I. The Shaping of North America

1. Recorded history began 6,000 years ago. It was 500 years ago that Europeans set foot on the Americas to begin colonization
2. The theory of Pangaea exists suggesting that the
   continents were once nestled together into one mega-continent. They
   then spread out as drifting islands.
3. Geologic forces of continental plates created the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains.
4. The Great Ice Age thrust down over North America & scoured the present day American Midwest.

II. Peopling the Americas

1. The Land Bridge theory.
   • As the Great Ice Age diminished, so did the glaciers over North America.
   • The theory holds that a Land Bridge emerged
     linking Asia & North America across what is now known as the Bering
     Sea. People were said to have walked across the "bridge" before the sea
     level rose and sealed it off; thus populating the Americas.
   • The Land Bridge is said to have occurred an estimated 35,000 years ago.
2. Many peoples
   • Those groups that traversed the bridge spread across North, Central, and South America.
   • Countless tribes emerged with an estimated 2,000 languages. Notably:
     • Incas: Peru, with elaborate network of roads and bridges linking their empire.
     • Mayas: Yucatan Peninsula, with their step pyramids.
     • Aztecs: Mexico, with step pyramids and huge sacrifices of conquered peoples.

III. The Earliest Americans

1. Development of corn or maize around 5,000 B.C. in Mexico was revolutionary in that:
   • Then, people didn't have to be hunter-gatherers, they could settle down and be farmers.
   • This fact gave rise to towns and then cities.
   • Corn arrived in the present day U.S. around 1,200 B.C.
2. Pueblo Indians
   • The Pueblos were the 1st American corn growers.
   • They lived in adobe houses (dried mud) and pueblos ("villages" in
     Spanish). Pueblos are villages of cubicle shaped adobe houses, stacked
     one on top the other and often beneath cliffs.
   • They had elaborate irrigation systems to draw water away from rivers to grown corn.
3. Mound Builders
   • These people built huge ceremonial and burial mounds and were located in the Ohio Valley.
   • Cahokia, near East St. Louis today, held 40,000 people.
4. Eastern Indians
   • Eastern Indians grew corn, beans, and squash in three sister farming:
     • Corn grew in a stalk providing a trellis for beans, beans grew up
       the stalk, squash's broad leaves kept the sun off the ground and thus
       kept the moisture in the soil.
     • This group likely had the best (most diverse) diet of all North American Indians and is typified by the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw (South) and Iroquois (North).
5. Iroquois Confederation
   • Hiawatha was the legendary leader of the group.
   • The Iroquois Confederation was a group of 5 tribes in New York state.
   • They were matrilineal as authority and possessions passed down through the female line.
   • Each tribe kept their independence, but met occasionally to discuss matters of common interest, like war/defense.
   • This was not the norm. Usually, Indians were scattered and separated (and thus weak).
6. Native Americans had a very different view of things as compared to Europeans.
   • Native Americans felt no man owned the land, the tribe did. (Europeans liked private property)
   • Indians felt nature was mixed with many spirits. (Europeans were Christian and monotheistic)
   • Indians felt nature was sacred. (Europeans felt nature and land was
     given to man by God in Genesis to be subdued and put to use).
   • Indians had little or no concept or interest in money. (Europeans loved money or gold)

IV. Indirect Discoverers of the New World

1. The 1st Europeans to come to America were the Norse (Vikings from Norway).
   • Around 1000 AD, the Vikings landed, led by Erik the Red and Leif Erikson.
   • They landed in Newfoundland or Vinland (because of all the vines).
   • However, these men left America and left no written record and therefore didn't get the credit.
   • The only record is found in Viking sagas or songs.
2. The Christian Crusaders of Middle Ages fought in Palestine to
   regain the Holy Land from Muslims. This mixing of East and West created
   a sweet-tooth where Europeans wanted the spices of the exotic East.

V. Europeans Enter Africa

1. Marco Polo traveled to China and stirred up a storm of European interest.
2. Mixed with desire for spices, an East to West (Asia to Europe)
   trade flourished but had to be overland, at least in part. This
   initiated new exploration down around Africa in hopes of an easier (all
   water) route.
3. Portugal literally started a sailing school to find better ways to get to the Spice Islands, eventually rounding Africa's southern Cape of Good Hope.
4. New developments:
   • caravel: a ship with triangular sail that could better tack (zig-zag) ahead into the wind and thus return to Europe from Africa coast.
   • compass: to determine direction.
   • astrolabe: a sextant gizmo that could tell a ship's latitude.
5. Slave trade begins
   • The 1st slave trade was across the Sahara Desert.
   • Later, it was along the West African coast. Slave traders purposely
     busted up tribes and families in order to squelch any possible uprising.
   • Slaves wound up on sugar plantations the Portuguese had set up on the tropical islands off Africa's coast.
   • Spain watched Portugal's success with exploration and slaving and wanted a piece of the pie.

VI. Columbus Comes upon a New World

1. Christopher Columbus convinced Isabella and Ferdinand to fund his expedition.
2. His goal was to reach the East (East Indies) by sailing west, thus bypassing the around-Africa route that Portugal monopolized.
3. He misjudged the size of the Earth though, thinking it 1/3 the size of what it was.
4. So, after 30 days or so at sea, when he struck land, he assumed
   he'd made it to the East Indies and therefore mistook the people as "Indians."
5. This spawned the following system:
   • Europe would provide the market, capital, technology.
   • Africa would provide the labor.
   • The New World would provide the raw materials (gold, soil, lumber).

VII. When Worlds Collide

1. Of huge importance was the biological flip-flop of Old and New
   Worlds. Simply put, we traded life such as plants, foods, animals,
   germs.
2. Columbian Exchange:
   • From the New World (America) to the Old
     • corn, potatoes, tobacco, beans, peppers, manioc, pumpkin, squash, tomato, wild rice, etc.
     • also, syphilis
   • From the Old World to the New
     • cows, pigs, horses, wheat, sugar cane, apples, cabbage, citrus, carrots, Kentucky bluegrass, etc.
     • devastating diseases (smallpox, yellow fever, malaria), as Indians had no immunities.
       • The Indians had no immunities in their systems built up over generations.
       • An estimated 90% of all pre-Columbus Indians died, mostly due to disease.

VIII. The Spanish Conquistadores

1. Treaty Line of Tordesillas 1494: Portugal and Spain feuded over who got what land. The Pope drew this line as he was respected by both.
   • The line ran North-South, and chopped off the Brazilian coast of South America
   • Portugal got everything east of the line (Brazil and land around/under Africa)
   • Spain got everything west of the line (which turned out to be much more, though they didn't know it at the time)
2. Conquistadores = "conquerors"
   • Vasco Balboa: "discovered" the Pacific Ocean across isthmus of Panama
   • Ferdinand Magellan: circumnavigates the globe (1st to do so)
   • Ponce de Leon: touches and names Florida looking for legendary Fountain of Youth
   • Hernando Cortes: enters Florida, travels up into present day Southeastern U.S., dies and is "buried" in Mississippi River
   • Francisco Pizarro: conquers Incan Empire of Peru
     and begins shipping tons of gold/silver back to Spain. This huge influx
     of precious metals made European prices skyrocket (inflation).
   • Francisco Coronado: ventured into current Southwest U.S. looking for legendary El Dorado, city of gold. He found the Pueblo Indians.
3. Encomienda system established
   • Indians were "commended" or given to Spanish landlords
   • The idea of the encomienda was that Indians would work and be
     converted to Christianity, but it was basically just slavery on a sugar
     plantation guised as missionary work.

IX. The Conquest of Mexico

1. Hernando Cortez conquered the Aztecs at Tenochtitlan.
2. Cortez went from Cuba to present day Vera Cruz, then marched over mountains to the Aztec capital.
3. Montezuma, Aztec king, thought Cortez might be the
   god Quetzalcoatl who was due to re-appear the very year. Montezuma
   welcomed Cortez into Tenochtitlan.
4. The Spanish lust for gold led Montezuma to attack on the noche
   triste, sad night. Cortez and men fought their way out, but it was
   smallpox that eventually beat the Indians.
5. The Spanish then destroyed Tenochtitlan, building the Spanish capital (Mexico City) exactly on top of the Aztec city.
6. A new race of people emerged, mestizos, a mix of Spanish and Indian blood.

X. The Spread of Spanish America

1. Spanish society quickly spread through Peru and Mexico
2. A threat came from neighbors:
   • English: John Cabot (an Italian who sailed for England) touched the coast of the current day U.S.
   • France: Giovanni de Verrazano also touched on the North American seaboard.
   • France: Jacques Cartier went into mouth of St. Lawrence River (Canada).
3. To oppose this, Spain set up forts (presidios) all over the California coast. Also cities, like St. Augustine in Florida.
4. Don Juan de Onate followed Coronado's old path
   into present day New Mexico. He conquered the Indians ruthlessly,
   maiming them by cutting off one foot of survivors just so they'd
   remember.
5. Despite mission efforts, the Pueblo Indians revolted in Pope's Rebellion.
6. Robert de LaSalle sailed down the Mississippi
   River for France claiming the whole region for their King Louis and
   naming the area "Louisiana" after his king. This started a slew of
   place-names for that area, from LaSalle, Illinois to "Louisville" and
   then on down to New Orleans (the American counter of Joan of Arc's
   famous victory at Orleans).
7. Black Legend: The Black Legend was the notion that
   Spaniards only brought bad things (murder, disease, slavery); though
   true, they also brought good things such as law systems, architecture,
   Christianity, language, civilization, so that the Black Legend is
   partly, but not entirely, accurate.

I. England’s Imperial Stirrings

1. North America in 1600 was largely unclaimed, though the Spanish had much control in Central and South America.
2. Spain had only set up Santa Fe, while France had founded Quebec and Britain had founded Jamestown.
3. In the 1500s, Britain failed to effectively colonize due to internal conflicts.
   • King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s and launched the English Protestant Reformation.
   • After Elizabeth I became queen, Britain became basically Protestant, and a rivalry with Catholic Spain intensified.
   • In Ireland, the Catholics sought Spain’s help in revolting against
     England, but the English crushed the uprising with brutal atrocity, and
     developed an attitude of sneering contempt for natives.

II. Elizabeth Energizes England

1. After Francis Drake pirated Spanish ships for gold then circumnavigated the globe, Elizabeth I knighted him on his ship. Obviously, this reward angered the Spanish who sought revenge.
2. Meanwhile, English attempts at colonization in the New World failed embarrassingly. Notable of these failures was Sir Walter Raleigh and the Roanoke Island Colony, better known as “The Lost Colony.”
3. Seeking to get their revenge, Spain attacked Britain but lost in the Spanish Armada’s
   defeat of 1588. This opened the door for Britain to cross the Atlantic.
   They swarmed to America and took over the lead in colonization and
   power.
   • Victory also fueled England to new heights due to…
     • Strong government/popular monarch, more religious unity, a sense of nationalism
     • Golden age of literature (Shakespeare)
     • Beginning of British dominance at sea (which lasts until U.S. tops them, around 1900)
   • Britain and Spain finally signed a peace treaty in 1604.

III. England on the Eve of the Empire

1. In the 1500s, Britain’s population was mushrooming.
2. New policy of enclosure (fencing in land) for farming. This meant there was less or no land for the poor.
3. The woolen districts fell upon hard times economically. This meant the workers lost jobs.
4. Tradition of primogeniture = 1st born son inherits
   ALL father’s land. Therefore, younger sons of rich folk (who couldn’t
   inherit money) tried their luck with fortunes elsewhere, like America.
5. By the 1600s, the joint-stock company was perfected (investors put money into the company with hopes for a good return), being a forerunner of today’s corporations.

IV. England Plants the **Jamestown Seedling**

1. In 1606, the Virginia Company received a charter from King James I to make a settlement in the New World.
   • Such joint-stock companies usually did not exist long, as
     stockholders invested hopes to form the company, turn a profit, and
     then quickly sell for profit a few years later.
2. The charter of the Virginia Company guaranteed settlers the same rights as Englishmen in Britain.
3. On May 24, 1607, about 100 English settlers disembarked from their ship and founded Jamestown.
   • Forty colonists had perished during the voyage.
   • Problems emerged including (a) the swampy site of Jamestown meant
     poor drinking water and mosquitoes causing malaria and yellow fever.
     (b) men wasted time looking for gold rather than doing useful tasks
     (digging wells, building shelter, planting crops), (c) there were zero
     women on the initial ship.
   • It didn’t help that a supply ship shipwrecked in the Bahamas in 1609 either.
4. Luckily, in 1608, a Captain John Smith took over control and whipped the colonists into shape.
   • At one point, he was kidnapped by local Indians and forced into a mock execution by the chief Powhatan and had been “saved” by Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas.
   • The act was meant to show that Powhatan wanted peaceful relations with the colonists.
   • John Smith’s main contribution was that he gave order and discipline, highlighted by his “no work, no food” policy.
5. Colonists had to eat cats, dogs, rats, even other people. One fellow wrote of eating “powdered wife.”
6. Finally, in 1610, a relief party headed by Lord De La Warr arrived to alleviate the suffering.
7. By 1625, out of an original overall total of 8,000 would-be settlers, only 1,200 had survived.

V. Cultural Clash in the Chesapeake

1. At first, Powhatan possibly considered the new colonists potential
   allies and tried to be friendly with them, but as time passed and
   colonists raided Indian food supplies, relations deteriorated and
   eventually, war occurred.
2. The First Anglo-Powhatan War ended in 1614 with a peace settlement sealed by the marriage of Pocahontas to colonist John Rolfe. Rolfe & Pocahontas nurtured a favorable flavor of sweet tobacco.
3. Eight years later, in 1622, the Indians struck again with a series
   of attacks that left 347 settlers, including John Rolfe, dead.
4. The Second Anglo-Powhatan War began in 1644, ended in 1646, and effectively banished the Chesapeake Indians from their ancestral lands.
5. After the settlers began to grow their own food, the Indians were useless, and were therefore banished.

VI. Virginia: Child of Tobacco

1. Jamestown’s gold is found and it is tobacco.
   • Rolfe’s sweet tobacco was sought as a cash crop by Europe. Jamestown had found its gold.
   • Tobacco created a greed for land, since it heavily depleted the soil and ruined the land.
2. Representative self-government was born in Virginia, when in 1619,
   settlers created the House of Burgesses, a committee to work out local
   issues. This set America on a self-rule pathway.
3. The first African Americans to arrive in America also came in 1619. It’s unclear if they were slaves or indentured servants.

VII. Maryland: Catholic Haven

1. Religious Diversity
   • Founded in 1634 by Lord Baltimore, Maryland was the second plantation colony and the fourth overall colony to be formed.
   • It was founded to be a place for persecuted Catholics to find refuge, a safe haven.
   • Lord Baltimore gave huge estates to his Catholic relatives, but the
     poorer people who settled there where mostly Protestant, creating
     friction.
2. However, Maryland prospered with tobacco.
3. It had a lot of indentured servants.
   • Only in the later years of the 1600s (in Maryland and Virginia) did Black slavery begin to become popular.
4. Maryland’s statute, the Act of Toleration,
   guaranteed religious toleration to all Christians, but decreed the
   death penalty to Jews and atheists and others who didn’t believe in the
   divinity of Jesus Christ.

VIII. The West Indies: Way Station to Mainland America

1. As the British were colonizing Virginia, they were also settling into the West Indies (Spain’s declining power opened the door).
2. By mid-1600s, England had secured claim to several West Indies islands, including Jamaica in 1655.
3. They grew lots of sugar on brutal plantations there.
4. Thousands of African slaves were needed to operate sugar
   plantations. At first, Indians were intended to be used, but disease
   killed an estimated 90% of all Native Americans. So, Africans were
   brought in.
5. To control so many slaves, “codes” were set up that defined the
   legal status of slaves and the rights of the masters. They were
   typically strict and exacted severe punishments for offenders.

IX. Colonizing the Carolinas

1. In England, King Charles I had been beheaded. Oliver Cromwell had
   ruled for ten very strict years before tired Englishmen restored Charles II to the throne in “The Restoration.” (After all the turmoil Civil War, they just went back to a king.)
2. The bloody period had interrupted colonization.
3. Carolina was named after Charles II, and was formally created in 1670.
4. Carolina flourished by developing close economic ties with the West Indies, due to the port of Charleston.
5. Many original Carolina settlers had come from Barbados and brought in the strict “Slave Codes” for ruling slaves.
6. Interestingly, Indians as slaves in Carolina was protested, but to
   no avail. Slaves were sent to the West Indies to work, as well as New
   England.
7. Rice emerged as the principle crop in Carolina.
   • African slaves were hired to work on rice plantations, due to (a)
     their resistance to malaria and just as importantly, (b) their
     familiarity with rice.
8. Despite violence with Spanish and Indians, Carolina proved to be too strong to be wiped out.

X. The Emergence of North Carolina

1. Many newcomers to Carolina were “squatters,” people who owned no land, usually down from Virginia.
2. North Carolinians developed a strong resistance to authority, due to geographic isolation from neighbors.
3. Two “flavors” of Carolinians developed: (a) aristocratic and
   wealthier down south around Charleston and rice & indigo
   plantations, and (b) strong-willed and independent-minded up north on
   small tobacco farms
4. In 1712, North and South Carolina were officially separated.
5. In 1711, when Tuscarora Indians attacked North Carolina, the
   Carolinians responded by crushing the opposition, selling hundreds to
   slavery and leaving the rest to wander north, eventually becoming the
   Sixth Nation of the Iroquois.

XI. Late-Coming Georgia: The Buffer Colony

1. Georgia was intended to be a buffer between the British colonies
   and the hostile Spanish settlements in Florida (Spanish, Indians,
   runaway slaves) and the enemy French in Louisiana.
2. It was founded last, in 1733, by a high-minded group of philanthropists, mainly James Oglethorpe.
3. Named after King George II, it was also meant to be a second chance site for wretched souls in debt.

iv. James Oglethorpe, the ablest of the founders and a dynamic soldier-statesman, repelled Spanish attacks.
* He saved “the Charity Colony” by his energetic leadership and by using his own fortune to help with the colony.

1. All Christians, except Catholics, enjoyed religious toleration, and many missionaries came to try to convert the Indians.
   • John Wesley was one of them, and he later returned to England and founded Methodism.
2. Georgia grew very slowly.

XII. The Plantation Colonies

1. Slavery was found in all the plantation colonies.
2. The growth of cities was often stunted by forests.
3. The establishment of schools and churches was difficult due to people being spread out.
4. In the South, the crops were tobacco and rice, and some indigo in the tidewater region of SC.
5. All the plantation colonies permitted some religious toleration.
6. Confrontations with Native Americans were often.

XIII. Makers of America: The Iroquois

1. In what is now New York State, the Iroquois League (AKA the Iroquois Confederation) was once a great power.
2. They were made up of the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas.
3. They vied with neighboring Indians and later French, English, and Dutch for supremacy.
4. The longhouse was the building block of Iroquois society.
   • Only 25 feet wide, but over 200 feet long, longhouses were
     typically occupied by a few blood-related families (on the mother’s
     side).
5. The Mohawks were middlemen with European traders.
6. The Senecas were fur suppliers.
7. The Five Nations of the Iroquois’ rivals, the neighboring Hurons, Eries, and Petuns, were vanquished.
8. Throughout the 1600s and 1700s, the Iroquois allied with the British and French (whichever was more beneficial).
9. When the American Revolution broke out, the question of with whom to side was split. Most sided with the British, but not all.
10. Afterwards, the Iroquois were forced to reservations, which proved to be unbearable to these proud people.
11. An Iroquois named Handsome Lake arose to warn his tribe’s people to mend their ways.
12. His teachings live today in the form of the longhouse religion.

I. The Protestant Reformation Produces Puritanism

1. 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral. Luther had several explosive ideas including…
   • The Bible alone was the source of God’s word (not the Bible and the church or pope).
   • People are saved simply by faith in Christ alone (not by faith and good works).
   • His actions ignited the Protestant Reformation.
2. John Calvin preached Calvinism which stressed “predestination” (those going to Heaven or hell has already been determined by God).
   • Basic doctrines were stated in the 1536 document entitled Institutes of the Christian Religion.
   • Stated that all humans were weak and wicked.
   • Only the predestined could go to heaven, no matter what.
   • Calvinists were expected to seek “conversions,” signs that they
     were one of the predestined, and afterwards, lead “sanctified lives.”
   • Calvinists are famous for working hard, dusk to dawn, to “prove” their worthiness.
   • The impact of Calvinism has been vividly stamped on the psyche of Americans, and been called the “Protestant Work Ethic”
3. In England, King Henry VIII was breaking his ties with the Holy Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s.
4. Some people, called Puritans, were influenced to totally reform (“purify”) the Church of England.
5. The Puritans
   • Believed that only “visible saints” should be admitted to church membership.
   • Separatists vowed to break away from the Church of England (AKA, the Anglican Church) because the “saints” would have to sit with the “damned.” These folks became the Pilgrims.
   • King James I, father of the beheaded Charles I,
     harassed the Separatists out of England because he thought that if
     people could defy him as their spiritual leader, they might defy him as
     their political ruler.

II. The Pilgrims End Their Pilgrimage at Plymouth

1. The Pilgrims or Separatists, came from Holland, where they had fled to after they had left England.
   • They were concerned that their children were getting too “Dutchified.”
   • They wanted a place where they were free to worship their own religion and could live and die as good Pilgrims.
2. After negotiating with the Virginia Company, the Separatists left
   Holland and sailed for 65 days at sea on the Mayflower until they
   arrived off the rocky coast of New England in 1620, a trip in which
   only one person died and one person was born.
   • Less than half of the pilgrims on the Mayflower were actually Separatists.
   • Contrary to myth, the Pilgrims undertook a few surveys before deciding to settle at Plymouth, an area far from Virginia.
   • The Pilgrims became squatters, people without legal right to land and without specific authority to establish government.
3. Captain Myles Standish (AKA, “Captain Shrimp”) proved to be a great Indian fighter and negotiator.
4. Before leaving the ship, the Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact, a set of rules by which to obey.
   • Though it wasn’t a constitution, it did set the standard for later
     constitutions. It also set the first step toward self-rule in the
     Northern colonies.
5. In the winter of 1620-21, only 44 of the 102 survived.
6. 1621 brought bountiful harvests, though, and the first Thanksgiving was celebrated that year.
7. William Bradford, chosen governor of Plymouth 30
   times in the annual elections, was a great leader, and helped Plymouth
   to survive and trade fur, fish, and lumber.
8. In 1691, Plymouth finally merged with the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

III. The Bay Colony Bible Commonwealth

1. In 1629, some non-Separatist Puritans got a royal charter from
   England to settle in the New World. Secretly, they took the charter
   with them and later used it as a type of constitution.
2. It was a well-equipped group of 11 ships that carried about 1,000 people to Massachusetts.
3. John Winthrop was elected governor or deputy governor for 19 years, helping Massachusetts prosper in fur trading, fishing, and shipbuilding.

IV. Building the Bay Colony

1. Soon after the establishment of the colony, the franchise (right to vote) was extended to all “freemen,” adult males who belonged to the Puritan congregations (later called the Congregational Church), making people who could enjoy the franchise about two fifths of the male population.
   • Un-churched men and women weren’t allowed into matters of government.
2. The provincial government was not a democracy.
   • Governor Winthrop feared and distrusted the common people, calling democracy the “meanest and worst” of all forms of government.
3. Religious leaders wielded powerful influence over the admission to church membership.
4. John Cotton, a prominent clergy member, was
   educated at Cambridge and had immigrated to Massachusetts to avoid
   persecution for his criticism of the Church of England.
5. However, congregations could hire and fire their ministers at will.
6. Still, there were laws to limit Earthly pleasures, such as a fine of twenty shillings for couples caught kissing in public.
7. The Puritan concept of Hell was very serious, frightening, and very real.
   • Michael Wigglesworth’s “Day of Doom,” written in 1662, sold one copy for every twenty people.

V. Trouble in the Bible Commonwealth

1. Tensions arose in Massachusetts.
2. Quakers were fined, flogged, and/or banished.
3. Anne Hutchinson was a very intelligent,
   strong-willed, talkative woman who claimed that a holy life was no sure
   sign of salvation and that the truly saved need not bother to obey the
   law of either God or man. A notion known as “antinomianism”.
   • Brought to trial in 1638, Anne boasted that her beliefs were directly from God.
   • She was banished from the colony and eventually made her way to Rhode Island.
   • She died in New York after an attack by Indians.
4. Roger Williams was a radical idealist hounded his fellow clergymen to make a clean and complete break with the Church of England.
   • He went on to deny that civil government could and should govern religious behavior.
   • He was banished in 1635, and led the way for the Rhode Island colony.

VI. The Rhode Island “Sewer”

1. People who went to Rhode Island weren’t necessarily similar; they were just unwanted everywhere else.
2. They were against special privilege.
3. “Little Rhody” was later known as “the traditional home of the otherwise minded.”
4. It finally secured a charter in 1644.

VII. New England Spreads Out

1. In 1635, Hartford, Connecticut was founded.
2. Reverend Thomas Hooker led an energetic group of Puritans west into Connecticut.
3. In 1639, settlers of the new Connecticut River colony drafted in open meeting a trailblazing document called the Fundamental Orders.
   • It was basically a modern constitution.
4. In 1638, New Haven was founded and eventually merged into Connecticut.
5. In 1623, Maine was absorbed by Massachusetts and remained so for nearly a century and a half.
6. In 1641, the granite-ribbed New Hampshire was absorbed into Massachusetts.
   • In 1679, the king separated the two and made New Hampshire a royal colony.

VIII. Puritans Versus Indians

1. Before the Puritans had arrived in 1620, an epidemic had swept through the Indians, killing over three quarters of them.
2. At first, Indians tried to befriend the Whites.
   • Squanto, a Wampanoag, helped keep relative peace.
3. In 1637, though, after mounting tensions exploded, English settlers and the powerful Pequot tribe fought in the Pequot War,
   in which the English set fire to a Pequot village on Connecticut’s
   Mystic River, annihilating the Indians and bringing about forty years
   of tentative peace.
   • In an attempt to save face, the Puritans did try to convert some of
     the Indians, though with less zeal than that of the Spanish and French.
4. In 1675, Metacom (called King Philip by the English) united neighboring Indians in a last-ditched attack that failed.
   • The King Philip’s War slowed the colonial western
     march, but Metacom was beheaded and quartered and his head was stuck on
     a sharp pike for all to see, his wife and son sold to slavery.

IX. Seeds of Colonial Unity and Independence

1. In 1643, four colonies banded together to form the New England Confederation.
   • It was almost all Puritan.
   • It was weak, but still a notable milestone toward American unity.
2. The colonies were basically allowed to be semiautonomous commonwealths.
3. After Charles II was restored to the British throne, he hoped to
   control his colonies more firmly, but was shocked to find how much his
   orders were ignored by Massachusetts.
   • As punishment, a sea-to-sea charter was given to rival Connecticut (1662), and a charter was given to Rhode Island (1663).
   • Finally, in 1684, Massachusetts’ charter was revoked.

X. Andros Promotes the First American Revolution

1. In 1686, the Dominion of New England was created to bolster the colonial defense against Indians and tying the colonies closer to Britain by enforcing the hated Navigation Acts.
   • The acts forbade American trade with countries other than Britain.
   • As a result, smuggling became common.
   • Head of the Dominion was Sir Edmund Andros.
     • Establishing headquarters in Boston, he openly showed his association with the locally hated Church of England.
     • His soldiers were vile-mouthed and despised by Americans.
2. Andros responded to opposition by curbing town meetings, restricting the courts and the press, and revoking all land titles.
3. He taxed the people without their consent.
4. At the same time, the people of England staged the Glorious Revolution, instating William and Mary to the crown.
   • Resultant, the Dominion of New England collapsed.
   • Massachusetts got a new charter in 1691, but this charter allowed
     all landowners to vote, as opposed to the previous law of voting
     belonging only to the church members.

XI. Old Netherlanders at New Netherland

1. In the 17th Century, the Netherlands revolted against Spain, and with the help of Britain, gained their independence.
2. The Dutch East India Company was established, with an army of 10,000 men and a fleet of 190 ships (including 40 men-of-war).
3. The Dutch West India Company often raided rather than traded.
4. In 1609, Henry Hudson ventured into Delaware and New York Bay and claimed the area for the Netherlands.
5. It was the Dutch West India Company that bought Manhattan Island
   for some worthless trinkets (22,000 acres of the most valuable land in
   the world today).
6. New Amsterdam was a company town, run by and for the Dutch company and in the interests of stockholders.
7. The Dutch gave patroonships (large areas of land) to promoters who agreed to settle at least 50 people on them.
8. New Amsterdam attracted people of all types and races.
   • One French Jesuit missionary counted 18 different languages being spoken on the street.

XII. Friction with English and Swedish Neighbors

1. Indian’s attacked the Dutch for their cruelties.
2. New England was hostile against Dutch growth.
3. The Swedes trespassed Dutch reserves from 1638 to 1655 by planting the anemic colony of New Sweden on the Delaware River.
4. Things got so bad that the Dutch erected a wall in New Amsterdam, for which Wall Street is named today.
5. In 1655, the Dutch sent one-legged Peter Stuyvesant
   to besiege the main Swedish fort, and he won, ending Swedish colonial
   rule and leaving only Swedish log cabins and place names as evidence
   that the Swedes were ever in Delaware.

XIII. Dutch Residues in New York

1. In 1664, Charles II granted the area of modern-day New York to his brother, the Duke of York, and that year, British troops landed and defeated the Dutch, kicking them out, without much violence.
2. New Amsterdam was renamed New York.
3. The Dutch Legacy
   • The people of New York retained their autocratic spirit.
   • Dutch names of cities remained, like Harlem, Brooklyn, and Hell Gate.
   • Even their architecture left its mark on buildings.
   • The Dutch also gave us Easter eggs, Santa Claus, waffles, sauerkraut, bowling, sleighing, skating, and golf.

XIV. Penn’s Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania

1. The Quakers (characteristics)
   • They “quaked” under deep religious emotion.
   • They were offensive to religious and civil rule.
   • They addressed everyone with simple “thee”s and “thou”s and didn’t
     swear oaths because Jesus had said “Swear not at all,” this last part
     creating a problem, since you had to swear a test oath to prove that
     you weren’t Roman Catholic.
   • Though stubborn and unreasonable, they were simple, devoted, democratic people against war and violence.
2. William Penn, a well-born Englishman, embraced the Quaker faith.
3. In 1681, he managed to secure an immense grant of fertile land from the king.
   • It was called Pennsylvania, in honor of Penn, who, being the modest person that he was, had insisted that it be called Sylvania.
   • It was the best advertised of all the colonies.

XV. Quaker Pennsylvania and Its Neighbors

1. Thousands of squatters already lived in Pennsylvania.
2. Philadelphia was more carefully planned than most cities, with beautiful, wide streets.
3. Penn bought land from the Indians, like Chief Tammany, later patron saint of New York’s political Tammany Hall.
4. His treatment of the Indians was so gentle that Quakers could walk through Indian territory unarmed without fear of being hurt.
5. However, as more and more non-Quakers came to Pennsylvania, they mistreated the Indians more and more.
6. Freedom of worship was available to everyone except for Jews and
   Catholics (only because of pressure from London), and the death penalty
   was only for murder and treason.
7. No restrictions were placed on immigration, and naturalization was made easy.
8. The Quakers also developed a dislike toward slavery.
9. Pennsylvania attracted a great variety of people from all races, class, and religion.
10. By 1700, only Virginia was more populous and richer.
11. Penn, unfortunately, was not well-liked because of his friendliness
    towards James II, the deposed Catholic king, and he was jailed at
    times, and also suffered a paralytic stroke, dying full of sorrows.

xii. New Jersey and Delaware prospered as well.
XVI. The Middle Way in the Middle Colonies

1. New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania
   • All had fertile soil and broad expanse of land.
   • All except for Delaware exported lots of grain.
   • The Susquehanna River tapped the fur trade of the interior, and the rivers were gentle, with little cascading waterfalls.
   • The middle colonies were the middle way between New England and the southern plantation states.
   • Landholdings were generally intermediate in size.
   • The middle colonies were more ethnically mixed than other colonies.
   • A considerable amount of economic and social democracy prevailed.
   • Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston, entered
     Philadelphia as a seventeen-year-old in 1720 with a loaf of bread under
     each arm and immediately found a congenial home in the urbane, open
     atmosphere of the city.
   • Americans began to realize that not only were they surviving, but that they were also thriving.

XVII. Makers of America: The English

1. In the 1600s, England was undergoing a massive population boom.
2. About 75% of English immigrants were indentured servants.
3. Most of them were young men from the “middling classes.”
4. Some had fled during the cloth trade slump in the early 1600s while others had been forced off their land due to enclosure.
5. Some 40% of indentured servants died before their seven years were over.
6. Late in the 17th century, as the supply of indentured servants slowly ran out, the southerners resolved to employ black slaves.
7. From 1629 to 1642, 11,000 Puritans swarmed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
8. In contrast to the indentured servants, Puritans migrated in family groups, not alone.
9. Puritans brought the way of life from England with them to America.
   • i.e. Marblehead, Mass. had mostly fishermen because most of the immigrants had been fisherman in England.
   • i.e. Rowley, Mass. brought from Yorkshire, England their distinctive way of life.
   • In Ipswich, Massachusetts, settled by East Anglican Puritans, the rulers had long terms and ruled with an iron hand.
   • However, in Newbury, people rarely won reelection.

I. The Unhealthy Chesapeake

1. Life in the American wilderness was harsh.
2. Diseases like malaria, dysentery, and typhoid killed many.
3. Few people lived to 40 or 50 years.
4. In the early days of colonies, women were so scarce that men fought
   over all of them. The Chesapeake region had fewer women and a 6:1 male
   to female ratio is a good guide.
5. Few people knew any grandparents.
6. A third of all brides in one Maryland county were already pregnant before the wedding (scandalous).
7. Virginia, with 59,000 people, became the most populous colony.

II. The Tobacco Economy

1. The Chesapeake was very good for tobacco cultivation.
2. Chesapeake Bay exported 1.5 million pounds of tobacco yearly in the
   1630s, and by 1700, that number had risen to 40 million pounds a year.
   • More availability led to falling prices, and farmers still grew more.
   • The headright system encouraged growth of the
     Chesapeake. Under this system, if an aristocrat sponsored an indentured
     servant’s passage to America, the aristocrat earned the right to
     purchase 50 acres land, undoubtedly at a cheap price. This meant land
     was being gobbled by the rich, and running out for the poor.
   • Early on, most of the laborers were indentured servants.
     • Life for them was hard, but there was hope at the end of seven years for freedom.
     • Conditions were brutal, and in the later years, owners unwilling to
       free their servants extended their contracts by years for small
       mistakes.

III. Frustrated Freemen and Bacon’s Rebellion

1. By the late 1600s, there were lots of free, poor, landless, single men frustrated by the lack of money, land, work, and women.
2. In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led a few thousand of these men in a rebellion against the hostile conditions.
   • These people wanted land and were resentful of Virginia governor William Berkeley’s friendly policies toward the Indians.
   • Bacon’s men murderously attacked Indian settlements after Berkeley
     refused to retaliate for a series of savage Indian attacks on the
     frontier.
3. Then, in the middle of his rebellion, Bacon suddenly died of disease, and Berkeley went on to crush the uprising.

• Still, Bacon’s legacy lived on, giving frustrated poor folks ideas
  to rebel, and so a bit of paranoia went on for some time afterwards.

IV. Colonial Slavery

1. In the 300 years following Columbus’ discovery of America, only
   about 400,000 of a total of 10 million African slaves were brought over
   to the United States.
2. By 1680, though, many landowners were afraid of possibly mutinous
   white servants, by the mid 1680s, for the first time, black slaves
   outnumbered white servants among the plantation colonies’ new arrivals.
3. After 1700, more and more slaves were imported, and in 1750, blacks accounted for nearly half of the Virginian population.
   • Most of the slaves were from West Africa, from places like Senegal and Angola.
4. Some of the earliest black slaves gained their freedom and some became slaveholders themselves.
5. Eventually, to clear up issues on slave ownership, the slave codes
   made it so that slaves and their children would remain slaves to their
   masters for life (chattels), unless they were voluntarily freed.
   • Some laws made teaching slaves to read a crime, and not even conversion to Christianity might qualify a slave for freedom.

V. Africans in America

1. Slave life in the Deep South was very tough, as rice growing was much harder than tobacco growing.
   • Many blacks in America evolved their own languages, blending their native tongues with English.
   • Blacks also contributed to music with instruments like the banjo and bongo drum.
2. A few of the slaves became skilled artisans (i.e. carpenters,
   bricklayers and tanners), but most were relegated to sweaty work like
   clearing swamps and grubbing out trees.
3. Revolts did occur.
   • In 1712, a slave revolt in New York City cost the lives of a dozen whites and 21 Blacks were executed.
   • In 1739, South Carolina blacks along the Stono River revolted and tried to march to Spanish Florida, but failed.

VI. Southern Society

1. A social gap appeared and began to widen.
   • In Virginia, a clutch of extended clans (i.e. the Fitzhughs, the
     Lees, and the Washingtons) owned tracts and tracts of real estate and
     just about dominated the House of Burgesses.
     • They came to be known as the First Families of Virginia (FFV).
2. In Virginia, there was often a problem with drunkenness.
3. The largest social group was the farmers.
4. Few cities sprouted in the South, so schools and churches were slow to develop.

VII. The New England Family

1. In New England, there was clean water and cool temperatures, so disease was not as predominant as in the South.
2. The first New England Puritans had an average life expectancy of 70 years.
3. In contrast to the Chesapeake, the New Englanders tended to migrate as a family, instead of individually.
   • Women usually married in their early twenties and gave birth every two years until menopause.
   • A typical woman could expect to have ten babies and raise about eight of them.

• Death in childbirth was not uncommon.

1. In the South, women usually had more power, since the Southern men
   typically died young and women could inherit the money, but in New
   England, the opposite was true.
   • In New England, men didn’t have absolute power over their wives (as
     evidenced by the punishments of unruly husbands), but they did have
     much power over women.
2. New England law was very severe and strict.
   • For example, adulterous women had to wear the letter “A” on their
     bosoms if they were caught (as with The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel
     Hawthorne).

VIII. Life in the New England Towns

1. Life in New England was organized.
   • New towns were legally chartered by colonial authorities.
   • A town usually had a meetinghouse surrounded by houses and a village green.
   • Towns of more than 50 families had to provide primary education.
   • Towns of more than 100 had to provide secondary education.
2. In 1636, Massachusetts Puritans established Harvard College to train men to become ministers.
   • (Note: in 1693, Virginia established their first college, William and Mary.)
3. Puritans ran their own churches, and democracy in Congregational
   church government led logically to democracy in political government.

IX. The Half-Way Covenant and the Salem Witch Trials

1. As Puritans began to worry about their children and whether or not
   they would be as loyal and faithful, and new type of sermon came about
   called “jeremiads.”
   • In jeremiads, earnest preachers scolded parishioners for their waning piety in hope to improve faith.
2. Paradoxically, troubled ministers announced a new formula for church membership in 1662, calling it the “Half-Way Covenant.”
   • In the Half-Way Covenant, all people could come and participate in
     the church, even if they fell short of the “visible-saint” status and
     were somehow only half converted (with the exception of a few extremely
     hated groups).
3. In the early 1690s, a group of Salem girls claimed to have been bewitched by certain older women.
   • What followed was a hysterical witch-hunt that led to the
     executions of 20 people (19 of which were hanged, 1 pressed to death)
     and two dogs.
   • Back in Europe, larger scale witch-hunts were already occurring.
   • Witchcraft hysteria eventually ended in 1693.

X. The New England Way of Life

1. Due to the hard New England soil (or lack thereof), New Englanders became great traders.
2. New England was also less ethnically mixed than its neighbors.
3. The climate of New England encouraged diversified agriculture and industry.
   • Black slavery was attempted, but didn’t work. It was unnecessary
     since New England was made of small farms rather than plantations as
     down South.
4. Rivers were short and rapid.
5. The Europeans in New England chastised the Indians for “wasting”
   the land, and felt a need to clear as much land for use as possible.
6. Fishing became a very popular industry. It is said New England was built on “God and cod.”

XI. The Early Settlers’ Days and Ways

1. Early farmers usually rose at dawn and went to bed at dusk.
2. Few events were done during the night unless they were “worth the candle.”
3. Life was humble but comfortable, at least in accordance to the surroundings.
4. The people who emigrated from Europe to America were most usually
   lower middle class citizens looking to have a better future in the New
   World.
5. Because of the general sameness of class in America, laws against
   extravagances were sometimes passed, but as time passed, America grew.

XII. Makers of America: From African to African-American

1. Africans’ arrival into the New World brought new languages, music, and cuisines to America.
   • Africans worked in the rice fields of South Carolina due to (a)
     their knowledge of the crop and (b) their resistance to disease (as
     compared to Indians).
2. The first slaves were men; some eventually gained freedom.
3. By 1740, large groups of African slaves lived together on
   plantations, where female slaves were expected to perform backbreaking
   labor and spin, weave, and sew.
4. Most slaves became Christians, though many adopted elements from their native religions.
   • Many African dances led to modern dances (i.e. the Charleston).
   • Christian songs could also be code for the announcement of the arrival of a guide to freedom.
   • Jazz is the most famous example of slave music entering mainstream culture.

I. Conquest by the Cradle

1. By 1775, Great Britain ruled 32 colonies in North America.
   • Only 13 of them revolted (the ones in what’s today the U.S.).
   • Canada and Jamaica were wealthier than the “original 13.”
   • All of them were growing by leaps and bounds.
2. By 1775, the population numbered 2.5 million people.
3. The average age was 16 years old (due mainly to having several children).
4. Most of the population (95%) was densely cooped up east of the
   Alleghenies, though by 1775, some had slowly trickled into Tennessee
   and Kentucky.
5. About 90% of the people lived in rural areas and were therefore farmers.

II. A Mingling of the Races

1. Colonial America, though mostly English, had other races as well.
2. Germans accounted for about 6% of the population, or about 150,000 people by 1775.
   • Most were Protestant (primarily Lutheran) and were called the
     “Pennsylvania Dutch” (a corruption of Deutsch which means
     German).
3. The Scots-Irish were about 7% of the population, with 175,000 people.
   • Over many decades, they had been transplanted to Northern Ireland,
     but they had not found a home there (the already existing Irish
     Catholics resented the intruders).
   • Many of the Scots-Irish reached America and became squatters, quarreling with both Indians and white landowners.
   • They seemed to try to move as far from Britain as possible, trickling down to Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas.
   • In 1764, the Scots-Irish led the armed march of the Paxton Boys.
     The Paxtons led a march on Philadelphia to protest the Quaker’
     peaceful treatment of the Indians. They later started the North
     Carolina Regulator movement in the hills and mountains of the colony,
     aimed against domination by eastern powers in the colony.
   • They were known to be very hot-headed and independent minded.
   • Many eventually became American revolutionists.
4. About 5% of the multicolored population consisted of other European
   groups, like French Huguenots, Welsh, Dutch, Swedes, Jews, Irish,
   Swiss, and Scots-Highlanders.
5. Americans were of all races and mixed bloods, so it was no wonder
   that other races from other countries had a hard time classifying them.

III. The Structure of the Colonial Society

1. In contrast to contemporary Europe, America was a land of opportunity.
   • Anyone who was willing to work hard could possibly go from rags to riches, and poverty was scorned.
   • Class differences did emerge, as a small group of aristocrats (made
     up of the rich farmers, merchants, officials, clergymen) had much of
     the power.
2. Also, armed conflicts in the 1690s and 1700s enriched a number of merchants in the New England and middle colonies.
3. War also created many widows and orphans who eventually had to turn to charity.
4. In the South, a firm social pyramid emerged containing…
   • The immensely rich plantation owners (“planters”) had many slaves (though these were few).
   • “Yeoman” farmers, or small farmers. They owned their land and, maybe, a few slaves.
   • Landless whites who owned no land and either worked for a landowner or rented land to farm.
   • Indentured servants of America were the paupers and the criminals
     sent to the New World. Some of them were actually unfortunate victims
     of Britain’s unfair laws and did become respectable citizens.
     This group was dwindling though by the 1700s, thanks to Bacon’s
     Rebellion and the move away from indentured servant labor and toward
     slavery.
   • Black slaves were at the bottom of the social ladder with no rights
     or hopes up moving up or even gaining freedom. Slavery became a
     divisive issue because some colonies didn’t want slaves while
     others needed them, and therefore vetoed any bill banning the
     importation of slaves.

IV. Clerics, Physicians, and Jurists

1. The most honored profession in the colonial times was the clergy
   (priests), which in 1775, had less power than before during the height
   of the “Bible Commonwealth,” but still wielded a great
   amount of authority.
2. Physicians were not highly esteemed and many of them were bad as medical practices were archaic.
   • Bleeding was often a favorite, and deadly, solution to illnesses.
   • Plagues were a nightmare.
     • Smallpox (afflicting 1 of 5 persons, including George Washington)
       was rampant, though a crude form of inoculation for it was introduced
       in 1721.
     • Some of the clergy and doctors didn’t like the inoculation though, preferring not to tamper with the will of God.
3. At first, lawyers weren’t liked, being regarded as noisy scumbags.
   • Criminals often represented themselves in court.
   • By 1750, lawyers were recognized as useful, and many defended
     high-profile cases, were great orators and played important roles in
     the history of America.

V. Workaday America

1. Agriculture was the leading industry (by a huge margin), since farmers could seem to grow anything.
   • In Maryland and Virginia, tobacco was the staple crop, and by 1759, New York was exporting 80,000 barrels of flour a year.
2. Fishing could be rewarding, though not as much as farming, and it
   was pursued in all the American colonies especially in New England.
3. Trading was also a popular and prevalent industry, as commerce occurred all around the colonies.
   • The “triangular trade” was common: a
     ship, for example, would leave (1) New England with rum and go to the
     (2) Gold Coast of Africa and trade it for African slaves. Then, it
     would go to the (3) West Indies and exchange the slaves for molasses
     (for rum), which it’d sell to New England once it returned there.
4. Manufacturing was not as important, though many small enterprises existed.
5. Strong-backed laborers and skilled craftspeople were scarce and highly prized.
6. Perhaps the single most important manufacturing activity was lumbering.
   • Britain sometimes marked the tallest trees for its navy’s
     masts, and colonists resented that, even though there were countless
     other good trees in the area and the marked tree was going toward a
     common defense (it was the principle of Britain-first that was
     detested).
7. In 1733, Parliament passed the Molasses Act,
   which, if successful, would have struck a crippling blow to American
   international trade by hindering its trade with the French West Indies.
   • The result was disagreement, and colonists got around the act through smuggling.

VI. Horsepower and Sailpower

1. Roads in 1700s America were very poor, and they only connected the large cites.
   • It took a young Benjamin Franklin 9 days to get from Boston to Philadelphia.
2. Roads were so bad that they were dangerous.
   • People who would venture these roads would often sign wills and pray with family members before embarking.
   • As a result, towns seemed to cluster around slow, navigable water sources, like gentle rivers, or by the ocean.
3. Taverns and bars sprang up to serve weary travelers and were great places of gossip and news.
4. An inter-colonial mail system was set up in the mid-1700s, but
   mailmen often passed time by reading private letters, since there was
   nothing else to do.

VII. Dominant Denominations

1. Two “established churches” (tax-supported) by 1775 were the Anglican and the Congregational.
2. A great majority of people didn’t worship in churches.
3. The Church of England (the Anglican Church) was official in Georgia, both Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, and a part of New York.
   • Anglican sermons were shorter, its descriptions of hell were less frightening, and amusements were less scorned.
   • For Anglicans, not having a resident bishop proved to be a problem for unordained young ministers.
   • So, William and Mary was founded in 1693 to train young clergy members.
4. The Congregational church had grown from the Puritan church, and it was established in all the New England colonies except for Rhode Island.
   • There was worry by the late 1600s that people weren’t devout enough.

VIII. The Great Awakening

1. Due to less religious fervor than before, and worry that so many
   people would not be saved, the stage was set for a revival, which
   occurred, and became the First Great Awakening.
2. Jonathan Edwards was a preacher with fiery
   preaching methods, emotionally moving many listeners to tears while
   talking of the eternal damnation that nonbelievers would face after
   death.
   • He began preaching in 1734, and his methods sparked debate among his peers.
   • Most famous sermon was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
     God,” describing a man dangling a spider over a blazing fire,
     able to drop the spider in at any time – just as God could do to
     man.
   • His famous metaphor: “The road to hell is paved with the skulls of unbaptized children.”
3. George Whitefield was even better than Edwards when he started four years later.
   • An orator of rare gifts, he even made Jonathan Edwards weep and
     persuaded always skeptical Ben Franklin to empty his pockets into the
     collection plate.
   • Imitators copied his emotional shaking sermons and his heaping of blame on sinners.
4. These new preachers were met with skepticism by the “old lights,” or the orthodox clergymen.
5. However, the Great Awakening led to the founding of “new
   light” centers like Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth.
6. The Great Awakening was the first religious experience shared by all Americans as a group.

IX. Schools and Colleges

1. Education was most important in New England, where it was used to train young future clergymen.
   • In other parts of America, farm labor used up most of the time that
     would have been spent in school. However, there were fairly adequate
     primary and secondary schools in areas other than New England. The only
     problem was that only well-to-do children could afford to attend.
2. In a gloomy and grim atmosphere, colonial schools put most of the
   emphasis on religion and on the classical languages, as well as
   doctrine and orthodoxy.
   • Discipline was quite severe, such as a child being cut by a limb from a birch tree.
3. Also, at least in New England, college education was regarded more important than the ABC’s.
4. Eventually, some change was made with emphasis of curriculum change
   from dead languages to live ones, and Ben Franklin helped by launching
   the school that would become the University of Pennsylvania.

X. A Provincial Culture

1. Though there was little time for recreation (due to farm work, fear
   of Indians, etc…), the little free time that was there was used
   on religion, not art.
2. Painters were frowned upon as pursuing a worthless pastime.
   • John Trumbull of Connecticut was discouraged, as a youth, by his father.
   • Charles Willson Peale, best know for his portraits
     of George Washington, also ran a museum, stuffed birds, and practiced
     dentistry in addition to his art.
   • Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley had to go to England to complete their ambitious careers.
3. Architecture was largely imported from the Old World and modified to meet American needs.
   • The log cabin was borrowed from Sweden.
   • The classical, red-bricked Georgian style of architecture was introduced about 1720.
4. Colonial literature was also generally undistinguished.
   • However, a slave girl, Phillis Wheatley, who had never been
     formally educated, did go to Britain and publish a book of verse and
     subsequently wrote other polished poems that revealed the influence of
     Alexander Pope.
   • Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack
     was very influential, containing many common sayings and phrases, and
     was more widely read in America and Europe than anything but for the
     Bible.
     • Ben Franklin’s experiments with science, and his sheer power of observation, also helped advance science.

XI. Pioneer Presses

1. Few libraries were found in early America, and few Americans were rich enough to buy books.
2. On the eve of the revolution, many hand-operated presses cranked out leaflets, pamphlets, and journals signed with pseudonyms.
3. In one famous case, John Peter Zenger, a New York
   newspaper printer, was taken to court and charged with seditious libel
   (writing in a malicious manner against someone).
   • The judge urged the jury to consider that the mere fact of
     publishing was a crime, no matter whether the content was derogatory or
     not.
   • Zenger won after his lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, excellently defended his case.
   • The importance—freedom of the press scored a huge early victory in this case.

XII. The Great Game of Politics

1. By 1775, eight of the colonies had royal governors who were appointed by the king.
2. Three had governors chosen by proprietors.
3. Practically every colony utilized a two-house legislative body.
   • The upper house was appointed by royal officials or proprietors.
   • The lower house was elected by the people.
4. Self-taxation with representation came to be a cherished privilege that Americans came to value above most other rights.
5. Most governors did a good job, but some were just plain corrupt.
   • I.e., Lord Cornbury, first cousin of Queen Anne, was made governor
     of New York and New Jersey in 1702, but proved to be a drunkard, a
     spendthrift, a grafter, and embezzler, a religious bigot, a
     cross-dresser, and a vain fool.
6. The right to vote was not available to just anyone, just white male landowners only.
   • However, the ease of acquiring land to hard workers made voting a privilege easily attainable to many people in this group.

XIII. Colonial Folkways

1. Americans had many hardships, as many basic amenities that we have today were not available.
   • Churches weren’t heated at all.
   • Running water or plumbing in houses was nonexistent.
   • Garbage disposal was primitive at best.
2. Yet, amusement was permitted, and people often worked/partied
   during house-raisings, barn-raisings, apple-parings, quilting bees,
   husking bees, and other merrymaking.
3. In the South, card playing, horse racing, cockfighting, and fox hunting were fun.
4. Lotteries were universally approved, even by the clergy because they helped raise money for churches and colleges.
5. Stage plays were popular in the South, but not really in the North.
6. Holidays were celebrated everywhere in the colonies (New England didn’t like Christmas, though).
7. America in 1775 was like a quilt, each part different and
   individual in its own way, but all coming together to form one single,
   unified piece.

XIV. Makers of America: The Scots-Irish

1. Life for the Scots was miserable in England, as many were extremely
   poor, and Britain still taxed them, squeezing the last cent out of them.
2. Migrating to Ulster, in Ireland, the Scots still felt unwelcome, and eventually came to America.
3. They constantly tried to further themselves away from Britain.
   • Most went to Pennsylvania, where tolerance was high.
4. The Scots-Irish were many of America’s pioneers, clearing the trails for others to follow.
5. Otherwise independent, religion was the only thing that bonded these people (Presbyterian).
6. Their hatred of England made them great allies and supporters of the United States during the Revolutionary War.

I. France Finds a Foothold in Canada

1. Like England and Holland, France was a latecomer in the race for colonies.
   • It was convulsed in the 1500s by foreign wars and domestic strife.
   • In 1598, the Edict of Nantes was issued, allowing limited toleration to the French Huguenots.
2. When King Louis XIV became king, he took an interest in overseas colonies.
   • In 1608, France established Quebec, overlooking the St. Lawrence River.
3. Samuel de Champlain, an intrepid soldier and explorer, became known as the “Father of New France.”
   • He entered into friendly relations with the neighboring Huron Indians and helped them defeat the Iroquois.
   • The Iroquois, however, did hamper French efforts into the Ohio Valley later.
4. Unlike English colonists, French colonists didn’t immigrate
   to North America by hordes. The peasants were too poor, and the
   Huguenots weren’t allowed to leave.

II. New France Fans Out

1. New France’s (Canada) one valuable resource was the beaver.
2. Beaver hunters were known as the coureurs de bois
   (runners of the woods) and littered the land with place names,
   including Baton Rouge (red stick), Terre Haute (high land), Des Moines
   (some monks) and Grand Teton (big breasts).
3. The French voyageurs also recruited Indians to
   hunt for beaver as well, but Indians were decimated by the white
   man’s diseases, and the beaver population was heavily
   extinguished.
4. French Catholic missionaries zealously tried to convert Indians.
5. To thwart English settlers from pushing into the Ohio Valley, Antoine Cadillac founded Detroit (“city of straits”) in 1701.
6. Louisiana was founded, in 1682, by Robert de LaSalle, to halt Spanish expansion into the area near the Gulf of Mexico.
   • Three years later, he tried to fulfill his dreams by returning, but
     instead landed in Spanish Texas and was murdered by his mutinous men in
     1687.
7. The fertile Illinois country, where the French established forts
   and trading posts at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes, became the
   garden of France’s North American empire.

III. The Clash of Empires

1. King William’s War and Queen Anne’s War
   • The English colonists fought the French coureurs de bois and their Indian allies.
     • Neither side considered America important enough to waste real troops on.
   • The French-inspired Indians ravaged Schenectady, New York, and Deerfield, Mass.
   • The British did try to capture Quebec and Montreal, failed, but did temporarily have Port Royal.
   • The peace deal in Utrecht in 1713 gave Acadia (renamed Nova
     Scotia), Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay to England, pinching the French
     settlements by the St. Lawrence. It also gave Britain limited trading
     rights with Spanish America.
2. The War of Jenkins’s Ear
   • An English Captain named Jenkins had his ear cut off by a Spanish
     commander, who had essentially sneered at him to go home crying.
   • This war was confined to the Caribbean Sea and Georgia.
   • This war soon merged with the War of Austrian Succession and came to be called King George’s War in America.
   • France allied itself with Spain, but England’s troops
     captured the reputed impregnable fortress of Cape Breton Island (Fort
     Louisbourg).
   • However, peace terms of this war gave strategically located
     Louisbourg, which the New Englanders had captured, back to France,
     outraging the colonists, who feared the fort.

IV. George Washington Inaugurates War with France

1. The Ohio Valley became a battleground among the Spanish, British, and French.
   • It was lush, fertile, and very good land.
2. In 1754, the governor of Virginia sent 21 year-old George Washington to the Ohio country as a lieutenant colonel in command of about 150 Virginia minutemen.
   • Encountering some Frenchmen in the forest about 40 miles from Fort Duquesne, the troops opened fire, killing the French leader.
   • Later, the French returned and surrounded Washington’s hastily constructed Fort Necessity, fought “Indian style” (hiding and guerilla fighting), and after a 10-hour siege, made him surrender.
   • He was permitted to march his men away with the full honors of war.

V. Global War and Colonial Disunity

1. The fourth of these wars between empires started in America, unlike the first three.
2. The French and Indian War (AKA Seven Years’ War) began with Washington’s battle with the French.
3. It was England and Prussia vs. France, Spain, Austria, and Russia.
4. In Germany (Prussia), Fredrick the Great won his title of
   “Great” by repelling French, Austrian, and Russian armies,
   even though he was badly outnumbered.
5. Many Americans sought for the American colonies to unite, for strength lay in numbers.
6. In 1754, 7 of the 13 colonies met for an inter-colonial congress held in Albany, New York, known simply as the Albany Congress.
   • A month before the congress, Ben Franklin had published his famous
     “Join or Die” cartoon featuring a snake in pieces,
     symbolizing the colonies.
   • Franklin helped unite the colonists in Albany, but the Albany plan
     failed because the states were reluctant to give up their sovereignty
     or power. Still, it was a first step toward unity.

VI. Braddock’s Blundering and Its Aftermath

1. In the beginning, the British sent haughty 60 year-old Gen. Edward Braddock to lead a bunch of inexperienced soldiers with slow, heavy artillery.
2. In a battle with the French, the British were ambushed routed by French using “Indian-tactics.”
   • In this battle, Washington reportedly had two horses shot from
     under him and four bullets go through his coat, but never through him.
3. Afterwards, the frontier from Pennsylvania to North Carolina felt the Indian wrath, as scalping occurred everywhere.
4. As the British tried to attack a bunch of strategic wilderness posts, defeat after defeat piled up.

VII. Pitt’s Palms of Victory

1. In this hour of British trouble, William Pitt, the “Great Commoner,” took the lead.
2. In 1757, he became a foremost leader in the London government and later earned the title of “Organizer of Victory”
3. Changes Pitt made…
   • He soft-pedaled assaults on the French West Indies, assaults which
     sapped British strength, and concentrated on Quebec-Montreal (since
     they controlled the supply routes to New France).
   • He replaced old, cautious officers with younger, daring officers
4. In 1758, Louisbourg fell. This root of a fort began to wither the New France vine since supplies dwindled.
5. 32 year-old James Wolfe, dashing and attentive to
   detail, commanded an army that boldly scaled the cliff walls of a part
   protecting Quebec, met French troops near the Plains of Abraham, and in
   a battle in which he and French commander Marquis de Montcalm both
   died, the French were defeated and the city of Quebec surrendered.
   • The 1759 Battle of Quebec ranks as one of the most
     significant engagements in British and American history, and when
     Montreal fell in 1760, that was the last time French flags would fly on
     American soil.
6. In the Peace Treaty at Paris in 1763…
   • France was totally kicked out of North America. This meant the
     British got Canada and the land all the way to the Mississippi River.
   • The French were allowed to retain several small but valuable sugar
     islands in the West Indies and two never-to-be-fortified islets in the
     Gulf of St. Lawrence for fishing stations.
7. France’s final blow came when they gave Louisiana to Spain to compensate for Spain’s losses in the war.
8. Great Britain took its place as the leading naval power in the world, and a great power in North America.

VIII. Restless Colonists

1. The colonists, having experienced war firsthand and come out victors, were very confident.
   • However, the myth of British invincibility had been shattered.
2. Ominously, friction developed between the British officers and the colonial “boors.”
   • I.e., the British refused to recognize any American officers above the rank of captain.
   • However, the hardworking Americans believed that they were equals with the Redcoats, and trouble began to brew.
3. Brits were concerned about American secret trade with enemy traders
   during the war; in fact, in the last year of the war, the British
   forbade the export of all supplies from New England to the middle
   colonies.
4. Also, many American colonials refused to help fight the French until Pitt offered to reimburse them.
5. During the French and Indian War, though, Americans from different
   parts of the colonies found, surprisingly to them, that they had a lot
   in common (language, tradition, ideals) and barriers of disunity began
   to melt.

IX. War’s Fateful Aftermath

1. Now that the French had been beaten, the colonists could now roam freely, and were less dependent upon Great Britain.
2. The French consoled themselves with the thought that if they could
   lose such a great empire, maybe the British would one day lose theirs
   too.
3. Spain was eliminated from Florida, and the Indians could no longer
   play the European powers against each other, since it was only Great
   Britain in control now.
4. In 1763, Ottawa Chief Pontiac led a few
   French-allied tribes in a brief but bloody campaign through the Ohio
   Valley, but the whites quickly and cruelly retaliated after being
   caught off guard.
   • One commander ordered blankets infected with smallpox to be distributed.
   • The violence convinced whites to station troops along the frontier.
5. Now, land-hungry Americans could now settle west of the Appalachians, but in 1763, Parliament issued its Proclamation of 1763, prohibiting any settlement in the area beyond the Appalachians.
   • Actually, this document was meant to work out the Indian problem by
     drawing the “out-of-bounds” line. But, colonists saw it as
     another form of oppression from a far away country. Americans asked,
     “Didn’t we just fight a war to win that land?”
   • In 1765, an estimated one thousand wagons rolled through the town
     of Salisbury, North Carolina, on their way “up west” in
     defiance of the Proclamation.
6. The British, proud and haughty, were in no way to accept this
   blatant disobedience by the lowly Americans, and the stage was set for
   the Revolutionary War.

X. Makers of America: The French

1. Louis XIV envisioned a French empire in North America, but defeats in 1713 and 1763 snuffed that out.
2. The first French to leave Canada were the Acadians.
   • The British who had won that area had demanded that all residents either swear allegiance to Britain or leave.
   • In 1755, they were forcefully expelled from the region.
3. The Acadians fled far south to the French colony of Louisiana,
   where they settled among sleepy bayous, planted sugar cane and sweet
   potatoes, and practiced Roman Catholicism.
   • They also spoke a French dialect that came to be called Cajun.
   • Cajuns married the Spanish, French, and Germans.
   • They were largely isolated in large families until the 1930s, when
     a bridge-building spree engineered by Governor Huey Long, broke the
     isolation of these bayou communities.
4. In 1763, a second group of French settlers in Quebec began to
   leave, heading toward New England because poor harvests led to lack of
   food in Quebec because…
   • The people hoped to return to Canada someday.
   • They notably preserved their Roman Catholicism and their language.
   • Yet today, almost all Cajuns and New England French-Canadians speak English.
5. Today, Quebec is the only sign of French existence that once ruled.
   • French culture is strong there in the form of road signs,
     classrooms, courts, and markets, eloquently testifying to the continued
     vitality of French culture in North America.

I. The Deep Roots of Revolution

1. In a broad sense, the American Revolution began when the first colonists set foot on America.
2. The war may have lasted for eight years, but a sense of
   independence had already begun to develop because London was over 3,000
   miles away.
   • Sailing across the Atlantic in a ship often took 6 to 8 weeks.
   • Survivors felt physically and spiritually separated from Europe.
   • Colonists in America, without influence from superiors, felt that
     they were fundamentally different from England, and more independent.
   • Many began to think of themselves as Americans, and that they were on the cutting edge of the British empire.

II. Mercantilism and Colonial Grievances

1. Of the 13 original colonies, only Georgia was formally planted by
   the British government. The rest were started by companies, religious
   groups, land speculators, etc…
2. The British embraced a theory that justified their control of the colonies called mercantilism:
   • A country’s economic wealth could be measured by the amount of gold or silver in its treasury.
   • To amass gold and silver, a country had to export more than it imported (it had to obtain a favorable balance of trade).
   • Countries with colonies were at an advantage, because the colonies
     could supply the mother country with raw materials, wealth, supplies, a
     market for selling manufactured goods etc…
   • For America, that meant giving Britain all the ships, ships’ stores, sailors, and trade that they needed and wanted.
   • Also, they had to grow tobacco and sugar for England that Brits would otherwise have to buy from other countries.
3. England’s policy of mercantilism severely handcuffed American trade.
   • The Navigation Laws were the most infamous of the laws to enforce mercantilism.
     • The first of these was enacted in 1650, and was aimed at rival
       Dutch shippers who were elbowing their way into the American shipping.
     • The Navigation Laws restricted commerce from the colonies to England (and back) to only English ships, and none other.
     • Other laws stated that European goods consigned to America had to land first in England, where custom duties could be collected.
     • Also, some products, “enumerated goods,” could only be shipped to England.
   • Settlers were even restricted in what they could manufacture at
     home; they couldn’t make woolen cloth and beaver hats to export
     (though, they could make them for themselves).
   • Americans had no currency, but they were constantly buying things
     from Britain, so that gold and silver was constantly draining out of
     America, forcing some to even trade and barter. Eventually, the
     colonists were forced to print paper money, which depreciated.
   • Colonial laws could be voided by the Privy Council, though this privilege was used sparingly (469 times out of 8,563 laws). Still, colonists were infuriated by its use.

III. The Merits and Menace of Mercantilism
Merits of mercantilism:

1. The Navigation Laws were hated, but until 1763, they were not
   really enforced much, resulting in widespread smuggling. This lack of
   enforcement is called “salutary neglect.”
   • In fact, John Hancock amassed a fortune through smuggling.
2. Tobacco planters, though they couldn’t ship it to anywhere except Britain, still had a monopoly within the British market.
3. Americans had unusual opportunities for self-government.
4. Americans also had the mightiest army in the world in Britain, and didn’t have to pay for it.
   • After independence, the U.S. had to pay for a tiny army and navy.
5. Basically, the Americans had it made: even repressive laws
   weren’t enforced much, and the average American benefited much
   more than the average Englishman.
   • The mistakes that occurred didn’t occur out of malice, at least until the revolution.
   • Also, France and Spain embraced mercantilism, and enforced it heavily.

Menace of mercantilism:

1. After Britain began to enforce mercantilism in 1763, the fuse for the American Revolution was lit.
2. Disadvantages of mercantilism included:
   • Americans couldn’t buy, sell, ship, or manufacture under their most favorable conditions.
   • The South, which produced crops that weren’t grown in England, was preferred over the North.
     • Virginia, which grew just tobacco, was at the mercy of the British
       buyers, who often paid very poorly and were responsible for putting
       many planters into debt.

• Many colonists felt that Britain was just milking her colonies for all they were worth.
  • Theodore Roosevelt later said, “Revolution broke out because
    England failed to recognize an emerging nation when it saw one.”

IV. The Stamp Tax Uproar

1. After the Seven Years’ War (French & Indian War), Britain
   had huge debt, and though it fairly had no intention of making the
   Americans pay off all of it for Britain, it did feel that Americans
   should pay off one-third of the cost, since Redcoats had been used for
   the protection of the Americans.
2. Prime Minister George Grenville, an honest and
   able financier but not noted for tact, ordered that the Navigation Laws
   be enforced, arousing resentment of settlers.
   • He also secured the Sugar Act of 1764, which
     increased duty on foreign sugar imported from the West Indies; after
     numerous protests from spoiled Americans, the duties were reduced.
3. The Quartering Act of 1765 required certain colonies to provide food and quarters for British troops.
4. In 1765, he also imposed a stamp tax to raise money for the new military force.
   • The Stamp Act mandated the use of stamped paper or the affixing of stamps, certifying payment of tax.
   • Stamps were required on bills of sale for about 50 trade items as well as on certain types of commercial and legal documents.
   • Both the Stamp Act and the Sugar Act provided for offenders to be
     tried in the admiralty courts, where defenders were guilty until proven
     innocent.
   • Grenville felt that these taxes were fair, as he was simply asking
     the colonists to pay their share of the deal; plus, Englishmen paid a
     much heavier stamp tax.
5. Americans felt that they were unfairly taxed for an unnecessary
   army (hadn’t the French army and Pontiac’s warriors been
   defeated?), and they lashed out violently, especially against the stamp
   tax.
   • Americans formed the battle cry, “No taxation without representation!”
   • Americans were angered, mostly, to the principle of the matter at hand.
   • Americans denied the right of Parliament to tax Americans, since no Americans were seated in Parliament.
6. Grenville replied that these statements were absurd, and pushed the idea of “virtual representation,” in which every Parliament member represented all British subjects (so Americans were represented).
7. Americans rejected “virtual representation” as hogwash.

V. Forced Repeal the Stamp Act

1. In 1765, representatives from 9 of the 13 colonies met in New York City to discuss the Stamp Tax.
   • The Stamp Act Congress was largely ignored in
     Britain, but was a step toward inter-colonial unity (similar to the
     Albany Congress of French & Indian War days).
2. Some colonists agreed to boycott supplies, instead, making their own and refusing to buy British goods.
3. Sons and Daughters of Liberty took the law into their own hands,
   tarring and feathering violators among people who had agreed to boycott
   the goods.
   • They also stormed the houses of important officials and took their money.
   • Stunned, demands appeared in Parliament for repeal of the stamp
     tax, though many wanted to know why 7.5 million Brits had to pay heavy
     taxes to protect the colonies, but 2 million colonials refused to pay
     only one-third of the cost of their own defense.
   • In 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act but passed the Declaratory Act, proclaiming that Parliament had the right “to bind” the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”

VI. The Townshend Tea Tax and the Boston “Massacre”

1. Charles “Champaign Charley” Townshend (a man who could
   deliver brilliant speeches in Parliament even while drunk) persuaded
   Parliament to pass the Townshend Acts in 1767.

They put light taxes on lead, paper, paint, and tea, which were later repealed, except tea.

1. In 1767, New York’s legislature was suspended for failure to comply with the Quartering Act.
2. Tea became smuggled, though, and to enforce the law, Brits had to send troops to America.
3. On the evening of March 5, 1770, a crowd of about 60 townspeople in Boston were harassing some ten Redcoats.
   • One fellow got hit in the head, another got hit by a club.
   • Without orders but heavily provoked, the troops opened fire,
     wounding or killing eleven “innocent” citizens, including Crispus Attucks, a black former-slave and the “leader” of the mob in the Boston Massacre. Attucks became a symbol of freedom (from slave, to freeman, to martyr who stood up to Britain for liberty).
   • Only two Redcoats were prosecuted.

VII. The Seditious Committees of Correspondence

1. King George III was 32 years old, a good person, but a poor ruler who surrounded himself with sycophants like Lord North.
2. The Townshend Taxes didn’t really do much, so they were repealed, except for the tea tax.
3. The colonies, in order to spread propaganda and keep the rebellious moods, set up Committees of Correspondence which was a network of letter-writers and forerunner of the Continental Congress; the first committee was started by Samuel Adams. They were key to keeping the revolution spirit rolling.

VIII. Tea Brewing in Boston

1. In 1773, the powerful British East India Company, overburdened with 17 million pounds of unsold tea, was facing bankruptcy.
2. The British decided to sell it to the Americans, who were
   suspicious and felt that it was a shabby attempt to trick the Americans
   with the bait of cheaper tea and paying tax.
3. On December 16, 1773, some Whites, led by patriot Samuel Adams,
   disguised themselves as Indians, opened 342 chests and dumped the tea
   into the ocean in this “Boston Tea Party.”
   • People in Annapolis did the same and burnt the ships to water level.
   • Reaction was varied, from approval to outrage to disapproval.
   • Edmund Burke declared, “To tax and to please, no more than to love and be wise, is not given to men.”

IX. Parliament Passes the “Intolerable Acts”

1. In 1774, by huge majorities, Parliament passed a series of “Repressive Acts” to punish the colonies, namely Massachusetts. These were called the Intolerable Acts by Americans.
   • The Boston Port Act closed the harbor in Boston.
   • Self-government was limited by forbidding town hall meetings without approval.
   • The charter to Massachusetts was revoked.
2. The Quebec Act
   • A good law in bad company, it guaranteed Catholicism to the
     French-Canadians, permitted them to retain their old customs, and
     extended the old boundaries of Quebec all the way to the Ohio River.
   • Americans saw their territory threatened and aroused anti-Catholics
     were shocked at the enlargement that would make a Catholic area as
     large as the original 13 colonies. Plus, Americans were banned from
     this region through the Proclamation Line of 1763.

X. Bloodshed

1. The First Continental Congress
   • In Philadelphia, from September 5th to October 26th, 1774, the First Continental Congress met to discuss problems.
   • While not wanting independence yet, it did come up with a list of grievances, which were ignored in Parliament.
   • 12 of the 13 colonies met, only Georgia didn’t have a representative there.
   • Also, they came up with a Declaration of Rights.
2. They agreed to meet again in 1775 (the next year) if nothing happened.
3. The “Shot Heard ‘Round the World”
   • In April 1775, the British commander in Boston sent a detachment of troops to nearby Lexington and Concord to seize supplies and to capture Sam Adams and John Hancock.
   • Minutemen, after having eight of their own killed at Lexington,
     fought back at Concord, pushing the Redcoats back, shooting them from
     behind rocks and trees, Indian style.

XI. Imperial Strength and Weaknesses

1. With war broken open, Britain had the heavy advantage: (1) 7.5
   million people to America’s 2 million, (2) superior naval power,
   (3) great wealth.
2. Some 30,000 Hessians (German mercenaries) were
   also hired by George III, in addition to a professional army of about
   50,000 men, plus about 50,000 American loyalists and many Native
   Americans.
3. However, Britain still had Ireland (which required troops) and
   France was just waiting to stab Britain in the back; plus, there was no
   William Pitt.
   • Many Brits had no desire to kill their American cousins, as shown by William Pitt’s withdrawal of his son from the army.
   • English Whigs at first supported America, as opposed to Lord North’s Tory Whigs, and they felt that if George III won, then his rule of England might become tyrannical.
   • Britain’s generals were second-rate, and its men were brutally treated.
   • Provisions were often scarce, plus Britain was fighting a war some 3,000 miles away from home.
   • America was also expansive, and there was no single capital to capture and therefore cripple the country.

XII. American Pluses and Minuses
Advantages

1. Americans had great leaders like George Washington (giant general), and Ben Franklin (smooth diplomat).
2. They also had French aid (indirect and secretly), as the French
   provided the Americans with guns, supplies, gunpowder, etc…
3. Marquis de Lafayette, at age 19, was made a major general in the colonial army and was a great asset.
4. The colonials were fighting in a defensive manner, and they were self-sustaining.
5. They were better marksmen. A competent American rifleman could hit a man’s head at 200 yards.
6. The Americans enjoyed the moral advantage in fighting for a just
   cause, and the historical odds weren’t unfavorable either.

Disadvantages

1. Americans were terribly lacking in unity, though.
2. Jealousy was prevalent, as colonies resented the Continental
   Congress’ attempt at exercising power. Sectional jealousy boiled
   up over the appointment of military leaders; some New Englanders almost
   preferred British officers to Americans from other colonies.
3. Americans had little money. Inflation also hit families of soldiers hard, and made many people poor.
4. Americans had nothing of a navy.

XIII. A Thin Line of Heroes

1. The American army was desperately in need of clothing, wool, wagons to ship food, and other supplies.
2. Many soldiers had also only received rudimentary training.
3. German Baron von Steuben, who spoke no English, whipped the soldiers into shape.
4. African Americans also fought and died in service, though in the beginning, many colonies barred them from service.
   • By war’s end, more than 5,000 blacks had enlisted in the American armed forces.
   • African-Americans also served on the British side.
   • In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, issued
     a proclamation declaring freedom for any enslaved black in Virginia who
     joined the British Army.
   • By war’s end, at least 1,400 Blacks were evacuated to Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and England.
5. Many people also sold items to the British, because they paid in gold.
6. Many people just didn’t care about the revolution, and
   therefore, raising a large number of troops was difficult, if not
   impossible.
7. Only because a select few threw themselves into the cause with passion, did the Americans win.

I. Congress Drafts George Washington

1. After the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord in April of 1775,
   about 20,000 Minutemen swarmed around Boston, where they outnumbered
   the British.
2. The Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia on May 10,
   1775, with no real intention of independence, but merely a desire to
   continue fighting in the hope that the king and Parliament would
   consent to a redress of grievances.
   • It sent another list of grievances to Parliament.
   • It also adopted measures to raise money for an army and a navy.
   • It also selected George Washington to command the army.
     • Washington had never risen above the rank of colonel, and his
       largest command had only been of 1,200 men, but he was a tall figure
       who looked like a leader, and thus, was a morale boost to troops.
     • He radiated patience, courage, self-discipline, and a sense of
       justice, and though he insisted on working without pay, he did keep a
       careful expense account amounting to more than $100,000.

II. Bunker Hill and Hessian Hirelings

1. In the first year, the war was one of consistency, as the colonists
   maintained their loyalty while still shooting at the king’s men.
2. In May 1775, a tiny American force called the Green Mountain Boys,
   led by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold, surprised and captured the
   British garrisons at Forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point
   • The importance of this raid lay in the fact that they captured much-needed cannons and gunpowder.
3. In June 1775, the colonials seized Bunker Hill (prior known as Breed’s Hill).
   • Instead of flanking them, the Redcoats launched a frontal attack,
     and the heavily entrenched colonial sharpshooters mowed them down until
     meager gunpowder supplies ran out and they were forced to retreat.
4. After Bunker Hill, George III slammed the door for all hope of
   reconciliation and declared the colonies to be in open rebellion, a
   treasonous affair.
5. The king also hired many German mercenaries, called Hessians, who,
   because they were lured by booty and not duty, had large numbers desert
   and remained in America to become respectful citizens.

III. The Abortive Conquest of Canada

1. In October 1775, the British burned Falmouth (Portland), Maine.
2. The colonists decided that invading Canada would add a 14th colony
   and deprive Britain of a valuable base for striking at the colonies in
   revolt.
   • Also, the French-Canadians would support the Americans because they
     supposedly were bitter about Britain’s taking over of their land.
   • General Richard Montgomery captured Montreal.
   • At Quebec, he was joined by the bedraggled army of Gen. Benedict Arnold.
   • On the last day of 1775, in the assault of Quebec, Montgomery was
     killed and Arnold was wounded in one leg, and the whole campaign
     collapsed as the men retreated up the St. Lawrence River, reversing the
     way Montgomery had come.
   • Besides, the French-Canadians, who had welcomed the Quebec Act, didn’t really like the anti-Catholic invaders.
3. In January 1776, the British set fire to Norfolk, Virginia, but in March, they were finally forced to evacuate Boston.
4. In the South, the rebels won a victory against some 1,500 Loyalists
   at Moore’s Creek Bridge, in North Carolina, and against an
   invading British fleet at Charleston Harbor.

IV. Thomas Paine Preaches Common Sense

1. In 1776, Thomas Paine published the pamphlet Common Sense, which
   urged colonials to stop this war of inconsistency, stop pretending
   loyalty, and just fight.
2. Nowhere in the universe did a smaller body control a larger one, so
   Paine argued, saying it was unnatural for tiny Britain to control
   gigantic America.
3. He called King George III “the Royal Brute of Great Britain.”

V. Paine and the Idea of “Republicanism”

1. Paine argued his idea that there should be a “republic”
   where representative senators, governors, and judges should have their
   power from the consent of the people.
2. He laced his ideas with Biblical imagery, familiar to common folk.
3. His ideas about rejecting monarchy and empire and embrace an
   independent republic fell on receptive ears in America, though it
   should be noted that these ideas already existed.
   • The New Englanders already practiced this type of government in their town meetings.
4. Some patriots, though, favored a republic ruled by a “natural aristocracy.”

VI. Jefferson’s “Explanation” of Independence

1. Members of the Philadelphia 2nd Continental Congress, instructed by
   their colonies, gradually moved toward a clean break with Britain.
2. On June 7, 1776, fiery Richard Henry Lee urged for complete independence, an idea that was finally adopted on July 2, 1776.
3. To write such a statement, Congress appointed Thomas Jefferson,
   already renown as a great writer, to concoct a Declaration of
   Independence.
   • He did so eloquently, coming up with a list of grievances against
     King George III and persuasively explaining why the colonies had the
     right to revolt.
   • His “explanation” of independence also upheld the
     “natural rights” of humankind (life, liberty, and the
     pursuit of happiness).
4. When Congress approved it on July 2nd, John Adams proclaimed that
   date to be celebrated from then on with fireworks, but because of
   editing and final approval, it was not completely approved until July
   4th, 1776.

VII. Patriots and Loyalists

1. The War of Independence was a war within a war, as not all colonials were united.
   • There were Patriots, who supported rebellion and were called “Whigs.”
   • There were Loyalists, who supported the king and who often went to
     battle against fellow Americans. The Loyalists were also called
     “Tories.”
   • There were Moderates in the middle and those who didn’t care
     either way. These people were constantly being asked to join one side
     or another.
2. During the war, the British proved that they could only control
   Tory areas, because when Redcoats packed up and left other areas, the
   rebels would regain control.
3. Typical Loyalist (Tory)
   • Loyalists were generally conservatives, but the war divided
     families. For example, Benjamin Franklin was against his illegitimate
     son, William, the last royal governor of New Jersey.
   • Loyalists were most numerous where the Anglican Church was strongest (the South).
   • Loyalists were less numerous in New England, where Presbyterianism
     and Congregationalism flourished. Loyalists were more numerous in the
     aristocratic areas such as Charleston, SC.
4. Typical Patriot
   • The Patriots were generally the younger generation, like Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry.
   • The Patriot militias constantly harassed small British detachments.
   • Patriots typically didn’t belong to the Anglican Church
     (Church of England) but were Congregational, Presbyterian, Baptist, or
     Methodist.
5. There were also those known as “profiteers” who sold to
   the highest bidder, selling to the British and ignoring starving,
   freezing soldiers (i.e. George Washington at Valley Forge).

VIII. The Loyalist Exodus

1. After the Declaration of Independence, Loyalists and Patriots were
   more sharply divided, and Patriots often confiscated Loyalist property
   to resell it (an easy way to raise money).
2. Some 50,000 Loyalists served the British in one way or another
   (fighting, spying, etc…), and it was an oddity that the Brits
   didn’t make more use of them during the war.

IX. General Washington at Bay

1. After the evacuation of Boston, the British focused on New York as a base for operations.
   • An awe-inspiring fleet appeared off the coast in July 1776,
     consisting of some 500 ships and 35,000 men—the largest armed
     force seen in America ever until the Civil War.
   • Washington could only muster 18,000 ill-trained men to fight, and they were routed at the Battle of Long Island.
     • Washington escaped to Manhattan Island, crossed the Hudson River to
       New Jersey, reaching the Delaware River with taunting, fox-hunt calling
       Brits on his heels.
   • He crossed the Delaware River at Trenton on a cold December 26,
     1776, and surprised and captured a thousand Hessians who were sleeping
     off their Christmas Day celebration (drinking).
   • He then left his campfires burning as a ruse, slipped away, and
     inflicted a sharp defeat on a smaller British detachment at Princeton,
     showing his military genius at its best.
   • It was odd that Gen. William Howe, the British general,
     didn’t crush Washington when he was at the Delaware, but he well
     remembered Bunker Hill, and was cautious.

X. Burgoyne’s Blundering Invasion

1. London officials adopted a complicated scheme for capturing the
   vital Hudson River valley in 1777, which, if successful, would sever
   New England from the rest of the colonies. The plan was such
   that…
   • General Burgoyne would push down the Lake Champlain route from Canada.
   • General Howe’s troops in New York, if needed, could advance up the Hudson and meet Burgoyne in Albany.
   • A third and much smaller British force commanded by Col. Barry St.
     Ledger would come in from the west by way of Lake Ontario and the
     Mohawk Valley.
2. However, Benedict Arnold, after failure at Quebec, retreated slowly
   along the St. Lawrence back to Lake Champlain, where the British would
   have to win control (of the lake) before proceeding.
   • The Brits stopped to build a huge force, while Arnold assembled a tattered flotilla from whatever boats he could find.
   • His “navy” was destroyed, but he had gained valuable
     time, because winter set in and the British settled in Canada, thus,
     they would have to begin anew the next spring.
     • Had Arnold not contributed his daring and skill, the Brits most
       likely would have recaptured Ticonderoga and Burgoyne could have
       started from there and succeeded in his venture.
3. Burgoyne began his mission with 7,000 troops and a heavy baggage
   train consisting of a great number of the officers’ wives.
   • Meanwhile, sneaky rebels, sensing the kill, were gathering along his flanks.
4. General Howe, at a time when he should be starting up the Hudson, deliberately embarked for an attack on Philadelphia.
   • He wanted to force an encounter with Washington and leave the path
     wide open for Burgoyne’s thrust. He thought he had enough time to
     help Burgoyne if needed.
   • Washington transferred his troops to Philadelphia, but was defeated at Brandywine Creek and Germantown.
   • Then, the fun-loving Howe settled down in Philadelphia, leaving Burgoyne “to the dogs.”
   • Ben Franklin, in Paris, joked that Howe hadn’t captured
     Philadelphia, but that “Philadelphia had captured Howe.”
5. Washington finally retired for the winter at Valley Forge, where
   his troops froze in the cold, but a recently arrived Prussian
   drillmaster, Baron von Steuben, whipped the cold troops into shape.
6. Burgoyne’s doomed troops were bogged down, and the rebels
   swarmed in with a series of sharp engagements, pushing St. Legers force
   back at Oriskany while Burgoyne, unable to advance or retreat,
   surrendered his entire force at The Battle of Saratoga, on October 17,
   1777.
   • This was perhaps one of the most decisive battles in British and American history.
   • The importance of Saratoga lay in the fact that afterwards, France
     sensed America might actually win and came out to officially help
     America.

XI. Revolution in Diplomacy?

1. France was eager to get revenge on Britain, and secretly supplied the Americans throughout much of the war.
2. The Continental Congress sent delegates to France. The delegates
   were guided by a “Model Treaty” which sought no political
   or military connections, but only commercial ones.
   • Ben Franklin played the diplomacy game by wearing simple gray
     clothes and a coonskin cap to supposedly exemplify a raw new America
3. After the humiliation at Saratoga, the British offered the
   Americans a measure that gave them home rule—everything they
   wanted except independence.
4. After Saratoga, France finally was persuaded to enter the war against Britain.
   • Louis XVI’s ministers argued that this was the perfect time
     to act, because if Britain regained control, she might then try to
     capture the French West Indies for compensation for the war.
   • Now was the time to strike, rather than risk a stronger Britain with its reunited colonies.
5. France, in 1778, offered a treaty of alliance, offering America
   everything that Britain had offered, plus recognition of independence.
   • The Americans accepted the agreement with caution, since France was
     pro-Catholic, but since the Americans needed help, they’d take it.

XII. The Colonial War Becomes a Wider War

1. In 1779, Spain and Holland entered the war against Britain.
2. In 1780, Catherine the Great of Russia took the lead in organizing
   the Armed Neutrality (she later called it the Armed Nullity) that lined
   up all of Europe’s neutrals in passive hostility against England.
3. America, though it kept the war going until 1778, didn’t win
   until France, Spain, and Holland joined in and Britain couldn’t
   handle them all.
4. Britain, with the French now in the seas, decided to finally
   evacuate Philadelphia and concentrate their forces in New York, and
   even though Washington attacked them at Monmouth on a blisteringly hot
   day in which scores of men died of sunstroke, the British escaped to
   New York.

XIII. Blow and Counterblow

1. French reinforcements, commanded by Comte de Rochambeau, arrived in
   Newport, Rhode Island in 1780, but flares sometimes erupted between the
   Americans and the French.
2. In 1780, feeling unappreciated and lured by British gold, Gen.
   Benedict Arnold turned traitor by plotting with the British to sell out
   West Point.
   • When the plot was discovered, he fled with the British.
   • “Whom can we trust now?” cried George Washington in anguish.
3. The British devised a plan to roll up the colonies from the South.
   • Georgia was ruthlessly overrun in 1778-1779.
   • Charleston, South Carolina, fell in 1780.
   • In the Carolinas, Patriots bitterly fought their Loyalist neighbors.
   • However, in 1781, American riflemen wiped out a British detachment
     at King’s Mountain, and then defeated a smaller force at Cowpens.
   • At the Carolina campaign of 1781, Quaker-reared tactician Gen.
     Nathanael Greene distinguished himself with his strategy of delay.
     • By slowly retreating and losing battles but winning campaigns, he
       helped clear the British out of most of Georgia and South Carolina.

XIV. The Land Frontier and the Sea Frontier

1. 1777 was known as the “bloody year” on the frontier, as Indians went on a scalping spree.
2. Most of the Indians supported Britain and believed that if they
   won, it would stop American expansion into the West, and save Indian
   land.
3. Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, recently converted to Anglicanism, and
   his men ravaged the backcountry of Pennsylvania and New York until
   checked by the Americans in 1779.
4. In 1784, the pro-British Iroquois (the Oneidas and the Tuscaroras
   had sided with the Americans, the other four with the British) signed
   the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the first treaty between the U.S. and an
   Indian nation.
   • Under its terms, the Indians ceded most of their land.
5. Even in wartime, pioneers moved west, showing their gratitude to
   the French with such town names as Louisville while remembering the
   revolution with Lexington, Kentucky.
6. George Rogers Clark, an audacious frontiersman, floated down the
   Ohio River with about 175 men in 1778-1779 and captured forts
   Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vicennes in quick succession.
7. The tiny American navy never really hurt the British warships, but
   it did destroy British merchant shipping and carried the war into the
   waters around the British Isles.
8. Swift privateers preyed on enemy shipping, capturing many ships and forcing them to sail in convoys.

XV. Yorktown and the Final Curtain

1. Before the last decisive victory, inflation continued to soar, and
   the government was virtually bankrupt. It announced that it could only
   repay many of its debts at a rate of 2.5 cents on the dollar.
2. However, Cornwallis was blundering into a trap.
   • Retreating to Chesapeake Bay and assuming that British control of
     the seas would give him much needed backup, Cornwallis instead was
     trapped by Washington’s army, which had come 300 miles from NY,
     Rochambeau’s French army, and the navy of French Admiral de
     Grasse.
3. After hearing the news of Cornwallis’ defeat, Lord North cried, “Oh God! It’s all over!”
4. Stubborn King George wanted to continue the war, since he still had
   54,000 troops in North America and 32,000 in the U.S., and fighting did
   continue for about a year after Yorktown, especially in the South, but
   America had won.

XVI. Peace at Paris

1. Many Brits were weary of the war, since they had suffered heavily
   in India and the West Indies, the island of Minorca in the
   Mediterranean which had fallen, and the Rock of Gibraltar was tottering.
2. Ben Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay met in Paris for a peace deal.
   • Jay suspected that France would try to keep the U.S. cooped up east of the Alleghenies and keep America weak.
   • Instead, Jay, thinking that France would betray American ambition
     to satisfy those of Spain, secretly made separate overtures to London
     (against instructions from Congress) and came to terms quickly with the
     British, who were eager to entice one of their enemies from the
     alliance.
3. The Treaty of Paris of 1783
   • Britain formally recognized U.S. independence and granted generous
     boundaries, stretching majestically to the Mississippi River to the
     west, the Great Lakes on the north, and to Spanish Florida on the South.
   • The Yankees also retained a share in the priceless fisheries of Newfoundland.
   • Americans couldn’t persecute Loyalists, though, and Congress
     could only recommend legislature that would return or pay for
     confiscated Loyalist land.

XVII. A New Nation Legitimized

1. Britain ceded so much land because it was trying to entice America from its French alliance.
   • Remember, George Rogers Clark had only conquered a small part of that western land.
2. Also, during the time, the American-friendly Whigs were in control
   of the Parliament, which was not to be the case in later years.
3. France approved the treaty, though with cautious eyes.
4. In truth, America came out the big winner, and seldom, if ever, have any people been so favored.

XVIII. Makers of America: The Loyalists

1. Loyalists were conservative, well-educated, and thought that a
   complete break with Britain would invite anarchy. They felt that
   America couldn’t win against the most powerful nation in the
   world.
2. Many Britons had settled in America after the Seven Years’ War, and they had reason to support their home country.
3. Thousands of African-Americans joined the British ranks for hope of freedom from bondage.
   • Many Black Loyalists won their freedom from Britain.
   • Others suffered betrayal, such as when Cornwallis abandoned over
     4,000 former slaves in Virginia and when many Black Loyalists boarded
     ships expecting to embark for freedom but instead found themselves sold
     back into slavery.
   • Some Black exiles settled in Britain, but weren’t really easily accepted.
4. Most Loyalists remained in America, where they faced special
   burdens and struggled to re-establish themselves in a society that
   viewed them as traitors.
5. Hugh Gaine, though, succeeded in building back his name.
   • He reopened his business and even won contracts from the new government.
   • He also published the new national army regulations authored by Baron von Steuben.
   • When New York ratified the Constitution in 1788, Gaine rode the float at the head of the city’s celebration parade.
   • He had, like many other former Loyalists, become an American.

I. The Pursuit of Equality

1. The American Revolution was more of an accelerated evolution than a revolution.
2. However, the exodus of some 80,000 Loyalists left a great lack of conservatives.
   • This weakening of the aristocratic “upper crust” let Patriot elites emerge.
3. The fight for separation of church and state resulted in notable gains.
   • The Congregational church continued to be legally established (tax
     supported) by some New England states, but the Anglican Church was
     humbled and reformed as the Protestant Episcopal Church.
4. Slavery was a large, problematic issue, as the Continental Congress
   of 1774 had called for the abolition of slavery, and in 1775, the
   Philadelphia Quakers founded the world’s first antislavery
   society.
   • This new spirit that “all men are created equal” even inspired a few slave owners to free their slaves.
5. Another issue was women. They still were unequal to men, even
   though some had served (disguised as men) in the Revolutionary War.
   • There were some achievements for women such as New Jersey’s 1776 constitution which allowed women to vote (for a time).
   • Mothers devoted to their families were developed as an idea of
     “republican motherhood” and elevated women to higher
     statuses as keepers of the nation’s conscience. Women raised the
     children and thereby held the future of the republic in their hands.

II. Constitution Making in the States

1. The Continental Congress of 1776 called upon colonies to draft new
   constitutions (thus began the formation of the Articles of the
   Confederation).
   • Massachusetts contributed one innovation when it called a special
     convention to draft its constitution and made it so that the
     constitution could only be changed through another specially called
     constitutional convention.
   • Many states had written documents that represented a fundamental law.
   • Many had a bill of rights and also required annual election of legislators.
   • All of them deliberately created weak executive and judicial
     branches since they distrusted power due to Britain’s abuse of it.
   • In most states, the legislative branch was given sweeping powers,
     though some people, like Thomas Jefferson, warned that “173
     despots [in legislature] would surely be as oppressive as one.”
2. Many state capitals followed the migration of the people and moved
   westward, as in New Hampshire, New York, Virginia, the Carolinas, and
   Georgia.

III. Economic Crosscurrents

1. After the Revolution, Loyalist land was seized, but people didn’t chop heads off (as later in France).
2. Goods formerly imported from England were cut off, forcing Americans to make their own.
3. Still, America remained agriculturalist by a large degree. Industrialization would come much later.
4. Prior to war, Americans had great trade with Britain, and now they
   didn’t. But they could now trade with foreign countries, and with
   any nation they wanted to, a privilege they didn’t have before.
5. Yankee shippers like the Empress of China (1784) boldly ventured into far off places.
6. However, inflation was rampant, and taxes were hated. The rich had
   become poor, and the newly rich were viewed with suspicion. Disrespect
   of private property became shocking.

IV. A Shaky Start Toward Union

1. While the U.S. had to create a new government, the people were far from united.
2. In 1786, after the war, Britain flooded America with cheap goods, greatly hurting American industries.
3. However, the states all did share similar constitutions, had a rich
   political inheritance form Britain, and America was blessed with men
   like Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, and John Adams, great
   political leaders of high order.

V. Creating a Confederation

1. The new states chose a confederation as their first
   government—a loose union of states where a federal and state
   level exist, yet the state level retains the most sovereignty to
   “do their own thing.”
   • For example, during the war, states had created their own individual currencies and tax barriers.
2. The Articles of the Confederation was finished in 1777, but it was
   finally completely ratified by the last state, Maryland, on March 1,
   1781.
3. A major dispute was that states like New York and Virginia had huge
   tracts of land west of the Appalachians that they could sell off to pay
   off their debts while other states could not do so.
   • As a compromise, these lands were ceded to the federal government,
     which pledged to dispense them for the common good of the union (states
     would be made).
   • The Northwest Ordinance later confirmed this.

VI. The Articles of the Confederation: America’s First Constitution

1. The main thing to know regarding the Articles is that they set up a
   very weak government. This was not by accident, but by plan. The reason
   a weak government was desired was simply to avoid a strong national
   government that would take away unalienable rights or abuse their power
   (i.e. England).
2. The Articles had no executive branch (hence, no single leader), a
   weak Congress in which each state had only one vote, it required 2/3
   majority on any subject of importance, and a fully unanimous vote for
   amendments.
3. Also, Congress was pitifully weak, and could not regulate commerce and could not enforce tax collection.
   • States printed their own, worthless paper money.
   • States competed with one another for foreign trade. The federal government was helpless.
4. Congress could only call up soldiers from the states, which weren’t going to help each other.
   • Example: in 1783, a group of Pennsylvanian soldiers harassed the
     government in Philadelphia, demanding back pay. When it pleaded for
     help from the state, and didn’t receive any, it had to shamefully
     move to Princeton College in New Jersey.
5. However, the government was a model of what a loose confederation
   should be, and was a significant stepping-stone towards the
   establishment of the U.S. Constitution.
6. Still, many thought the states wielded an alarmingly great of power.

VII. Landmarks in Land Laws

1. The Land Ordinance of 1785 answered the question, “How will
   the new lands in the Ohio Valley be divided up?” It provided the
   acreage of the Old Northwest should be sold and that the proceeds be
   used to pay off the national debt.
   • This vast area would be surveyed before settlement and then divided
     into townships (six miles square), which would then be divided into 36
     square sections (1 mile square) with one set aside for public schools
     (section #16).
2. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 answered the question, “How
   will new states be made once people move out there?” It made
   admission into the union a two stage affair:
   • There would be two evolutionary territorial stages, during which the area would be subordinate to the federal government.
   • When a territory had 60,000 inhabitants, they wrote a state
     constitution and sent it to Congress for approval. If approved,
     it’s a new state.
   • It worked very well to solve a problem that had plagued many other nations.

VIII. The World’s Ugly Duckling

1. However, Britain still refused to repeal the Navigation Laws, and
   closed down its trading to the U.S. (proved useless to U.S. smuggling).
   It also sought to annex Vermont to Britain with help from the Allen
   brothers and Britain continued to hold a chain of military posts on
   U.S. soil.
   • One excuse used was that the soldiers had to make sure the U.S. honor its treaty and pay back debts to Loyalists.
2. In 1784, Spain closed the Mississippi River to American commerce.
3. It also claimed a large area near the Gulf of Mexico that was ceded to the U.S. by Britain.
   • At Natchez, on disputed soil, it also held a strategic fort.
4. Both Spain and England, while encouraging Indian tribes to be
   restless, prevented the U.S. from controlling half of its territory.
5. Even France demanded payment of U.S. debts to France.
6. The pirates of the North African states, including the arrogant Dey
   of Algiers, ravaged U.S. ships in the area and enslaved Yankee sailors.
   Worse, America was just too weak to stop them.

IX. The Horrid Specter of Anarchy

1. States were refusing to pay taxes, and national debt was mounting as foreign credibility was slipping.
2. Boundary disputes erupted into small battles while states taxed goods from other states.
3. Shays’ Rebellion, which flared up in western Massachusetts in 1786.
   • Shays’ was disgruntled over getting farmland mortgages.
     Notably, the inability to get land is the same motivation for rebellion
     as Bacon’s Rebellion back in 1676 in Virginia. And, the desire
     for land was also the motivator of the Paxton Boys in Pennsylvania in
     1764.
   • Daniel Shays was convicted, but later pardoned.
   • The importance of Shays’ Rebellion‡ The fear of such
     violence lived on and paranoia motivated folks to desire a stronger
     federal government.
4. People were beginning to doubt republicanism and this Articles of the Confederation.
5. However, many supporters believed that the Articles merely needed to be strengthened.
6. Things began to look brighter, though, as prosperity was beginning
   to emerge. Congress was beginning to control commerce, and overseas
   shipping was regaining its place in the world.

X. A Convention of “Demigods”

1. An Annapolis, Maryland convention was called to address the
   Articles’ inability to regulate commerce, but only five states
   were represented. They decided to meet again.
2. On May 25, 1787, 55 delegates from 12 states (Rhode Island
   wasn’t there) met in Philadelphia to “revise the Articles
   only.”
   • Among them were people like Hamilton, Franklin, and Madison.
   • However, people like Jefferson, John and Sam Adams, Thomas Paine,
     Hancock, and Patrick Henry were not there. Notably the Patriots like
     Sam Adams were seen as too radical.

XI. Patriots in Philadelphia

1. The 55 delegates were all well-off and mostly young, and they hoped
   to preserve the union, protect the American democracy from abroad and
   preserve it at home, and to curb the unrestrained democracy rampant in
   various states (like rebellions, etc…).

XII. Hammering Out a Bundle of Compromises

1. The delegates quickly decided to totally scrap the Articles and create a new Constitution.
   • Virginia’s large state plan called for Congressional
     representation based on state population, while New Jersey’s
     small state plan called for equal representation from all states (in
     terms of numbers, each state got the same number of representatives,
     two.)
   • Afterwards, the “Great Compromise” was worked out so
     that Congress would have two houses, the House of Representatives,
     where representation was based on population, and the Senate, where
     each state got two representatives
   • All tax bills would start in the House.
2. Also, there would be a strong, independent executive branch with a
   president who would be military commander-in-chief and who could veto
   legislation.
3. Another compromise was the election of the president through the
   Electoral College, rather than by the people directly. The people were
   viewed as too ignorant to vote.
4. Also, slaves would count as 3/5 of a person in census counts for representation.
   • Also, the Constitution enabled a state to shut off slave importation if it wanted, after 1807.

XIII. Safeguards for Conservatism

1. The delegates at the Convention all believed in a system with
   checks and balances, and the more conservative people deliberately
   erected safeguards against excesses of mobs. Such as…
   • Federal chief justices were appointed for life, thus creating stability conservatives liked.
   • The electoral college created a buffer between the people and the presidency.
   • Senators were elected by state legislators, not by the people.
   • So, the people voted for 1/2 of 1/3 of the government (only for representatives in the House).
2. However, the people still had power, and government was based on the people.
3. By the end of the Convention, on Sept. 17, 1787, only 42 of the original 55 were still there to sign the Constitution.

XIV. The Clash of Federalists and Anti-federalists

1. Knowing that state legislatures would certainly veto the new
   Constitution, the Founding Fathers sent copies of it out to state
   conventions, where it could be debated and voted upon.
   • The people could judge it themselves.
2. The American people were shocked, because they had expected a
   patched up Articles of the Confederation and had received a whole new
   Constitution (the Convention had been very well concealed and kept
   secret).
3. The Federalists, who favored the proposed stronger government, were
   against the anti-federalists, who were opposed to the Constitution.
   • The Federalists were more respectable and generally embraced the
     cultured and propertied groups, and many were former Loyalists. These
     folks lived nearer the coast in the older areas.
4. Anti-federalists truthfully cried that it was drawn up by aristocratic elements and was therefore anti-democratic.
   • The Anti-federalists were mostly the poor farmers, the illiterate,
     and states’ rights devotees. It was basically the poorer classes
     who lived westward toward the frontier.
   • They decried the dropping of annual elections of congressional
     representatives and the erecting of what would become Washington D.C.,
     and the creation of a standing army.

XV. The Great Debate in the States

1. Elections were run to elect people into the state conventions.
2. Four small states quickly ratified the Constitution, and Pennsylvania was the first large state to act.
3. In Massachusetts, a hard fought race between the supporters and
   detractors (including Samuel Adams, the “Engineer of
   Revolution” who now resisted change), and Massachusetts finally
   ratified it after a promise of a bill of rights to be added later.
   • Had this state not ratified, it would have brought the whole thing down.
4. Three more states ratified, and on June 21, 1788, the Constitution
   was officially adopted after nine states (all but Virginia, New York,
   North Carolina, and Rhode Island) had ratified it.

XVI. The Four Laggard States

1. Virginia, knowing that it could not be an independent state (the
   Constitution was about to be ratified by the 9th state, New Hampshire,
   anyway), finally ratified it by a vote of 89 to 79.
2. New York was swayed by The Federalist Papers, written by John Jay,
   James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, and finally yielded after
   realizing that it couldn’t prosper apart from the union.
3. North Carolina and Rhode Island finally ratified it after intense pressure from the government.

XVII. A Conservative Triumph

1. The minority had triumphed again, and the transition had been peaceful.
2. Only about 1/4 of the adult white males in the country (mainly those with land) had voted for the ratifying delegates.
3. Conservationism was victorious, as the safeguards had been erected against mob-rule excesses.
4. Revolutionaries against Britain had been upended by revolutionaries against the Articles.
   • It was a type of counterrevolution.
5. Federalists believed that every branch of government effectively
   represented the people, unlike Anti-federalists who believed that only
   the legislative branch did so.
6. In the U.S., conservatives and radicals alike have championed the heritage of democratic revolution.

I. Growing Pains

1. In 1789, the new U.S. Constitution was launched, and the population was doubling every 20 years.
   • America’s population was still 90% rural, with 5% living west of the Appalachians.
   • Vermont became the 14th state in 1791, and Kentucky, Tennessee, and
     Ohio (states where trans-Appalachian overflow was concentrated) became
     states soon after.
   • Visitors looked down upon the crude, rough pioneers, and these western people were restive and dubiously loyal at best.
2. In the twelve years after American independence, laws had been
   broken and a constitution had been completely scrapped and replaced
   with a new one, a government that left much to be desired.
3. America was also heavily in debt, and paper money was worthless,
   but meanwhile, restless monarchs watched to see if the U.S. could
   succeed in setting up a republic while facing such overwhelming odds.

II. Washington for President

1. At 6’2”, 175 pounds, with broad and sloping shoulders, a strongly
   pointed chin and pockmarks from smallpox, George Washington was an
   imposing figure, which helped in his getting unanimously elected as
   president by the Electoral College in 1789.
2. His long journey from Mt. Vernon to New York (capital at the time)
   was a triumphant procession filled with cheering crowds and roaring
   festivities, and he took his oath of office on April 30, 1789, on a
   balcony overlooking Wall Street.
3. Washington established a diverse cabinet (which was not necessary Constitutional).
   • Secretary of State: Thomas Jefferson
   • Secretary of the Treasury: Alexander Hamilton
   • Secretary of War: Henry Knox

III. The Bill of Rights

1. Many states had ratified the Constitution on the condition that
   there would be a Bill of Rights, and many Anti-Federalists had
   criticized the Constitution for its lack of a Bill.
2. The necessary number of states adopted the Bill of Rights in 1791.
3. Bill of Rights
   • Amendment I: Freedom of religion, speech or press, assembly, and petition.
   • Amendment II: Right to bear arms (for militia).
   • Amendment III: Soldiers can’t be housed in civilian homes during peacetime.
   • Amendment IV: No unreasonable searches; all searches require warrants.
   • Amendment V: Right to refuse to speak during a civil trial; No Double Jeopardy.
   • Amendment VI: Right to a speedy and public trial.
   • Amendment VII: Right to trial by jury when the sum exceeds $20.
   • Amendment VIII: No excessive bails and/or fines.
   • Amendment IX: Other rights not enumerated are also in effect. (“People’s Rights” Amendment)
   • Amendment X: Unlisted powers belong to the state. (“States’ Rights” Amendment)
4. The Judiciary Act of 1789 created effective federal courts.
5. John Jay became the first Chief Justice of the United States

IV. Hamilton Revives the Corpse of Public Credit

1. Born in the British West Indies, Alexander Hamilton’s loyalty to
   the U.S. was often questioned, even though he claimed he loved his
   adopted country more than his native country.
2. He urged the federal government to pay its debts of $54 million and
   try to pay them off at face value (“Funding at Par”), plus interest, as
   well as assume the debts of the states of $21.5 million (this was known
   as "assumption").
   • Massachusetts had a huge debt, but Virginia didn’t, so there needed
     to be some haggling. This was because Virginia felt it unfair that all
     debts were to be assumed by the entire nation. Essentially, its rival
     states would be at the same level as Virginia, even though they had
     obtained larger debts.
   • The bargain‡ Virginia would have the District of Columbia built on
     its land (therefore gaining prestige) in return for letting the
     government assume all the states’ debts.
3. The “Funding at Par” would gain the support of the rich to the federal government, not to the states.

V. Customs Duties and Excise Taxes

1. With the national debt at a huge $75 million, Alexander Hamilton was strangely unworried.
2. He used the debt as an asset: the more people the government owed
   money to, the more people would care about what would happen to the
   U.S. as a whole nation.
3. To pay off some of the debt, Hamilton first proposed custom duties,
   and the first one, imposing a low tariff of about 8% of the value of
   dutiable imports, was passed in 1789.
   • Hamilton also wanted to protect America’s infant industries, though
     the U.S. was still dominated by agricultural programs. Little was done
     regarding this.
4. In 1791, Hamilton secured an excise tax on a few domestic items, notably whiskey (at 7 cents per gallon).

VI. Hamilton Battles Jefferson for a Bank

1. Hamilton proposed a national treasury, to be a private institution
   modeled after the Bank of England, to have the federal government as a
   major stockholder, to circulate cash to stimulate businesses, to store
   excess money, and to print money that was worth something. This was
   opposed by Jefferson as being unconstitutional (as well as a tool for
   the rich to better themselves).
2. Hamilton’s Views:
   • What was not forbidden in the Constitution was permitted.
   • A bank was “necessary and proper” (from Constitution).
   • He evolved the Elastic Clause, AKA the “necessary and proper”
     clause, which would greatly expand federal power. This is a “loose
     interpretation” of the Constitution.
3. Jefferson’s Views:
   • What was not permitted was forbidden.
   • A bank should be a state-controlled item (since the 10th Amendment
     says powers not delegated in the Constitution are left to the states).
   • The Constitution should be interpreted literally and through a “strict interpretation.”
4. End result: Hamilton won the dispute, and Washington reluctantly
   signed the bank measure into law. The Bank of the United States was
   created by Congress in 1791, and was chartered for 20 years.
   • It was located in Philadelphia and was to have a capital of $10 million.
   • Stock was thrown open to public sale, and surprisingly, a milling crowd oversubscribed in two hours.

VII. Mutinous Moonshiners in Pennsylvania

1. In 1794, in western Pennsylvania, the Whiskey Rebellion flared up when fed-up farmers revolted against Hamilton’s excise tax.
   • Around those parts, liquor and alcohol was often used as money.
   • They said they’d been unfairly singled out to be taxed.
   • They cried “taxation without representation” since many were from
     Tennessee and Kentucky which were not yet states and had no one in
     Congress.
2. Washington cautiously sent an army of about 13,000 troops from
   various states to the revolt, but the soldiers found nothing upon
   arrival; the rebels had scattered.
3. Washington’s new presidency now commanded new respect, but
   anti-federalists criticized the government’s use of a sledgehammer to
   crush a gnat.
4. The lesson of the Whiskey Rebellion‡ this government, unlike the Articles, was strong!

VIII. The Emergence of Political Parties

1. Hamilton’s policies (national bank, suppression of Whiskey Rebellion, excise tax) seemed to encroach on states’ rights.
2. As resentment grew, what was once a personal rivalry between
   Hamilton and Jefferson gradually evolved into two political parties.
3. The Founding Fathers had not envisioned various political parties
   (Whigs and Federalists and Tories, etc… had existed, but they had been
   groups, not parties).
4. Since 1825, the two-party system has helped strengthen the U.S.
   government, helping balance power and ensuring there was always a
   second choice to the ruling party.

IX. The Impact of the French Revolution

1. Near the end of Washington’s first term, in 1793, two parties had
   evolved: the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans and the Hamiltonian
   Federalists.
2. However, the French Revolution greatly affected America.
3. At first, people were overjoyed, since the first stages of the
   revolution were not unlike America’s dethroning of Britain. Only a few
   ultraconservative Federalists were upset at this “mobocracy” and revolt.
4. When the French declared war on Austria, then threw back the
   Austrian armies and then proclaimed itself a republic, Americans sang
   “The Marseillaise” and other French revolutionary songs, and renamed
   various streets and places.
5. After the revolution turned radical and bloody, the Federalists
   rapidly changed opinions and looked nervously at the Jeffersonians, who
   felt that no revolution could be carried out without a little bloodshed.
6. Still, neither group completely approved of the French Revolution and its antics.
7. America was sucked into the revolution when France declared war on
   Great Britain and the battle for North American land began…again.

X. Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation

1. With war came the call by the JDR’s (Jeffersonian
   Democratic-Republicans) to enter on the side of France, the recent
   friend of the U.S., against Britain, the recent enemy.
2. Hamilton leaned toward siding with the Brits, as doing so would be economically advantageous.
3. Washington knew that war could mean disaster and disintegration,
   since the nation in 1793 was militarily and economically weak and
   politically disunited.
4. In 1793, he issued the Neutrality Proclamation, proclaiming the
   U.S.’s official neutrality and warning Americans to stay out of the
   issue and be impartial.
5. JDR’s were furious, and this controversial statement irked both sides, France and England.
6. Soon afterwards, Citizen Edmond Genêt, landed at Charleston, South Carolina, as representative to the U.S.
   • On his trip to Philadelphia, he had been cheered rousingly by
     Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans, who supported France, and he came
     to wrongly believe that Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation didn’t
     truly reflect the feelings of Americans.
   • Also, he equipped privateers to plunder British ships and to invade Spanish Florida and British Canada.
   • He even went as far as to threaten to appeal over the head of
     Washington to the sovereign voters. Afterwards, he was basically kicked
     out of the U.S.
7. Actually, America’s neutrality helped France, since only in that
   way could France get needed American foodstuffs to the Caribbean
   islands.
8. Although France was mad that the U.S. didn’t help them, officially,
   the U.S. didn’t have to honor its alliance from the Treaty of 1778
   because France didn’t call on it to do so.

XI. Embroilments with Britain

1. Britain still had many posts in the frontier, and supplied the Indians with weapons.
2. The Treaty of Greenville, in 1795, had the Indians cede their vast
   tract in the Ohio country to the Americans after General “Mad Anthony”
   Wayne crushed them at the Battle of Fallen Timbers on August 20, 1794.
   It was here that the Americans learned of, and were infuriated by,
   British guns being supplied to the Indians.
3. Ignoring America’s neutrality, British commanders of the Royal Navy
   seized about 300 American merchant ships and impressed (kidnapped)
   scores of seamen into their army.
4. Many JDR’s cried out for war with Britain, or at least an embargo,
   but Washington refused, knowing that such drastic action would destroy
   the Hamilton financial system.

XII. Jay’s Treaty and Washington’s Farewell

1. In a last-ditch attempt to avert war, Washington sent John Jay to England to work something out.
2. However, his negotiations were sabotaged by England-loving
   Hamilton, who secretly gave the Brits the details of America’s
   bargaining strategy.
3. The results of the Jay Treaty with England weren’t pretty:
   • Britain would repay the lost money from recent merchant ship
     seizures called “impressment”, but it said nothing about future
     seizures or supplying Indians with arms.
   • America would have to pay off its pre-Revolutionary War debts to Britain.
4. Result‡ the JDR’s from the South were furious, as the southern
   farmers would have to pay while the northern merchants would be paid.
   Jay’s effigy was burnt in the streets. However, war was avoided.
5. At this time, the Pinckney Treaty of 1795 with Spain gave Americans
   free navigation of the Mississippi and the large disputed territory
   north of Florida. Oddly, it was the pro-British Jay Treaty that
   prompted Spain to be so lenient in the Pinckney Treaty (since Spain
   didn’t want America buddying up to their enemy, England).
6. After his second term, Washington stepped down, creating a strong two-term precedent that wasn’t broken until FDR was president.
   • His Farewell Address warned (1) against political parties and (2) against building permanent alliances with foreign nations.
   • Washington had set the U.S. on its feet and had made it sturdy.

XIII. John Adams Becomes President

1. Hamilton was the logical choice to become the next president, but his financial plan had made him very unpopular.
2. John Adams, the ablest statesmen of his day, won, 71 to 68, against Thomas Jefferson, who became vice president.
3. Adams had a hated rival and opponent in Hamilton, who plotted with
   Adams’ cabinet against the president, and a political rival in his vice
   president.
4. He also had a volatile situation with France that could explode into war.

XIV. Unofficial Fighting with France

1. France was furious about the Jay’s Treaty, calling it a flagrant
   violation of the 1778 Franco-American treaty, and so began seizing
   defenseless American merchant ships.
2. In the XYZ Affair, John Adams sent three envoys (including John
   Marshall) to France, where they were approached by three agents, “X,”
   “Y,” and “Z,” who demanded a load of 32 million florins and a $250,000
   bribe just for talking to Talleyrand.
   • Even though bribes were routine in diplomacy, such a large sum for
     simply talking weren’t worth it, and there was no guarantee of an
     agreement.
   • The envoys returned to America, cheered by angry Americans as having done the right thing for America.
3. Irate Americans called for war with France, but Adams, knowing just
   as Washington did that war could spell disaster, remained neutral.
4. Thus, an undeclared war mostly confined to the seas raged for two
   and a half years, where American ships captured over 80 armed French
   ships.

XV. Adams Puts Patriotism Above Party

1. Talleyrand, knowing that war with the U.S. would add another enemy
   to France, declared that if another envoy was sent to France, that it
   would be received with respect.
2. In 1800, the three American envoys were met by Napoleon, who was eager to work with the U.S.
3. The treaty in 1800, signed in Paris, ended the 1778 alliance in
   return for the Americans paying the claims of its shippers’ as alimony.
4. In keeping the U.S. at peace, John Adams plunged his popularity and
   lost his chance at a possible second term, but he did the right thing,
   keeping the U.S. neutral while it was still weak.

XVI. The Federalist Witch Hunt

1. The Federalists scorned the poor people, who in turn were welcomed by the JDR’s.
2. With the Alien Laws, Federalists therefore raised the residence
   requirements for aliens who wanted to become citizens from five to
   fourteen years, a law that violated the traditional American policy of
   open-door hospitality and speedy assimilation.
   • Another law let the president deport dangerous aliens during peacetime and jail them during times of war.
3. The Sedition Act provided that anyone who impeded the policies of
   the government or falsely defamed its officials, including the
   president, would be liable to a heavy fine and imprisonment; it was
   aimed at newspaper editors and the JDR’s.
   • While obviously unconstitutional, this act was passed by the
     Federalist majority in Congress and upheld in the court because of the
     majority of Federalists there too.
   • It was conveniently written to expire in 1801 to prevent the use of it against themselves.
   • Matthew Lyon was one of those imprisoned when he was sentenced to
     four months in jail for writing ill things about President John Adams.
4. Furthermore, in the elections of 1798-99, the Federalists won the most sweeping victory of their history.

XVII. The Virginia (Madison) and Kentucky (Jefferson) Resolutions

1. Resentful Jeffersonians would not take these laws lying down, and
   Jefferson feared that the Federalists, having wiped out freedom of
   speech and of the press, might wipe out more.
2. He wrote a series of legislation that Kentucky approved in 1798-99,
   and friend James Madison wrote another series of legislation (less
   extreme) that Virginia approved.
   • They stressed the “compact theory” which meant that the 13 states,
     in creating the federal government, had entered into a contract
     regarding its jurisdiction, and the individual states were the final
     judges of the laws passed in Congress. In other words, the states had
     made the federal government, the federal government makes laws, but
     since the states made the federal government, the states reserve the
     right to nullify those federal laws. This compact theory is heard at
     this point, then again in 1832 regarding the national tariff, then
     again in the 1850s over slavery. Civil War erupts afterwards. Notably,
     this theory goes by several names, all synonymous: the “compact
     theory,” “states’ rights theory,” or “nullification.”
   • This legislation set out to kill the Sedition and Alien Laws.
3. Only those two states adopted the laws.
4. Federalists, though, argued that the people, not the states, had
   made the contract, and it was up to the Supreme Court to nullify
   legislation, a procedure that it adopted in 1803.
5. While neither Madison nor Jefferson wanted secession, they did want an end to Federalist abuses.

XVIII. Federalists Versus Democratic-Republicans

1. The Federalists
   • Most Federalists were the old Federalists from before the Constitution.
   • They wanted a strong government ruled by the educated aristocrats, the “best people.”
   • Most were the merchants, manufacturers, and shippers along the Atlantic seaboard.
   • They were mostly pro-British and recognized that foreign trade was key in the U.S.
2. The Democratic-Republicans
   • Republicans were led by Thomas Jefferson, a poor speaker but a
     great leader, and an appealer to the common people. They desired rule
     by informed classes and a weaker central government that would preserve
     the sovereignty of the states. They were mostly pro-French.
   • Jefferson was rich and even owned slaves, but he sympathized with the common people.
   • They emphasized that national debt had to be paid off.
   • They were mostly agrarians (farmers), and insisted on no privileges for the upper class.
     • They saw farming was ennobling: it kept people away from wickedness of the cities, in the sun, and close to God.
   • He advocated rule of the people, but not all the people, just those who weren’t ignorant.
   • Slavery could help avoid a class of landless voters by providing the necessary labor.
   • He championed free speech, but he was foully abused by editorial pens.
3. Thus, as 1800 rolled around, the disunity of America was making its existence very much felt.

I. Federalist and Republican Mudslingers

1. In the election of 1800, the Federalists had a host of enemies stemming from the Alien and Sedition Acts.
2. The Federalists had been most damaged by John Adams’ not declaring war against France.
   • They had raised a bunch of taxes and built a good navy, and then
     had not gotten any reason to justify such spending, making them seem
     fraudulent as they had also swelled the public debt.
     • John Adams became known as “the Father of the American Navy.”
   • Federalists also launched attacks on Jefferson, saying that he had
     robbed a widow and her children of a trust fund, fathered numerous
     children with his slaves (which turned out to be true), called him an
     atheist (he was a Deist), and used other inflammatory remarks.

II. The Jeffersonian “Revolution of 1800”

1. Thomas Jefferson won the election of 1800 by a majority of 73
   electoral votes to 65, and even though Adams got more popular votes,
   Jefferson got New York. But, even though Jefferson triumphed, in a
   technicality he and Aaron Burr tied for presidency.
   • The vote, according to the Constitution, would now go to the Federalist-dominated House of Representatives.
   • Hateful of Jefferson, many wanted to vote for Burr, and the vote
     was deadlocked for months until Alexander Hamilton and John Adams
     persuaded a few House members to change their votes, knowing that if
     the House voted for Burr, the public outcry would doom the Federalist
     Party.
   • Finally, a few changed their minds, and Jefferson was elected to the presidency.
2. The “Revolution of 1800” was that (1) there was a
   peaceful transfer of power; Federalists stepped down from office after
   Jefferson won and did so peacefully, though not necessarily happily and
   (2) the Republicans were more of the “people’s party”
   compared to the Federalists.

III. Responsibility Breeds Moderation

1. On March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated president in the new capital of Washington D.C.
   • In his address, he declared that all Americans were Federalists,
     all were Republicans, implying that Americans were a mixture. He also
     pledged “honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances
     with none.”
   • Jefferson was simple and frugal, and did not seat in regard to rank
     during his dinners He also was unconventional, wearing sloppy attire,
     and he started the precedent of sending messages to Congress to be read
     by a clerk.
   • There were two Thomas Jeffersons: the scholarly private citizen who
     philosophized in his study, and the harassed public official who
     discovered that bookish theories worked out differently in practical
     politics.
   • Jefferson also dismissed few Federalist officials and those who wanted the seats complained.
   • Jefferson had to rely on his casual charm because his party was so disunited still.

IV. Jeffersonian Restraint

1. Jefferson pardoned those who were serving time under the Sedition
   Act, and in 1802, he enacted a new naturalization law that returned the
   years needed for an immigrant to become a citizen from 14 to 5.
2. He also kicked away the excise tax, but otherwise left the Hamiltonian system intact.
3. The new secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, reduced the national debt substantially while balancing the budget.
4. By shrewdly absorbing the major Federalist programs, Jefferson
   showed that a change of regime need not be disastrous for the exiting
   group.

V. The “Dead Clutch” of the Judiciary

1. The Judiciary Act, passed by the Federalists in their last days of
   Congressional domination in 1801, packed newly created judgeships with
   Federalist-backing men, so as to prolong their legacy.
2. Chief Justice John Marshall, a cousin of Jefferson, had served at
   Valley Forge during the war, and he had been impressed with the
   drawbacks of no central authority, and thus, he became a lifelong
   Federalist, committed to strengthening the power of the federal
   government.
   • Marbury v. Madison (1803): William Marbury had been one of the
     “midnight judges” appointed by John Adams in his last hours
     as president. He had been named justice of peace for D.C., but when
     Secretary of State James Madison decided to shelve the position,
     Marbury sued for its delivery. Marshall dismissed the case, but he said
     that the Judiciary Act of 1789 was unconstitutional, thus suggesting
     that the Supreme Court could determine the constitutionality of laws
     (AKA, “judicial review”).
3. In 1804, Jefferson tried to impeach the tart-tongued Supreme Court
   justice, Samuel Chase, but when the vote got to the Senate, not enough
   votes were mustered, and to this day, no attempt to alter the Supreme
   Court has ever been tried through impeachment.

VI. Jefferson, a Reluctant Warrior

1. Jefferson had a natural fear of a large, strong, standing military
   since such a military could be turned on the people. So, he reduced the
   militia to 2500 men, and navies were reduced a bit to peacetime footing.
2. However, the pirates of the North African Barbary States were still
   looting U.S. ships, and in 1801, the pasha of Tripoli indirectly
   declared war when he cut down the flagstaff of the American consulate.
   • Non-interventionalist Jefferson had a problem of whether to fight
     or not, and he reluctantly sent the infant navy to the shores of
     Tripoli, where fighting continued for four years until Jefferson
     succeeded in extorting a treaty of peace from Tripoli in 1805 for
     $60,000.
   • Stephen Decatur’s exploits in the war with the ship Intrepid made him a hero.
   • The small, mobile gunboats used in the Tripolitan War fascinated
     Jefferson, and he spent money to build about 200 of them (these boats
     might be zippy and fast, but they did little against large
     battleships). The years eventually showed building small ships to be a
     poor decision.

VII. The Louisiana Godsend

1. In 1800, Napoleon secretly induced the king of Spain to cede the Louisiana territory to France.
2. Then, in 1802, the Spaniards at New Orleans withdrew the right of
   deposit guaranteed by the Pinckney Treaty of 1795. Such deposit
   privileges were vital to the frontier farmers who floated their goods
   down the Mississippi River to its mouth to await oceangoing vessels.
   • These farmers talked of marching to New Orleans to violently get
     back what they deserved, an action that would have plunged the U.S.
     into war with Spain and France.
3. In 1803, Jefferson sent James Monroe to join regular minister
   Robert R. Livingston to buy New Orleans and as much land to the east of
   the river for a total of $10 million, tops.
4. Instead, Napoleon offered to sell New Orleans and the land west of
   it, Louisiana, for a bargain of $15 million, thereby abandoning his
   dream of a French North American empire.
   • This abandonment was due to the rebellion in Haiti, led by
     Toussaint L’Ouverture, which had been unsuccessful, but had
     killed many French troops due to yellow fever. The decision to sell
     Louisiana was also because Napoleon needed cash to renew his war with
     Britain.
5. The Louisiana Purchase was finalized on April 30, 1803.
6. Jefferson had a dilemma, since the Constitution said nothing about
   purchasing foreign land, but on the other hand, this deal was simply
   too good to pass up!
   • After considering an amendment, Jefferson finally decided to go
     through with the deal anyway, even though nothing in the Constitution
     talked about land purchases. Jefferson had been a strict interpreter of
     the Constitution, but he was now using a loose interpretation.
   • Federalists, normally loose interpreters, took a strict
     interpretation and opposed the purchase. Federalist didn’t want
     the new lands because they correctly foresaw new lands meant new
     settlers and new states, which meant more farmers and more Republicans.
   • Thus, both parties made a full 180° turnaround from their
     previous philosophical beliefs about the Constitution simply because of
     the practical matters at hand.
7. The Senate quickly approved the purchase with Jefferson’s
   urging, and the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United
   States. This was the biggest bargain in history averaging 3 cents per
   acre.

VIII. Louisiana in the Long View

1. The purchase created a precedent of acquisition of foreign territory through purchase.
2. In the spring of 1804, Jefferson sent William Clark and Meriwether
   Lewis to explore this new territory. Along with a Shoshoni woman named
   Sacajawea, the two spent 21/2 years exploring the land, marveling at
   the expanses of buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, and the landscape and
   went all the way to Oregon and the Pacific before returning.
   • Other explorers, like Zebulon Pike trekked to the headwaters of the
     Mississippi River in 1805-06 and ventured to the southern portion of
     Louisiana, Spanish land in the southwest, and sighted Pike’s Peak.

IX. The Aaron Burr Conspiracies

1. The Federalists now sank lower than ever, and tried to scheme with
   Aaron Burr to make New England and New York secede from the union; in
   the process Aaron Burr killed Hamilton in a duel.
2. In 1806, Burr was arrested for treason, but the necessary two witnesses were nowhere to be found.
3. The Louisiana Purchase was also nurturing a deep sense of loyalty
   among the West to the federal government, and a new spirit of
   nationalism surged through it.

X. A Precarious Neutrality

1. In 1804, Jefferson won with a margin of 162 electoral votes to 14
   for his opponent, but this happiness was nonexistent because in 1803,
   Napoleon had deliberately provoked Britain into renewing its war with
   France.
   • As a result, American trade sank as England and France, unable to
     hurt each other (England owned the sea thanks to the Battle of
     Trafalgar while France owned the land thanks to the Battle of
     Austerlitz), resorted to indirect blows.
   • In 1806, London issued the Orders in Council, which closed ports
     under French continental control to foreign shipping, including
     American, unless they stopped at a British port first.
   • Likewise, Napoleon ordered the seizure of all ships, including American, which entered British ports.
   • Impressment (illegal seizure of men and forcing them to serve on
     ships) of American seamen also infuriated the U.S.; some 6,000
     Americans were impressed from 1808-11.
   • In 1807, a royal frigate the Leopard confronted the U.S. frigate,
     the Chesapeake, about 10 miles off the coast of Virginia, and the
     British captain ordered the seizure of four alleged deserters. When the
     American commander refused, the U.S. ship received three devastating
     broadsides that killed 3 Americans and wounded 18. In an incident in
     which England was clearly wrong, Jefferson still clung to peace.

XI. The Hated Embargo

1. In order to try to stop the British and French seizure of American
   ships, Jefferson resorted to an embargo. His belief was that the only
   way to stay out of the war was to shut down shipping.
   • Jefferson thought Britain and France relied on American goods (it
     was really the opposite, Americans relied on Europe’s goods).
   • Also, the U.S. still had a weak navy and a weaker army.
2. The Embargo Act of late 1807 forbade the export of all goods from
   the United States to any foreign nation, regardless of whether they
   were transported in American or foreign ships.
   • The net result was deserted docks, rotting ships in the harbors,
     and Jefferson's embargo hurt the same New England merchants that it was
     trying to protect.
   • The commerce of New England was harmed more than that of France and Britain.
   • Farmers of the South and West were alarmed by the mounting piles of unexportable cotton, grain, and tobacco.
   • Illegal trade mushroomed in 1808, where people resorted to smuggling again.
3. Finally, coming to their senses and feeling the public’s
   anger, Congress repealed the act on March 1, 1809, three days before
   Jefferson’s retirement and replaced it with the Non-Intercourse
   Act, which reopened trade with all the nations of the world, except
   France and England.
   • However, this act had the same effect as the Embargo because America’s #1 and #2 trade partners were Britain and France.
   • Thus, economic coercion continued from 1809 to 1812, when war struck.
4. The embargo failed for two main reasons: (1) Jefferson
   underestimated the bulldog British and their dependence on American
   goods and (2) he didn’t continue the embargo long enough or
   tightly enough to achieve success.
   • Even Jefferson himself admitted that the embargo was three times
     more costly than war, and he could have built a strong navy with a
     fraction of the money lost.
5. During the time of the embargo, the Federalist Party regained some of its lost power.
6. However, during this embargo, resourceful Americans also opened and
   reopened factories, and thus, the embargo helped to promote
   industrialism—another irony since it was Jefferson who was
   committed to an agrarian, while it was his archrival Alexander Hamilton
   who was committed to industry.
7. Also, the embargo did affect Britain, and had it been continued, it might have succeeded.
   • In fact, two days before Congress declared war in June 1812, London
     ordered the Orders in Council to be suspended. Had America known this
     fact, war would have likely not been declared.

XII. Madison’s Gamble

1. After Jefferson, James Madison took the oath of presidency on March 4, 1809, short, bald, and not a great speaker.
2. In 1810, Congress adopted a bargaining measure called Macon’s
   Bill No. 2, which while permitting American trade with all the world,
   also promised American restoration of trade to France and/or England if
   either dropped their commercial restrictions.
   • Napoleon had his opportunity: in August of 1810, he announced that
     French commercial restrictions had been lifted, and Madison, desperate
     for recognition of the law, declared France available for American
     trade.
   • Of course, Napoleon lied, and never really lifted restrictions, but
     meanwhile, America had been duped into entering European affairs
     against Great Britain.

XIII. Tecumseh and the Prophet

1. In 1811, new young politicians swept away the older
   “submission men,” and they appointed Henry Clay of
   Kentucky, then 34 years old, to Speaker of the House.
2. The western politicians also cried out against the Indian threat on
   the frontier. These young, aggressive Congressmen were known as
   “War Hawks.”
3. Indians had watched with increasing apprehension as more and more
   whites settled in Kentucky, a traditionally sacred area where
   settlement and extensive hunting was not allowed except in times of
   scarcity.
   • Thus, two Shawnee brothers, Tecumseh and the Prophet, decided that
     the time to act was now, and gathered followers, urging them to give up
     textile clothing for traditional buckskin garments, arguing eloquently
     for the Indian’s to not acknowledge the White man’s
     “ownership” of land, and urging that no Indian should cede
     control of land to whites unless all Indians agreed.
   • On November 7, 1811, American general William Henry Harrison
     advanced upon Tecumseh’s headquarters at Tippecanoe, killed the
     Prophet, and burned the camp to the ground.
   • Tecumseh was killed by Harrison at the Battle of the Thames in 1813, and the Indian confederacy dream perished.
   • In the South, Andrew Jackson crushed the Creek Indians at the
     Battle of Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814, effectively breaking the
     Indian rebellion and leaving the entire area east of the Mississippi
     open for safe settlement.
4. The War Hawks cried that the only way to get rid of the Indians was
   to wipe out their base, Canada, since the British had helped the
   Indians.
   • War was declared in 1812, with a House vote of 79 to 49 and a very
     close Senate vote of 19 to 13, showing America’s disunity.

XIV. Mr. Madison’s War

1. Why did America go to war with Britain and not France? Because
   England’s impressments of American sailors stood out, France was
   allied more with the Republicans, and Canada was a very tempting prize
   that seemed easy to get, a “frontiersman’s frolic.”
2. New England, which was still making lots of money, damned the war
   for a free sea, and Federalists opposed the war because (1) they were
   more inclined toward Britain anyway and (2) if Canada was conquered, it
   would add more agrarian land and increase Republican supporters.
3. In brief, America’s reasons for entering the War of 1812 were…
   • “Freedom of the seas” – The U.S. wanted the right to sail and trade without fear.
   • Possibility of land – The U.S. might gain Canada or Florida.
   • Indian issues – Americans were still upset about British guns being giving to Indians.
4. The nation became sectionalized. Generally, the North was against war, the West and the South was for the war.
   • Thus, a disunited America had to fight both Old England and New
     England in the War of 1812, since Britain was the enemy while New
     England tried everything that they could do to frustrate American
     ambitions in the war.

I. On to Canada Over Land and Lakes

1. Due to widespread disunity, the War of 1812 ranks as one of America’s worst fought wars.
2. There was not a burning national anger, like there was after the
   Chesapeake outrage; the regular army was very bad and scattered and had
   old, senile generals, and the offensive strategy against Canada was
   especially poorly conceived.
3. Had the Americans captured Montreal, everything west would have
   wilted like a tree after its trunk has been severed, but the Americans
   instead focused a three-pronged attack that set out from Detroit,
   Niagara, and Lake Champlain, all of which were beaten back.
4. In contrast, the British and Canadians displayed enthusiasm early
   on in the war and captured the American fort of Michilimackinac, which
   commanded the upper Great Lakes area (the battle was led by British
   General Isaac Brock).
5. After more land invasions were hurled back in 1813, the Americans,
   led by Oliver Hazard Perry, built a fleet of green-timbered ships
   manned by inexperienced men, but still managed to capture a British
   fleet. His victory, coupled with General William Henry Harrison’s
   defeat of the British during the Battle of the Thames, helped bring
   more enthusiasm and increased morale for the war.
6. In 1814, 10,000 British troops prepared for a crushing blow to the
   Americans along the Lake Champlain route, but on September 11, 1814,
   Capt. Thomas MacDonough challenged the British and snatched victory
   from the fangs of defeat and forced the British to retreat.

II. Washington Burned and New Orleans Defended

1. In August 1814, British troops landed in the Chesapeake Bay area,
   dispersed 6,000 panicked Americans at Bladensburg, and proceeded to
   enter Washington D.C. and burn most of the buildings there.
2. At Baltimore, another British fleet arrived but was beaten back by
   the privateer defenders of Fort McHenry, where Francis Scott Key wrote
   “The Star Spangled Banner.”
3. Another British army menaced the entire Mississippi Valley and
   threatened New Orleans, and Andrew Jackson, fresh off his slaughter of
   the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, led a hodgepodge
   force of 7,000 sailors, regulars, pirates, and Frenchmen, entrenching
   them and helping them defeat 8,000 overconfident British that had
   launched a frontal attack in the Battle of New Orleans.
4. The news of this British defeat reached Washington early in February 1815, and two weeks later came news of peace from Britain.
5. Ignorant citizens simply assumed that the British, having been
   beaten by Jackson, finally wanted peace, lest they get beaten again by
   the “awesome” Americans.
6. During the war, the American navy had oddly done much better than
   the army, since the sailors were angry over British impressment of U.S.
   sailors.
7. However, Britain responded with a naval blockade, raiding ships and ruining American economic life such as fishing.

III. The Treaty of Ghent

1. At first, the confident British made sweeping demands for a
   neutralized Indian buffer state in the Great Lakes region, control of
   the Great Lakes, and a substantial part of conquered Maine, but the
   Americans, led by John Quincy Adams, refused. As American victories
   piled up, though, the British reconsidered.
2. The Treat of Ghent, signed on December 24, 1814, was an armistice,
   acknowledging a draw in the war and ignoring any other demands of
   either side. Each side simply stopped fighting. The main issue of the
   war, impressment, was left unmentioned.

IV. Federalist Grievances and the Hartford Convention

1. As the capture of New Orleans seemed imminent, Massachusetts,
   Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island secretly met in
   Hartford from December 15, 1814 to January 5, 1815, to discuss their
   grievances and to seek redress for their wrongs.
   • While a few talked about secession, most wanted financial
     assistance form Washington to compensate for lost trade, and an
     amendment requiring a 2/3 majority for all declarations of embargos,
     except during invasion.
2. Three special envoys from Mass. went to D.C., where they were
   greeted with the news from New Orleans; their mission failed, and they
   sank away in disgrace and into obscurity.
   • The Hartford Convention proved to be the death of the Federalist
     Party, as their last presidential nomination was trounced by James
     Monroe in 1816.

V. The Second War for American Independence

1. The War of 1812 was a small war involving some 6,000 Americans
   killed or wounded, and when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 with
   500,000 men, Madison tried to invade Canada with about 5,000 men.
2. Yet, the Americans proved that they could stand up for what they
   felt was right, and naval officers like Perry and MacDonough gained new
   respect; American diplomats were treated with more respect than before.
3. The Federalist Party died out forever, and new war heroes, like Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison, emerged.
4. Manufacturing also prospered during the British blockade, since there was nothing else to do.
5. Incidents like the burning of Washington added fuel to the bitter
   conflict with Britain, and led to hatred of the nation years after the
   war, though few would have guessed that the War of 1812 would be the
   last war America fought against Britain.
6. Many Canadians felt betrayed by the Treaty of Ghent, since not even
   an Indian buffer state had been achieved, and the Indians, left by the
   British, were forced to make treaties where they could.
7. In 1817, though, after a heated naval arms race in the Great Lakes,
   the Rush-Bagot Treaty between the U.S. and Britain provided the
   world’s longest unfortified boundary (5,527 mi.).
8. After Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo, Europe sank into
   an exhaustion of peace, and America looked west to further expand.

VI. Nascent Nationalism

1. After the war, American nationalism really took off, and authors
   like Washington Irving (Rumpelstiltskin, The Knickerbocker Tales such
   as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) and James Fenimore Cooper (The
   Leatherstocking Tales which included The Last of the Mohicans) gained
   international recognition.
2. The North American Review debuted in 1815, and American painters
   painted landscapes of America on their canvases, while history books
   were now being written by Americans for Americans.
3. Washington D.C. rose from the ashes to be better than ever, and the navy and army strengthened themselves.
4. Stephen Decatur, naval hero of the War of 1812 and the Barbary
   Coast expeditions, was famous for his American toast after his return
   from the Mediterranean: “Our country! In her intercourse with
   foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right
   or wrong!”

VII. “The American System”

1. After the war, British competitors dumped their goods onto America
   at cheap prices, so America responded with the Tariff of 1816, the
   first in U.S. history designed for protection, which put a 20-25%
   tariff on dutiable imports.
2. It was not high enough, but it was a great start, and in 1824, Henry Clay established a program called the American System.
   • The system began with a strong banking system.
   • It advocated a protective tariff behind which eastern manufacturing would flourish.
   • It also included a network of roads and canals, especially in the
     burgeoning Ohio Valley, to be funded for by the tariffs, and through
     which would flow foodstuffs and raw materials from the South and West
     to the North and East.
   • Lack of effective transportation had been one of the problems of
     the War of 1812, especially in the West, and in 1817, Congress sought
     to distribute $1.5 million to the states for internal improvements, but
     Madison vetoed it, saying it was unconstitutional, thus making the
     states look for their own money to build the badly needed roads.

VIII. The So-Called Era of Good Feelings

1. James Monroe defeated his Federalist opponent 183 to 34, and ushered in a short period of one-party rule.
2. He straddled the generations of the Founding Fathers and the new Age of Nationalism.
3. Early in 1817, Monroe took a goodwill tour venturing deep into New England, where he received heartwarming welcomes.
4. A Boston newspaper even went as far as to declare that an “Era of Good Feelings” had began.
5. However, seeds of sectional troubles were planted. Notably, the
   South did not like the tariff saying it only benefited the North and
   made the South pay higher prices. And, the South disliked the internal
   improvements linking the North and West—the South didn’t
   see any benefits in paying taxes for roads and canals in other states.

IX. The Panic of 1819 and the Curse of Hard Times

1. In 1819, a paralyzing economic panic (the first since
   Washington’s times) engulfed the U.S., bringing deflation,
   depression, bankruptcies, bank failures, unemployment, soup kitchens,
   and overcrowded debtors’ prisons.
   • A major cause of the panic had been over-speculation in land prices, where the Bank of the United States fell heavily into debt.
   • Oddly, this started an almost predictable chain of panics or
     recessions. An economic panic occurred every 20 years during the 1800s
     (panics occurred during 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893).
2. The West was especially hard hit, and the Bank of the U.S. was soon viewed upon as the cause.
3. There was also attention against the debtors, where, in a few
   overplayed cases, mothers owing a few dollars were torn away from their
   infants by the creditors.

X. Growing Pains of the West

1. Between 1791 and 1819, nine frontier states had joined the original 13.
2. This explosive expansion of the west was due in part to the cheap
   land, the elimination of the Indian menace, the “Ohio
   Fever,” and the need for land by the tobacco farmers, who
   exhausted their lands.
3. The Cumberland Road, begun in 1811 and ran ultimately from western
   Maryland to Illinois. And, the first steamboat on western waters
   appeared in 1811.
4. The West, still not populous and politically weak, was forced to ally itself with other sections, and demanded cheap acreage.
5. The Land Act of 1820 gave the West its wish by authorizing a buyer
   to purchase 80 acres of land at a minimum of $1.25 an acre in cash; the
   West demanded and slowly got cheap transportation as well.

XI. Slavery and the Sectional Balance

1. Sectional tensions between the North and the South came to a boil when Missouri wanted to become a slave state.
2. Although it met all the requirements of becoming a state, the House
   of Representatives stymied the plans for its statehood when it proposed
   the Tallmadge Amendment, which provided that no more slaves be brought
   into Missouri and also provided for the gradual emancipation of
   children born to slave parents already in Missouri (this was shot down
   in the Senate).
3. Angry Southerners saw this as a threat figuring that if the
   Northerners could wipe out slavery in Missouri, they might try to do so
   in all of the rest of the slave states.
4. Plus, the North was starting to get more prosperous and populous than the South.

XII. The Uneasy Missouri Compromise

1. Finally, the deadlock was broken by a bundle of compromises known as the Missouri Compromise.
   • Missouri would be admitted as a slave state while Maine would be
     admitted as a free state, thus maintaining the balance (it went from 11
     free states and 11 slave states to 12 and 12).
   • All new states north of the 36°30’ line would be free, new states southward would be slave.
2. Both the North and South gained something, and though neither was totally happy, the compromise worked for many years.
   • Monroe should have been doomed after the 1819 panic and the
     Missouri problem, but he was so popular, and the Federalist Party so
     weak, that he won in 1820 by all but one vote (unanimity was reserved
     for Washington).

XIII. John Marshall and Judicial Nationalism

1. Chief Justice John Marshall helped to bolster the power of the government at the expense of the states.
2. McCulloch vs. Maryland (1819): This case involved Maryland’s
   trying to destroy the Bank of the U.S. by taxing its currency notes.
   Marshall invoked the Hamiltonian principle of implied powers and denied
   Maryland’s right to tax the bank, and also gave the doctrine of
   “loose construction,” using the elastic clause of the
   Constitution as its basis. He implied that the Constitution was to last
   for many ages, and thereby was constructed loosely, flexibly, to be
   bent as times changed.
3. Cohens vs. Virginia (1821): The Cohens had been found guilty by
   Virginia courts of illegally selling lottery tickets, had appealed to
   the Supreme Court, and had lost, but Marshall asserted the right of the
   Supreme Court to review the decisions of the state supreme courts in
   all questions involving powers of the federal government. The federal
   government won, the states lost.
4. Gibbons vs. Ogden (1824): When New York tried to grant a monopoly
   of waterborne commerce, Marshall struck it down by saying that only
   Congress can control interstate commerce, not the states themselves; it
   was another blow to states’ rights.

XIV. Judicial Dikes Against Democratic Excesses

1. Fletcher vs. Peck (1810): After Georgia fraudulently granted 35
   million acres in the Yazoo River country (Mississippi) to privateers,
   the legislature repealed it after public outcry, but Marshall ruled
   that it was a contract, and that states couldn’t impair a
   contract. It was one of
2. Dartmouth College vs. Woodward (1819): Dartmouth had been granted a
   charter by King George III, but New Hampshire had tried to change it.
   Dartmouth appealed, using alumni Daniel Webster to work as lawyer, and
   Marshall ruled that the original charter must stand. It was a contract,
   and the Constitution protected those and overruled state rulings.
3. Marshall’s rulings gave the Supreme Court its powers and
   greatly strengthened the federal government, giving it power to
   overrule state governments sometimes.

XV. Sharing Oregon and Acquiring Florida

1. The Treaty of 1818 put the northern boundary of the Louisiana
   Purchase at the 49th parallel and provided for a ten-year joint
   occupation of the Oregon Territory with Britain, without a surrender of
   rights and claims by neither Britain nor America.
2. When revolutions broke out in South and Central America, Spanish
   troops in Florida were withdrawn to put down the rebellions, and Indian
   attacks ravaged American land while the Indians would then retreat back
   to Spanish territory.
3. Andrew Jackson swept across the Florida border, hanged two Indian
   chiefs without ceremony, executed two British subjects for assisting
   Indians, and seized St. Marks and Pensacola.
4. Monroe consulted his cabinet as to what to do against Jackson; all
   wanted to punish him except for John Quincy Adams, who demanded huge
   concessions from Spain.
5. The Florida Purchase Treaty of 1819 had Spain cede Florida and
   shadowy claims to Oregon in exchange for Texas. The U.S. paid $5
   million to Spain for Florida.

XVI. The Menace of Monarchy in America

1. Monarchs in Europe now were determined to protect the world against
   democracy, and crushed democratic rebellions in Italy (1821) and in
   Spain (1823), much to the alarm of Americans.
2. Also, Russia’s claims to North American territory were
   intruding and making Americans nervous that Russia might claim
   territory that was “rightfully American.”
3. Then, in August 1823, the British foreign secretary, George
   Canning, approached the American minister in London proposing that the
   U.S. and Britain combine in a joint declaration renouncing any interest
   in acquiring Latin American territory, and specifically warning the
   European despots to keep their hands off of Latin American politics.

XVII. Monroe and His Doctrine

1. Sly and careful John Q. Adams sensed a joker in the proposal,
   correctly assumed that the European powers weren’t going to
   invade America anytime soon, and knew that a self-denouncing alliance
   with Britain would morally tie the hands of the U.S.
2. He knew that the British boats would need to protect South America
   to protect their merchant trade, and presumed it safe to blow a
   defiant, nationalistic blast at all Europe.
3. Late in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine was born, incorporating non-colonization and nonintervention.
4. Dedicated primarily to Russia in the West, Monroe said that no
   colonization in the Americas could happen anymore and also, European
   nations could not intervene in Latin American affairs.
5. In return, the U.S. would not interfere in the Greek democratic revolt against Turkey.

XVIII. Monroe’s Doctrine Appraised

1. The monarchs of Europe were angered, but couldn’t do anything
   about it, since the British navy would be there to stop them, further
   frustrating them.
2. Monroe’s declaration made little splash in Latin America,
   since those who knew of the message also recognized that it was the
   British navy and not America that was protecting them, and that the
   U.S. was doing this only to protect its own hide.
3. Not until 1845 did President Polk revive it.
4. In the Russo-American Treaty of 1824, the Russian tsar fixed the
   southern boundary of his Alaskan territory at 54°40’ and it
   stayed at that.
5. The Monroe Doctrine might better be called the Self-Defense
   Doctrine, since Monroe was concerned about the safety of his own
   country, not Latin America.
6. The doctrine has never been law, a pledge, or an agreement.
7. It was mostly an expression of post-1812 U.S. nationalism, gave a
   voice of patriotism, and added to the illusion of isolationism.
8. Many Americans falsely concluded that the Republic was in fact
   insulated from European dangers simply because it wanted to be and
   because, in a nationalistic outburst, Monroe had publicly warned the
   Old World powers to stay away.

I. The “Corrupt Bargain” of 1824

1. After the Era of Good Feelings, politics was transformed. The big
   winner of this transformation was the common man. Specifically, the
   common white man as universal white manhood suffrage (all white men
   could vote) became the norm.
2. In the election of 1824, there were four towering candidates:
   Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, Henry Clay of Kentucky, William H.
   Crawford of Georgia, and John Q. Adams of Massachusetts.
   • All four called themselves Republicans.
   • Three were a “favorite son” of their respective region but Clay
     thought of himself as a national figure (he was Speaker of the House
     and author of the “American System”).
3. In the results, Jackson got the most popular votes and the most
   electoral votes, but he failed to get the majority in the Electoral
   College. Adams came in second in both, while Crawford was fourth in the
   popular vote but third in the electoral votes. Clay was 4th in the
   electoral vote.
4. By the 12th Amendment, the top three electoral vote getters would
   be voted upon in the House of Reps. and the majority (over 50%) would
   be elected president.
5. Clay was eliminated, but he was the Speaker of the House, and since
   Crawford had recently suffered a paralytic stroke and Clay hated
   Jackson, he threw his support behind John Q. Adams, helping him become
   president.
   • When Clay was appointed Secretary of the State, the traditional
     stepping-stone to the presidency, Jacksonians cried foul play and
     corruption. Jackson said he, the people’s choice, had been swindled out
     of the presidency by career politicians in Washington D.C.
   • John Randolph publicly assailed the alliance between Adams and Clay.
6. Evidence against any possible deal has never been found in this “Corrupt Bargain,” but both men flawed their reputations.

II. A Yankee Misfit in the White House

1. John Quincy Adams was a man of puritanical honor, and he had
   achieved high office by commanding respect rather than by boasting
   great popularity. Like his father, however, he was able but somewhat
   wooden and lacked the “people’s touch” (which Jackson notably had).
2. During his administration, he only removed 12 public servants from
   the federal payroll, thus refusing to kick out efficient officeholders
   in favor of his own, possibly less efficient, supporters.
3. In his first annual message, Adams urged Congress on the
   construction of roads and canals, proposed a national university, and
   advocated support for an astronomical observatory.
   • Public reaction was mixed: roads were good, but observatories
     weren’t important, and Southerners knew that if the government did
     anything, it would have to continue collecting tariffs.
4. With land, Adams tried to curb over-speculation of land, much to
   Westerners’ anger even though he was doing it for their own good, and
   with the Cherokee Indians, he tried to deal fairly with them although
   the state of Georgia successfully resisted federal attempts to help the
   Cherokees.

III. Going “Whole Hog” for Jackson in 1828”

1. Jacksonians argued, “Should the people rule?” and said that the
   Adams-Clay bargaining four years before had cheated the people out of
   the rightful victor.
   • They successfully turned public opinion against an honest and honorable president.
2. However, Adams’ supporters also hit below the belt, even though Adams himself wouldn’t stoop to that level.
   • They called Jackson’s mother a prostitute, called him an adulterer
     (he had married his wife Rachel thinking that her divorce had been
     granted, only to discover two years later that it hadn’t been), and
     after he got elected, Rachel died. Jackson blamed Adams’ men who had
     slandered Andrew Jackson for Rachel Jackson’s death—he never forgave
     them.
3. John Q. Adams had purchased, with his own money and for his own
   use, a billiard table and a set of chessmen, but the Jacksonians had
   seized this, criticizing Adams’ incessant spending.

IV. “Old Hickory” as President

1. When he became president, Andrew Jackson had already battled
   dysentery, malaria, tuberculosis, and lead poisoning from two bullets
   lodged somewhere in his body.
2. He personified the new West: rough, a jack-of-all-trades, a genuine folk hero.
3. Born in the backwoods of the Carolinas (we’re not even sure if it
   was North or South Carolina, and both states still claim to be his
   home), Jackson had been early orphaned, was interested in cockfighting
   as a kid, and wasn’t really good with reading and writing, sometimes
   misspelling the same word twice in one letter.
4. He went to Tennessee, where he became a judge and a congressman,
   and his passions were so profound that he could choke up on the floor.
5. A man with a violent temper, he got into many duels, fights, stabbings, etc…
6. He was a Western aristocrat, having owned many slaves, and lived in
   a fine mansion, the Hermitage, and he shared many of the prejudices of
   the masses.
7. He was called “Old Hickory” by his troops because of his toughness.
8. He was anti-federalist, believing that the federal government was
   for the privileged only, although he maintained the sacredness of the
   Union and the federal power over the states. Still, he welcomed the
   western democracy.
9. Jackson commanded fear and respect from his subordinates, and
   ignored the Supreme Court on several occasions; he also used the veto
   12 times (compared to a combined 10 times by his predecessors) and on
   his inauguration, he let commoners come into the White House.
   • They wrecked the china and caused chaos until they heard that there
     was spiked punch on the White House front lawn; thus was the “inaugural
     bowl.”
   • Conservatives condemned Jackson as “King Mob” and berated him greatly.

V. The Spoils System

1. The spoils system rewarded supporters with good positions in office.
2. Jackson believed that experience counted, but that loyalty and
   young blood and sharp eyes counted more, and thus, he went to work on
   overhauling positions and erasing the old.
3. Not since the election of 1800 had a new party been voted into the
   presidency, and even then, many positions had stayed and not changed.
4. Though he wanted to “wipe the slate clean,” only 1/5 of the men
   were sent home, and clean sweeps would come later, but there were
   always people hounding Jackson for positions, and those who were
   discharged often went mad, killed themselves, or had a tough time with
   it.
5. The spoils system denied many able people a chance to contribute.
6. Samuel Swartwout was awarded the lucrative post of collector of the
   customs of the port of New York, and nearly nine years later, he fled
   for England, leaving his accounts more than a million dollars short,
   and thus becoming the first person to steal a million dollars from the
   government.
7. The spoils system was built up by gifts from expectant party
   members, and the system secured such a tenacious hold that it took more
   than 50 years before its grip was even loosened.

VI. The Tricky “Tariff of Abominations”

1. In 1824, Congress had increased the general tariff from 23% to 37%, but wool manufactures still wanted higher tariffs.
2. In the Tariff of 1828, the Jacksonians (who disliked tariffs)
   schemed to drive up duties to as high as 45% while imposing heavy
   tariffs on raw materials like wool, so that even New England, where the
   tariff was needed, would vote the bill down and give Adams another
   political black eye.
   • However, the New Englanders backfired the plan and passed the law (amended).
   • Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun reversed their positions from
     1816, with Webster supporting the tariff and Calhoun being against it.
   • The Southerners immediately branded it as the “Tariff of Abominations.”
3. In the South at this time, Denmark Vesey, a free Black, led an
   ominous slave rebellion in Charleston. This raised fears by Southern
   whites and led to a tightening of control over slaves.
   • The South mostly complained because it was now the least expanding of the sections.
   • Cotton prices were falling and land was growing scarce.
4. Southerners sold their cotton and other products without tariffs,
   while the products that they bought were heavily taxed. The South said
   all tariffs did for them was hike up prices.
5. Tariffs led the U.S. to buy less British products and vice versa,
   but it did help the Northeast prosper so that it could buy more of the
   South’s products.
6. John C. Calhoun secretly wrote “The South Carolina Exposition” in
   1828, boldly denouncing the recent tariff and calling for nullification
   of the tariff by all states.
7. However, South Carolina was alone in this nullification threat,
   since Andrew Jackson had been elected two weeks earlier, and was
   expected to sympathize with the South against the tariff.

VII. “Nullies” in South Carolina

1. South Carolinians, still scornful toward the Tariff of 1828,
   attempted to garner the necessary two-thirds majority to nullify it in
   the S.C. legislature, but determined Unionists blocked them.
2. In response to the anger at the “Tariff of Abominations,” Congress
   passed the Tariff of 1832, which did away with the worst parts of the
   Tariff of 1828, such as lowering the tariff down to 35%, a reduction of
   10%, but many southerners still hated it.
3. In the elections of 1832, the Nullies came out with a two-thirds
   majority over the Unionists, met in the state legislature, and declared
   the Tariff of 1832 to be void within S.C. boundaries.
   • They also threatened with secession against the Union, causing a huge problem.
   • President Jackson issued a ringing proclamation against S.C., to
     which governor Hayne issued a counter-proclamation, and civil war
     loomed dangerously.
   • To compromise and prevent Jackson from crushing S.C. and becoming
     more popular, the president’s rival, Henry Clay, proposed a compromise
     bill that would gradually reduce the Tariff of 1832 by about 10% over a
     period of eight years, so that by 1842 the rates would be down to 20%
     to 25%.
4. The Tariff of 1833 narrowly squeezed through Congress.
5. However, to save face, Congress also passed the Force Bill (AKA the
   “Bloody Bill”) that authorized the president to use the army and navy,
   if necessary, to collect tariffs.
6. No other states had supported South Carolina’s stance of possible secession, though Georgia and Virginia toyed with the idea.
7. Finally, S.C. repealed the nullification ordinance.

VIII. The Trail of Tears

1. By 1830, the U.S. population stood at 13 million, and as states emerged, the Indians were stranded.
2. Federal policy officially was to acquire land from the Indians through formal treaties, but too many times, they were tricked.
3. Many people respected the Indians, though, and tried to Christianize them.
   • i.e. the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among Indians (est. 1787).
4. Some Indians violently resisted, but the Cherokees were among the
   few that tried to adopt the Americans ways, adopting a system of
   settled agriculture, devising an alphabet, legislating legal code in
   1808, and adopting a written constitution in 1827.
5. The Cherokees, the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and the Seminoles were known as the “Five Civilized Tribes.”
6. However, in 1828, Congress declared the Cherokee tribal council
   illegal, and asserted its own jurisdiction over Indian lands and
   affairs, and even though the Cherokees appealed to and won in the
   Supreme Court, Jackson refused to recognize the decision.
7. Jackson, though, still harbored some sentiment of Indians, and
   proposed that they be bodily transferred west of the Mississippi, where
   they could preserve the culture, and in 1830, Congress passed the
   Indian Removal Act, in which Indians were moved to Oklahoma.
   • Thousands of Indians died on the “Trail of Tears” after being
     uprooted from their sacred lands that had been theirs for centuries.
   • Also, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was established in 1836 to deal with Indians.
8. In 1832, in Illinois and Wisconsin, the Sauk and Fox tribes revolted but were crushed.
9. From 1835 to 1842, the Seminoles waged guerrilla warfare against
   the U.S., but were broken after their leader, Osceola, was seized; some
   fled deeper into the Everglades of Florida; others moved to Oklahoma.

IX. The Bank War

1. Andrew Jackson, like most westerners, distrusted big banks, especially the BUS—Bank of the United States.
   • To Jackson and westerners, the BUS was simply a tool of the rich to get richer.
   • The BUS minted coin money (“hard money”), but not paper money.
     Farmers out west wanted paper money which caused inflation, and enabled
     them to more easily pay off their debts.
   • Jackson and westerners saw the BUS and eastern banks as being in a
     conspiracy to keep the common man down economically. This conspiracy
     was carried out through hard money and debt.
2. The BUS, led by Nicholas Biddle, was harsh on the volatile western
   “wildcat” banks that churned out unstable money and too-lenient credit
   for land (which the westerners loved). The BUS seemed pretty autocratic
   and out of touch with America during its New Democracy era, and it was
   corrupt.
3. Nicholas Biddle cleverly lent U.S. funds to friends, and often used the money of the BUS to bribe people, like the press.
4. However, the bank was financially sound, reduced bank failures,
   issued sound notes, promoted economic expansion by making abundant
   credit, and was a safe depository for the funds of the Washington
   government.
5. It was highly important and useful, though sometimes not necessarily pure and wholesome.
6. In 1832, Henry Clay, in a strategy to bring Jackson’s popularity
   down so that he could defeat him for presidency, rammed a bill for the
   re-chartering of the BUS—four years early.
7. He felt that if Jackson signed it, he’d alienate his followers in
   the West and South, and if he vetoed it, he’d lose the supports of the
   “best people” of the East.
8. He failed to realize that the West held more power now, not the East.
9. The re-charter bill passed through Congress easily, but Jackson
   demolished it in a scorching veto that condemned the BUS as
   unconstitutional (despite political foe John Marshall’s ruling that it
   was okay), and anti-American.
10. The veto amplified the power of the president by ignoring the Supreme Court and aligned the West against the East.

X. “Old Hickory” Wallops Clay in 1832

1. Jackson’s supporters again raised the hickory pole while Clay’s men
   detracted Jackson’s dueling, gambling, cockfighting, and fast living.
2. However, a new third party, the Anti-Masonic Party, made its entrance for the first time.
   • Opposed to the fearsome secrecy of the Masonic order, it was
     energized by the mysterious murder of someone who threatened to expose
     the Freemason’s secrets.
   • While sharing Jacksonian ideals, they were

against Jackson, a Mason.
* Also, they were supported by churches hoping to pass religious reform.

1. Also for the first time, national conventions were held to nominate candidates.
2. Clay had the money and the “support” of the press, but the poor
   people voted too, and Jackson won handily, handing Clay his third loss
   in three tries.

XI. Burying Biddle’s Bank

1. Hoping to kill the BUS, Jackson now began to withdraw federal funds
   from the bank, so as to drain it of its wealth; in reaction, Biddle
   began to call for unnecessary loans, personally causing a mini panic.
2. Jackson won, and in 1836, the BUS breathed its last breath, but
   because it had been the only source of sure credit in the United
   States, hard times fell upon the West once the BUS died, since the
   wildcat banks were very unreliable.

XII. The Birth of the Whigs

1. Under Jackson, the modern two-party system of politics came to be.
2. Opponents of Jackson despised his iron-fisted nature and called him
   “King Andrew.” This wide group coalesced into the Whig party, united
   only by dislike of Jackson.
3. Generally, the Whigs:
   • Disliked Jackson
   • Supported Henry Clay’s American System and internal improvements.
4. Once formed, American would have at least two major political parties thenceforth.

XIII. The Election of 1836

1. “King Andrew” was too old to run again, but offered Martin van Buren to follow in his coattails.
2. The Whigs suffered from disorganization. They tried to offer a
   favorite son candidate from each section of the country—their hopes
   were that no one would win a majority of electoral votes, the election
   would thus be thrown to the House of Representatives, and they could
   win there. Their scheme failed, and van Buren won.

XIV. Big Woes for the “Little Magician”

1. Van Buren was the first president to have been born in America, but
   he lacked the support of many Democrats and Jackson’s popularity.
2. A rebellion in Canada in 1837 threatened to plunge America into
   war, and Van Buren also inherited the depression caused by Jackson’s
   BUS killing.

XV. Depression Doldrums and the Independent Treasury

1. The Panic of 1837 was caused by the “wildcat banks” loans, the
   over-speculation, the “Bank War,” and the Specie Circular stating that
   debts must be paid in specie (gold or silver), which no one had.
2. Failures of wheat crops caused by the Hessian fly also worsened the
   situation, and the failure of two large British Banks in 1836 had
   already started the panic going.
3. Hundreds of banks fell, including some of Jackson’s “pet banks,”
   banks that had received the money that Jackson had withdrawn from the
   BUS to kill it.
4. The Whigs proposed expansion of bank credit, higher tariffs, and
   subsidies for internal improvements, but Van Buren spurned such ideas.
5. Instead, he proposed the “Divorce Bill” (separating the bank from
   the government and storing money in some of the vaults of the larger
   American cities, thus keeping the money safe but also unavailable) that
   advocated the independent treasury, and in 1840, it was passed.
   • The next year, the victorious Whigs repealed it, but in 1846, it
     was brought back; it finally merged with the Federal Reserve System in
     the next century.

XVI. Gone to Texas

1. Americans continued to covet Texas, and in 1823, after Mexico had
   gained independence from Spain, Stephen Austin had made an agreement
   with the Mexican government to bring about 300 families into a huge
   tract of granted land to settle.
2. The stipulations were: (1) they must become Mexican citizens, (2)
   they must become Catholic, and (3) no slavery allowed. These
   stipulations were largely ignored by the new settlers.

XVII. The Lone Star Rebellion

1. The Texans (among them Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie) resented the
   “foreign” government, but they were led by Sam Houston, a man whose
   wife had left him.
2. In 1830, Mexico freed its slaves and prohibited them in Texas, much to the anger of citizens.
3. In 1833, Stephen Austin went to Mexico City to clear up differences and was jailed for 8 months.
4. In 1835, dictator Santa Anna started to raise an army to suppress the Texans; the next year, they declared their independence.
5. After armed conflict and slaughters at the Alamo and at Goliad,
   Texan war cries rallied citizens, volunteers, and soldiers, and the
   turning point came after Sam Houston led his army for 37 days eastward,
   then turned on the Mexicans, taking advantage of their siesta hour,
   wiping them out, and capturing Santa Anna.
6. The treaty he was forced to sign was later negated by him on grounds that the treaty was extorted under duress.
7. Texas was supported in their war by the United States, but Jackson
   was hesitant to formally recognize Texas as an independent nation until
   he had secured Martin Van Buren as his successor, but after he
   succeeded, Jackson did indeed recognize Texas on his last day before he
   left office, in 1837.
8. Many Texans wanted to become part of the Union, but the slavery issue blocked this.
9. The end was an unsettled predicament in which Texans feared the return of Santa Anna.

XVIII. Log Cabins and Hard Cider of 1840

1. In 1840, William Harrison was nominated due to his being issueless and enemyless, with John Tyler as his running mate.
2. He had only been popular from Tippecanoe (1811) and the Battle of the Thames (1813).
3. A stupid Democratic editor also helped Harrison’s cause when he
   called the candidate a poor old farmer with hard cider and
   inadvertently made him look like many poor Westerners.
4. With slogans of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” the Whigs advocated
   this “poor man’s president” idea and replied, to such questions of the
   bank, internal improvements, and the tariff, with answers of “log
   cabin,” “hard cider,” and “Harrison is a poor man.”
5. The popular election was close, but Harrison blew Van Buren away in the Electoral College.
6. Basically, the election was a protest against the hard times of the era.

XIX. Politics for the People

1. When the Federalists had dominated, democracy was not respected, but by the 1820s, it was widely appealing.
   • Politicians now had to bend to appease and appeal to the masses,
     and the popular ones were the ones who claimed to be born in log cabins
     and had humble backgrounds.
   • Those who were aristocratic (too clean, too well-dressed, too grammatical, to highly intellectual) were scorned.
2. Western Indian fighters and/or militia commanders, like Andrew
   Jackson, Davy Crocket, and William Henry Harrison, were quite popular.
3. Jacksonian Democracy said that whatever governing that was to be done should be done directly by the people.
4. This time was called the New Democracy, and was based on universal white manhood suffrage.
   • In 1791, Vermont became the first state admitted to the union to allow all white males to vote in the elections.
5. While the old bigwigs who used to have power sneered at the
   “coonskin congressmen” and the “bipeds of the forest,” the new
   democrats argued that if they messed up, they messed up together and
   were not victims of aristocratic domination.

XX. The Two-Party System

1. The Democrats had so successfully absorbed the Federalist ideas
   before, that a true two party system had never emerged—until now.
2. The Democrats
   • Glorified the liberty of the individual.
   • Clung to states’ rights and federal restraint in social and economic affairs.
   • Mostly more humble, poorer folk.
   • Generally from the South and West.
3. The Whigs
   • Trumpeted the natural harmony of society and the value of community.
   • Berated leaders whose appeals and self-interest fostered conflict among individuals.
   • Favored a renewed national bank, protective tariffs, internal improvements, public schools, and moral reforms.
   • Mostly more aristocratic and wealthier.
   • Generally from the East.
4. Things in Common
   • Based on the people, with “catchall” phrases for popularity.
   • Both also commanded loyalties from all kinds of people.

I. The Westward Movement

1. The U.S. marched quickly toward the West which proved to be very hard with disease and loneliness.
2. Frontier people were individualistic, superstitious and ill-informed of current matters.

II. Shaping the Western Landscape

1. The westward movement molded the environment.
   • Tobacco overuse had exhausted the land forcing settlers to move on, but “Kentucky bluegrass” thrived.
   • Settlers trapped beavers, sea otters, and bison for fur to ship back East.
2. The spirit of nationalism led to an appreciation of the American wilderness.
   • Artist George Catlin pushed for national parks and later achieved it with Yellowstone in 1872.

III. The March of the Millions

1. In the mid-1800s, the population continued to double every 25 years.
   • By 1860, the original 13 states now had become 33 states; the
     American population was 4th in the world (behind Russia, France,
     Austria).
   • Urban growth continued explosively.
     • In 1790, only New York & Philadelphia had more than 20,000 people, but by 1860, 43 cities had.
     • With growth came poor sanitation ‡ later, sewage systems and piped-in water came about.
2. A high birthrate had accounted for population growth, but near 1850s, millions of Irish and German came.
   • They came due to a surplus population in Europe, but not all came to the U.S.
   • The appeal of the U.S. was for land, freedom from church, no aristocracy, 3 meat meals a day.
   • Also, transoceanic steamships were used meaning travel time dropped to 12 days and it was safer.

IV. The Emerald Isle Moves West

1. The Irish potato famine in the mid-1840s led to the death of 2 million and saw many flee to the U.S.
   • “Black Forties”—they mainly came to cities like Boston and especially New York (biggest Irish city).
   • They were illiterate, discriminated against by older Americans, and received lowest-paying jobs (railroad-building).
   • They were hated by Protestants because they’re Catholic.
   • Americans hated the Irish (such as “NINA”—No
     Irish Need Apply); the Irish hated competition with blacks for the
     low-paying jobs.
   • The Ancient Order of Hibernians was established to aid the Irish.
   • Gradual property ownership came about, and their children earned education.
   • The Irish were attracted to politics, and often filled police departments as officers.
   • The politicians tried to appeal to the Irish by yelling at London (“Twisting the Lion’s Tail”).

V. The German Forty-Eighters

1. 1 million Germans poured in between 1830s-1860s because of crop failures and revolution/war of 1848.
   • Liberals such as Carl Schurz contributed to the elevation of the U.S. political scene.
   • They had more money than the Irish, so they bought land in West, especially in Wisconsin.
   • Their votes were crucial, so they were wooed by U.S. politicians, yet they lacked potency because they were rather spread out.
     • The Germans contributed to the U.S. culture (i.e. the Christmas tree) and isolationism.
   • They urged public education (started kindergarten) and freedom (they were enemies of slavery).
   • They faced resent from old Americans because the Germans grouped
     themselves together, were aloof, clung to their old ways and kept
     speaking the German language and religion, and brought beer to the U.S.

VI. Flare-ups of Antiforeignism

1. “nativists” – older Americans who were prejudiced against newcomers in jobs, politics, and religion
2. Catholicism became a major faith due to the immigration of the 1840s and 50s; they also set out to build Catholic schools
3. nativists feared that Catholicism challenged Protestantism (Popish
   idols) so they formed the “Order of Star-Spangled Banner”
   AKA, “The Know-Nothings”
   • they met in secrecy - “I Know-Nothing” was their response to any inquiries
   • fought for restrictions on immigration, naturalization & deportation of alien paupers
   • wrote fiction books about corruption of churches
   • there was mass violence, i.e. Philadelphia in 1844, which burnt churches, schools, and saw people killed
   • it made America a pluralistic society with diversity
   • as time passed, immigrants were less disliked since they were
     crucial to economic expansion & more jobs were becoming available
     (although they were low-paying)

VII. Creeping Mechanization

1. The industrial revolution spread to U.S. The U.S. was destined to become an industrial giant because…
   • land was cheap, money for investment plentiful, raw materials were plentiful
   • Britain lacked consumers for factory-scale manufacturing whereas America had the growing numbers
   • But, Britain’s long-established factory system was in competition with the infant U.S. industries
   • the Brits kept textile industry secrets as a monopoly (forbade travel of craftsmen & export of machines)
2. Still, the U.S. remained very rural and was mostly a farming nation

VIII. Whitney Ends the Fiber Famine

1. Samuel Slater – “Father of the Factory System”
   • learned of textile machinery when working in British
     factory‡ he escaped to U.S., was aided by Moses Brown and built
     1st cotton thread spinner in the U.S. located in Pawtucket, Rhode
     Island (1791)
2. Eli Whitney built a cotton gin (which was 50 times more effective than separating cotton seed by hand)
   • cotton economics were now profitable and saved the South with “King Cotton”
   • the South flourished and expanded the cotton kingdom westward
   • the Northern factories manufactured textiles (cloth), especially in
     New England due to its poor soil, dense labor, access to sea, and fast
     rivers for water power)

IX. Marvels in Manufacturing

1. The Embargo Act of the War of 1812 encouraged home manufacturing
2. after the peace treaty at Ghent, the British poured in a surplus of
   cheap goods, forcing the close of many American factories who could not
   compete with long-established British companies
3. Congress then passed Tariff of 1816 to protect U.S. economy
4. Eli Whitney introduced machine-made inter-changeable parts (on muskets) - 1850
   • this was the base of the assembly line which flourished in the North, while the cotton gin flourished South
5. Elias Howe & Issac Singer (1846) made the sewing machine (the foundation of clothing industry)
6. The decade of 1860 had 28,000 patents while 1800 only had 306
7. The principle of limited liability in a corporation (can’t lose more than invested) stimulated the economy
8. Laws of “free incorporation” came about saying there
   was no need to apply for a charter from a legislature to start a
   corporation
9. Samuel Morse’s telegraph connected the business world when he asked, “What hath God wrought?”

X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”

1. The factory system led to impersonal relations
2. The benefit went to factory owner; hours were long, wages low,
   conditions unsafe and unhealthy, no unions existed to address these
   issues
3. child labor was heavy; 50% of the industrial labor force were children
4. adult working condition improved in the 1820s & 30s with the mass vote given to workers
   • 10 hour day, higher wages, tolerable conditions, public education, a ban of imprisonment for debt
   • in the 1840s, President Van Buren established 10 hour day for federal employees
   • many went on strike, but lost because employers simply imported more workers (the much-hated immigrants)
5. labor unions formed in the 1830s, but were hit by Panic of 1837
   • case of Commonwealth v. Hunt in Massachusetts Supreme Court (1842) legalized unions for peaceful and honorable protest
   • however, the effectiveness of unions was small (due mostly to their
     threat of a strike was always undermined by the management’s
     ability to simply call in “scabs”, plentiful immigrants
     eager to work)

XI. Women and the Economy

1. women toiled in factories under poor conditions
2. in Lowell, Massachusetts, a model textile mill employed young, single women under a watchful eye.
3. opportunities were rare and women mainly worked in nursing, domestic service, teaching (encouraged by Catharine Beecher)
4. women usually worked before marriage, after marriage they became housewives and mothers
5. arranged marriages died down; marriages due to love tied family closer
6. families grew smaller (average of 6); the fertility rate dropped
   sharply; this “domestic feminism” was a crude form of birth
   control
7. child-centered families emerged with less children and discipline
8. the home changed from a place of labor, to a place of refuge and rest from labor at the mill
9. women were in charge of family: small, affectionate, child-centered families. This was a small arena for talented women

XII. Western Farmers Reap a Revolution in the Fields

1. the trans-Allegheny region (Ohio-Indiana-Illinois) became the nation’s breadbasket
   • they planted corn and raised hogs (Cincinnati was known as “the porkopolis” of the west”
2. inventions that boomed agriculture
   • John Deere – invented the steel plow that cut through hard soil and could be pulled by horses
   • Cyrus McCormick – invented the mechanical mower-reaper to harvest grain
3. this led to large-scale production and growth of cash crops
4. The North produced more food than the South (who grew cotton);
   products flowed from the North to the South via sea and rivers, not
   East to West which need transportation revolution in roads and canals

XIII. Highways and Steamboats

1. improvements in transportation were needed for raw material transport
2. Lancaster Turnpike – a hard road from Philadelphia to Lancaster, PA which brought economic expansion westward
3. The federal government constructed the Cumberland Road AKA The National Road (Maryland - Illinois) with state and federal money
4. Robert Fulton invented the first steamboat, the Clermont in 1807; steamboats were common by the 1830s
   • this caused an increase of U.S. trade because there was no concern for weather and water current
   • this contributed to the development of Southern and Western economies

XIV. “Clinton’s Big Ditch” in New York

1. Gov. DeWitt Clinton’s Big Ditch was the Erie Canal between Lake Erie and the Hudson River
   • it shortened the expense and time of transportation (to one
     twentieth what it was before); cities grew along the canal and the
     price of food was reduced
   • farmers were unable to compete in the rocky soils of the East, so they went to the West

XV. The Iron Horse

1. The 1st railroad in U.S. was introduced in 1828; by 1860, 30,000
   miles of railroad tracks had been laid in the U.S. (3/4 of those tracks
   were up North)
2. The railroads were 1st opposed because financiers were afraid of
   losing money from Erie Canal traffic; railroads also caused fires to
   houses from their embers.
3. Early trains were poorly constructed (with bad brakes) and the gauge of tracks varied

XVIII. Cables, Clippers, and Pony Riders

1. foreign exports
   • South‡ cotton account for 50% of exports
   • North‡ after the repeal of the British Corn Law of 1846, wheat became an important commodity in trade with England
2. Americans imported more than they exported (causing substantial debt to foreign creditors)
3. In 1858, Cyrus Field laid a telegraph cable between the U.S. &
   Europe (but died in 3 weeks); a better one was laid in 1866. This
   provided instant communication with Europe—a monumental step
   forward.
4. American vessels had been idle due to embargoes and panics; the U.S. Navy made little progress
   • the golden age of the American merchant marine came in 1840s and
     50s – Donald Mckay built the clipper ships which dominated the
     seas for a brief time (they were very fast, sleek, and long)
     • tea trade with the British grew and carried many to California
   • America’s brief dominance at sea with the clipper ships was
     crushed by British iron steamers, “Tea kettles” that were
     more reliable and could haul heavier loads, though slower.
5. speedy communication popped up from Missouri to California, in the
   Pony Express (going 2,000 miles in 10 days). The Pony Express was
   short-lived though, lasting but 2 years, and was replaced by the
   telegraph wire.

XIX. The Transport Web Binds the Union

1. the steamboat allowed reverse transport of South to West and served to bind them together
2. more canals led to more trade with East from the West (the South was left out with canals)
3. New York became the queen port of the country, replacing New Orleans, thanks to the Erie Canal
4. Principle of divided labor emerged with each region specializing in its own economic activity
   • South cotton to New England; West grain &
     livestock for the East & Europe; East machines, textiles
     for South and West
5. The South thought the Mississippi River linked them to upper valley
   states; they would overlook man-made links when they began to consider
   secession
6. Transformed the home, it was once the center of economics, but now served as a refuge from work.

XXI. The Market Revolution

1. Just as the political landscape of America changed, the economic scene did too. Essentially, business began to grow up.
2. The era of the self-supported farm was changing to a more modern, specialty driven economy.
3. These times widened the gap between the rich and poor.
4. Cities saw the greatest extremes
   • unskilled workers were “drifters” from town to town looking for jobs (1/2 of industrial population)
   • social mobility existed, although rags-to-riches stories were rare
   • the standard of living did rise, however, as wages did rise (this helped diffuse any potential class conflict)

I. Reviving Religion

1. Church attendance was regular in 1850 (3/4 of population attended)
2. Many relied on Deism (reason rather revelation); Deism rejected
   original sin of man, denied Christ’s divinity but believed in a
   supreme being that created universe with an order, similar to a
   clockmaker.
3. Unitarian faith begins (New England)
   • believed God existed in only 1 person, not in the orthodox trinity; stressed goodness of human nature
   • believed in free will and salvation through good works; pictured God as a loving father
   • appealed to intellectuals with rationalism and optimism
4. These perversions of Christianity ignited Christians to “take back their faith” and oppose these new beliefs
5. Liberalism in religion started in 1800 spawned the 2nd Great
   Awakening a tidal wave of spiritual fervor that resulted in prison
   reform, church reform, temperance movement (no alcohol), women’s
   rights movement, abolition of slavery in 1830s
   • it spread to the masses through huge “camp meetings”
   • the East went to the West to Christianize Indians
   • Methodists and Baptists stressed personal conversion, democracy in church affairs, emotionalism
   • Peter Cartwright – was best known of the “circuit riders” or traveling preachers
   • Charles Grandison Finney – the greatest revival preacher who led massive revivals in Rochester, NY

II. Denominational Diversity

1. The revival furthered fragmentation of religious faiths
   • New York, with its Puritans, preached “hellfire” and was known as the “Burned-Over District”
   • Millerites (Adventists) – predicted Christ to return to earth
     on Oct 22, 1844. When this prophesy failed to materialize, the movement
     lost credibility.
   • The Awakening widened lines between classes the region (like 1st Great Awakening)
   • conservatives were made up of: propertied Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Unitarians
   • the less-learned of the South the West (frontier areas) were usually Methodists or Baptists
2. Religion further split with the issue of slavery (i.e. the Methodists and Presbyterians split)

III. A Desert Zion in Utah

1. Joseph Smith (1830) claimed to have found golden tablets in NY with
   the Book of Mormon inscribed on them. He came up with Mormon or Church
   of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
   • antagonism toward Mormons emerged due to their polygamy, drilling militia, and voting as a unit
   • Smith was killed, but was succeeded by Brigham Young, who led followers to Utah
   • they grew quickly by birth and immigration from Europe
   • they had a federal governor and marched to Utah when Young became governor
   • the issue of polygamy prevented Utah’s entrance to U.S. until 1896

IV. Free School for a Free People

1. The idea of tax-supported, compulsory (mandatory), primary schools was opposed as a hand-out to paupers
   • Gradually, support rose because uneducated “brats” might grow up to be rabbles with voting rights
   • Free public education, triumphed in 1828 along with the voting power in the Jackson election
   • there were largely ill-taught and ill-trained teachers, however
   • Horace Mann fought for better schools and is the “Father of Public Education”
   • school was too expensive for many community; blacks were mostly left out from education
2. Important educators - Noah Webster (dictionary and Blueback Speller); William H. McGuffey — McGuffey’s Readers)

V. Higher Goals for Higher Learning

1. The 2nd Great Awakening led to the building of small schools in the South the West (mainly for pride)
   • the curriculum focused mainly on Latin, Greek, Math, moral philosophy
2. The 1st state-supported university was founded in the Tar Heel
   state, the Univ. of North Carolina, in 1795; Jefferson started the
   University of Virginia shortly afterwards (UVA was to be independent of
   religion or politics)
3. women were thought to be corrupted if too educated and were therefore excluded
4. Emma Willard — established Troy Female Seminary (1821) and Mount Holyoke Seminary (1837) was established by Mary Lyon
5. Libraries, public lectures, and magazines flourished

VI. An Age of Reform

1. reformers opposed tobacco, alcohol, profanity, and many other vices, and came out for women’s rights
2. women were very important in motivating these reform movements
3. reformers were often optimists who sought a perfect society
   • some were naïve and ignored the problems of factories
   • they fought for no imprisonment for debt (the poor were sometimes
     locked in jail for less than $1 debt); this was gradually abolished
   • reformers wanted criminal codes softened and reformatories created
   • the mentally insane were treated badly. Dorothea Dix fought for reform of the mentally insane in her classic petition of 1843
   • there was agitation for peace (i.e. the American Peace Society) - William Ladd had some impact until Civil War and Crimean war

VII. Demon Rum—The “Old Deluder”

1. drunkenness was widespread
2. The American Temperance Society was formed at Boston (1826) –
   the “Cold Water Army” (children), signed pledges, made
   pamphlets, and an anti-alcohol novel emerged called 10 nights in a
   Barroom and What I Saw There
3. Attack on the demon drink adopted 2 major lines attack…
   • stressed temperance (individual will to resist)
   • legislature-removed temptation - Neal S. Dow becomes the “Father of Prohibition”
   • sponsored Maine Law of 1851 which prohibited making and sale of liquor (followed by others)

VIII. Women in Revolt

1. Women stayed home, without voting rights. Still, in the 19th century, American women were generally better off than in Europe.
2. many women avoided marriage altogether becoming “spinsters”
3. gender differences increased sharply with different economic roles
   • women were perceived as weak physically and emotionally, but fine for teaching
   • men were perceived as strong, but crude and barbaric, if not guided by the purity of women
4. home was the center of the female’s world (even for reformer Catharine Beecher) but many felt that was not enough
5. they joined the movement to abolish of slavery
6. the women’s movement was led by Lucretia Mott, Susan B.
   Anthony (Suzy Bs), Elizabeth Candy Stanton, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell
   (1st female medical graduate), Margaret Fuller, the Grimke sisters
   (anti-slavery advocates), and Amelia Bloomer (semi-short skirts)
   • The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention (1848) – held in NY, it was a major landmark in women’s rights
   • Declaration of Sentiments – was written in the spirit of the
     Declaration of Independence saying that “all Men and Women are
     created equal”
   • demanded ballot for women
   • launched modern women’s rights movement
7. the women’s rights movement was temporarily eclipsed by
   slavery when the Civil War heated up, but served as a foundation for
   later days

IX. Wilderness Utopias

1. Robert Owen founded New Harmony, IN (1825) though it failed in confusion
2. Brook Farm – Massachusetts experiment (1841) where 20
   intellectuals committed to Transcendentalism (it lasted until ‘46)
3. Oneida Community — practiced free love, birth control,
   eugenic selection of parents to produce superior offspring; it survived
   ironically as a capitalistic venture, selling baskets and then cutlery.
4. Shakers – a communistic community (led by Mother Ann Lee); they couldn’t marry so they became extinct

X. The Dawn of Scientific Achievement

1. Early Americans were interested in practical science rather than pure science (i.e., Jefferson and his newly designed plow).
   • Nathaniel Bowditch – studied practical navigation and oceanography
   • Matthew Maury - ocean winds, currents
2. Writers were concerned with basic science.
3. The most influential U.S. scientists…
   • Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864) - pioneer in chemistry geologist (taught in Yale)
   • Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) - served at Harvard, insisted on original research
   • Asa Gray (1810-1888) Harvard, was the Columbus of botany
   • John Audubon (1785-1851) painted birds with exact detail
4. Medicine in the U.S. was primitive (i.e., bleeding used for cure; smallpox, yellow fever though it killed many).
5. Life expectancy was unsurprisingly low.
6. Self-prescribed patent medicines were common, they were usually were mostly alcohol and often as harmful as helpful.
7. The local surgeon was usually the local barber or butcher.

XI. Artistic Achievements

1. U.S. had traditionally imitated European styles of art (aristocratic subjects, dark portraits, stormy landscapes)
2. 1820-50 was a Greek revival, as they’d won independence from Turks; Gothic forms also gained popularity
3. Thomas Jefferson was the most able architect of his generation (Monticello and University of Virginia)
4. Artists were viewed as a wasters of time; they suffered from Puritan prejudice of art as sinful pride
5. Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) - painted Washington and competed with English artists

Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) painted 60 portraits of Washington
John Trumbull (1756-1843) - captured the Revolutionary War in paint in dramatic fashion

1. During the nationalism upsurge after War of 1812, U.S. painters portrayed human landscapes and Romanticism
   • “darky” tunes became popular
   • Stephen Foster wrote Old Folks at Home (AKA Suwannee River, his most famous)

XII. The Blossoming of a National Literature

1. Literature was imported or plagiarized from England
2. Americans poured literature into practical outlets (i.e. The
   Federalist Papers, Common Sense (Paine), Ben Franklin’s
   Autobiography, Poor Richard’s Almanack)
3. literature was reborn after the War of Independence and especially after War of 1812
4. The Knickerbocker group in NY wrote the first truly American literature
   • Washington Irving (1783-1859) - 1st U.S. internationally recognized writings, The Sketch Book
   • James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) - 1st US novelist,
     Leatherstocking Tales (which included The Last of the Mohicans which
     was popular in Europe)
   • William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) – Thanatopsis, the 1st high quality poetry in U.S.

XIII. Trumpeters of Transcendentalism

1. Literature dawned in the 2nd quarter of 19th century with the transcendentalist movement (circa 1830)
   • transcendentalism clashed with John Locke (who argued knowledge
     came from reason); for transcendentalists, truth came not by
     observation alone, from with inner light
   • it stressed individualism, self-reliance, and non-conformity
   • Ralph Waldo Emerson was popular since the ideal of the essay reflected the spirit of the U.S.
   • he lectured the Phi Beta Kappa Address “The American Scholar”
   • he urged U.S. writers throw off European tradition
   • influential as practical philosopher (stressed self-government, self-reliance, depending on self)
   • most famous for his work, Self Reliance
   • Henry David Thoreau
   • He condemned slavery and wrote Walden: Or life in the Woods
   • He also wrote On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, which was
     idealistic in thought, and a forerunner of Gandhi and then Martin
     Luther King Jr., saying it is not wrong to disobey a wrong law
   • Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass (poetry) and was “Poet Laureate of Democracy”

XIV. Glowing Literary Lights (not associated with transcendentalism)

1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - wrote poems popular in Europe such as Evangeline
2. John Greenleaf Whittier - poems that cried against injustice, intolerance, inhumanity
3. James Russell Lowell - political satirist who wrote Biglow Papers
4. Oliver Wendell Holmes - The Last Leaf
5. Women writers
   • Louisa May Alcott - with transcendentalism wrote Little Women
   • Emily Dickinson – wrote of the theme of nature in poems
6. Southern literary figure – William Gillmore Simms -
   “the cooper of the south”; wrote many books of life in
   frontier South during the Revolutionary War

XV. Literary Individualists and Dissenters

1. Edgar Allan Poe - wrote “The Raven” and many short stories
   • invented modern detective novel and “psychological thriller”
   • he was fascinated by the supernatural and reflected a morbid sensibility (more prized by Europe)
2. reflections of Calvinist obsession with original sin and struggle between good & evil
   • Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter (psychological effect of sin)
   • Herman Melville - Moby Dick, and allegory between good and evil told of a whaling captain

XVI. Portrayers of the Past

1. George Bancroft – founded the naval academy; published U.S.
   history book and was known as the “Father of American
   History”
2. William H. Prescott - published on the conquest of Mexico, Peru
3. Francis Parkman - published on the struggle between France and England in colonial North America
4. Historians were all from New England because they had the most books. Therefore, there became an anti-South bias.

I. “Cotton’s Is King!”

1. Before the 1793 invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin,
   slavery was a dying business, since the South was burdened with
   depressed prices, unmarketable goods, and over-cropped lands.
   • After the gin was invented, growing cotton became wildly profitable and easier, and more slaves were needed.
2. The North also transported the cotton to England and the rest of
   Europe, so they were in part responsible for the slave trade as well.
3. The South produced more than half the world’s supply of
   cotton, and held an advantage over countries like England, an
   industrial giant, which needed cotton to make cloth, etc…
4. The South believed that since England was so dependent on them
   that, if civil war was to ever break out, England would support the
   South that it so heavily depended on.

II. The Planter “Aristocracy”

1. In 1850, only 1733 families owned more than 100 slaves each, and
   they were the wealthy aristocracy of the South, with big houses and
   huge plantations.
2. The Southern aristocrats widened the gap between the rich and the
   poor and hampered public-funded education by sending their children to
   private schools.
   • Also, a favorite author among them was Sir Walter Scott, author of
     Ivanhoe, who helped them idealize a feudal society with them as the
     kings and queens and the slaves as their subjects.
3. The plantation system shaped the lives of southern women.
   • Mistresses of the house commanded a sizable household of mostly
     female slaves who cooked, sewed, cared for the children, and washed
     things.
   • Mistresses could be kind or cruel, but all of them did at one point
     or another abuse their slaves to some degree; there was no
     “perfect mistress.”

III. Slaves of the Slave System

1. Cotton production spoiled the earth, and even though profits were
   quick and high, the land was ruined, and cotton producers were always
   in need of new land.
2. The economic structure of the South became increasingly
   monopolistic because as land ran out, smaller farmers sold their land
   to the large estate owners.
3. Also, the temptation to over-speculate in land and in slaves caused many planters to plunge deep into debt.
   • Slaves were valuable, but they were also a gamble, since they might run away or be killed by disease.
4. The dominance of King Cotton likewise led to a one-crop economy whose price level was at the mercy of world conditions.
5. Southerners resented the Northerners who got rich at their expense
   while they were dependent on the North for clothing, food, and
   manufactured goods.
6. The South repelled immigrants from Europe, who went to the North, making it richer.

IV. The White Majority

1. Beneath the aristocracy were the whites that owned one or two, or a
   small family of slaves; they worked hard on the land with their slaves
   and the only difference between them and their northern neighbors was
   that there were slaves living with them.
2. Beneath these people were the slaveless whites (a full 3/4 of the
   white population) that raised corn and hogs, sneered at the rich cotton
   “snobocracy” and lived simply and poorly.
   • Some of the poorest were known as “poor white trash,”
     “hillbillies” and “clay-eaters” and were
     described as listless, shiftless, and misshapen.
   • It is now known that these people weren’t lazy, just sick,
     suffering from malnutrition and parasites like hookworm (which they got
     eating/chewing clay for minerals)
3. Even the slaveless whites defended the slavery system because they
   all hoped to own a slave or two some day, and they could take perverse
   pleasure in knowing that, no matter how bad they were, they always
   “outranked” Blacks.
4. Mountain whites, those who lived isolated in the wilderness under
   Spartan frontier conditions, hated white aristocrats and Blacks, and
   they were key in crippling the Southern secessionists during the Civil
   War.

V. Free Blacks: Slaves Without Masters

1. By 1860, free Blacks in the South numbered about 250,000.
2. In the upper South, these Blacks were descended from those freed by
   the idealism of the Revolutionary War (“all men were created
   equal”).
3. In the deep South, they were usually mulattoes (Black mother, White
   father who was usually a master) freed when their masters died.
4. Many owned property; a few owned slaves themselves.
5. Free Blacks were prohibited from working in certain occupations and
   forbidden from testifying against whites in court; and as examples of
   what slaves could be, Whites resented them.
6. In the North, free Blacks were also unpopular, as several states
   denied their entrance, most denied them the right to vote and most
   barred them from public schools.
7. Northern Blacks were especially hated by the Irish, with whom they competed for jobs.
8. Anti-black feeling was stronger in the North, where people liked
   the race but not the individual, than in the South, were people liked
   the individual (with whom they’d often grown up), but not the
   race.

VI. Plantation Slavery

1. Although slave importation was banned in 1808, smuggling of them
   continued due to their high demand and despite death sentences to
   smugglers
2. However, the slave increase (4 million by 1860) was mostly due to their natural reproduction.
3. Slaves were an investment, and thus were treated better and more
   kindly and were spared the most dangerous jobs, like putting a roof on
   a house, draining a swamp, or blasting caves.
   • Usually, Irishmen were used to do that sort of work.
4. Slavery also created majorities or near-majorities in the Deep
   South, and the states of South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama,
   and Louisiana accounted for half of all slaves in the South.
5. Breeding slaves was not encouraged, but thousands of slaves were “sold down the river” to toil as field-gang workers, and women who gave birth to many children were prized.
   • Some were promised freedom after ten children born.
6. Slave auctions were brutal, with slaves being inspected like
   animals and families often mercilessly separated; Harriet Beecher Stowe
   seized the emotional power of this scene in her Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

VII. Life Under the Lash

1. Slave life varied from place to place, but for slaves everywhere,
   life meant hard work, no civil or political rights, and whipping if
   orders weren’t followed.
2. Laws that tried to protect slaves were difficult to enforce.
3. Lash beatings weren’t that common, since a master could lower the value of his slave if he whipped him too much.
4. Forced separation of spouses, parents and children seem to have been more common in the upper South, among smaller plantations.
5. Still, most slaves were raised in stable two-parent households and
   continuity of family identity across generations was evidenced in the
   widespread practice of naming children for grandparents or adopting the
   surname of a forebear’s master.
6. In contrast to the White planters, Africans avoided marriage of first cousins.
7. Africans also mixed the Christian religion with their own native
   religion, and often, they sang Christian hymns as signals and codes for
   news of possible freedom; many of them sang songs that emphasize
   bondage. (“Let my people go.”)

VIII. The Burdens of Bondage

1. Slaves had no dignity, were illiterate, and had no chance of achieving the “American dream.”
2. They also devised countless ways to make trouble without getting punished too badly.
   • They worked as slowly as they could without getting lashed.
   • They stole food and sabotaged expensive equipment.
   • Occasionally, they poisoned their masters’ food.
3. Rebellions, such as the 1800 insurrection by a slave named Gabriel
   in Richmond, Virginia, and the 1822 Charleston rebellion led by Denmark
   Vesey, and the 1831 revolt semiliterate preacher Nat Turner, were never
   successful. However, they did scare the jeepers out of whites, which
   led to tightened rules.
4. Whites became paranoid of Black revolts, and they had to degrade
   themselves, along with their victims, as noted by distinguished Black
   leader Booker T. Washington.

IX. Early Abolitionism

1. In 1817, the American Colonization Society was founded for the
   purpose of transporting Blacks back to Africa, and in 1822, the
   Republic of Liberia was founded for Blacks to live.
   • Most Blacks had no wish to be transplanted into a strange civilization after having been partially Americanized.
   • By 1860, virtually all slaves were not Africans, but native-born African-Americans.
2. In the 1830s, abolitionism really took off, with the Second Great Awakening and other things providing support.
3. Theodore Dwight Weld was among those who were inflamed against slavery.
4. Inspired by Charles Grandison Finney, Weld preached against slavery and even wrote a pamphlet, American Slavery As It Is.

X. Radical Abolitionism

1. On January 1st, 1831, William Lloyd Garrison published the first
   edition of The Liberator triggering a 30-year war of words and in a
   sense firing one of the first shots of the Civil War.
2. Other dedicated abolitionists rallied around Garrison, such as
   Wendell Phillips, a Boston patrician known as “abolition’s
   golden trumpet” who refused to eat cane sugar or wore cotton
   cloth, since both were made by slaves.
3. David Walker, a Black abolitionist, wrote Appeal to the Colored
   Citizens of the World in 1829 and advocated a bloody end to white
   supremacy.
4. Sojourner Truth, a freed Black woman who fought for black
   emancipation and women’s rights, and Martin Delaney, one of the
   few people who seriously reconsidered Black relocation to Africa, also
   fought for Black rights.
5. The greatest Black abolitionist was an escaped black, Frederick
   Douglass, who was a great speaker and fought for the Black cause
   despite being beaten and harassed.
   • His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
     depicted his remarkable struggle and his origins, as well as his life.
   • While Garrison seemed more concerned with his own righteousness,
     Douglass increasingly looked to politics to solve the slavery problem.
   • He and others backed the Liberty Party in 1840, the Free Soil Party in 1848, and the Republican Party in the 1850s.
6. In the end, many abolitionists supported war as the price for emancipation.

XI. The South Lashes Back

1. In the South, abolitionist efforts increasingly came under attack and fire.
2. Southerners began to organize a campaign talking about
   slavery’s positive good, conveniently forgetting about how their
   previous doubts about “peculiar institution’s”
   (slavery’s) morality.
3. Southern slave supporters pointed out how masters taught their
   slaves religion, made them civilized, treated them well, and gave them
   “happy” lives.
4. They also noted the lot of northern free Blacks, now were
   persecuted and harassed, as opposed to southern Black slaves, who were
   treated well, given meals, and cared for in old age.
5. In 1836, Southern House members passed a “gag
   resolution” requiring all antislavery appeals to be tabled
   without debate, arousing the ire of northerners like John Quincy Adams.
6. Southerners also resented the flood of propaganda in the form of pamphlets, drawings, etc…

XII. The Abolitionist Impact in the North

1. For a long time, abolitionists like the extreme Garrisonians were
   unpopular, since many had been raised to believe the values of the
   slavery compromises in the Constitution.
   • Also, his secessionist talks contrasted against Webster’s cries for union.
2. The South owed the North $300 million by the late 1850s, and northern factories depended on southern cotton to make goods.
3. Many abolitionists’ speeches provoked violence and mob
   outbursts in the North, such as the 1834 trashing of Lewis
   Tappan’s New York House.
4. In 1835, Garrison miraculously escaped a mob that dragged him around the streets of Boston.
5. Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy of Alton, Illinois, who impugned the
   chastity of Catholic women, had his printing press destroyed four times
   and was killed by a mob in 1837; he became an abolitionist martyr.
6. Yet by the 1850s, abolitionist outcries had been an impact on
   northern minds and were beginning to sway more and more toward their
   side.

I. The Accession of “Tyler Too”

1. The Whig leaders, namely Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, had planned
   to control newly elected President William H. Harrison, but their plans
   hit a snag when he contracted pneumonia and died—only four weeks
   after he came to the White House.
2. The new president was John Tyler, a Virginian gentleman who was a lone wolf.
   • He did not agree with the Whig party, since the Whigs were pro-bank
     and pro-protective tariff, and pro-internal improvements, but hailing
     from the South, he was not. Tyler was really more of a Democrat.

II. John Tyler: A President Without a Party

1. After their victory, the Whigs unveiled their platform for America:
   • Financial reform would come in the form of a law ending the independent treasury system; Tyler agreeably signed it.
   • A new bill for a new Bank of the U.S. was on the table, but Clay
     didn’t try hard enough to conciliate with Tyler and get it
     passed, and it was vetoed.
2. Whig extremists now started to call Tyler “his accidency.”
   • His entire cabinet resigned, except for Webster.
3. Also, Tyler vetoed a proposed Whig tariff.
4. The Whigs redrafted and revised the tariff, taking out the
   dollar-distribution scheme and pushing down the rates to about the
   moderately protective level of 1832 (32%), and Tyler, realizing that a
   tariff was needed, reluctantly signed it.

III. A War of Words with England

1. At this time, anti-British sentiment was high because the
   pro-British Federalists had died out, there had been two wars with
   Britain, and the British travelers in America scoffed at the
   “uncivilized” Americans.
2. American and British magazines ripped each other’s countries,
   but fortunately, this war was only of words and not of blood.
3. In the 1800s, America with its expensive canals and railroads was a
   borrowing nation while Britain was the one that lent money, but when
   the Panic of 1837 broke out, the Englishmen who lost money assailed
   their rash American borrowers.
4. In 1837, a small rebellion in Canada broke out, and Americans furnished arms and supplies.
5. Also in 1837, an American steamer, the Caroline, was attacked in N. and set afire by a British force.
6. Tensions were high afterwards, but later calmed; then in 1841,
   British officials in the Bahamas offered asylum to some 130 revolting
   slaves who had captured the ship Creole.

IV. Manipulating the Maine Maps

1. Maine had claimed territory on its northern and eastern border that
   was also claimed by England, and there were actually small skirmishes
   in the area (the “Aroostook War” of feuding lumberjacks).
2. Luckily, in 1842 Britain sent Lord Ashburton to negotiate with
   Daniel Webster, and after talks, the two agreed to what is now called
   the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which gave Britain their desired
   Halifax-Quebec route for a road while America got a bit more land north
   of Maine.
3. The U.S. also got, as a readjustment of the U.S.—Canadian
   border, the unknowingly priceless Mesabi Range of iron ore up in
   Minnesota. It later provided the iron for steel in the boom of industry.

V. The Lone Star of Texas Shines Alone

1. Ever since it had declared independence in 1836, Texas had built up
   reinforcements because it had no idea if or when Mexico would attack
   again to reclaim her “province in revolt.” So, Texas made
   treaties with France, Holland, and Belgium. These alliances worried the
   U.S. because…
2. If Texas "buddied up" to Europe, Britain especially, it’d cause big problems for America, such as…
   • The Monroe Doctrine (where Europe was told to "stay away") would be undermined if England had a buddy over here in Texas.
   • The dominant Southern cotton economy would also be undercut by Texas cotton shipping to England.
3. The U.S. was at a stand-still over what to do with Texas.
   • The North decried the Southern "slavocracy" (a supposed Southern conspiracy to always gain more slave land).
   • America could not just boldly annex Texas without a war with Mexico.
   • Overseas, Britain wanted an independent Texas to check American expansionism.
   • Yet, Texas would be good boost for American cotton production and provide tons more land. What to do?!

VI. The Belated Texas Nuptials

1. James K. Polk and his expansionist ideas won the election of 1844.
   His election was seen as a "mandate for manifest destiny," so the
   following year, Texas was formally invited to become the 28th state of
   the Union.
2. Mexico complained that Americans had despoiled it of Texas, which
   was partly true, but as it turned out, Mexico would not have been able
   to reconquer their lost province anyway.

VII. Oregon Fever Populates Oregon

1. Oregon was a great place, stretching from the northern tip of California to the 54° 40’ line.
2. Once claimed by Russia, Spain, England, and the U.S., now, only the
   latter two claimed it; England had good reasons for its claims north of
   the Columbia River, since it was populated by British and by the
   Hudson’s Bay Company.
3. However, Americans had strong claims south of the Columbia River
   (named after his ship by Robert Gray when he discovered the river),
   since they populated it much more. Plus, the Americans occupied and had
   explored the interior of the land, thanks to Lewis and Clark.
4. The Oregon Trail, an over 2000-mile trail across America, was a common route to Oregon during the early 1840s.

VIII. A Mandate (?) for Manifest Destiny

1. In 1844, the two candidates for presidency were Henry Clay, the
   popular Whig who had been defeated twice before, and a dark-horse
   candidate, James K. Polk, who had been picked because the Democrats
   couldn’t agree on anyone else.
2. Polk, having been Speaker of the House for four years and governor
   of Tennessee for two terms. He was no stranger to politics, was called
   “Young Hickory” (in fact, Polk was born in Pineville, N.C.,
   only some 15 miles from Jackson’s birthplace) and Polk was even
   sponsored by former president Andrew Jackson.
3. He and the Democrats advocated “Manifest Destiny”, a
   concept that stated that the U.S. was destined to expand across the
   continent and get as much land as possible.
4. On the issue of Texas, Clay tried to say two things at once, and
   thus, it cost him, since he lost the election (170 to 105 in the
   Electoral; 1,338,464 to 1,300,097 in the popular) by 5000 votes in New
   York.

IX. Polk the Purposeful

1. Polk laid out a 4-point mission for himself and the nation (then achieved all 4 points in 4 years)
   • Lower the tariff
   • Restore the independent treasury (put U.S. money into non-government banks)
   • Clear up the Oregon border issue
   • Get California
2. One of Polk’s acts was to lower the tariff, and his secretary
   of the treasury, Robert J. Walker, did so, lowering the tariff from 32%
   to 25% despite complaints by the industrialists.
   • Despite warnings of doom, the new tariff was followed by good times.
3. He also restored the independent treasury in 1846 and wanted to acquire California and settle the Oregon dispute.
4. Under Polk, the Oregon border issue was settled.
   • While the Democrats had promoted acquiring all of Oregon during
     their campaign, after the annexation of Texas, the Southern Democrats
     didn’t much care anymore.
   • England and the U.S. had been bargaining for Oregon land to answer, "Where is the border of Oregon?"
     • England first answered 42^o latitude; then said the Columbia River
     • The U.S. first answered 54^o40^' latitude; then said 49^o latititude
     • Things were tense for a while, but England realized there were more
       Americans in Oregon than Brits—their leverage was small.
   • So, the British proposed a treaty that would separate British and American claims at the **49^th parallel (excluding Vancouver), a proposal that Polk threw to the Senate, and which accepted.
   • The U.S. got the better of the deal since
     • the British second-choice was rejected but the Americans' second-choice was accepted and
     • as with the Maine treaty, the U.S. got a bit more land than England did
   • Those angry with the deal cried, “Why all of Texas but not
     all of Oregon?” The cold, hard answer was that because Mexico was
     weak and that England was strong.

X. Misunderstandings with Mexico

1. Polk wanted California, but this was difficult due to strained U.S.-Mexican relations.
   • After the annexation of Texas, Mexico had recalled its foreign
     minister, and before, it had been forced to default on its payments of
     $3 million to the U.S.
   • Also, when Texas claimed its southern boundary to be the Rio Grande
     and not the Nueces River like Mexico said, Polk felt that he had to
     defend Texas and did so.
2. The U.S. then sent John Slidell to Mexico City as an envoy
   instructed to buy California for $25 million, however, once he arrived,
   the Mexican government, pressured by its angry people, refused to see
   him, thus “snubbing” him.

XI. American Blood on American (?) Soil

1. A frustrated Polk now forced a showdown, and on Jan. 13, 1846, he
   ordered 4000 men under Zachary Taylor to march from the Nueces River to
   the Rio Grande, provocatively near Mexican troops.
2. As events would have it, on April 25, 1846, news of Mexican troops
   crossing the Rio Grande and killing of wounding 16 Americans came to
   Washington, and Polk pushed for a declaration of war
   • A group of politicians, though, wanted to know where exactly was
     the spot of the fighting before committing to war; among them was
     Abraham “Spotty” Lincoln because of his “Spot
     Resolution.”
   • Pushed by Polk, Congress declared war, and so began the Mexican-American War.

XII. The Mastering of Mexico

1. Polk hoped that once American had beaten Mexico enough, he could
   get California and end the war, and the recently dethroned Santa Anna
   told the U.S. that if he could return to Mexico, he would take over the
   government, end the war, and give California to the U.S. He lied.
2. In the Southwest, U.S. operations led by Stephen W. Kearny (led
   1700 troops from Leavenworth to Santa Fe) and John C. Fremont (leader
   of the Bear Flag Revolt in California) were successful.
3. “Old Rough and Ready” Zachary Taylor, a general, he
   fought into Mexico, reaching Buena Vista, and repelled 20,000 Mexicans
   with only 5000 men, instantly becoming a hero.
4. General Winfield Scott led American troops into Mexico City.

XIII. Fighting Mexico for Peace

1. Polk sent Nicholas Trist to negotiate an armistice with Mexico at a
   cost of $10,000 (Santa Anna took the bribe and then used it for his
   defenses).
2. Afterwards, Trist was recalled, but he refused to leave.
3. He negotiated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, which…
   • Gave to America all Mexican territory from Texas to California that
     was north of the Rio Grande. This land was called the Mexican Cession
     since Mexico ceded it to the U.S.
   • U.S. only had to pay $15 million to Mexico for it.
   • $3.5 million in debts from Mexico to the U.S. were absolved as well.
   • In essence, the U.S. had forced Mexico to "sell" the Mexican Cession lands.
4. In America, there were people clamoring an end to the war (the
   Whigs) and those who wanted all of Mexico (but the leaders of the South
   like John C. Calhoun realized the political nightmare that would cause
   and decided not to be so greedy), so Polk speedily passed the bill to
   the Senate, which approved it, 38 to 14.
5. Polk had originally planned to pay $25 million just for California,
   but he only paid $18,250,000; some people say that American paid even
   that much because it felt guilty for having bullied Mexico into a war
   it couldn’t win.

XIV. Profit and Loss in Mexico

1. In the war, America only had 13,000 dead soldiers, most taken by
   disease, and the war was a great practice for the Civil War, giving men
   like Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant invaluable battle experience.
2. Outside countries now respected America more, since it had made no
   major blunders during the war and had proven its fighting prowess.
3. However, it also paved the way to the Civil War by attaining more land that could be disputed over slavery.
4. David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced his Wilmot Proviso (a
   provision or amendment), which stated that slavery should never exist
   in any of the Mexican Cession territories that would be taken from
   Mexico; the amendment was passed twice by the House but it never got
   passed the Senate (where southern states equaled northern).
   • Although it failed, the importance of the Wilmot Proviso lay in the fact that it opened old wounds—those of slavery.
   • In other words, it opened a "can of worms" by raising the question, "Will we have slavery in the Mexican Cession lands?"
   • It's this question that starts the Civil War in 1861, only 13 years later.
5. Bitter Mexicans, resentful of the land that was taken from them,
   land that halved their country’s size while doubling
   America’s. They took small satisfaction when the same land caused
   disputes that led to the Civil War, a fate called "Santa Anna’s
   Revenge".

I. The Popular Sovereignty Panacea

1. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War, but
   it started a whole new debate about the extension of slavery, with
   Northerners rallying around the Wilmot Proviso (which proposed that the
   Mexican Cession lands be free soil); however, the Southerners shot it
   down.
2. Before, the two national parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, had
   had strong support from all over the nation; now, that was in jeopardy.
3. In 1848, Polk, due to tremendous overworking and chronic diarrhea,
   did not seek a second term, and the Democrats nominated General Lewis
   Cass, a veteran of the War of 1812, a senator and diplomat of wide
   experience and considerable ability, and the originator of popular
   sovereignty, the idea that issues should be decided upon by the people
   (specifically, it applied to slavery, stating that the people in the
   territories should decide to legalize it or not).
   • It was good (and liked by politicians) because it was a compromise
     between the extremes of the North and the South, and it stuck with the
     idea of self-determination, but it could spread slavery.

II. Political Triumphs for General Taylor

1. The Whigs nominated General Zachary Taylor, the hero of Buena Vista
   in the Mexican War, a man with no political experience, but popular
   man, and they avoided all picky issues in his campaign.
2. Disgusted antislavery Northerners organized the Free Soil Party, a
   party committed against the extension of slavery in the territories and
   one that also advocated federal aid for internal improvements and urged
   free government homesteads for settlers.
   • This party appealed to people angry over the half-acquisition of
     Oregon, people who didn’t like Blacks in the new territory, as
     well as “conscience Whigs” who condemned slavery on moral
     grounds.
   • The Free-Soilers nominated Martin Van Buren.
3. Neither major party talked about the slavery issue, but Taylor won narrowly.

III. “Californy Gold”

1. In 1848, gold was discovered in California, and thousands flooded into the state, thus blowing the lid off of the slavery issue.
2. Most people didn’t “strike it rich,” but there were many lawless men and women.
3. As a result, California (privately encouraged by the president)
   drafted a constitution and then applied for free statehood, thus
   bypassing the usual territorial stage and avoiding becoming a slave
   state.

IV. Sectional Balance and the Underground Railroad

1. In 1850, the South was very well off, with a Southerner as
   president (Taylor), a majority in the cabinet and on the Supreme Court,
   and equality in the Senate meaning that its 15 states could block any
   proposed amendment that would outlaw slavery. Still, the South was
   worried.
2. The balance of 15 free states and 15 slave states was in danger
   with the admission of free California (which would indeed destroy the
   equilibrium forever) and other states might follow California as free
   states.
3. The South was also agitated about Texas’ claims on disputed
   territory and the prospect of no slavery in Washington D.C., thus
   putting a piece of non-slavery land right in the middle of
   slave-holding Virginia and Maryland.
4. Finally the Underground Railroad, a secret organization that took
   runaway states north to Canada, was taking more and more slaves from
   the South.
5. Harriet Tubman freed more than 300 slaves during 19 trips to the South.
6. The South was also demanded a stricter fugitive slave law.

V. Twilight of the Senatorial Giants

1. In 1850, the South was confronted with catastrophe, with California demanding admission as a free state.
   • Thus, the three giants met together for the last time to engineer a compromise.
2. Henry Clay, AKA “The Great Compromiser,” now 73 years
   old, urged concession from both the North and the South (the North for
   a fugitive slave law, the South for others) and was seconded by Stephen
   Douglas, the “Little Giant” and fine senator.
3. Southern spokesman John C. Calhoun, dying of tuberculosis, pleaded
   for states’ rights, for slavery to be left alone, for the return
   of runaway slaves, the restoration of the rights of the South as a
   minority, and the return for political balance.
4. Northerner Daniel Webster proclaimed that the new land could not
   hold slaves anyway, since it couldn’t cultivate cotton,
   etc… and his Seventh of March speech helped move the North into
   compromise.
5. As a result of the popular speech, though, Webster was also
   proclaimed a traitor to the North, since he had called for ignoring the
   slavery subject.

VI. Deadlock and Danger on Capitol Hill

1. A new group of politicians, the “Young Guard,” seemed
   more interested in purifying the Union rather than patching it up.
2. William H. Seward, a young senator from New York, was flatly
   against concession and hated slavery, but he didn’t seem to
   realize that the Union was built on compromise, and he said that
   Christian legislators must adhere to a “higher law” and not
   allow slavery to exist; this might have cost him the 1860 presidential
   election.
3. President Taylor also appeared to have fallen under the influence
   of the “higher law,” vetoing every compromise sent to him
   by Congress.

VII. Breaking the Congressional Logjam

1. Then, in 1850, Zachary Taylor suddenly died of an acute intestinal disorder, and portly Millard Fillmore took over the reigns.
2. Impressed by arguments of conciliation, he signed a series of agreements that came to be known as the Compromise of 1850.
3. Clay, Webster, and Douglas orated on behalf of the compromise for
   the North, but the South hated it; fortunately, they finally accepted
   it after much debate.

VIII. Balancing the Compromise Scales

1. What the North got… (the North got the better deal in the Compromise of 1850)
   1. California was admitted as a free state, permanently tipping the balance.
   2. Texas lost its disputed territory to New Mexico and (now) Oklahoma.
   3. The District of Columbia could not have slave trade, but slavery
      was still legal. This was symbolic only. It was symbolic in that the
      nation’s capital “took a stance” against the trade.
      However, it was impractical because the trade only was illegal, not
      slavery and because a person could easily buy a slave in next-door
      Virginia.
2. What the South got…
   1. Popular sovereignty in the Mexican Cession lands. This was good for
      the South because prior to this, there was to be no new slave lands
      (the 36^o30’ Missouri Compromise line had drawn that).
      On paper, this opened a lot of land to slavery, possibly. This was bad
      for the South because those lands were too dry to raise cotton anyway
      and therefore would never see slaves.
   2. Texas was paid $10 million for the land lost to New Mexico.
   3. A new, tougher Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was drastic, and it
      stated that (1) fleeing slaves couldn’t testify on their own
      behalf, (2) the federal commissioner who handled the case got $5 if the
      slave was free and $10 if not, and (3) people who were ordered to help
      catch slaves had to do so, even if they didn’t want to.
      • Angry Northerners pledged not to follow the new law, and the Underground Railroad stepped up its timetable.
      • It turns out that the new Fugitive Slave Law was a blunder on
        behalf of the South, since it inflamed both sides, but a civil war
        didn’t occur, and this was better for the North, since with each
        moment, it was growing ahead of the South in population and
        wealth—in crops, factories, foundries, ships, and railroads.

IX. Defeat and Doom for the Whigs

1. In 1852, the Democrats, unable to agree, finally nominated dark horse Franklin Pierce, a man who was unknown and enemyless.
2. The Whigs nominated “Old Fuss and Feathers,” Winfield
   Scott, the old veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War.
3. Both parties boasted about the Compromise of 1850, though the Democrats did more.
4. The Whigs were hopelessly split, and thus, Pierce won in a
   landslide; the death of the Whigs ended the national political
   arguments and gave rise to sectional political alignments.

X. Expansionist Stirrings South of the Border

1. Pierce tried to be another Polk, and he impressed followers by
   reciting his inaugural address from memory, but his cabinet was filled
   with Southerners like Jefferson Davis and he was prepared to be a
   Southerners’ tool.
2. In July of 1856, a brazen American adventurer, William Walker,
   grabbed control in Nicaragua and proclaimed himself president, then
   legalized slavery, but a coalition of Latin American states overthrew
   him. This threw some fuel on the “Slavocracy” theory (a
   conspiracy theory where the South was always seeking new slave land).
3. America also eyed Cuba with envy.
   • Although America wanted Cuba, Spain wouldn’t sell it to the U.S. at any price.
   • So after two attempts to take Cuba failed, and after Spain captured
     the American steamer Black Warrior on a technicality, three U.S.
     foreign ministers met in Ostend, Belgium and drew up the Ostend
     Manifesto which stated that the U.S. was to offer $120 million to Spain
     for Cuba, and if it refused and Spain’s ownership of Cuba
     continued to endanger the U.S., then America would be justified in
     seizing the island (sell it or it’ll be taken).
4. Northerners were outraged once this “secret” document
   was leaked, and the South could not get Cuba (and obtain another slave
   state). Pierce was embarrassed and more fuel thrown on the Slavocracy
   theory.

XI. The Allure of Asia

1. Over on the Pacific, America was ready to open to Asia.
   • Caleb Cushing was sent to China on a goodwill mission.
2. The Chinese were welcoming since they wanted to counter the British.
3. U.S.—China trade began to flourish.
4. Missionaries also sought to save souls; they largely kindled resent however.
5. Relations opened up Japan when Commodore Matthew C. Perry steamed
   into the harbor of Tokyo in 1854 and asked/coerced/forced them to open
   up their nation.
   • Perry’s Treaty of Kanagawa formerly opened Japan.
   • This broke Japan’s centuries-old traditional of isolation,
     and started them down a road of modernization and then imperialism and
     militarism.

XII. Pacific Railroad Promoters and the Gadsden Purchase

1. Though the U.S. owned California and Oregon, getting out there was
   very difficult, since the sea routes were too long and the wagon route
   overland was dangerous, so the only real feasible solution lay in a
   transcontinental railroad.
2. The Southerners wanted a route through the South, but the best one
   would go through Mexico, so Secretary of War Jefferson Davis arranged
   to have James Gadsden appointed minister to Mexico.
   • Two reasons this was the best route: (1) the land was organized
     meaning any Indian attacks could be repelled by the U.S. Army and (2)
     geography—the plan was to skirt south of the Rocky Mtns
   • Finding Santa Anna in power again, he bought the Gadsden Purchase
     for $10 million, and despite clamor about the “rip-off,”
     Congress passed the sale.
3. A northern railroad would be less effective since it would cross over mountains and cross through Indian territory.
4. The South now appeared to have control of the location of the
   transcontinental railroad, but the North said that if the organization
   of territories was the problem, then Nebraska should be organized.

XIII. Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Scheme

1. To do this, Senator Stephen Douglas proposed the Kansas-Nebraska
   Act, which would let slavery in Kansas and Nebraska be decided upon by
   popular sovereignty (a concession to the South in return for giving up
   the railroad).
2. The problem was that the Missouri Compromise had banned any slavery
   north of the 36∞30’ line, so the act would have to repeal
   it.
3. Southerners had never thought of Kansas as a possible slave state, and thus backed the bill, but Northerners rallied against it.
4. Nevertheless, Douglas rammed the bill through Congress, and it was passed, repealing the Missouri Compromise.

XIV. Congress Legislates a Civil War

1. The Kansas-Nebraska Act directly wrecked the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (by opening slavery up above the 36^o30’ line) and indirectly wrecked the Compromise of 1850 (when everyone thought the issue was settled and done).
2. Northerners no longer enforced the Fugitive Slave Law at all, and Southerners were still angry.
3. The Democratic Party was hopelessly split into two, and after 1856, it would not have a president elected for 28 years.

I. Stowe and Helper: Literary Incendiaries

1. In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a popular book that awakened the passions of the North toward the evils of slavery.
   • In one line, it’s about the splitting up of a slave family
     and the cruel mistreatment of likeable Uncle Tom by a cruel slave
     master.
   • The book sold millions of copies, and overseas, British people were charmed by it.
   • The South cried foul, saying Stowe’s portrayal of slavery was wrong and unfair.
   • The book helped Britain stay out of the Civil War because its
     people, who had read the book and had now denounced slavery because
     they sympathized with Uncle Tom, wouldn’t allow intervention on
     behalf of the South.
2. Another book, The Impending Crisis of the South, written
   by Hinton R. Helper , a non-aristocratic white North Carolinian, tried
   to prove, by an array of statistics, that the non-slave-holding
   Southern whites were really the ones most hurt by slavery.
   • Published in the North, this book and Uncle Tom’s Cabin were both banned in the South, but widely read in the North. They drove the North—South wedge deeper.

II. The North-South Contest for Kansas

1. Northerners began to pour into Kansas, and Southerners were
   outraged, since they had supported the Compromise of 1850 under the
   impression that Kansas would become a slave state.
2. Thus, on election day in 1855, hordes of Southerners “border
   ruffians” from Missouri flooded the polls and elected Kansas to
   be a slave state; free-soilers were unable to stomach this and set up
   their own government in Topeka.
   • Thus, confused Kansans had to chose between two governments: one
     illegal (free government in Topeka) and the other fraudulent (slavery
     government in Shawnee).
3. In 1856, a group of pro-slavery raiders shot up and burnt part of Lawrence, thus starting violence.

III. Kansas in Convulsion

1. John Brown, a crazy man (literally), led a band of followers to
   Pottawatomie Creek in May of 1856 and hacked to death five presumable
   pro-slaveryites.
   • This brutal violence surprised even the most ardent abolitionists
     and brought swift retaliation from pro-slaveryites. “Bleeding
     Kansas” was earning its name.
2. By 1857, Kansas had enough people to apply for statehood, and those
   for slavery devised the Lecompton Constitution, which provided that the
   people were only allowed to vote for the constitution “with
   slavery” or “without slavery.”
   • However, even if the constitution was passed “without
     slavery,” those slaveholders already in the state would still be
     protected. So, slaves would be in Kansas, despite the vote.
   • Angry free-soilers boycotted the polls and Kansas approved the constitution with slavery.
3. In Washington, James Buchanan had succeeded Franklin Pierce, but
   like the former president, Buchanan was more towards the South, and
   firmly supported the Lecompton Constitution.
4. Senator Stephen Douglas, refusing to have this fraudulent vote by
   saying this wasn’t true popular sovereignty, threw away his
   Southern support and called for a fair re-vote.
5. Thus, the Democratic Party was hopelessly divided, ending the last
   remaining national party for years to come (the Whigs were dead and the
   Republicans were a sectional party).

IV. “Bully” Brooks and His Bludgeon

1. “Bleeding Kansas” was an issue that spilled into
   Congress: Senator Charles Sumner was a vocal anti-slaveryite, and his
   blistering speeches condemned all slavery supporters.
2. Congressman Preston S. Brooks decided that since Sumner was not a
   gentleman he couldn’t challenge him to a duel, so Brooks beat
   Sumner with a cane until it broke; nearby, Senators did nothing but
   watched, and Brooks was cheered on by the South.
3. However, the incident touched off fireworks, as Sumner’s
   “The Crime Against Kansas” speech was reprinted by the
   thousands, and it put Brooks and the South in the wrong.

V. “Old Buck” versus “The Pathfinder”

1. In 1856, the Democrats chose James Buchanan, someone untainted by
   the Kansas-Nebraska Act and a person with lots of political experience,
   to be their nomination for presidency against Republican John C.
   Fremont, a fighter in the Mexican-American War.
2. Another party, the American Party, also called the
   “Know-Nothing Party” because of its secrecy, was organized
   by “nativists,” old-stock Protestants against immigrants,
   who nominated Millard Fillmore.
   • These people were anti-Catholic and anti-foreign and also included old Whigs.
     • The campaign was full of mudslinging, which included allegations of scandal and conspiracy.
     • Fremont was hurt by the rumor that he was a Roman Catholic.

VI. The Electoral Fruits of 1856

1. Buchanan won because there were doubts about Fremont’s honesty, capacity, and sound judgment.
2. Perhaps it was better that Buchanan won, since Fremont was not as
   strong as Lincoln, and in 1856, many people were still apathetic about
   slavery, and the South could have seceded more easily.

VII. The Dred Scott Bombshell

1. On March 6, 1857, the Dred Scott decision was handed down by the Supreme Court.
   • Dred Scott was a slave whose master took him north into free states
     where he lived for many years. After his master’s death, he sued
     for his freedom from his new master, claiming that he had been in free
     territory and was therefore free. The Missouri Supreme Court agreed,
     freeing him, but his new master appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court,
     which overruled the decision.
2. Outcomes or decisions of the case…
   • Chief Justice Roger Taney said that no slave could be a citizen of the U.S. in his justification.
   • The Court said a legislature/Congress cannot outlaw slavery, as
     that would go against the 5th Amendment saying a person’s
     property cannot be taken without due process of law. This was the
     bombshell statement.
   • The Court then concluded the Missouri Compromise had been
     unconstitutional all along (because it’d banned slavery north of
     the 36° 30’ line and doing so was against the second point
     listed above).
3. The case inflamed millions of abolitionists against slavery and even those who didn’t care much about it.
4. Northerners complained; Southerners were ecstatic about the decision but inflamed by northern defiance, and more tension built.
5. The North—South scoreboard now favored the South undeniably.
   The South had (1) the Supreme Court, (2) the president, and (3) the
   Constitution on its side. The North had only Congress (which was now
   banned from outlawing slavery).
   • Reasons the Constitution favored the South…
     1. the Supreme Court just said so with the Dred Scott decision and it is the Supreme Court that interprets the Constitution
     2. the 5th Amendment said Congress could not take away property, in this case, slaves
     3. it could be argued that slavery is in the Constitution by way of the Three-Fifths Compromise
     4. it could be argued slavery is not in the Constitution
        since the word “slavery” is not present, but using this
        argument, the 10th Amendment said anything not in the Constitution is
        left up to the states, and the Southern states would vote for slavery.

VIII. The Financial Crash of 1857

1. Psychologically, the Panic of 1857 was the worst of the 19th
   century, though it really wasn’t as bad as the Panic of 1837.
   It’s causes were
   • California gold causing inflation,
   • over-growth of grain,
   • over-speculation, as always, this time in land and railroads.
2. The North was especially hard hit, but the South rode it out with
   flying colors, seemingly proving that cotton was indeed king and
   raising Southern egos.
3. Also, in 1860, Congress passed a Homestead Act that would provide
   160 acres of land at a cheap price for those who were less-fortunate,
   but it was vetoed by Buchanan.
   • This plan, though, was opposed by the northeast, which had long
     been unfriendly to extension of land and had feared that it would drain
     its population even more, and the south, which knew that it would
     provide an easy way for more free-soilers to fill the territories.
4. The panic also brought calls for a higher tariff rate, which had been lowered to about 20% only months before.

IX. An Illinois Rail-Splitter Emerges

1. In 1858, Senator Stephen Douglas’ term was about to expire, and against him was Republican Abraham Lincoln.
   • Abe was an ugly fellow who had risen up the political ladder slowly
     but was a good lawyer, had a down-home common sense about him, and a
     pretty decent debater.

X. The Great Debate: Lincoln Versus Douglas

1. Lincoln rashly challenged Douglas, the nation’s most
   devastating debater, to a series of seven debates, which the Senator
   accepted, and despite expectations of failure, Lincoln held his own.
2. The most famous debate came at Freeport, Illinois, where Lincoln
   essentially asked, “Mr. Douglas, if the people of a territory
   voted slavery down, despite the Supreme Court saying that they could
   not do so (point #2 of the Dred Scott decision), which side would you
   support, the people or the Supreme Court?”
   • “Mr. Popular Sovereignty,” Douglas replied with his
     “Freeport Doctrine,” which said that no matter how the
     Supreme Court ruled, slavery would stay down if the people voted it
     down; tsince power was held by the people.
3. Douglas won the Illinois race for senate, but more people voted for Abe, so he won the moral victory.
   • Plus, Douglas “won the battle but lost the war” because
     his answer in the Freeport Doctrine caused the South to dislike him
     even more.
     • The South had loved Douglas prior to this due to his popular
       sovereignty position, but then came the Kansas pro-slavery vote which
       he’d shot down.
     • Then the Freeport Doctrine came down where he turned his back on the Supreme Court’s pro-South decision).
   • This Freeport statement ruined the 1860 election for presidency for him, which was what he really wanted all along.

XI. John Brown: Murderer or Martyr?

1. John Brown now had a plan to invade the South, seize its arms, call
   upon the slaves to rise up and revolt, and take over the South and free
   it of slaves. But, in his raid of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, the
   slaves didn’t revolt, and he was captured by the U.S. Marines
   under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee and convicted of
   treason, sentenced to death, and hanged.
2. Brown, though insane, was not stupid, and he portrayed himself as a
   martyr against slavery, and when he was hanged, he instantly became a
   martyr for abolitionists; northerners rallied around his memory.
   Abolitionists were infuriated by his execution (as they’d
   conveniently forgotten his violent past).
3. The South was happy and saw justice. They also felt his actions were typical of the radical North.

XII. The Disruption of the Democrats

1. After failing to nominate a candidate in Charleston, South
   Carolina, the Democrats split into Northern and Southern factions, and
   at Baltimore, the Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas for
   president while the Southern Democrats chose John C. Breckinridge.
2. Meanwhile, the “Know-Nothings” chose John Bell of
   Tennessee and called themselves the Constitutional Union party. They
   tried to mend fences and offered as their platform, simply, the
   Constitution.

XIII. A Rail-Splitter Splits the Union

1. The Republicans, sensing victory against their split opponents,
   nominated Abraham Lincoln, not William “Higher Law” Seward.
2. Their platform had an appeal to every important non-southern group:
   for free-soilers it proposed the non-expansion of slavery; for northern
   manufacturers, a protective tariff; for the immigrants, no abridgement
   of rights; for the West, internal improvements at federal expense; and
   for the farmers, free homesteads.
3. Southerners threatened that Lincoln’s election would result in Southern secession.
4. Lincoln wasn’t an outright abolitionist, since as late as
   February 1865, he had still favored cash compensation for free slaves.
5. Abe Lincoln won the election despite not even being on the ballot in the South.

XIV. The Electoral Upheaval of 1860

1. Lincoln won with only 40% of the popular vote, and had the
   Democratic Party been more organized and energetic, they might have won.
2. It was a very sectional race: the North went to Lincoln, the South
   to Breckinridge, the “middle-ground” to the
   middle-of-the-road candidate in Bell, and popular-sovereignty-land went
   to Douglas.
3. The Republicans did not control the House or the Senate, and the
   South still had a five-to-four majority in the Supreme Court, but the
   South still decided to secede.

XV. The Secessionist Exodus

1. South Carolina had threatened to secede if Lincoln was elected
   president, and now it went good on its word, seceding in December of
   1860.
   • Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas (the
     Deep South) followed in the next six weeks, before Abe was inaugurated.
   • The seven secession states met in Montgomery, Alabama in February
     of 1861 and created the Confederate States of America, and they chose
     Jefferson Davis as president.
2. President Buchanan did nothing to force the confederacy back into
   the Union, partly because the Union troops were needed in the West and
   because the North was still apathetic toward secession; he simply left
   the issue for Lincoln to handle when he got sworn in.

XVI. The Collapse of Compromise

1. In a last-minute attempt at compromise (again), James Henry
   Crittenden of Kentucky proposed the Crittenden Compromise, which would
   ban slavery north of the 36°30’ line extended to the Pacific
   and would leave the issue in territories south of the line up to the
   people; also, existing slavery south of the line would be protected.
2. Lincoln opposed the compromise, which might have worked, because
   his party had preached against the extension of slavery, and he had to
   stick to principle.
3. It also seems that Buchanan couldn’t have saved the Union no matter what he would have done.

XVII. Farewell to Union

1. The seceding states did so because they feared that their rights as
   a slaveholding minority were being threatened, and were alarmed at the
   growing power of the Republicans, plus, they believed that they would
   be unopposed despite what the Northerners claimed.
2. The South also hoped to develop its own banking and shipping, and to prosper.
3. Besides, in 1776, the 13 colonies had seceded from Britain and had won; now the South could do the same thing.

I. The Menace of Secession

1. On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated president, having
   slipped into Washington D.C. to thwart assassins, and in his inaugural
   address, he stated that there would be no conflict unless the South
   provoked it.
2. He marked restoration of the union as his top goal, and offered doubts about it splitting.
   • He stated that geographically, the United States could not be split (which was true).
   • A split U.S. brought up questions about the sharing of the national debt and the allocation of federal territories.
   • A split U.S. also pleased the European countries, since the U.S.
     was the only major display of democracy in the Western Hemisphere, and
     with a split U.S., the Monroe Doctrine could be undermined as well if
     the new C.S.A. allowed Europe to gain a foothold with it.

II. South Carolina Assails Fort Sumter

1. Most of the forts in the South had relinquished their power to the
   Confederacy, but Fort Sumter was among the two that didn’t. And
   since its supplies were running out against a besieging South
   Carolinian army, Lincoln had a problem of how to deal with the
   situation.
   • Lincoln wisely chose to send supplies to the fort, and he told the
     South Carolinian governor that the ship to the fort only held
     provisions, not reinforcements.
   • However, to the South, provisions were reinforcements, and on April
     12, 1861, cannons were fired onto the fort; after 34 hours of
     non-lethal firing, the fort surrendered.
2. Northerners were inflamed by the South’s actions, and Lincoln
   now called on 75,000 volunteers; so many came that they had to be
   turned away.
3. On April 19 and 27, Lincoln also called a naval blockade on the South that was leaky at first but soon clamped down tight.
4. The Deep South (which had already seceded), felt that Lincoln was
   now waging an aggressive war, and was joined by four more Southern
   states: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
   • The capital of the Confederacy was moved from Montgomery, AL to Richmond, VA.

III. Brother’s Blood and Border Blood

1. The remaining Border States (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland) were
   crucial for both sides, as they would have almost doubled the
   manufacturing capacity of the South and increased its supply of horses
   and mules by half.
   • They’re called “border states” because…
     1. they are on the North-South border and…
     2. they are slave-states. They have not seceded, but at any moment, they just might.
2. Thus, to retain them, Lincoln used moral persuasion…and methods of dubious legality:
   • In Maryland, he declared martial law in order to retain a state
     that would isolate Washington D.C. within Confederate territory if it
     went to the South
   • He also sent troops to western Virginia and Missouri to secure those areas.
3. At the beginning, in order to hold the remaining Border States,
   Lincoln repeatedly said that the war was to save the Union, not free
   the slaves, since a war for the slaves’ freedom would have lost
   the Border States.
4. Most of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw,
   Chickasaw, Seminole) sided with the South, although parts of the
   Cherokee and most of the Plains Indians were pro-North.
5. The war was one of brother vs. brother, with the mountain men of
   what’s now West Virginia sending some 50,000 men to the Union.
   The nation’s split was very visible here, as Virginia literally
   split.

IV. The Balance of Forces

1. The South, at the beginning of the war, did have many advantages:
   • It only had to fight to a draw to win, since all it had to do was
     keep the North from invading and taking over all of its territory.
   • It had the most talented officers, including Robert E. Lee and
     Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and most of the Southerners had
     been trained in a military-style upbringing and education since they
     were children, as opposed to the tame Northerners. Many top Southern
     young men attended military schools like West Point, The Citadel, or
     VMI.
2. However, the South was handicapped by a shortage of factories and
   manufacturing plants, but during the war, those developed in the South.
3. Still, as the war dragged on, the South found itself with a
   shortage of shoes, uniforms, blankets, clothing, and food, which
   didn’t reach soldiers due to supply problems.
4. However, the North had a huge economy, many more men available to
   fight, and it controlled the sea, though its officers weren’t as
   well-trained as some in the South.
5. As the war dragged on, Northern strengths beat Southern advantages.

V. Dethroning King Cotton

1. The South was depending on foreign intervention to win the war, but didn’t get it.
2. While the European countries wanted the Union to be split (which
   would strengthen their nation, relatively speaking), their people were
   pro-North and anti-slavery, and sensing that this was could eliminate
   slavery once and for all, they would not allow any intervention by
   their nations on behalf of the South. The reason for the pro-North,
   anti-slavery stance by the people, was the effect of Uncle Tom’s
   Cabin—being lowly wage earners, the common people felt Uncle
   Tom’s pain.
3. Still, the Southern ideas was that the war would produce a shortage
   of cotton, which would draw England and others into the war, right?
   Wrong.
   • In the pre-war years, cotton production had been immense, and thus, England and France had huge surpluses of cotton.
   • As the North won Southern territory, it sent cotton and food over to Europe.
   • India and Egypt upped their cotton production to offset the hike in the price of cotton.
4. So, King Wheat and King Corn (of the North) beat King Cotton of the
   South, since Europe needed the food much more than it needed the cotton.

VI. The Decisiveness of Diplomacy

1. The South still hoped for foreign intervention, and it almost got it on a few occasions.
2. Late in 1861, a Union warship stopped the British mail steamer the
   Trent and forcibly removed two Confederate diplomats bound for Europe.
   • Britain was outraged at the upstart Americans and threatened war,
     but luckily, Lincoln released the prisoners and tensions cooled.
     “One war at a time,” he said.
   • British-built sea vessels that went to the Confederacy were also a problem.
     • In 1862, the C.S.S. Alabama escaped to the Portuguese Azores, took
       on weapons and crew from Britain, but never sailed into a Confederate
       base, thus using a loophole to help the South.
3. Charles Francis Adams persuaded Britain not to build any more ships
   for the Confederacy, since they might someday be used against England.

VII. Foreign Flare-Ups

1. Britain also had two Laird rams, Confederate warships that could
   destroy wooden Union ships and wreak havoc on the North, but after the
   threat of war by the U.S., Britain backed down and used those ships for
   its Royal Navy.
2. Near Canada, Confederate agents plotted (and sometimes succeeded)
   to burn down American cities, and as a result, there were several
   mini-armies (raised mostly by British-hating Irish-Americans) sent to
   Canada.
3. Napoleon III of France also installed a puppet government in Mexico
   City, putting in the Austrian Archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico,
   but after the war, the U.S. threatened violence, and Napoleon left
   Maximilian to doom at the hands of a Mexican firing squad.

VIII. President Davis Versus President Lincoln

1. The problem with the South was that it gave states the ability to
   secede in the future, and getting Southern states to send troops to
   help other states was always difficult to do. By definition in a
   confederacy, national power was weak.
2. Jefferson Davis was never really popular and he overworked himself.
3. Lincoln, though with his problems, had the benefit of leading an
   established government and grew patient and relaxed as the war dragged
   on.

IX. Limitations on Wartime Liberties

1. Abe Lincoln did make some tyrannical acts during his term as
   president, such as illegally proclaiming a blockade, proclaiming acts
   without Congressional consent, and sending in troops to the Border
   States, but he justified his actions by saying that such acts
   weren’t permanent, and that he had to do those things in order to
   preserve the Union.
2. Such actions included the advancement of $2 million to three
   private citizens for war purposes, the suspension of habeas corpus so
   that anti-Unionists could be arrested without a formal charge, and the
   intimidation of voters in the Border States.
3. The Confederate states’ refusal to sacrifice some
   states’ rights led to the handicapping of the South, and perhaps
   to its ultimate downfall.

X. Volunteers and Draftees: North and South

1. At first, there were numerous volunteers, but after the initial
   enthusiasm slacked off, Congress passed its first conscription law ever
   (the draft), one that angered the poor because rich men could hire a
   substitute instead of entering the war just by paying $300 to Congress.
   • As a result, many riots broke out, such as one in New York City.
2. Volunteers manned more than 90% of the Union army, and as
   volunteers became scarce, money was offered to them in return for
   service; still, there were many deserters.
3. The South had to resort to a draft nearly a year before the North,
   and it also had its privileges for the rich—those who owned or
   oversaw 20 slaves or more were exempt from the draft.

XI. The Economic Stresses of War

1. The North passed the Morrill Tariff Act, increasing tariff rates by about 5 to 10%, but war soon drove those rates even higher.
2. The Washington Treasury also issued greenback paper money totaling
   nearly $450 million, but this money was very unstable and sank to as
   low as 39 cents per gold dollar.
3. The federal Treasury also netted $2.6 billion in the sale of bonds.
4. The National Banking System was a landmark of the war, created to
   establish a standard bank-note currency, and banks that joined the
   National Banking System could buy government bonds and issue sound
   paper money.
   • The National Banking Act was the first step toward a unified
     national banking network since 1836, when the Bank of the United States
     was killed by Andrew Jackson.
5. In the South, runaway inflation plagued the Confederates, and
   overall, in the South inflation went up to 9000%, as opposed to
   “just” 80% in the North.

XII. The North’s Economic Boom

1. The North actually emerged from the Civil War more prosperous than
   before, since new factories had been formed and a millionaire class was
   born for the first time in history.
2. However, many Union suppliers used shoddy equipment in their supplies, such as using cardboard as the soles of shoes.
3. Sizes for clothing were invented, and the reaper helped feed millions.
4. In 1859, a discovery of petroleum oil sent people to Pennsylvania.
5. Women gained new advances in the war, taking the jobs left behind
   by men going off to battle, and other women posed as men and became
   soldiers with their husbands.
   • Clara Barton and Dorothea Dix helped transform nursing from a lowly
     service to a respected profession, and in the South, Sally Tompkins ran
     a Richmond infirmary for wounded Confederate soldiers and was awarded
     the rank of Captain by Jefferson Davis.

XIII. A Crushed Cotton Kingdom

1. The South was ruined by the war, as transportation collapsed and
   supplies of everything became scarce, and by the end of the war, the
   South claimed only 12% of the national wealth as opposed to 30% before
   the war, and it’s per capita income was now 2/5 that of
   Northerners, as opposed to 2/3 of Northerners before the war.
2. Still, though many Southerners were resourceful and spirited, the South just couldn’t win.

I. Bull Run Ends the “Ninety-Day War”

1. When President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 militiamen on
   April 15, 1861, he and just about everyone else in the North expected a
   swift war lasting about 90 days, with a quick suppression of the South
   to prove the North’s superiority and end this foolishness.
2. On July 21, 1861, ill-trained Yankee recruits swaggered out toward
   Bull Run to engage a smaller Confederate unit. They expected one big
   battle and a quick victory for the war.
   • The atmosphere was like that of a sporting event, as spectators gathered in picnics to watch.
   • However, after initial success by the Union, Confederate
     reinforcements arrived and, coupled with Stonewall Jackson’s line
     holding, sent the Union soldiers into disarray.
3. The Battle of Bull Run showed the North that this would not be a
   short, easy war and swelled the South’s already too-large ego.

II. “Tardy George” McClellan and the Peninsula Campaign

1. Later in 1861, command of the Army of the Potomac (name of the
   Union army) was given to 34 year old General George B. McClellan, an
   excellent drillmaster and organizer of troops, but also a perfectionist
   who constantly believed that he was outnumbered, never took risks, and
   held the army without moving for months before finally ordered by
   Lincoln to advance.
2. At Lincoln’s urging, he finally decided upon a water-borne
   approach to Richmond (the South’s capital), called the Peninsula
   Campaign, taking about a month to capture Yorktown before coming to
   Richmond.
   • At this moment, President Lincoln took McClellan’s expected
     reinforcements and sent them chasing Stonewall Jackson, and after
     “Jeb” Stuart’s Confederate cavalry rode completely
     around McClellan’s army, Southern General Robert E. Lee launched
     a devastating counterattack—the Seven Days’
     Battles—on June 26 to July 2 of 1862.
   • The victory at Bull Run ensured that the South, if it lost, would
     lose slavery as well, and it was after this battle that Lincoln began
     to draft an emancipation proclamation.
3. With the quick-strike plan a failure, the Union strategy now turned
   to total war. Summed up, the plan was to blockade, divide, and conquer.
   The plan included…
   • Suffocate the South through an oceanic blockade.
   • Free the slaves to undermine the South’s very economic foundations.
   • Cut the Confederacy in half by seizing control of the Mississippi River.
   • Chop the Confederacy to pieces by marching through Georgia and the Carolinas.
   • Capture its capital, Richmond, Virginia.
   • Try everywhere to engage the enemy’s main strength and grind it to submission.
   • This was essentially General Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan.”

III. The War at Sea

1. The Union blockade started with many leaks at first, but it clamped down later.
2. Britain, who would ordinarily protest such interference in the seas
   that she “owned,” recognized the blockade as binding, since
   Britain herself often used blockades in her wars.
3. Blockade-running, or the process of smuggling materials through the
   blockade, was a risky but profitable business, but the Union navy also
   seized British freighters on the high seas, citing “ultimate
   destination” (to the South) as their reasons; the British
   relented, since they might have to do the same thing in later wars (as
   they did in World War I).
4. The biggest Confederate threat to the Union came in the form of an
   old U.S. warship reconditioned and plated with iron railroad rails: the
   Virginia (formerly called the Merrimack), which threatened to break the
   Union blockade, but fortunately, the Monitor arrived just in time to
   fight the Merrimack to a standstill, and the Confederate ship was
   destroyed later by the South to save it from the North.
   • The lessons of the Monitor vs. the Merrimack were that boats needed to be steam-powered and armored, henceforth.

IV. The Pivotal Point: Antietam

1. In the Second Battle of Bull Run, Robert E. Lee crushed the arrogant General John Pope.
2. After this battle, Lee hoped to thrust into the North and win,
   hopefully persuading the Border States to join the South and foreign
   countries to intervene on behalf of the South.
   • At this time, Lincoln reinstated General McClellan.
3. McClellan’s men found a copy of Lee’s plans (as
   wrapping paper for cigars) and were able to stop the Southerners at
   Antietam Creek on September 17, 1862 in one of the bloodiest days of
   the Civil War.
   • Jefferson Davis was never so close to victory as he was that day,
     since European powers were very close to helping the South, but after
     the Union army displayed unexpected power at Antietam, that help faded.
   • Antietam was also the Union display of power that Lincoln needed to
     announce his Emancipation Proclamation, which didn’t actually
     free the slaves, but gave the general idea; it was announced on January
     1, 1863. Lincoln said the slaves would be free in the seceded states
     (but NOT the border states as doing so might anger them into seceding
     too).
     • Now, the war wasn’t just to save the Union, it was to free the slaves a well.
     • This gave the war a moral purpose (end slavery) to go with its political purpose (restore the union).

V. A Proclamation Without Emancipation

1. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in not-yet-conquered
   Southern territories, but slaves in the Border States and the conquered
   territories were not liberated since doing so might make them go to the
   South; Lincoln freed the slaves where he couldn’t and
   wouldn’t free the slaves where he could.
2. The proclamation was very controversial, as many soldiers refused to fight for abolition and deserted.
3. However, since many slaves, upon hearing the proclamation, left
   their plantations, the Emancipation Proclamation did succeed in one of
   its purposes: to undermine the labor of the South.
4. Angry Southerners cried that Lincoln was stirring up trouble and trying to incite a slave insurrection.

VI. Blacks Battle Bondage

1. At first, Blacks weren’t enlisted in the army, but as men ran
   low, these men were eventually allowed in; by war’s end,
   Black’s accounted for about 10% of the Union army.
2. Until 1864, Southerners refused to recognize Black soldiers as
   prisoners of war, and often executed them as runaways and rebels, and
   in one case, at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, Blacks who had surrendered were
   massacred.
   • Afterwards, vengeful Black units swore to take no prisoners, crying, “Remember Fort Pillow!”
3. Many Blacks, whether through fear, loyalty, lack of leadership, or
   strict policing, didn’t cast off their chains when they heard the
   Emancipation Proclamation, but many others walked off of their jobs
   when Union armies conquered territories that included the plantations
   that they worked on.

VII. Lee’s Last Lunge at Gettysburg

1. After Antietam, A. E. Burnside (known for his sideburns) took over
   the Union army, but he lost badly after launching a rash frontal attack
   at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on Dec. 13, 1862.
2. “Fighting Joe” Hooker (known for his prostitutes) was
   badly beaten at Chancellorsville, Virginia, when Lee divided his
   outnumbered army into two and sent “Stonewall” Jackson to
   attack the Union flank, but later in that battle, Jackson’s own
   men mistakenly shot him at dusk, and he died.
3. Lee now prepared to invade the North for the second and final time,
   at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but he was met by new General George G.
   Meade, who by accident took a stand atop a low ridge flanking a shallow
   valley and the Union and Confederate armies fought a bloody and brutal
   battle in which the North “won.”
   • In the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863), General George
     Pickett led a hopeless, bloody, and pitiful charge across a field that
     ended in the pig-slaughter of Confederates.
   • A few months later, Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address, which
     added moral purpose to the war saying a new goal was to make sure those
     who’d been killed had not died in vain.

VIII. The War in the West

1. Lincoln finally found a good general in Ulysses S. Grant, a
   mediocre West Point graduate who drank too much whiskey and also fought
   under the ideal of “immediate and unconditional surrender.”
2. Grant won at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, but then muffed-up and
   lost a tough battle at Shiloh (April 6-7, 1862), just over the
   Tennessee border.
3. In the spring of 1862, a flotilla commanded by David G. Farragut joined with a Northern army to seize New Orleans.
4. At Vicksburg, Mississippi, U.S. Grant besieged the city and
   captured it on July 4, 1863, thus securing the important Mississippi
   River. Grant redeemed himself here after blundering at Shiloh.
   • The Union victory at the Battle of Vicksburg came the day after the
     Union victory at Gettysburg, and afterwards, the Confederate hope for
     foreign intervention was lost.

IX. Sherman Scorches Georgia

1. After Grant cleared out Tennessee, General William Tecumseh Sherman
   was given command to march through Georgia, and he delivered, capturing
   and burning down Atlanta before completing his infamous “March to
   the Sea” at Savannah.
   • His men cut a trail of destruction one-mile wide, waging
     “total war” by cutting up railroad tracks, burning fields
     and crops, and destroying everything.

X. The Politics of War

1. The “Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War”
   was created in 1861 and was dominated by “radical”
   Republicans and gave Lincoln much trouble.
2. The Northern Democrats split after the death of Stephen Douglas, as
   “War Democrats” supported Lincoln while “Peace
   Democrats” did not.
   • Copperheads were those who were totally against the war, and
     denounced the president (the “Illinois Ape”) and his
     “nigger war.”
   • The most famous of the Copperheads was Clement L. Valandigham, who
     harshly denounced the war but was imprisoned, then banished to the
     South, then came back to Ohio illegally, but was not further punished,
     and also inspired the story The Man without a Country.

XI. The Election of 1864

1. In 1864, the Republicans joined the War Democrats to form the Union
   Party and renominated Abe Lincoln despite a bit of opposition, while
   the Copperheads and Peace Democrats ran George McClellan.
   • The Union Party chose Democrat Andrew Johnson to ensure that the
     War Democrats would vote for Lincoln, and the campaign was once again
     full of mudslinging.
   • Near election day, the victories at New Orleans and Atlanta
     occurred, and the Northern soldiers were pushed to vote, and Lincoln
     smoked his opponent in the Electoral College, 212-21.
     • The popular vote was closer: 2.2 million to 1.8.

XII. Grant Outlasts Lee

1. Grant was a man who could send thousands of men out to die just so
   that the Confederates would lose, because he knew that he could afford
   to lose twice as many men while Lee could not.
   • In a series of wilderness encounters, Grant fought Lee, with Grant losing about 50,000 men.
   • At Cold Harbor, the Union sent soldiers to battle with papers
     pinned on their backs showing their names and addresses, and over 7,000
     died in a few minutes.
   • The public was outraged and shocked over this kind of gore and
     death, and demanded the relief of General Grant, but U.S. Grant stayed.
     Lincoln wanted somebody who’d keep the “axe to the
     grindstone,” and Grant was his man.
2. Finally, Grant and his men captured Richmond, burnt it, and
   cornered Lee at Appomattox Courthouse at Virginia in April of 1865,
   where Lee formally surrendered; the war was over.

XIII. The Martyrdom of Lincoln

1. On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth and died shortly after.
2. Before his death, few people had suspected his greatness, but his
   sudden and dramatic death erased his shortcomings and made people
   remember him for his good things.
3. The South cheered Lincoln’s death at first, but later, his
   death proved to be worse than if he had lived, because he would have
   almost certainly treated the South much better than they were actually
   treated during Reconstruction.

XIV. The Aftermath of the Nightmare.

1. The Civil War cost 600,000 men, $15 billion, and wasted the cream of the American crop.
2. However, it gave America a supreme test of its existence, and the
   U.S. survived, proving its strength and further increasing its growing
   power and reputation; plus, slavery was also eradicated.
3. The war paved the way for the United States’ fulfillment of
   its destiny as the dominant republic of the Western
   Hemisphere—and later, the world.

I. The Problems of Peace

1. After the war, there were many questions over what to do with the
   free Blacks, such as how to reintegrate the Southern states into the
   Union, what to do with Jefferson Davis, and who would be in charge of
   Reconstruction?
2. The Southern way of life had been ruined, as crops and farms were
   destroyed, the slaves had been freed, the cities were burnt down, but
   still, and many Southerners remained defiant.

II. Freedmen Define Freedom

1. At first, the freed Blacks faced a confusing situation, as many slave owners re-enslaved their slaves after Union troops left.
   • Other planters resisted emancipation through legal means, citing
     that emancipation wasn’t valid until local or state courts
     declared it.
2. Some slaves loyally stuck to their owners while others let out
   their pent-up bitterness by pillaging their former masters’ land,
   property, and even whipping the old master.
3. Eventually, even resisting plantation owners had to give up their
   slaves, and afterwards tens of thousands of Blacks took to the roads to
   find new work or look for lost loved ones.
4. The church became the focus of the Black community life in the years following the war.
   • Emancipation also meant education for Blacks, but despite all the
     gains Blacks made, they still faced severe discrimination and would
     have to wait a century before truly attaining their rights.

III. The Freedman’s Bureau

1. In order to train the unskilled and unlettered freed Blacks, the
   Freedman’s Bureau was set up on March 3, 1865. Union General
   Oliver O. Howard headed it.
2. The bureau taught about 200,000 Blacks how to read (its greatest
   success), since most former slaves wanted to narrow the literary gap
   between them and Whites; the bureau also read the word of God.
3. However, it wasn’t as effective as it could have been, as
   evidenced by the further discrimination of Blacks, and it expired in
   1872 after much criticism by racist Whites.

IV. Johnson: The Tailor President

1. Andrew Johnson came from very poor and humble beginnings, and he
   served in Congress for many years (he was the only Confederate
   congressman not to leave Congress when the rest of the South seceded).
2. He was feared for his reputation of having a short temper and being
   a great fighter, was a dogmatic champion of states’ rights and
   the Constitution, and he was a Tennessean who never earned the trust of
   the North and never regained the confidence of the South.

V. Presidential Reconstruction

1. Since Abraham Lincoln believed that the South had never legally
   withdrawn from the Union, restoration was to be relatively simple. In
   his plan for restoring the union, the southern states could be
   reintegrated into the Union if and when they had only 10% of its voters
   pledge and taken an oath to the Union, and also acknowledge the
   emancipation of the slaves; it was appropriately called the Ten Percent
   Plan. Like the loving father who welcomed back the prodigal son,
   Lincoln’s plan was very forgiving to the South.
2. The Radical Republicans felt punishment was due the South for all
   the years of strife. They feared that the leniency of the 10 %
   Plan would allow the Southerners to re-enslave the newly freed Blacks,
   so they rammed the Wade-Davis Bill through Congress. It required 50% of
   the states’ voters to take oaths of allegiance and demanded
   stronger safeguards for emancipation than the 10% Plan.
3. However, Lincoln pocket-vetoed the bill by letting it expire, and the 10% Plan remained.
4. It became clear that there were now two types of Republicans: the
   moderates, who shared the same views as Lincoln and the radicals, who
   believed the South should be harshly punished.
   • Sadly though, Lincoln was assassinated. This left the 10% Plan’s future in question.
   • When Andrew Johnson took power, the radicals thought that he would
     do what they wanted, but he soon proved them wrong by basically taking
     Lincoln’s policy and issuing his own Reconstruction proclamation:
     certain leading Confederates were disfranchised (right to vote
     removed), the Confederate debt was repudiated, and states had to ratify
     the 13th Amendment.

VI. The Baleful Black Codes

1. In order to control the freed Blacks, many Southern states passed
   Black Codes, laws aimed at keeping the Black population in submission
   and workers in the fields; some were harsh, others were not as harsh.
2. Blacks who “jumped” their labor contracts, or walked
   off their jobs, were subject to penalties and fines, and their wages
   were generally kept very low.
3. The codes forbade Blacks from serving on a jury and some even
   barred Blacks from renting or leasing land, and Blacks could be
   punished for “idleness” by being subjected to working on a
   chain gang.
4. Making a mockery out of the newly won freedom of the Blacks, the
   Black Codes made many abolitionists wonder if the price of the Civil
   War was worth it, since Blacks were hardly better after the war than
   before the war. They were not “slaves” on paper, but in
   reality, their lives were little different.

VII. Congressional Reconstruction

1. In December, 1865, when many of the Southern states came to be
   reintegrated into the Union, among them were former Confederates and
   Democrats, and most Republicans were disgusted to see their former
   enemies on hand to reclaim seats in Congress.
2. During the war, without the Democrats, the Republicans had passed
   legislation that had favored the North, such as the Morrill Tariff, the
   Pacific Railroad Act, and the Homestead Act, so now, many Republicans
   didn’t want to give up the power that they had gained in the war.
3. Northerners now realized that the South would be stronger
   politically than before, since now, Blacks counted for a whole person
   instead of just 3/5 of one, and Republicans also feared that the
   Northern and Southern Democrats would join and take over Congress and
   the White House and institute their Black Codes over the nation,
   defeating all that the Civil War gained.
4. On December 6, 1865, President Johnson declared that the South had
   satisfied all of the conditions needed, and that the Union was now
   restored.

VIII. Johnson Clashes with Congress

1. Johnson repeatedly vetoed Republican-passed bills, such as a bill
   extending the life of the Freedman’s Bureau, and he also vetoed
   the Civil Rights Bill, which conferred on blacks the privilege of
   American citizenship and struck at the Black Codes.
2. As Republicans gained control of Congress, they passed the bills
   into laws with a 2/3 vote and thus override Johnson’s veto.
3. In the 14th Amendment, the Republicans sought to instill the same
   ideas of the Civil Rights Bill: (1) all Blacks were American citizens,
   (2) if a state denied citizenship to Blacks, then its representatives
   in the Electoral College were lowered, (3) former Confederates could
   not hold federal or state office, and (4) the federal debt was
   guaranteed while the Confederate one was repudiated (erased).
4. The radicals were disappointed that Blacks weren’t given the
   right to vote, but all Republicans agreed that states wouldn’t be
   accepted back into the Union unless they ratified the 14th Amendment.

IX. Swinging ‘Round the Circle with Johnson

1. In 1866, Republicans would not allow Reconstruction to be carried
   on without the 14th Amendment, and as election time approached, Johnson
   wanted to lower the amount of Republicans in Congress, so he began a
   series of ‘Round the Circle speeches.
2. However, as he was heckled by the audience, he hurled back insults,
   gave “give ‘em hell” speeches, and generally
   denounced the radicals, and in the process, he gave Republicans more
   men in Congress than they had before—the opposite of his original
   intention.

X. Republican Principles and Programs

1. By then, the Republicans had a veto-proof Congress and nearly
   unlimited control over Reconstruction, but moderates and radicals still
   couldn’t agree with one another.
2. In the Senate, the leader of the radicals was Charles Sumner, long
   since recovered from his caning by Preston Brooks, and in the House,
   the radical leader was Thaddeus Stevens, an old, sour man who was an
   unswerving friend of the Blacks.
3. The radicals wanted to keep the South out of the Union as long as
   possible and totally change its economy and the moderates wanted a
   quicker Reconstruction. What happened was a compromise between the two
   extremes.

XI. Reconstruction by Sword

1. The Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867 divided the South into five
   military zones, temporarily disfranchised tens of thousands of former
   Confederates, and laid down new guidelines for the readmission of
   states (Johnson had announced the Union restored, but Congress had not
   yet formally agreed on this).
   • All states had to approve the 14th Amendment, making all Blacks citizens.
   • All states had to guarantee full suffrage of all male former slaves.
2. The 15th Amendment, passed by Congress in 1869, gave Blacks their right to vote.
3. In the case Ex parte Milligan (1866), the Supreme Court ruled that
   military tribunals could not try civilians, even during wartime, if
   there were civil courts available.
4. By 1870, all of the states had complied with the standards of
   Reconstruction, and in 1877, the last of the states were given their
   home rule back, and Reconstruction ended.
   • The end of Reconstruction was part of the Compromise of
     1877—the two presidential candidates were at a stalemate and the
     only way to break the stalemate was with a deal. In the deal, the North
     got their president (Rutherford B. Hayes) and the South got the
     military to pull-out (abandon?) the South and the former slaves, thus
     ending Reconstruction.

XII. No Women Voters

1. Women suffrage advocates were disappointed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, since they didn’t give women suffrage.
   • After all, women had gathered petitions and had helped Blacks gain their rights.
   • Frederick Douglass believed in the women’s movement, but believed that it was now “the Negro’s hour.”
2. As a result, women advocates like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan
   B. Anthony campaigned against the 14th and 15th
   Amendments—Amendments that inserted the word male into the
   Constitution for the first time ever.

XIII. The Realities of Radical Reconstruction in the South

1. Blacks began to organize politically, and their main vehicle was the Union League.
   • It became a network of political clubs that educated members in
     their civic duties and campaigned for Republican candidates, and later
     even built Black churches and schools, represented Black grievances,
     and recruited militias to protect Blacks.
   • Black women attended the parades and rallies of Black communities.
2. Black men also began to hold political offices, as men like Hiram
   Revels and Blanche K. Bruce served in Congress (they represented
   Mississippi).
3. Southern Whites hated seeing their former slaves now ranking above
   them, and they also hated “scalawags,” Southerners who were
   accused of plundering Southern treasuries and selling out the
   Southerners, and “carpetbaggers,” Northerners accused of
   parasitically milking power and profit in a now-desolate South.
4. One could note that Southern governments were somewhat corrupted during these times.

XIV. The Ku Klux Klan

1. Extremely racist Whites who hated the Blacks founded the
   “Invisible Empire of the South,” or Ku Klux Klan, in
   Tennessee in 1866—an organization that scared Blacks into not
   voting or not seeking jobs, etc… and often resorted to violence
   against the Blacks in addition to terror.
2. This radical group undermined much of what abolitionists sought to do.

XV. Johnson Walks the Impeachment Plank

1. Radical Republicans were angry with President Johnson, and they decided to try to get rid of him.
2. In 1867, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, which provided
   that the president had to secure the consent of the Senate before
   removing his appointees once they had been approved by the Senate (one
   reason was to keep Edwin M. Stanton, a Republican spy, in office).
3. However, when Johnson dismissed Stanton early in 1868, the Republicans impeached him.

XVI. A Not-Guilty Verdict for Johnson

1. Johnson was not allowed to testify by his lawyers, who argued that
   the Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional and Johnson was acting
   under the Constitution, not the law.
2. On May 16, 1868, Johnson was acquitted of all charges by a single
   vote, as seven Republican senators with consciences voted
   “not-guilty” (interestingly, those seven never secured a
   political office again afterwards).
3. Die-hard radicals were infuriated by the acquittal, but many
   politicians feared establishing a precedence of removing the president
   through impeachment.

XVII. The Purchase of Alaska

1. In 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward bought Alaska from
   Russia to the United States for $7.2 million, but most of the public
   jeered his act as “Seward’s Folly” or
   “Seward’s Ice-box.”
2. Only later, when oil and gold were discovered, did Alaska prove to be a huge bargain.

XVIII. The Heritage of Reconstruction

1. Many Southerners regarded Reconstruction as worse than the war
   itself, as they resented the upending of their social and racial system.
2. The Republicans, though with good intentions, failed to improve the
   South, and the fate of Blacks would remain poor for almost another
   century before the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s secured
   Black privileges.

I. The “Bloody Shirt” Elects Grant

1. The Republicans nominated Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant, who was a great soldier but had no political experience.
   • The Democrats could only denounce military Reconstruction and
     couldn’t agree on anything else, and thus, were disorganized.
   • The Republicans got Grant elected (barely) by “waving the
     bloody shirt,” or reliving his war victories, and used his
     popularity to elect him, though his popular vote was only slightly
     ahead of rival Horatio Seymour. Seymour was the Democratic candidate
     who didn’t accept a redemption-of-greenbacks-for-maximum-value
     platform, and thus doomed his party.
2. However, due to the close nature of the election, Republicans could not take future victories for granted.

II. The Era of Good Stealings

1. Despite the Civil War, the population still mushroomed, partially
   due to immigration, but during this time, politics became very corrupt.
   • Railroad promoters cheated gullible customers.
   • Stock-market investors were a cancer in the public eye.
   • Too many judges and legislators put their power up for hire.
2. Two notorious millionaires were Jim Fisk and Jay Gould.
   • In 1869, the pair concocted a plot to corner the gold market that
     would only work if the treasury stopped selling gold, so they worked on
     President Grant directly and through his brother-in-law, but their plan
     failed when the treasury sold gold.
3. The infamous Tweed Ring (AKA, “Tammany Hall) of NYC, headed
   by “Boss” Tweed, employed bribery, graft, and fake
   elections to cheat the city of as much as $200 million.
   • Tweed was finally caught when The New York Times secured evidence of his misdeeds, and later died in jail.
   • Samuel J. Tilden gained fame by leading the prosecution of Tweed,
     and he would later use this fame to become the Democratic nominee in
     the presidential election of 1876.
   • Thomas Nast, political cartoonist, constantly drew against Tammany’s corruption.

III. A Carnival of Corruption

1. Grant, an easy-going fellow, apparently failed to see the
   corruption going on, even though many of his friends wanted offices and
   his cabinet was totally corrupt (except for Secretary of State Hamilton
   Fish), and his in-laws, the Dent family, were especially terrible.
2. The Credit Mobilier, a railroad construction company that paid
   itself huge sums of money for small railroad construction, tarred
   Grant.
   • A New York newspaper finally busted it, and two members of Congress
     were formally censured (the company had given some of its stock to the
     congressmen) and the Vice President himself was shown to have accepted
     20 shares of stock.
3. In 1875, the public learned that the Whiskey Ring had robbed the
   Treasury of millions of dollars, and when Grant’s own private
   secretary was shown to be one of the criminals, Grant retracted his
   earlier statement of “Let no guilty man escape.”
   • Later, in 1876, Secretary of War William Belknap was shown to have pocketed some $24,000 by selling junk to Indians.

IV. The Liberal Republican Revolt of 1872

1. By 1872, a power wave of disgust at Grant’s administration
   was building, despite the worst of the scandals not having been
   revealed yet, and reformers organized the Liberal Republican Party and
   nominated the dogmatic Horace Greeley.
   • The Democratic Party also supported Greeley, even though he had
     blasted them repeatedly in his newspaper (the New York Tribune), but he
     pleased them because he called for a clasping of hands between the
     North and South and an end to Reconstruction.
2. The campaign was filled with more mudslinging (as usual), as
   Greeley was called an atheist, a communist, a vegetarian, and a signer
   of Jefferson Davis’s bail bond (that part was true) while Grant
   was called an ignoramus, a drunkard, and a swindler.
   • Still, Grant crushed Greeley in the electoral vote and in the popular vote was well.
3. In 1872, the Republican Congress passed a general amnesty act that
   removed political disabilities from all but some 500 former Confederate
   leaders.

V. Depression, Deflation, and Inflation

1. In 1873, a paralyzing panic broke out, the Panic of 1873, caused by
   too many railroads and factories being formed than existing markets
   could bear and the over-loaning by banks to those projects.
   Essentially, the causes of the panic were the same old ones
   that’d caused recessions every 20 years that century: (1)
   over-speculation and (2) too-easy credit.
   • It first started with the failure of the New York banking firm Jay
     Cooke & Company, which was headed by the rich Jay Cooke, a
     financier of the Civil War.
   • Before, the greenbacks that had been issued in the Civil War were
     being recalled, but now, during the panic, the
     “cheap-money” supporters wanted greenbacks to be printed en
     mass again, to create inflation.
   • However, supporters of “hard-money” (actual gold and
     silver) persuaded Grant to veto a bill that would print more paper
     money, and the Resumption Act of 1875 pledged the government to further
     withdraw greenbacks and made all further redemption of paper money in
     gold at face value, starting in 1879.
2. Debtors now cried that silver was under-valued (another call for
   inflation), but Grant refused to coin more silver dollars, which had
   been stopped in 1873, and besides, new silver discoveries in the later
   1870s shot the price of silver way down.
   • Grant’s name remained fused to sound money, though not sound government.
   • As greenbacks regained their value, few greenback holders bothered
     to exchange their more convenient bills for gold when Redemption Day
     came in 1879.
3. In 1878, the Bland-Allison Act instructed the Treasury to buy and
   coin between $2 million and $4 million worth of silver bullion each
   month.
   • The minimum was actually coined and its effect was minimal on creating “cheap money.”
4. The Republican hard-money policy, unfortunately for it, led to the
   election of a Democratic House of Representatives in 1874 and spawned
   the Greenback Labor Party in 1878.

VI. Pallid Politics in the Gilded Age

1. “The Gilded Age,” was a term coined by Mark Twain
   hinting that times looked good, yet if one scratched a bit below the
   surface, there were problems. Times were filled with corruption and
   presidential election squeakers, and even though Democrats and
   Republicans had similar ideas on economic issues, there were
   fundamental differences.
   • Republicans traced their lineage to Puritanism.
   • Democrats were more like Lutherans and Roman Catholics.
   • Democrats had strong support in the South.
   • Republicans had strong votes in the North and the West, and from
     the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), an organization made up of
     former Union veterans.
2. In the 1870s and the 1880s, Republican infighting was led by rivals
   Roscoe Conkling (Stalwarts) and James G. Blaine (Half-Breeds), who
   bickered and deadlocked their party.

VII. The Hayes-Tilden Standoff, 1876

1. Grant almost ran for a third term before the House derailed that
   proposal, so the Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, dubbed the
   “Great Unknown” because no one knew much about him, while
   the Democrats ran Samuel Tilden.
   • The election was very close, with Tilden getting 184 votes out of a
     needed 185 in the Electoral College, but votes in four states,
     Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and part of Oregon, were unsure and
     disputed.
   • The disputed states had sent in two sets of returns, one Democrat, one Republican.

VIII. The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction

1. The Electoral Count Act, passed in 1877, set up an electoral
   commission that consisted of 15 men selected from the Senate, the
   House, and the Supreme Court, which would count the votes (the 15th man
   was to be an independent, David Davis, but at the last moment, he
   resigned).
2. In February of 1877, the Senate and the House met to settle the
   dispute, and eventually, Hayes became president as a part of the rest
   of the Compromise of 1877. True to a compromise, both sides won a bit:
   • For the North—Hayes would become president if he agreed to
     remove troops from the remaining two Southern states where Union troops
     remained (Louisiana and South Carolina), and also, a bill would
     subsidize the Texas and Pacific rail line.
   • For the South—military rule and Reconstruction ended when the military pulled out of the South.
   • The Compromise of 1877 abandoned the Blacks in the South by
     withdrawing troops, and their last attempt at protection of Black
     rights was the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which was mostly declared
     unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1883 Civil Rights cases.

IX. The Birth of Jim Crow in the Post-Reconstruction South

1. As Reconstruction ended and the military returned northward, whites once again asserted their power.
   • Literacy requirements for voting began, voter registration laws
     emerged, and poll taxes began. These were all targeted at black voters.
   • Most blacks became sharecroppers (providing nothing but labor) or tenant farmers (if they could provide their own tools).
2. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson
   that “separate but equal” facilities were constitutional.
   • Thus “Jim Crow” segregation was legalized.

X. Class Conflicts and Ethnic Clashes

1. In 1877, the presidents of the nation’s four largest
   railroads decided to cut wages by 10%. Workers struck back, stopping
   work, and when President Hayes sent troops to stop this, violence
   erupted, and more than 100 people died in the several weeks of chaos.
2. The failure of the railroad strike showed the weakness of the labor
   movement, but this was partly caused by friction between races,
   especially between the Irish and the Chinese.
3. In San Francisco, Irish-born Denis Kearney incited his followers to terrorize the Chinese.
4. In 1879, Congress passed a bill severely restricting the influx of
   Chinese immigrants (most of whom were males who had come to California
   to work on the railroads), but Hayes vetoed the bill on grounds that it
   violated an existing treaty with China.
   • After Hayes left office, the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882,
     was passed, barring any Chinese from entering the United
     States—the first law limiting immigration.

XI. Garfield and Arthur

1. James A. Garfield
   • In 1880, the Republicans nominated James A. Garfield, a man from
     Ohio who had risen to the rank of major general in the Civil War, and
     as his running mate, a notorious Stalwart (supporter of Roscoe
     Conkling) was chosen: Chester A. Arthur of New York.
   • The Democrats chose Winfield S. Hancock, a Civil War general who
     appealed to the South due to his fair treatment of it during
     Reconstruction and a veteran who had been wounded at Gettysburg, and
     thus appealed to veterans.
   • The campaign once again avoided touchy issues, and Garfield
     squeaked by in the popular vote (the electoral count was wider: 214 to
     155).
     • Garfield was a good person, but he hated to hurt people’s feelings and say “no.”
   • Garfield named James G. Blaine to the position of Secretary of the
     State, and he made other anti-Stalwart acts, but on September 19, 1881,
     Garfield died after having been shot in the head by a crazy but
     disappointed office seeker, Charles J. Guiteau, who, after being
     captured, used an early version of the “insanity defense”
     to avoid conviction (he was hanged anyway).
2. Chester Arthur
   • Chester Arthur didn’t seem to be a good fit for the
     presidency, but he surprised many by giving the cold shoulder to
     Stalwarts, his chief supporters, and by calling for reform, a call
     heeded by the Republican party as it began to show newly found
     enthusiasm for reform.
   • The Pendleton Act of 1883, the so-called Magna Charta of
     civil-service reform (awarding of government jobs based on ability, not
     just because a buddy awarded the job), prohibited financial assessments
     on jobholders, including lowly scrubwomen, and established a merit
     system of making appointments to office on the basis of aptitude rather
     than “pull.”
     • It also set up a Civil Service Commission, charged with
       administering open competitive service, and offices not
       “classified” by the president remained the fought-over
       footballs of politics.
     • Luckily, Arthur cooperated, and by 1884, he had classified nearly 10% of all federal offices, or nearly 14,000 of them.
   • The Pendleton Act partially divided politics from patronage, but it
     drove politicians into “marriages of convenience” with
     business leaders.

XII. The Blaine-Cleveland Mudslingers of 1884

1. James G. Blaine became the Republican candidate, but some
   Republican reformers, unable to stomach this, switched to the
   Democratic Party and were called Mugwumps.
2. The Democrats chose Grover Cleveland as their candidate but
   received a shock when it was revealed that he might have been the
   father of an illegitimate child.
   • The campaign of 1884 was filled with perhaps the lowest mudslinging in history.
   • The contest depended on how New York chose, but unfortunately, one
     foolish Republican insulted the race, faith, and patriotism of New
     York’s heavy Irish population, and as a result, New York voted
     for Cleveland; that was the difference.

XIII. “Old Grover” Takes Over

1. Portly Grover Cleveland was the first Democratic president since
   James Buchanan, and as a supporter of laissez-faire capitalism, he
   delighted business owners and bankers.
2. Cleveland named two former Confederates to his cabinet, and at
   first tried to adhere to the merit system (but eventually gave in to
   his party and fired almost 2/3 of the 120,000 federal employees), but
   he had his problems.
   • Military pensions plagued Cleveland; these bills were given to
     Civil War veterans to help them, but they were used fraudulently to
     give money to all sorts of people.
   • However, Cleveland showed that he was ready to take on the corrupt
     distributors of military pensions when he vetoed a bill that would add
     several hundred thousand new people on the pension list.

XIV. Cleveland Battles for a Lower Tariff

1. By 1881, the Treasury had a surplus of $145 million, most of it
   having come from the high tariff, and there was a lot of clamoring for
   lowering the tariff, though big industrialists opposed it.
2. Cleveland wasn’t really interested in the subject at first,
   but as he researched it, he became inclined towards lowering the
   tariff, so in late 1887, Cleveland openly tossed the appeal for lower
   tariffs into the lap of Congress.
   • Democrats were upset at the obstinacy of their chief while Republicans gloated at his apparently reckless act.

XV. The Billion Dollar Congress

1. The new Speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reed, was a large, tall man, a tremendous debater, and very critical and quick man.
   • To solve the problem of reaching a quorum in Congress, Reed counted
     the Democrats who were present yet didn’t answer to the roll
     call, and after three days of such chaos, he finally prevailed, opening
     the 51st, or “Billion Dollar” Congress—one that
     legislated many expensive projects.

XVI. The Drumbeat of Discontent

1. The Populist Party emerged in 1892 from disgruntled farmers.
   • Their main call was for inflation via free coinage of silver.
   • They called for a litany of items including: a graduated income
     tax, government regulation of railroads and telegraphs/telephones,
     direct elections of U.S. senators, a one term limit, initiative and
     referendum, a shorter workday, and immigration restriction.

XVII. Cleveland and Depression

1. Grover Cleveland won, but no sooner than he had stepped into the
   presidency did the Depression of 1893 break out. It was the first such
   panic in the new urban and industrial age, and it caused much outrage
   and hardships. This completed the almost predictable, every-20-year
   cycle of panics during the 1800s (panics occurred during 1819, 1837,
   1857, 1873, and 1893).
2. About 8,000 American business houses collapsed in six months, and dozens of railroad lines went into the hands of receivers.
   • This time, Cleveland had a deficit and a problem, for the Treasury
     had to issue gold for the notes that it had paid in the Sherman Silver
     Purchase Act, and according to law, those notes had to be reissued,
     thus causing a steady drain on gold in the Treasury—the level
     alarmingly dropped below $100 million at one point.
3. Meanwhile, Grover Cleveland had developed a malignant growth under
   the roof of his mouth, and it had to be secretly removed in a surgery
   that took place aboard his private yacht; had he died, Adlai E.
   Stevenson, a “soft money” (paper money) man, would have
   caused massive chaos with inflation.
4. Also, 33 year-old William Jennings Bryan was advocating “free
   silver,” and gaining support for his beliefs, but an angry
   Cleveland used his executive power to break the filibuster in the
   Senate—thus alienating the silver-supporting Democrats.

XVIII. Cleveland Breeds a Backlash

1. Cleveland was embarrassed at having to resort to J.P. Morgan to bale out the depression.
2. He was also embarrassed by the Wilson-Gorman Tariff. He’d
   promised to lower the tariff, but so many tack-ons had been added, the
   result was nill.
   • Further, the Supreme Court struck down an income tax. It looked like all politicians were tools of the wealthy.

I. The Iron Colt Becomes an Iron Horse

1. After the Civil War, railroad production grew enormously, from
   35,000 mi. of track laid in 1865 to a whopping 192,556 mi. of track
   laid in 1900.
   • Congress gave land to railroad companies totally 155,504,994 acres.
   • For railroad routes, companies were allowed alternate mile-square
     sections in checkerboard fashion, but until companies determined which
     part of the land was the best to use for railroad building, all of the
     land was withheld from all other users.
     • Grover Cleveland stopped this in 1887.
2. Railroads gave land their value; towns where railroads ran became
   sprawling cities while those skipped by railroads sank into ghost
   towns, so, obviously, towns wanted railroads in them.

II. Spanning the Continent with Rails

1. Deadlock over where to build a transcontinental railroad was broken
   after the South seceded, and in 1862, Congress commissioned the Union
   Pacific Railroad to begin westward from Omaha, Nebraska, to gold-rich
   California.
   • The company received huge sums of money and land to build its
     tracks, but corruption also plagued it, as the insiders of the Credit
     Mobilier reaped $23 million in profits.
   • Many Irishmen, who might lay as much as 10 miles a day, laid the tracks.
   • When Indians attacked while trying to save their land, the Irish
     dropped their picks and seized their rifles, and scores of workers and
     Indians died during construction.
2. Over in California, the Central Pacific Railroad was in charge of
   extending the railroad eastward, and it was backed by the Big Four:
   including Leland Stanford, the ex-governor of California who had useful
   political connections, and Collis P. Huntington, an adept lobbyist.
   • The Central Pacific used Chinese workers, and received the same
     incentives as the Union Pacific, but it had to drill through the hard
     rock of the Sierra Nevada.
3. In 1869, the transcontinental rail line was completed at Promontory
   Point near Ogden, Utah; in all, the Union Pacific built 1,086 mi. of
   track, compared to 689 mi. by the Central Pacific.

III. Binding the Country with Railroad Ties

1. Before 1900, four other transcontinental railroads were built:
   • The Northern Pacific Railroad stretched from Lake Superior to the Puget Sound and was finished in 1883.
   • The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe stretched through the Southwest deserts and was completed the following year, in 1884.
   • The Southern Pacific (completed in 1884) went from New Orleans to San Francisco.
   • The Great Northern ran from Duluth to Seattle and was the creation
     of James J. Hill, probably the greatest railroad builder of all.
2. However, many pioneers over-invested on land, and the banks that
   supported them often failed and went bankrupt when the land
   wasn’t worth as much as initially thought.

IV. Railroad Consolidation and Mechanization

1. Older eastern railroads, like the New York Central, headed by
   Cornelius Vanderbilt, often financed the successful western railroads.
2. Advancements in railroads included the steel rail, which was
   stronger and more enduring than the iron rail, the Westinghouse air
   brake which increased safety, the Pullman Palace Cars which were
   luxurious passenger cars, and telegraphs, double-racking, and block
   signals.
   • Nevertheless, train accidents were common, as well as death.

V. Revolution by Railways

1. Railroads stitched the nation together, generated a huge market and
   lots of jobs, helped the rapid industrialization of America, and
   stimulated mining and agriculture in the West by bringing people and
   supplies to and from the areas where such work occurred.
2. Railroads helped people settle in the previously harsh Great Plains.
3. Due to railroads, the creation of four national time zones occurred
   on November 18, 1883, instead of each city having its own time zone
   (that was confusing to railroad operators).
4. Railroads were also the makers of millionaires and the millionaire class.

VI. Wrongdoing in Railroading

1. Railroads were not without corruption, as shown by the Credit Mobilier scandal.
2. Jay Gould made millions embezzling stocks from the Erie, Kansas
   Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Texas and Pacific railroad
   companies.
3. One method of cheap moneymaking was called “stock
   watering,” in which railroad companies grossly over-inflated the
   worth of their stock and sold them at huge profits.
4. Railroad owners abused the public, bribed judges and legislatures,
   employed arm-twisting lobbyists, elected their own to political office,
   gave rebates (which helped the wealthy but not the poor), and used free
   passes to gain favor in the press.
5. As time passed, though, railroad giants entered into defensive
   alliances to show profits, and began the first of what would be called
   trusts, although at that time they were called “pools.” A
   pool (AKA, a “cartel”) is a group of supposed competitors
   who agree to work together, usually to set prices.

VII. Government Bridles the Iron Horse

1. People were aware of such injustice, but were slow to combat it.
2. The Grange was formed by farmers to combat such corruption, and
   many state efforts to stop the railroad monopoly occurred, but they
   were stopped when the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the Wabash
   case, in which it ruled that states could not regulate interstate
   commerce, such as trains.
3. The Interstate Commerce Act, passed in 1887, banned rebates and
   pools and required the railroads to publish their rates openly (so as
   not to cheat customers), and also forbade unfair discrimination against
   shippers and banned charging more for a short haul than for a long one.
   • It also set up the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to enforce this.
4. The act was not a victory against corporate wealth, as people like
   Richard Olney, a shrewd corporate lawyer, noted that they could use the
   act to their advantage, but it did represent the first attempt by
   Congress to regulate businesses for society’s interest.

VIII. Miracles of Mechanization

1. In 1860, the U.S. was the 4th largest manufacturer in the world, but by 1894, it was #1, why?
   • Now-abundant liquid capital.
   • Fully exploited natural resources (like coal, oil, and iron, the
     iron came from the Minnesota-Lake Superior region which yielded the
     rich iron deposits of the Mesabi Range).
   • Massive immigration made labor cheap.
   • American ingenuity played a vital role, as such inventions like
     mass production (from Eli Whitney) were being refined and perfected.
     • Popular inventions included the cash register, the stock ticker,
       the typewriter, the refrigerator car, the electric dynamo, and the
       electric railway, which displaced animal-drawn cars.
2. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and a new age was launched.
3. Thomas Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” was the most
   versatile inventor, who, while best known for his electric light bulb,
   also cranked out scores of other inventions.

IX. The Trust Titan Emerges

1. Industry giants used various ways to eliminate competition and maximize profits.
   • Andrew Carnegie used a method called “vertical
     integration,” which meant that he bought out and controlled all
     aspects of an industry (in his case, he mined the iron, transported it,
     refined it, and turned it into steel, controlling all parts of the
     process).
   • John D. Rockefeller, master of “horizontal
     integration,” simply allied with or bought out competitors to
     monopolize a given market.
     • He used this method to form Standard Oil and control the oil industry by forcing weaker competitors to go bankrupt.
2. These men became known for their trusts, giant, monopolistic corporations.
   • J.P. Morgan also placed his own men on the boards of directors of
     other rival competitors to gain influence there and reduce competition,
     a process called “interlocking directorates.”

X. The Supremacy of Steel

1. In Lincoln’s day, steel was very scarce and expensive, but by
   1900, Americans produced as much steel as England and Germany combined.
2. This was due to an invention that made steel-making cheaper and
   much more effective: the Bessemer process, which was named after an
   English inventor even though an American, William Kelly, had discovered
   it first:
   • Cold air blown on red-hot iron burned carbon deposits and purified it.
   • America was one of the few nations that had a lot of coal for fuel,
     iron for smelting, and other essential ingredients for steel making,
     and thus, quickly became #1.

XI. Carnegie and Other Sultans of Steel

1. Andrew Carnegie started off as a poor boy in a bad job, but by
   working hard, assuming responsibility, and charming influential people,
   he worked his way up to wealth.
2. He started in the Pittsburgh area, but he was not a man who liked
   trusts; still, by 1900, he was producing 1/4 of the nation’s
   Bessemer steel, and getting $25 million a year.
3. J. Pierpont Morgan, having already made a fortune in the banking
   industry and in Wall Street, was ready to step into the steel tubing
   industry, but Carnegie threatened to ruin him, so after some tense
   negotiation, Morgan bought Carnegie’s entire business at $400
   million (this was before income tax). But Carnegie, fearing ridicule
   for possessing so much money, spent the rest of his life donating $350
   million of it to charity, pensions, and libraries.
   • Meanwhile, Morgan took Carnegie’s holdings, added others, and
     launched the United States Steel Corporation in 1901, a company that
     became the world’s first billion-dollar corporation (it was
     capitalized at $1.4 billion).

XII. Rockefeller Grows an American Beauty Rose

1. In 1859, a man named Drake first used oil to get money, and by the
   1870s, kerosene, a type of oil, was used to light lamps all over the
   nation.
2. However, by 1885, 250,000 of Edison’s electric light bulbs
   were in use, and the electric industry soon rendered kerosene obsolete,
   just as kerosene had made whale oil obsolete.
3. Oil, however, was just beginning with the gasoline-burning internal combustion engine.
4. John D. Rockefeller, ruthless and merciless, organized the Standard
   Oil Company of Ohio in 1882 (five years earlier, he had already
   controlled 95% of all the oil refineries in the country).
5. Rockefeller crushed weaker competitors—part of the natural
   process according to him—but his company did produce superior oil
   at a cheaper price.
6. Other trusts, which also generally made better products at cheaper
   prices, emerged, such as the meat industry of Gustavus F. Swift and
   Philip Armour.

XIII. The Gospel of Wealth

1. Many of the newly rich had worked from poverty to wealth, and thus
   felt that some people in the world were destined to become rich and
   then help society with their money. This was the “Gospel of
   Wealth.”
2. “Social Darwinism” applied Charles Darwin’s
   survival-of-the-fittest theories to business. It said the reason a
   Carnegie was at the top of the steel industry was that he was most fit
   to run such a business.
3. The Reverend Russell Conwell of Philadelphia became rich by
   delivering his lecture, “Acres of Diamonds” thousands of
   times, and in it he preached that poor people made themselves poor and
   rich people made themselves rich; everything was because of one’s
   actions only.
4. Corporate lawyers used the 14th Amendment to defend trusts, the
   judges agreed, saying that corporations were legal people and thus
   entitled to their property, and plutocracy ruled.

XIV. Government Tackles the Trust Evil

1. In 1890, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was signed into law; it forbade
   combinations (trusts, pools, interlocking directorates, holding
   companies) in restraint of trade, without any distinction between
   “good” and “bad” trusts.
   • It proved ineffective, however, because it couldn’t be enforced.
   • Not until 1914 was it properly enforced and those prosecuted for violating the law were actually punished.

XV. The South in the Age of Industry

1. The South remained agrarian despite all the industrial advances,
   though James Buchanan Duke developed a huge cigarette industry in the
   form of the American Tobacco Company and made many donations to what is
   now Duke University.
2. Men like Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper urged the South to industrialize.
3. However, many northern companies set rates to keep the South from
   gaining any competitive edge whatsoever, with examples including the
   rich deposits of iron and coal near Birmingham, Alabama, and the
   textile mills of the South.
   • However, cheap labor led to the creation of many jobs, and despite
     poor wages, many white Southerners saw employment as a blessing.
4. The Impact of the New Industrial Revolution on America
   • As the Industrial Revolution spread in America, the standard of
     living rose, immigrants swarmed to the U.S., and early Jeffersonian
     ideals about the dominance of agriculture fell.
   • Women, who had swarmed to factories and had been encouraged by
     recent inventions, found new opportunities, and the “Gibson
     Girl,” created by Charles Dana Gibson, became the romantic ideal
     of the age.
     • The Gibson Girl was young, athletic, attractive, and outdoorsy (not the stay-at-home mom type).
     • However, many women never achieved this, and instead toiled in hard work because they had to do so in order to earn money.
5. A nation of farmers was becoming a nation of wage earners, but the
   fear of unemployment was never far, and the illness of a breadwinner
   (the main wage owner) in a family was disastrous.
6. Strong pressures in foreign trade developed as the tireless industrial machine threatened to flood the domestic market.

XVI. In Unions There Is Strength

1. With the inflow of immigrants providing a labor force that would
   work for low wages and in poor environments, the workers who wanted to
   improve their conditions found that they could not, since their bosses
   could easily hire the unemployed to take their places.
2. Corporations had many weapons against strikers, such as hiring
   strikebreakers or asking the courts to order strikers to stop striking,
   and if they continued, to bring in troops. Other methods included
   hiring “scabs” or replacements or “lockouts” to
   starve strikers into submission, and often, workers had to sign
   “ironclad oaths” or “yellow dog contracts”
   which banned them from joining unions.
   • Workers could be “blacklisted,” or put on a list and denied privileges elsewhere.
3. The middle-class, annoyed by the recurrent strikes, grew deaf to the workers’ outcry.
4. The view was that people like Carnegie and Rockefeller had battled
   and worked hard to get to the top, and workers could do the same if
   they “really” wanted to improve their situations.

XVII. Labor Limps Along

1. The Civil War put a premium on labor, which helped labor unions grow.
2. The National Labor Union, formed in 1866, represented a giant boot
   stride by workers and attracted an impressive total of 600,000 members,
   but it only lasted six years.
   • However, it excluded Chinese and didn’t really try to get Blacks and women to join.
   • It worked for the arbitration of industrial disputes and the
     eight-hour workday, and won the latter for government workers, but the
     depression of 1873 knocked it out.
3. A new organization, the Knights of Labor, was begun in 1869 and
   continued secretly until 1881. This organization was similar to the
   National Labor Union.
   • It only barred liquor dealers, professional gamblers, lawyers,
     bankers, and stockbrokers, and they campaigned for economic and social
     reform.
   • Led by Terence V. Powderly, the Knights won a number of strikes for
     the eight-hour day, and when they staged a successful strike against
     Jay Gould’s Wabash Railroad in 1885, membership mushroomed to 3/4
     of a million workers.

XVIII. Unhorsing the Knights of Labor

1. However, the Knights became involved in a number of May Day strikes of which half failed.
2. In Chicago, home to about 80,000 Knights and a few hundred
   anarchists that advocated a violent overthrow of the American
   government, tensions had been building, and on May 4, 1886, Chicago
   police were advancing on a meeting that had been called to protest
   brutalities by authorities when a dynamite bomb was thrown, killing or
   injuring several dozen people.
   • Eight anarchists were rounded up yet no one could prove that they
     had any association with the bombing, but since they had preached
     incendiary doctrines, the jury sentenced five of them to death on
     account of conspiracy and gave the other three stiff prison terms.
   • In 1892, John P. Altgeld, a German-born Democrat was elected
     governor of Illinois and pardoned the three survivors after studying
     the case extensively.
   • He received violent verbal abuse for that and was defeated during re-election.
3. This so-called Haymarket Square Bombing forever associated the
   Knights of Labor with anarchists and lowered their popularity and
   effectiveness; membership declined, and those that remained fused with
   other labor unions.

XIX. The AF of L to the Fore

1. In 1886, Samuel Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor.
   • It consisted of an association of self-governing national unions,
     each of which kept its independence, with the AF of L unifying overall
     strategy.
2. Gompers demanded a fairer share for labor.
   • He simply wanted “more,” and sought better wages, hours, and working conditions.
3. The AF of L established itself on solid but narrow foundations,
   since it tried to speak for all workers but fell far short of that.
   • Composed of skilled laborers, it was willing to let unskilled
     laborers fend for themselves. Critics called it “the labor
     trust.”
4. From 1881 to 1900, there were over 23,000 strikes involving
   6,610,000 workers with a total loss to both employers and employees of
   about $450 million.
   • Perhaps the greatest weakness of labor unions was that they only embraced a small minority—3%—of all workers.
5. However, by 1900, the public was starting to concede the rights of
   workers and beginning to give them some or most of what they wanted.
   • In 1894, Labor Day was made a legal holiday.
6. A few owners were beginning to realize that losing money to fight
   labor strikes was useless, though most owners still dogmatically fought
   labor unions.
7. If the age of big business had dawned, the age of big labor was still some distance over the horizon.

I. The Urban Frontier

1. From 1870 to 1900, the American population doubled, and the population in the cities tripled.
2. Cities grew up and out, with such famed architects as Louis
   Sullivan working on and perfecting skyscrapers (first appearing in
   Chicago in 1885).
   • The city grew from a small compact one that people could walk
     through to get around to a huge metropolis that required commuting by
     electric trolleys.
   • Electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephones made city life more alluring.
3. Department stores like Macy’s (in New York) and Marshall
   Field’s (in Chicago) provided urban working-class jobs and also
   attracted urban middle-class shoppers.
   • Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie told of a woman’s
     escapades in the big city and made cities dazzling and attractive.
   • However, the move to city produced lots of trash, because while
     farmers always reused everything or fed “trash” to animals,
     city dwellers, with their mail-order houses like Sears and Montgomery
     Ward, which made things cheap and easy to buy, could simply throw away
     the things that they didn’t like anymore.
4. In cities, criminals flourished, and impure water, uncollected
   garbage, unwashed bodies, and droppings made cities smelly and
   unsanitary.
   • Worst of all were the slums, which were crammed with people.
   • The so-called “dumbbell tenements” (which gave a bit of
     fresh air down their airshaft) were the worst since they were dark,
     cramped, and had little sanitation or ventilation.
5. To escape, the wealthy of the city-dwellers fled to suburbs.

II. The New Immigration

1. Until the 1880s, most of the immigrants had come from the British
   Isles and western Europe (Germany and Scandinavia) and were quite
   literate and accustomed to some type of representative government. This
   was called the “Old Immigration.” But by the 1880s and
   1890s, this shifted to the Baltic and Slavic people of southeastern
   Europe, who were basically the opposite, “New Immigration.”
   • While the southeastern Europeans accounted for only 19% of
     immigrants to the U.S. in 1880, by the early 1900s, they were over 60%!

III. Southern Europe Uprooted

1. Many Europeans came to America because there was no room in Europe,
   nor was there much employment, since industrialization had eliminated
   many jobs.
   • America was also often praised to Europeans, as people boasted of eating everyday and having freedom and much opportunity.
   • Profit-seeking Americans also perhaps exaggerated the benefits of
     America to Europeans, so that they could get cheap labor and more money.
2. However, it should be noted that many immigrants to America stayed
   for a short period of time and then returned to Europe, and even those
   that remained (including persecuted Jews, who propagated in New York)
   tried very hard to retain their own culture and customs.
   • However, the children of the immigrants sometimes rejected this Old World culture and plunged completely into American life.

IV. Reactions to the New Immigration

1. The federal government did little to help immigrants assimilate
   into American society, so immigrants were often controlled by powerful
   “bosses” (such as New York’s Boss Tweed) who provided
   jobs and shelter in return for political support at the polls.
2. Gradually, though, the nation’s conscience awoke to the
   plight of the slums, and people like Walter Rauschenbusch and
   Washington Gladden began preaching the “Social Gospel,”
   insisting that churches tackle the burning social issues of the day.
3. Among the people who were deeply dedicated to uplifting the urban
   masses was Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in 1889 to teach
   children and adults the skills and knowledge that they would need to
   survive and succeed in America.
   • She eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, but her pacifism
     was looked down upon by groups such as the Daughters of the American
     Revolution, who revoked her membership.
   • Other such settlement houses like Hull House included Lillian
     Wald’s Henry Street Settlement in New York, which opened its
     doors in 1893.
   • Settlement houses became centers for women’s activism and
     reform, as females such as Florence Kelley fought for protection of
     women workers and against child labor.
   • The new cities also gave women opportunities to earn money and
     support themselves better (mostly single women, since being both a
     working mother and wife was frowned upon).

V. Narrowing the Welcome Mat

1. The “nativism” and anti-foreignism of the 1840s and
   1850s came back in the 1880s, as the Germans and western Europeans
   looked down upon the new Slavs and Baltics, fearing that a mixing of
   blood would ruin the fairer Anglo-Saxon races and create inferior
   offspring.
   • The “native” Americans blamed immigrants for the
     degradation of the urban government. These new bigots had forgotten how
     they had been scorned when they had arrived in America a few decades
     before.
   • Trade unionists hated them for their willingness to work for
     super-low wages and for bringing in dangerous doctrines like socialism
     and communism into the U.S.
2. Anti-foreign organizations like the American Protective Association
   (APA) arose to go against new immigrants, and labor leaders were quick
   to try to stop new immigration, since immigrants were frequently used
   as strikebreakers.
3. Finally, in 1882, Congress passed the first restrictive law against
   immigration, which banned paupers, criminals, and convicts from coming
   here.
4. In 1885, another law was passed banning the importation of foreign workers under usually substandard contracts.
5. Literacy tests for immigrants were proposed, but were resisted
   until they were finally passed in 1917, but the 1882 immigration law
   also barred the Chinese from coming (the Chinese Exclusion Act).
6. Ironically in this anti-immigratnt climate, the Statue of Liberty
   arrived from France—a gift from the French to America in 1886.

VI. Churches Confront the Urban Challenge

1. Since churches had mostly failed to take any stands and rally
   against the urban poverty, plight, and suffering, many people began to
   question the ambition of the churches, and began to worry that Satan
   was winning the battle of good and evil.
   • The emphasis on material gains worried many.
2. A new generation of urban revivalists stepped in, including people
   like Dwight Lyman Moody, a man who proclaimed the gospel of kindness
   and forgiveness and adapted the old-time religion to the facts of city
   life.
   • The Moody Bible Institute was founded in Chicago in 1889 and continued working well after his 1899 death.
3. Roman Catholic and Jewish faiths were also gaining many followers with the new immigration.
   • Cardinal Gibbons was popular with Roman Catholics and Protestants, as he preached American unity.
   • By 1890, Americans could choose from 150 religions, including the
     new Salvation Army, which tried to help the poor and unfortunate.
4. The Church of Christ, Scientist (Christian Science), founded by
   Mary Baker Eddy, preached a perversion of Christianity that she claimed
   healed sickness.
5. YMCA’s and YWCA’s also sprouted.

VII. Darwin Disrupts the Churches

1. In 1859, Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species,
   which set forth the new doctrine of evolution and attracted the ire and
   fury of fundamentalists.
   • “Modernists” took a step from the fundamentalists and
     refused to believe that the Bible was completely accurate and factual.
     They contended that the Bible was merely a collection of moral stories
     or guidelines, but not sacred scripture inspired by God.
2. Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll was one who denounced creationism, as
   he had been widely persuaded by the theory of evolution. Others blended
   creationism and evolution to invent their own interpretations.

VIII. The Lust for Learning

1. A new trend began in the creation of more public schools and the provision of free textbooks funded by taxpayers.
   • By 1900, there were 6,000 high schools in America; kindergartens also multiplied.
2. Catholic schools also grew in popularity and in number.
3. To partially help adults who couldn’t go to school, the
   Chautauqua movement, a successor to the lyceums, was launched in 1874.
   It included public lectures to many people by famous writers and
   extensive at-home studies.
4. Americans began to develop a faith in formal education as a solution to poverty.

IX. Booker T. Washington and Education for Black People

1. The South, war-torn and poor, lagged far behind in education,
   especially for Blacks, so Booker T. Washington, an ex-slave came to
   help. He started by heading a black normal (teacher) and industrial
   school in Tuskegee, Alabama, and teaching the students useful skills
   and trades.
   • However, he avoided the issue of social equality; he believed in Blacks helping themselves first before gaining more rights.
2. One of Washington’s students was George Washington Carver,
   who later discovered hundreds of new uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes,
   and soybeans.
3. However, W.E.B. Du Bois, the first Black to get a Ph.D. from
   Harvard University, demanded complete equality for Blacks and action
   now. He also founded the National Association for the Advancement of
   Colored People (NAACP) in 1910.
   • Many of DuBois’s differences with Washington reflected the contrasting life experiences of southern and northern Blacks.

X. The Hallowed Halls of Ivy

1. Colleges and universities sprouted after the Civil War, and colleges for women, such as Vassar, were gaining ground.
   • Also, colleges for both genders grew, especially in the Midwest,
     and Black colleges also were established, such as Howard University in
     Washington D.C., Atlanta University, and Hampton Institute in Virginia.
2. The Morrill Act of 1862 had provided a generous grant of the public
   lands to the states for support of education and was extended by the
   Hatch Act of 1887, which provided federal funds for the establishment
   of agricultural experiment stations in connection with the land-grant
   colleges.
3. Private donations also went toward the establishment of colleges,
   including Cornell, Leland Stanford Junior, and the University of
   Chicago, which was funded by John D. Rockefeller.
4. Johns Hopkins University maintained the nation’s first high-grade graduate school.

XI. The March of the Mind

1. The elective system of college was gaining popularity, and it took
   off especially after Dr. Charles W. Eliot became president of Harvard.
2. Medical schools and science were prospering after the Civil War.
   • Discoveries by Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister (antiseptics) improved medical science and health.
   • The brilliant but sickly William James helped establish the
     discipline of behavioral psychology, with his books Principles of
     Psychology (1890), The Will to Believe (1897), and Varieties of
     Religious Experience (1902).
     • His greatest work was Pragmatism (1907), which preached what he believed in: pragmatism (everything has a useful purpose).

XII. The Appeal of the Press

1. Libraries such as the Library of Congress also opened across America, bringing literature into people’s homes.
2. With the invention of the Linotype in 1885, the press more than
   kept pace with demand, but competition sparked a new brand of
   journalism called “yellow journalism,” in which newspapers
   reported on wild and fantastic stories that often were false or quite
   exaggerated: sex, scandal, and other human-interest stories.
3. Two new journalistic tycoons emerged: Joseph Pulitzer (New York
   World) and William Randolph Hearst (San Francisco Examiner, et al.).

d. Luckily, the strengthening of the Associated Press, which had
been established in the 1840s, helped to offset some of the
questionable journalism.
e. Hi Mrs. Kelly!

XIII. Apostles of Reform

1. Magazines like Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and
   Scribner’s Monthly partially satisfied the public appetite for
   good reading, but perhaps the most influential of all was the New York
   Nation, launched in 1865 by Edwin L. Godkin, a merciless critic. These
   were all liberal, reform-minded publications.
2. Another enduring journalist-author was Henry George, who wrote
   Progress and Poverty, which undertook to solve the association of
   poverty with progress.
   • It was he who came up with the idea of the graduated income tax—the more you make, the greater percent you pay in taxes.
3. Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward in 1888, in which he
   criticized the social injustices of the day and pictured a utopian
   government that had nationalized big business serving the public good.

XIV. Postwar Writing

1. After the war, Americans devoured “dime-novels” which
   depicted the wild West and other romantic and adventurous settings.
   • The king of dime novelists was Harland F. Halsey, who made 650 of these novels.
   • General Lewis Wallace wrote Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which
     combated the ideas and beliefs of Darwinism and reaffirmed the
     traditional Christian faith.
2. Horatio Alger was even more popular, since his rags-to-riches books
   told that virtue, honesty, and industry were rewarded by success,
   wealth, and honor. His most notable book was titled Ragged Dick.
3. Walt Whitman was one of the old writers who still remained active, publishing revisions of his hardy perennial: Leaves of Grass.
4. Emily Dickinson was a famed hermit of a poet whose poems were published after her death.
5. Other lesser poets included Sidney Lanier, who was oppressed by poverty and ill health.

XV. Literary Landmarks

1. Other famous writers:
   • Kate Chopin, wrote about adultery, suicide, and women’s ambitions in The Awakening.
   • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) wrote many books, including The
     Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Roughing
     It about the wild West, The Gilded Age (hence the term given to the era
     of corruption after the Civil War) and The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
     Calaveras County.
   • Bret Harte wrote California gold rush stories.
   • William Dean Howells became editor in chief of the Atlantic Monthly
     and wrote about ordinary people and sometimes-controversial social
     themes.
   • Stephen Crane wrote about the seamy underside of life in urban,
     industrial America (prostitutes, etc.) in such books like Maggie: Girl
     of the Street.
     • He also wrote The Red Badge of Courage, a tale about a Civil War soldier.
   • Henry James wrote Daisy Miller and Portrait of a Lady, often making
     women his central characters in his novels and exploring their
     personalities.
   • Jack London wrote about the wild unexplored regions of wilderness in The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Iron Heel.
   • Frank Norris’s The Octopus exposed the corruption of the railroads.
   • Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt, two Black writers,
     used Black dialect and folklore in their poems and stories,
     respectively.

XVI. The New Morality

1. Victoria Woodhull proclaimed free love, and together with her
   sister, Tennessee Claflin, wrote Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly,
   which shocked readers with exposés of affairs, etc.
2. Anthony Comstock waged a lifelong war on the “immoral.”
3. The “new morality” reflected sexual freedom in the
   increase of birth control, divorces, and frank discussion of sexual
   topics.

XVII. Families and Women in the City

1. Urban life was stressful on families, who were often separated, and
   everyone had to work—even children as young as ten years old.
   • While on farms, more children meant more people to harvest and
     help, in the cities, more children meant more mouths to feed and a
     greater chance of poverty.
2. In 1898, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published Women and Economics, a
   classic of feminist literature, in which she called for women to
   abandon their dependent status and contribute to the larger life of the
   community through productive involvement in the economy.
   • She also advocated day-care centers and centralized nurseries and kitchens.
3. Feminists also rallied toward suffrage, forming the National
   American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890, an organization led by
   Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who’d organized the first women’s
   rights convention in 1848 at Seneca Falls, NY) and Susan B. Anthony.
4. By 1900, a new generation of women activists were present, led by
   Carrie Chapman Catt, who stressed the desirability of giving women the
   vote if they were to continue to discharge their traditional duties as
   homemakers in the increasingly public world of the city.
   • The Wyoming Territory was the first to offer women unrestricted suffrage in 1869.
   • The General Federation of Women’s Clubs also encouraged women’s suffrage.
5. Ida B. Wells rallied toward better treatment for Blacks as well and formed the National Association of Colored Women in 1896.

XVIII. Prohibition of Alcohol and Social Progress

1. Concern over the popularity (and dangers) of alcohol was also
   present, marked by the formation of the National Prohibition Party in
   1869.
   • Other organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance
     Union also rallied against alcohol, calling for a national prohibition
     of the beverage.
     • Leaders included Frances E. Willard and Carrie A. Nation who literally wielded a hatchet and hacked up bars.
   • The Anti-Saloon League was also formed in 1893.
2. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was
   formed in 1866 to discourage the mistreatment of livestock, and the
   American Red Cross, formed by Clara Barton, a Civil War nurse, was
   formed in 1881.

XIX. Artistic Triumphs

1. Art was largely suppressed during the first half of the 1800s and
   failed to really take flight in America, forcing such men as James
   Whistler and John Singer Sargent to go to Europe to study art.
2. Mary Cassatt painted sensitive portraits of women and children, while George Inness became America’s leading landscapist.
3. Thomas Eakins was a great realist painter, while Winslow Homer was
   perhaps the most famous and the greatest of all. He painted scenes of
   typical New England life (schools and such).
4. Great sculptors included Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who made the Robert Gould Shaw memorial, located in Boston, in 1897.
5. Music reached new heights with the erection of opera houses and the emergence of jazz.
6. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, which allowed the reproduction of sounds that could be heard by listeners.
7. Henry H. Richardson was another fine architect whose “Richardsonian” architecture was famed around the country.
   • The Columbian Exposition in 1893, in Chicago, displayed many architectural triumphs.

XX. The Business of Amusement

1. In entertainment, Phineas T. Barnum (who quipped,
   “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and
   “People love to be humbugged.”) and James A. Bailey teamed
   up in 1881 to stage the “Greatest Show on Earth” (now the
   Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus).
2. “Wild West” shows, like those of “Buffalo
   Bill” Cody (and the markswoman Annie Oakley who shot holes
   through tossed silver dollars) were ever-popular, and baseball and
   football became popular as well.
3. Baseball emerged as America’s national pastime.
4. Wrestling gained popularity and respectability.
5. In 1891, James Naismith invented basketball.

I. The Clash of Cultures on the Plains

1. After the Civil War, the Great West was still relatively untamed,
   wild, full of Indians, bison, and wildlife, and sparsely populated by a
   few Mormons and Mexicans.
2. As the White settlers began to populate the Great West, the
   Indians, caught in the middle, increasingly turned against each other,
   were infected with White man’s diseases, and stuck battling to
   hunt the few remaining bison that were still ranging around.
   • The Sioux, displaced by Chippewas from the their ancestral lands at
     the headwaters of the Mississippi in the late 1700s, expanded at the
     expense of the Crows, Kiowas, and Pawnees, and justified their actions
     by reasoning that White men had done the same thing to them.
     • The Indians had become great riders, hunters, and fighters ever since the Spanish had introduced the horse to them.
3. The federal government tried to pacify the Indians by signing
   treaties at Fort Laramie in 1851 and Fort Atkinson in 1853 with the
   chiefs of the tribes. However, the U.S. failed to understand that such
   “tribes” and “chiefs” didn’t necessarily
   represent groups of people in Indian culture, and that in most cases,
   Native Americans didn’t recognize authorities outside of their
   families.
4. In the 1860s, the U.S. government intensified its efforts by
   herding Indians into still smaller and smaller reservations (like the
   Dakota Territory).
   • Indians were often promised that they wouldn’t be bothered
     further after moving out of their ancestral lands, and often, Indian
     agents were corrupt and pawned off shoddy food and products to their
     own fellow Indians.
   • White men often disregarded treaties, though, and frequently swindled the Indians.
5. In frustration, many Native American tribes fought back. A slew of
   Indian vs. White skirmishes emerged between roughly 1864 to 1890 in the
   so-called “Indian Wars.”
   • After the Civil War, the U.S. Army’s new mission
     became—go clear Indians out of the West for White settlers to
     move in.
   • Many times though, the Indians were better equipped than the
     federal troops sent to quell their revolts because arrows could be
     fired more rapidly than a muzzle-loaded rifle. Invention of the Colt
     .45 revolver (six-shooter) and Winchester repeating rifle changed this.
   • Generals Sherman, Sheridan, and Custer (at Little Bighorn) all battled Indians.

II. Receding Native Population

1. Violence reigned supreme in Indian-White relations.
   • In 1864, at Sand Creek, Colorado, Colonel J.M. Chivington’s
     militia massacred some four hundred Indians in cold blood—Indians
     who had thought they had been promised immunity and Indians who were
     peaceful and harmless.
   • In 1866, a Sioux war party ambushed Captain William J.
     Fetterman’s command of 81 soldiers and civilians who were
     constructing the Bozeman Trail to the Montana goldfields, leaving no
     survivors.
     • This massacre was one of the few Indian victories, as another treaty at Fort Laramie was signed two years later.
2. Colonel Custer found gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota
   (sacred Sioux land), and hordes of gold-seekers invaded the Sioux
   reservation in search of gold, causing Sitting Bull and the Sioux to go
   on the warpath, completely decimating Custer’s Seventh Calvary at
   Little Big Horn in the process.
   • The reinforcements that arrived later brutally hunted down the
     Indians who had attacked, including their leader, Sitting Bull (he
     escaped).
3. The Nez Percé Indians also revolted when gold seekers made
   the government shrink their reservation by 90%, and after a tortuous
   battle, Chief Joseph finally surrendered his band after a long trek
   across the Continental Divide toward Canada. He buried his hatchet and
   gave his famous speech saying, “From where the sun now stands I
   will fight no more forever.”
4. The most difficult to subdue were the Apache tribes of Arizona and
   New Mexico, led by Geronimo, but even they finally surrendered after
   being pushed to Mexico, and afterwards, they became successful farmers.
5. The Indians were subdued due to (1) the railroad, which cut through
   the heart of the West, (2) the White man’s diseases, (3) the
   extermination of the buffalo, (4) wars, and (5) the loss of their land
   to White settlement.

III. Bellowing Herds of Bison

1. In the early days, tens of millions of bison dotted the American
   prairie, and by the end of the Civil War, there were still 15 million
   buffalo grazing, but it was the eruption of the railroad that really
   started the buffalo massacre.
   • Many people killed buffalo for their meat, their skins, or their
     tongues, but many people either killed the bison for sport or killed
     them, took only one small part of their bodies (like the tongue) and
     just left the rest of the carcass to rot.
2. By 1885, fewer than 1,000 buffalo were left, and the species was in
   danger of extinction. Those left were mostly in Yellowstone National
   Park.

IV. The End of the Trail

1. Sympathy for the Indians finally materialized in the 1880s, helped
   in part by Helen Hunt Jackson’s book A Century of Dishonor and
   her novel Ramona.
   • Humanitarians wanted to kindly help Indians “walk the White
     man’s road” while the hard-liners stuck to their
     “kill ‘em all” beliefs, and no one cared much for the
     traditional Indian heritage and culture.
2. Often, zealous White missionaries would force Indians to convert,
   and in 1884, they helped urge the government to outlaw the sacred Sun
   Dance, called the Ghost Dance by Whites. It was a festival that Whites
   thought was the war-drum beating.
   • At the Battle of Wounded Knee, the “Ghost Dance” was
     brutally stamped out by U.S. troops, who killed women and children as
     well. This battle marks the end of the Indian Wars as by then the
     Indians were all either on reservations or dead.
3. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 dissolved the legal entities of all
   tribes, but if the Indians behaved the way Whites wanted them to behave
   (become farmers on reservations), they could receive full U.S.
   citizenship in 25 years (full citizenship to all Indians was granted in
   1924). Ironically, an immigrant from a foreign nation could become a
   citizen much, much faster than a native-born Native American.
   • Reservation land not allotted to Indians under the act was sold to railroads.
   • In 1879, the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania was founded to
     teach Native American children how to behave like Whites, completely
     erasing their culture.
   • The Dawes Act struck forcefully at the Indians, and by 1900 they
     had lost half the land than they had held 20 years before. This plan
     would outline U.S. policy toward Indians until the 1934 Indian
     Reorganization Act which helped the Indian population rebound and grow.

V. Mining: From Dishpan to Ore Breaker

1. Gold was discovered in California in the late 1840s, and in 1858,
   the same happened at Pike’s Peak in Colorado.
   “Fifty-Niners” flocked out there, but within a month or
   two, the gold had run out.
2. The Comstock Lode in Nevada was discovered in 1859, and a fantastic
   amount of gold and silver worth more than $340 million was mined.
3. Smaller “lucky strikes” also drew money-lovers to
   Montana, Idaho, and other western states. Anarchy in these outposts
   seemed to rule, but in the end, what was left were usually ghost towns.
4. After the surface gold was found, ore-breaking machinery was
   brought in to break the gold-bearing quartz (which was very expensive
   to do).
5. Women found new rights in these Western lands however, gaining
   suffrage in Wyoming (1869) (the first place for women to vote), Utah
   (1870), Colorado (1893) and Idaho (1896).
6. Mining also added to the folklore and American literature (Bret Harte & Mark Twain).

VI. Beef Bonanzas and the Long Drive

1. As cities back east boomed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the demand for food and meat increased sharply.
2. The problem of marketing meat profitably to the public market and
   cities was solved by the new transcontinental railroads. Cattle could
   now be shipped to the stockyards under “beef barons” like
   the Swifts and Armours.
   • The meat-packaging industry thus sprang up.
3. The “Long Drive” emerged to become a spectacular feeder
   of the slaughterhouses, as Texas cowboys herded cattle across desolate
   land to railroad terminals in Kansas.
   • Dodge City, Abilene, Ogallala, and Cheyenne became favorite stopovers.
     • At Dodge City Wyatt Earp and in Abilene, Marshal James B. Hickok maintained order.
4. The railroads made the cattle herding business prosper, but it also
   destroyed it, for the railroads also brought sheepherders and
   homesteaders who built barbed-wire, invented by Samuel Glidden, fences
   that erased the open-range days of the long cattle drives.
   • Also, blizzards in the winter of 1886-87 left dazed cattle starving and freezing.
5. Breeders learned to fence their ranches and to organize (i.e. the Wyoming Stock-Growers’ Association).
   • The legends of the cowboys were made here at this time, but lived on in American lore.

VII. The Farmers’ Frontier

1. The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed folks to get as much as 160 acres
   of land in return for living on it for five years, improving it, and
   paying a nominal fee of about $30.00. Or, it allowed folks to get land
   after only six month’s residence for $1.25 an acre.
   • Before, the U.S. government had sold land for revenue, but now, it was giving it away.
   • This act led half a million families to buy land and settle out
     West, but it often turned out to be a cruel hoax because in the dry
     Great Plains, 160 acres was rarely enough for a family to earn a living
     and survive. And often, families were forced to give up their
     homesteads before the five years were up, since droughts, bad land, and
     lack of necessities forced them out.
   • However, fraud was spawned by the Homestead Act, since almost ten
     times as much land ended up in the hands of land-grabbing promoters
     than in the hands of real farmers. Sometimes these cheats would not
     even live on the land, but say that they’d erected a
     “twelve by fourteen” dwelling—which later turned out
     to be twelve by fourteen inches!
2. Taming Western Deserts
   • Railroads such as the Northern Pacific helped develop the
     agricultural West, a place where, after the tough, horse-trodden lands
     had been plowed and watered, proved to be surprisingly fertile.
   • Due to higher wheat prices resulting from crop failures around the
     world, more people rashly pushed further westward, past the 100th
     meridian (which is also the magic 20-inch per year rainfall line),
     where it was difficult to grow crops.
     • Here, as warned by geologist John Wesley Powell, so little rain
       fell that successful farming could only be attained by massive
       irrigation.
     • To counteract the lack of water (and a six year drought in the
       1880s), farmers developed the technique of “dry farming,”
       or using shallow cultivation methods to plant and farm, but over time,
       this method created a finely pulverized surface soil that contributed
       to the notorious “Dust Bowl” several decades later.
   • A Russian species of wheat—tough and resistant to
     drought—was brought in and grew all over the Great Plains, while
     other plants were chosen in favor of corn.
   • Huge federally financed irrigation projects soon caused the
     “Great American Desert” to bloom, and dams that tamed the
     Missouri and Columbia Rivers helped water the land.

VIII. The Far West Comes of Age

1. The Great West experienced a population surge, as many people moved onto the frontier.
2. New states like Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming were admitted into the Union.
   • Not until 1896 was Utah allowed into the Union, and by the 20th
     century, only Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona remained as territories.
   • In Oklahoma, the U.S. government made available land that had
     formerly belonged to the Native Americans, and thousands of
     “Sooners” jumped the boundary line and illegally went into
     Oklahoma, often forcing U.S. troops to evict them.
   • On April 22, 1889, Oklahoma was legally opened, and 18 years later, in 1907, Oklahoma became the “Sooner State.”
3. In 1890, for the first time, the U.S. census announced that a frontier was no longer discernible.
4. The “closing” of the frontier inspired the Turner Thesis, which stated that America needed a frontier.
5. At first, the public didn’t seem to notice that there was no
   longer a frontier, but later, they began to realize that the land was
   not infinite, and concern led to the first national park being opened,
   Yellowstone, founded in 1872, followed by Yosemite and Sequoia (1890).

IX. The Fading Frontier

1. The frontier was a state of mind and a symbol of opportunity.
2. The “safety valve theory” stated that the frontier was
   like a safety valve for folks who, when it became too crowded in their
   area, could simply pack up and leave, moving West.
   • Actually, few city-dwellers left the cities for the West, since
     they didn’t know how to farm; the West increasingly became less
     and less a land of opportunity for farms, but still was good for hard
     laborers and ranchers.
   • Still, free acreage did lure a host of immigrant farmers to the
     West—farmers that probably wouldn’t have come to the West
     had the land not been cheap—and the lure of the West may have led
     to city employers raising wages to keep workers in the cities.
3. It seems that the cities, not the West, were the safety valves, as
   busted farmers and fortune seekers made Chicago and San Francisco into
   large cities.
4. Of hundreds of years, Americans had expanded west, and it was in
   the trans-Mississippi west that the Indians made their last stand,
   where Anglo culture collided with Hispanic culture, and where America
   faced Asia.
5. The life that we live today is one that those pioneers dreamed of,
   and the life that they lived is one of which we can only dream.

X. The Farm Becomes a Factory

1. Farmers were now increasingly producing single “cash”
   crops, since they could then concentrate their efforts, make profits,
   and buy manufactured goods from mail order companies, such as the Aaron
   Montgomery Ward catalogue (first sent in 1872) or from Sears.
2. Large-scale farmers tried banking, railroading, and manufacturing,
   but new inventions in farming, such as a steam engine that could pull a
   plow, seeder, or harrow, the new twine binder, and the combined
   reaper-thresher sped up harvesting and lowered the number of people
   needed to farm.
   • Farmers, though, were inclined to blame banks and railroads for their losses rather than their own shortcomings.
3. The mechanization of agriculture led to enormous farms, such as
   those in the Minnesota-North Dakota area and the Central Valley of
   California.
   • Henry George described the state as a country of plantations and estates.
   • California vegetables and fruits, raised by ill-paid Mexican workers, made handsome profits when sold to the East.

XI. Deflation Dooms the Debtor

1. In the 1880s, when world markets rebounded, produced more crops,
   and forced prices down, the farmers in America were the ones that found
   ruin.
2. Paying back debts was especially difficult in this deflation-filled
   time during which there was simply not enough money to go around for
   everyone. Less money in circulation was called
   “contraction.”
3. Farmers operated year after year on losses and lived off their fat
   as best they could, but thousands of homesteads fell to mortgages and
   foreclosures, and farm tenancy rather than farm ownership was
   increasing.
4. The fall of the farmers in the late 1800s was similar to the fall
   of the South and its “King Cotton” during the Civil War:
   depending solely on one crop was good in good times but disastrous
   during less prosperous times.

XII. Unhappy Farmers

1. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, droughts, grasshopper plagues,
   and searing heat waves made the toiling farmers miserable and poor.
2. City, state, and federal governments added to this by gouging the
   farmers, ripping them off by making them pay painful taxes when they
   could least afford to do so.
3. The railroads (by fixing freight prices), the middlemen (by taking
   huge cuts in profits), and the various harvester, barbed wire, and
   fertilizer trusts all harassed farmers.
4. In 1890, one half of the U.S. population still consisted of farmers, but they were hopelessly disorganized.

XIII. The Farmers Take Their Stand