reconstruction by force, and by 1877 white southerners had regained control of all their state governments.
Influence of Big Business
Because of the alliance between financial interests and the Republican Party machine, Republican rule during the first two decades after the Civil War resulted in a period of unparalleled favoritism to big business. For example, government policy under Republican control unduly favored the organizers of new railroad enterprises in the West. In 1862 Congress chartered five railroads in the Far West, and it subsequently granted these railroads large loans and huge tracts of far western territory; the Northern Pacific Railroad alone received 18.8 million hectares (47 million acres) of land.
Also during this period, a series of frauds was perpetrated, notably during the administration of President Grant (see Whiskey Ring). Unscrupulous politicians in alliance with corrupt business executives stole from both the public treasury and the public domain. By the Homestead Act of 1862, which was intended to encourage western migration, the government gave 65 hectares (160 acres) of land free to any head of a family who contracted to cultivate the tract for five years; millions of acres, however, were placed fraudulently into the hands of so-called land sharks. Even the epoch-making achievement of building the 2900-km (1800-mi) railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Coast (finished on May 10, 1869), which completed the first American transcontinental railroad route, was tainted with fraud. See Crédit Mobilier of America.
Reform Movements
In moves to counter this state of affairs, a dissident group within the Republican Party, called the Liberal Republicans, initiated (1870-1872) a movement to bring about civil service reform, to reduce the protective tariff that was causing high prices, and to withdraw the federal troops upholding the black Republican state governments in the South; the group also condemned the corruption in the national government. In the election of 1872 the Liberal Republicans nominated the newspaper editor Horace Greeley for president. Although he was also the nominee of the Democratic Party, he was defeated by Grant, the Republican candidate.
Outside the party, a strong protest movement arose among American farmers against the economic burdens imposed on the agricultural classes of the West and elsewhere by the railroads, particularly in the form of high freight rates charged to carry crops and supplies (see Granger Movement). A movement to bring about labor reforms and currency reforms that would make more money available to the debtor classes, especially the farmers, resulted in the formation of the Greenback Party, later called the Greenback-Labor Party. In 1876 the Greenback Party nominated the philanthropist Peter Cooper for president, but he received only 1 percent of the vote. The election of 1876 was won by the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes after a bitter struggle with his Democratic opponent Samuel J. Tilden.
Hayes's Administration
Hayes was not a machine politician; his administration was marked by his efforts to inaugurate various reforms, all of which were opposed by most other party leaders. For instance, he withdrew the federal troops still supporting carpetbag governments in the South (in Louisiana and South Carolina), although his action meant that the governments of these states would immediately come under the control of the Democratic Party. Hayes's administration was also notable for two financial measures. One measure, passed despite Hayes's veto, was the Bland-Allison Act of 1878, which answered the demands of western silver-mine owners who desired a market for their product and of western farmers and others who desired an increased amount of currency in circulation. By this act, the U.S. government agreed to purchase at least $24 million worth of silver annually from the miners and to coin the supply into silver dollars. The second measure was the resumption by the U.S. Treasury in 1879 of specie payment-that is, payments in gold for outstanding paper money; such payments, suspended during the Civil War, increased faith in the credit of the United States.
Largely because of his opposition to the Republican machine, Hayes refused renomination by the Republicans in 1880. At the convention, however, an inconclusive contest between the two machine candidates, Grant and James G. Blaine, led to the nomination of a compromise candidate, James A. Garfield. Garfield was elected over the Democratic candidate, Winfield S. Hancock, and once in office, he opposed the Republican machine leaders, principally by refusing to make federal appointments according to their orders. On July 2, 1881, Garfield was shot by a disappointed office-seeker, Charles J. Guiteau, and died on September 19; he was succeeded by the Vice President, Chester A. Arthur, who was faithful to the party machine.
Reemergence of the Democratic Party
During Arthur's administration, several off-year elections in which the Democratic Party won important state offices alerted the Republican Party to the growing dissatisfaction with its partisan policies; notable among these Democratic victories was the election of Grover Cleveland as governor of New York. The Republican Party sought to placate this dissatisfaction by passing in 1883 a civil service reform bill, but national feeling had so turned against the Republican Party by 1884 that for the first time since 1856 the Democrats won the presidency. Grover Cleveland defeated the Republican nominee, James G. Blaine, after a campaign remarkable for the rancor with which the two parties attacked each other.
Domestic Affairs (1885-1920)
President Cleveland in his first administration (1885-1889) was confronted with five major domestic problems: the federal civil service, federal pensions, labor unrest, abuses in the business methods of the railroads, and the Treasury surplus and the tariff.
Cleveland was a strong advocate of a federal civil service with appointments based on merit. He often rejected the demands of Democratic Party leaders for federal jobs, earning him the animosity of party members. Eventually he agreed to remove arbitrarily numerous officeholders and to select replacements based on service to the Democratic Party; however, he did add 12,000 positions to the group based on merit. The administration was plagued by numerous private pension bills passed by Congress, chiefly in favor of Civil War veterans who could not get on the regular pension rolls; Cleveland vetoed more than 200 of these bills.
Beginnings of the Labor Movement
Cleveland's administration was also noted for the emergence of labor as an organized economic and political force in the United States. Trade unions were formed on a national scale between 1861 and 1866; and the first attempt to unite all trade unions into one federation took place in 1866, with the organization of the National Labor Union (see Trade Unions in the United States), which was disbanded in 1872 because of internal strife. It was succeeded by the Knights of Labor, organized in 1869. By 1886 this body was a national organization with more than 700,000 members. Its policy was to demand of state and national governments laws to ameliorate injustices inflicted on the working class by contemporary economic conditions and practices. In Cleveland's administration, labor for the first time in the United States made vigorous claims, through demands for higher wages and shorter hours, to a larger share of the national income than it had previously enjoyed. Such demands resulted in unprecedented conflict between capital and labor; in 1886 and 1887 an estimated 3000 strikes took place in the United States. The strike at the McCormick reaper works in Chicago occasioned the violent Haymarket Square Riot, which dampened support for the labor movement.
Railroad Regulation and the Tariff
In Cleveland's administration also, much criticism was directed at the railroads, which had practically a monopoly of freight transportation on western routes and practiced extortion and discrimination in setting freight rates. In 1887, as the result of agitation for federal control of the railroads, the U.S. Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act to regulate railroads, establishing a precedent for similar regulation of other interstate commercial enterprises.
The most important issue in Cleveland's administration, however, was the tariff. On taking office, the president found a surplus of nearly $500 million in the Treasury; this sum had accumulated because of the high protective tariffs that had prevailed since the Civil War. Cleveland felt that bringing about a reduction in the tariff was in the interest of consumers and taxpayers; such a reduction would discourage Congress from making extravagant appropriations and would also lower prices on many commonly used commodities. Through his influence, the House of Representatives passed a bill reducing the tariff by 7 to 8 percent, but the bill was not passed in the Senate. The tariff was the principal issue of the presidential campaign of 1888. Although Cleveland was actually a proponent of a low tariff, the Republican Party made it appear that he favored a free-trade policy that would enable British manufacturers to undersell U.S. manufacturers in the U.S. market. Using this tactic, the Republican Party successfully brought about the election of Benjamin Harrison.
The Harrison Administration
Harrison's administration brought a reversal of the financial policies of Grover Cleveland. Congress disposed of the Treasury surplus by making large appropriations for pensions, naval vessels, lighthouses, coast defenses, and other projects. It also passed the McKinley Tariff Act, which raised the already high protective duties and resulted in higher prices for many household commodities. In order to gain the support of the West for the bill, Congress in 1890 passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, by which the government agreed to buy 4,500,000 oz (130,000 kg) of silver every month and to issue paper money equaling the full amount purchased. Also in 1890 Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, which declared illegal "every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade." Although the nation favored this measure, it reacted against the higher prices brought about by the McKinley Act by electing a Democratic Congress in 1890. In 1892 former Democratic President Grover Cleveland won his second term. A feature of the campaign was the emergence of a new political party-the People's Party, usually known as the Populist Party-formed principally by western farmers and workers who were members of the Farmers' Alliances or of the American Federation of Labor. The People's Party nominee for president, James Baird Weaver of Iowa, ran on a platform that included demands for the free coinage of silver, government ownership of important utilities, and election of U.S. senators by popular vote.
The Second Cleveland Administration
Cleveland's second administration was marked by increasing conflict between the interests of the agricultural reformers, whose followers lived in the West, and those of the large bankers and manufacturers of the country, the seat of whose enterprises was generally in the East. Those who expected Cleveland and his solidly Democratic Congress to effect the financial and economic reforms demanded by the West suffered disappointment. Although pledged to a tariff for revenue only, Congress yielded to the desires of senators devoted to protecting the interests of large corporations or trusts by passing another high protective tariff. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the income tax law. (The burdens of this tax, which had been much stiffened in 1894, had fallen on the comparatively wealthy.) Besides legislation and judicial decisions that displeased the West, the administration saw a period of industrial depression, high prices, widespread unemployment, lockouts, and strikes.
The most important strike was that in 1894 of the employees of the Pullman Company, who were led by the American Railway Union. The strike was called to protest unfair working conditions at the Chicago-based Pullman Company, a manufacturer of railroad sleeping cars. It resulted in violence, the deaths of workers, and the destruction of property. President Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to restore order, and the federal courts issued an injunction to break the strike. Several of the strike leaders were imprisoned, including labor leader Eugene V. Debs. Among working classes, particularly the Populists and the more radical Democrats, the episode resulted in increasing discontent with the administration. This dissatisfaction was expressed at the Democratic convention of 1896. Dominated by the radical elements of the West, the convention issued a platform demanding, among other things, the free and unlimited coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1 see Bimetallism, and an end to government by federal injunction, as in the Pullman strike. The Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan for president; the Republicans, William McKinley. The chief issue of the campaign, in which the economic interests of West and East were sharply opposed, was the silver question. After a strenuous contest, McKinley defeated Bryan.
The McKinley Administrations
The principal event of McKinley's first administration was the Spanish-American War (1898), fought over the issue of the liberation of Cuba. The United States was victorious in the war, and Spain relinquished Cuba and ceded to the United States the Philippine Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Expansion of the nation to include regions outside of the North American continent was denounced as imperialism by the Democratic Party, and became the principal issue of the 1900 presidential campaign. The nation, however, supported the policy of expansion as carried out by the McKinley administration; in the election McKinley again defeated Bryan, this time by a popular majority of almost 1 million votes and by 292 electoral votes to 155. In September 1901 McKinley was assassinated by a crazed anarchist, and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt became president. His administrations marked a new attitude held by a section of the Republican Party toward the important social, political, and economic questions of the time, and led gradually to a sharp split in the party.
Theodore Roosevelt and Progressivism
Theodore Roosevelt, like Jackson and Lincoln, believed that the president had the duty of initiating and leading Congress to implement a policy of social and economic benefit to the people at large. As he himself put it, he found the presidency "a bully pulpit." Roosevelt's policies, designed to secure a greater measure of social justice in the United States, were outlined in his first message to Congress, on December 3, 1901. Roosevelt's address included demands for federal supervision and regulation of all interstate corporations; for amendment of the Interstate Commerce Act to prohibit railroads from giving special rates to shippers; for the conservation of natural resources; for federal appropriations for irrigation of arid regions in the West; and for extension of the merit system in civil service.
President Roosevelt was particularly noted for his policy regarding the trust, a type of business combination that forms for the purpose of reducing competition and controlling prices. The number of trusts in the United States had increased greatly at the end of the 19th century; only 60 had existed in the United States before the Spanish-American War, whereas 183 were formed between 1899 and 1901. Many of the trusts had practical monopolies of vital commodities such as oil, beef, coal, and sugar or of important utilities such as the railroads. Roosevelt recognized the right of such combinations to exist, but he also insisted on the right of the government to control and regulate the trusts. At his urging, Congress passed several measures designed to help enforce the antitrust laws already on the statute books. Among the new laws were the Elkins Act (1903), aimed at eliminating the discriminatory practice of secret rebates given by various railroads to certain shippers, and the Hepburn Act (1906), aimed at strengthening the Interstate Commerce Commission in its authority over railroads and other public carriers. During his administrations (after completing McKinley's administration, Roosevelt was elected in 1904), the Department of Justice instituted 43 suits against the trusts and won several important judicial decisions, including one ordering the dissolution of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey as a holding company with a monopoly on oil refining.
Other domestic reforms in Roosevelt's program, which he called the Square Deal, were his expansion of forest reserves and national parks; the appointment of the National Conservation Commission in 1908 to promote further conservation; and the passage of the Meat Inspection Act. Also passed was the first of the Pure Food and Drug Acts, which followed a federal investigation of packing-house conditions prompted by revelations made in Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle (1906) (see Sinclair, Upton Beall). Roosevelt gained worldwide importance through his dramatic speeches and actions as president, his inauguration of the building of the Panama Canal, and his activities in ending the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). Roosevelt declined to run for reelection in 1908 and the Republicans nominated his secretary of war, William Howard Taft, based on Roosevelt's recommendation. Taft easily defeated his Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan.
The Taft Administration
The Republican platform of 1908, like the Democratic platform of that year, called for a downward revision of the tariff. Nonetheless, the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act, which Congress passed in 1909, was still a high protective tariff. A pronounced split over the tariff questions and other issues developed in the Republican Party during Taft's administration. On one side was the conservative element, the so-called standpatters, who wanted a high tariff and opposed the kind of reforms initiated by Roosevelt. On the other side were the so-called insurgents, later known as progressives, who denounced the high rates of the Payne-Aldrich tariff as a betrayal of the promises made in the Republican platform and criticized the administration for refusing to continue the reforms begun by Roosevelt. Former President Roosevelt openly sided with the progressives; he supported not only tariff revision but other political and economic reforms such as direct primaries, the recall, and an income tax.
In January 1911 the Republican senator from Wisconsin, Robert M. La Follette, organized the National Republican Progressive League to take political action for the principles of the progressive element in the Republican Party. By 1912 the progressives had elected several governors in western states. Standpatters and progressive Republicans engaged in a bitter battle for control of the Republican national convention of June 1912. Defeated in their efforts to seat their delegates, the progressives, led by Roosevelt, bolted the convention and in August organized the Progressive Party. Popularly known as the Bull Moose Party, the progressives nominated Roosevelt for president and Governor Hiram W. Johnson of California for vice president. The regular Republican convention had nominated Taft, and the Democratic Party nominated Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey. Because of the split in the Republican ranks, Wilson won decisively.
Wilson and the New Freedom
Woodrow Wilson, like Roosevelt, believed that the presidency should be used for initiating and guiding national legislation in accordance with the chief executive's interpretation of the will of the people. In his inaugural address, he announced his dedication to the task of improving the national life in all possible aspects. Wilson's social, economic, and political policies as a unit are sometimes known as the New Freedom, from the title of a volume by him published in 1913 and containing significant passages from his addresses in the campaign of 1912. Displaying unusual executive ability and skillful control of his cabinet and Congress during most of his two terms in office (he was reelected in 1916), Wilson succeeded in carrying out notable revisions and reforms in the laws governing the tariff, the banking system, trusts, labor, and agriculture.
Under Wilson's guidance and urging, Congress in 1913 passed the Underwood Tariff Act, which provided for a general decrease in the Payne-Aldrich tariff schedules and for an income tax to bring in sufficient revenue to compensate for any loss in national revenue occasioned by the lower tariff duties. To provide the means for furnishing an elastic currency-that is, one that could be readily expanded or contracted to suit the national need, and to establish more effective general supervision of banking than existed at the time, Wilson actively advocated the passage by Congress of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which resulted in the organization of the Federal Reserve System. Also in 1913 the 17th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, requiring that U.S. senators be elected by popular vote rather than by state legislatures.
Wilson considered private monopoly "indefensible and intolerable" and prevailed on Congress in 1914 to pass two important pieces of legislation in regard to trusts. One established the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and prevent unfair methods of business competition; the second was the Clayton Antitrust Act, designed primarily to punish those guilty of employing such unfair methods. The Clayton Act also exempted all labor unions and agricultural associations from the provisions of the antitrust laws; prohibited, in most instances, the use of the injunction in labor disputes; and expressed the principle that strikes, peaceful picketing, and boycotts do not violate the federal laws. Other measures to protect labor passed during Wilson's administration include the La Follette Act, which regulated working conditions for seamen on U.S. ships; laws providing an eight-hour working day for railroad workers on interstate lines; and the prohibition of child labor under certain conditions. The Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 established 12 federal land banks to make money available for long-term farm mortgages at reasonable rates.
Wilson also achieved a victory in domestic affairs when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which legalized women's voting rights, was passed in 1919 and ratified in 1920 (see Woman Suffrage).
The most important issues of Wilson's first and second terms, however, were those arising from the outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914, the entrance of the United States into the war in 1917, and the making of peace in 1919. For discussion of these issues, see "World War I," below.
Foreign Affairs (1865-1920)
The period included in the following summary of the foreign relations of the United States may be divided into three parts. In the first, from 1865 to 1898, U.S. foreign policy was determined principally by the attitudes and actions of foreign governments. U.S. foreign policy during these three decades was strongly nationalistic; it did not concern itself with world issues, nor did it enable the United States to play an important part in world affairs. As a result of the Spanish-American War, however, the United States acquired territorial possessions outside its continental area, giving the nation problems of colonial government and control that, together with other factors, compelled it to assume an increasing role in world affairs. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought a period of diplomatic conflict between the United States and Great Britain and between the United States and Germany; in 1917 the United States was finally drawn into the war against Germany and its allies. The United States was influential in the writing of the Treaty of Versailles, which formally ended the war in 1919. The U.S. Senate's rejection of the treaty and of U.S. membership in the League of Nations, the covenant for which formed part of the treaty, temporarily reversed the tendency toward U.S. involvement in world affairs.
The Influence of Foreign Governments (1865-1898)
During the American Civil War, both France and Great Britain sought to profit by the federal government's preoccupation with its conflict with the South. France's Napoleon III ignored the U.S. Department of State's protests that he was violating the Monroe Doctrine when, in 1863, he made Maximilian, archduke of Austria, the emperor of Mexico. In 1864 he supported with French troops Maximilian's invasion of Mexico. After the close of the Civil War, however, more vigorous U.S. objections resulted in the withdrawal in 1867 of the French forces. Maximilian lost his throne and was executed by rebellious subjects. Great Britain during the Civil War had permitted construction in British shipyards of Confederate cruisers, which inflicted severe losses on northern shipping. The United States sought damages from Great Britain to compensate for the losses caused by the Confederate ships, particularly the cruiser Alabama (see Alabama Claims). In contrast to France and Great Britain during the Civil War, Russia was friendly to the United States. The amicable Russo-American relations of the period led in 1867 to the U.S. purchase from Russia of Alaska, then known as Russian America; the United States paid $7.2 million in gold for the territory.
Expansion in the Pacific
The last quarter of the 19th century also witnessed a number of disputes between the United States and Great Britain. These disputes included the Bering Sea Controversy, a dispute over U.S. fishing rights in waters off Canada and Alaska, which caused friction between Canada and the United States until the matter was arbitrated during the administration of Cleveland; and a dispute that arose when the United States felt that Great Britain was attempting, despite the Monroe Doctrine, to add Venezuelan territory to British Guiana (now Guyana). The Venezuelan boundary question was so sharply disputed by the diplomats of Great Britain and the United States that war fever was engendered in both countries; the matter was finally settled in 1897 by arbitration, largely in favor of Great Britain. The last third of the century was also marked by the U.S. acquisition of harbor privileges in the Samoan Islands, and in 1899 by the acquisition of the island of Tutuila (see American Samoa). In 1893 a revolution in the Hawaiian Islands was led by U.S. sugar planters, who had acquired large interests there since earlier in the century. The revolt resulted in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the subsequent annexation of the island group by the United States in 1898. In the last half of the century the United States also acquired several additional islands in the Pacific, including Wake Island and Midway.
Confrontation with Spain
The outstanding conflict with a foreign government in the second half of the 19th century was that with Spain over the island of Cuba. During the Ten Years' War (1868-1878) between Spain and its Cuban subjects, a Spanish warship captured the U.S. steamer Virginius, which was bringing supplies to the Cuban insurgents. The Spanish executed some of the crew, including eight U.S. citizens. Called the Virginius Affair, this incident aroused considerable ill-feeling in the United States against Spain. Matters came to a climax when the U.S. battleship Maine, lying in the harbor of Havana to protect U.S. citizens in Cuba, was blown up on February 15, 1898, killing 260 people. Although it could not be determined at the time whether the Maine was blown up by the Spanish, by Cuban action, or by internal combustion, U.S. opinion placed the blame on Spain. (A U.S. Navy study published in 1976 suggested that spontaneous combustion in the ship's coal bunkers caused the explosion.) On April 19, 1898, Congress adopted a resolution that recognized Cuba's independence, demanded that Spain withdraw from Cuba, and authorized the president to use force to carry out the resolution; this was practically a declaration of war against Spain.
In the brief war that ensued, the United States won a decisive victory (see Spanish-American War). The Treaty of Paris, which concluded the conflict on December 10, 1898, provided for the independence of Cuba; the cession by Spain to the United States of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands; and the payment to Spain of $20 million by the United States for the Philippines. The acquisition by the United States of distant territories was denounced by many Americans as imperialism, and considerable opposition to the treaty was expressed in the Senate before that body finally ratified it. That the American people on the whole agreed with President McKinley's policy of territorial expansion was made clear by his victory over Bryan in the election of 1900, in which this policy was one of the principal issues.
After the Spanish-American War
The conclusion of the Spanish-American War confronted the United States with the problem of organizing and administering Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Cuba, which had won its independence from Spain and was under U.S. occupation. The United States held a protectorate over Cuba until 1902. After the Cubans had incorporated into their constitution a number of provisions insisted on by the United States for its own military and commercial advantage, and had held elections, the U.S. occupation forces in 1902 turned Cuba over to its first president, Tomás Estrada Palma. In Puerto Rico, by terms of the Foraker Act, Congress in 1900 set up a civil government, and the Jones Act of 1917 granted U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans. In the Philippines, insurgents led by Emilio Aguinaldo initially resisted the U.S. occupation, but the last guerrillas gave up in 1902. The Jones Act of 1916 instituted an elected senate and promised eventual independence; however, not until July 4, 1946, did the Philippines become a sovereign state.
"Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick"
During the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt, the foreign policy of the United States was aggressive, in keeping with Roosevelt's motto, "Speak softly and carry a big stick." In the Caribbean area, in East Asia, and elsewhere, U.S. policies were vigorously stated and enforced by diplomatic or military action when necessary. When U.S. naval units in the Pacific were needed in the Caribbean Sea during the Spanish-American War, they were forced to steam down the coast of South America, around Cape Horn, and then northward. This circuitous route proved the necessity of an ocean-to-ocean canal either in Nicaragua or the Isthmus of Panama, which for reasons of national defense would be under exclusive U.S. control. On the initiative of President Roosevelt, the United States in 1903 concluded the Hay-Herrán Treaty with Colombia, of which Panama was then a province, granting the United States a long-term lease over a zone 16 km (10 mi) wide in Panama. The Colombian senate rejected the treaty, whereupon a rebellion broke out in Panama. With the active support of the United States, Panama became an independent republic. By the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903 with the new Republic of Panama, the United States obtained in perpetuity, the 16-km zone it required for a canal. In return the United States made Panama an initial payment of $10 million and agreed to an annual payment of $250,000. Construction of the canal was begun at once and completed in 1914. (By treaties ratified in 1978, the United States relinquished the Panama Canal Zone in 1979 and will hand over the canal itself to Panama in the year 2000.) See Panama Canal.
At the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, Roosevelt secured the recognition by the belligerents of the neutrality of all of China with the exception of Manchuria. He also kept France and Germany from helping Russia. In 1905, Roosevelt's mediation brought about the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the war. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his accomplishments
The foreign policy of the United States during the administration of Woodrow Wilson was concerned with four principal problems: Japanese protest against the California Landholding Act, or Webb Act, of 1913; British objection to U.S. policy regarding tolls for the Panama Canal; the Mexican situation; and World War I.
Relations with Japan and Britain
By the Webb Act, California denied to Japanese the right to acquire land or long leaseholds. Japan protested that this act violated rights given it by treaty with the national government, but the federal government disclaimed the power to interfere with state laws such as the act in question. By the Tolls Act of 1912, the United States levied tolls on all vessels using the Panama Canal excepting those of U.S. registry employed in coastwise trade. Great Britain protested that the act violated treaty rights that had guaranteed equality of treatment in the Panama Canal for the ships of all nations. President Wilson desired to avoid friction with Great Britain while engaged in controversy with Japan and was also eager to obtain British support for U.S. policy in Mexico. At his urging, and for other reasons, Congress repealed the act in 1914.
United States Actions Against Mexico
Since 1910 the situation in Mexico had caused the U.S. government great concern. In 1911 the dictator Porfirio Díaz had been overthrown by a revolution led by the reformer Francisco Madero. Madero, whose efforts to bring about reforms in Mexico were viewed sympathetically by the United States, was murdered in 1913, and General Victoriano Huerta seized the government and ruled as a dictator. Although 22 of the 27 Mexican states supported Huerta, and 26 foreign nations recognized him as president of Mexico, Wilson refused to recognize him. Wilson maintained that the new regime had brought about the murder of Madero and was, in addition, too weak to keep order in Mexico. In 1914 the United States aided General Venustiano Carranza, the leader of a revolution against Huerta, by allowing Carranza to obtain arms in the United States. Huerta retaliated by acts of reprisal against U.S. nationals, and the United States countered by forcibly occupying Veracruz; the landing operations there cost 17 American lives.
In an attempt to prevent war between Mexico and the United States, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile (the so-called ABC powers) mediated an agreement that resulted in the resignation of Huerta and the assumption of power by Carranza, whose government the United States recognized in 1915. A number of rebellions had been in progress against Carranza; all the leaders of these but one, Francisco (Pancho) Villa, now laid down their arms. Villa still refused to obey Carranza's authority. He also attacked foreigners, and in 1916 led a raid into Columbus, New Mexico, killing 16 people and partly destroying the town by fire. With the permission of Carranza, the United States sent into Mexico a military force under General John J. Pershing to find and punish Villa. He eluded pursuit. Carranza, fearing that the U.S. force might be used against his government, demanded its withdrawal, and the expedition was recalled without accomplishing its purpose.
World War I
The most difficult and far-reaching problems of foreign policy that arose in Wilson's administration were caused by World War I. At the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1914 between the Central Powers and the Triple Entente, President Wilson formally proclaimed the neutrality of the United States. His proclamation was not sufficient, however, to prevent strong partisan feeling from arising in the country, nor could it prevent difficulties with both warring groups in respect to U.S. neutral rights. The United States charged that Great Britain, in the course of maintaining a blockade against the Central Powers, was interfering with U.S. shipments to other neutral nations and was in other ways violating U.S. neutral rights at sea. The British replies to these protests, although not entirely satisfactory, were sufficiently reasonable and conciliatory to mollify U.S. public opinion.
German Submarine Warfare
The dispute between the United States and Germany was far more serious. In order to prevent food, munitions, and other supplies from reaching Great Britain, Germany in 1915 declared the waters surrounding Great Britain and Ireland a war zone in which German submarines would sink all enemy vessels without the visit or search stipulated by international law. To avoid the possibility that neutral vessels might be sunk by mistake, or that neutrals might be killed, Germany warned neutral ships not to enter the zone. They also advised citizens of neutral nations not to travel on ships of the Allied nations. Germany remained intransigent in the face of U.S. protests against this declaration. In May 1915 a German submarine torpedoed the British passenger liner Lusitania off the Irish coast without warning, causing the deaths of 1198 people, of whom 128 were U.S. citizens. The Germans asserted that the Lusitania was carrying munitions to Britain, and later research has proven this to be true. But the American public was outraged by the sinking, and strong protests by the U.S. State Department brought a promise from Germany not to sink any passenger liners without taking precautions to protect the lives of noncombatants.
United States Enters the War
In March 1916, however, a German submarine sank an unarmed French Channel steamer, the Sussex, with the loss of two Americans. President Wilson threatened to sever diplomatic relations with the German government unless it abandoned "its present methods of submarine warfare against passenger and freight-carrying vessels." In May the German government pledged not to sink merchant vessels without warning and without saving the lives of those aboard. For nine months the pledge was kept generally to the satisfaction of the United States. Wilson's vigorous diplomacy seemed to have averted war with Germany, and as the Democratic candidate in the presidential election of 1916, Wilson was elected over the Republican nominee, Charles Evans Hughes, largely because "he kept us out of war." The war, however, was imminent.
At the end of January 1917, Germany broke the so-called Sussex Pledge by declaring unrestricted submarine warfare in a zone even larger than the one it had proclaimed in 1915. On February 3, Wilson replied by breaking off diplomatic relations with Germany. Later in the month, at his request, Congress passed a bill permitting U.S. merchant vessels to arm. After new depredations by German submarines against neutral shipping, and the discovery of a plan made by the German Foreign Office to unite Germany, Mexico, and Japan against the United States if it entered the war, Wilson on April 2, 1917, requested Congress to declare war. On April 6, Congress passed a resolution declaring a state of war with Germany. See World War I.
Peace Treaties
Following the defeat of Germany, President Wilson played an important part in the peace conference in 1919 at Paris. Wilson intended to bring about a peace based on his program known as the Fourteen Points, an idealistic plan for a just and lasting peace. However, he was frustrated by the adroit diplomacy of the other Allies, who were intent on inflicting penalties upon Germany. The Treaty of Versailles declared Germany guilty of all the economic losses sustained by the peoples of the Allied nations and established a Reparations Commission that subsequently imposed upon Germany reparations amounting to $33 billion. Germany signed the treaty, but only after protest. The only important part of Wilson's peace program that was written into the treaty was the Covenant of the League of Nations (see League of Nations). Although Wilson toured the United States to raise support for the League and the treaty, the Senate did not ratify it. Subsequently, treaties between the United States and Germany, Austria, and Hungary were separately negotiated and ratified by the