I. “The Era of Nationalism, 1815–1828”

The “Era of Nationalism” was influenced by federal governmental growth, expansion into the West (the new “Great Migration” beginning in 1815) and improvements in transportation.

The Tariff of 1816 and the Bonus Bill of 1816 (promoting internal improvements (especially in transportation) nation-wide), were instituted to protect the American economy from low-priced English goods.  This measure was “supported by John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster, all leading statesmen of the antebellum period.

Monroe, James (1758 – 1831) became the Fifth President of the United States (for two terms: 1817–1825; he won his first term with 183 to 34 electoral votes) and the third president of the “Virginia Dynasty”   Ushering in the “Era of Good Feelings,” it lasted until the Panic of 1819.
Included in the Monroe cabinet were the following individuals:

1) John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State
2) William H. Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury
3) John C. Calhoun, Secretary of War

“Sectionalism and Party Politics, 1824–1828”

A. The “Emergence of a Sectional Pattern” in the United States.

1) U.S. “sections” each demanded political concessions that benefited their respective regions by 1824.

A) The industrial Northeast manufacturing centers favored protective tariffs.

B) The Southern cotton producing regions favored low import tariffs and free trade.

C) The “agricultural West insisted on the availability of inexpensive lands for the expansion of settlement, tariffs to protect home products, and “federally built internal improvements.”

1) through 1820, Congressmen voted in party caucuses for the nomination of Presidential candidates.  Before the election of 1824, this practice was changed because it was thought to violate the principles of American democracy and the separation of powers, by granting too much authority to the legislative branch of the government.

2) The candidates for President included:

a) William H. Crawford (GA) a states’ rights advocate who represented Georgia’s planter aristocracy.]

b) John Quincy Adams (MA)

c) Henry Clay, (KY) the advocate of an American System which brought together the northern desire for high protective tariffs and the southern and western aims of federally funded internal improvements.  He was also the Speaker of the House of Representatives during his campaign.

d) Andrew Jackson (TN) (along with (SC) Vice Presidential candidate John C. Calhoun), both popular candidates due to Jackson’s status as a military hero, and both their images as representatives of disenfranchised masses in the West and South (“piney woods”).

3) Jackson received the majority of the Electoral College votes (99).  Adams came in second (84), and Crawford won 41, while Clay received 37 votes.

a) because there wasn’t a clear majority of votes won by any of the four candidates, the House of Representatives was required under the Constitution of the U.S. to make the final choice.

i) Henry Clay as Speaker of the House was in a position to affect the outcome of this vote, and did so by influencing the Congress to support the election of John Quincy Adams to the Presidency.  He did this because he favored Adams’s position on national policy and internal improvements, etc., but also because he figured that Adams would lose the 1828 election and saw his efforts in 1824 as a means to position himself favorably to oppose Jackson in four years.

ii) Adams became President of the United States.

4) The newly elected Adams installed Henry Clay as the Secretary of State, causing Jackson’s followers to claim that Adams and Clay had negotiated a "Corrupt Bargain.”  Such claims were untrue, but they were strong enough to hurt the Adams presidency and ruin Clay’s plans to become president.

a) Party realignment resulted from these two opposing camps (1824).

i) The anti-Adams/Clay camp became known as the Democrats.

ii) The pro-Adams/Clay camp coalesced into the Whig party (though it did not formally organize until 1834).

1) Clay’s “American System” internal improvements (roads and canals, primarily).

2) The Panama Congress in which all the newly independent Latin American “republics” met at a convention aimed at achieving recognition from Spain.  Secretary of State Clay convinced President Adams to support their effort and a delegate from the United States was sent.  Opponents of Clay and Adams, particularly in the South, claimed that the United States might thus support the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico (both island colonies had populations composed mostly of slaves).  The southern U.S. critics feared slave revolts in their own states.

3) The controversy between the State of Georgia and Creek Indians in that state resulted in the Adams administration supporting Indian land concessions and removal in 1825 and 1827.

4) Northern and middle Atlantic industrial regions pushed for new tariff measures in 1820; due to strong southern opposition, it failed, but a new measure, the Tariff of 1824 was passed.

a) In a political move aimed at strengthening the position of Andrew Jackson, the Democratic party pushed a new tariff bill through the Congress and likewise also argued against it, hoping for its defeat by all factions (northern industrialists and southern cotton growers alike).   The Democratic proponents of the tariff figured that once it was defeated, they could still claim in the North and West that they had created it (and thereby win political support), and in the South, they could claim to have defeated it, likewise winning southern votes.  To their surprise, the bill passed both houses of Congress, and once signed into law by President Adams, it became known as the Tariff of 1828 (Tariff of Abominations).  This new tariff hurt Adams in his bid for reelection, and he lost to Andrew Jackson in the fall of 1828.

As Europe entered the conservatism of “the Age of Metternich” by 1830, the United States emerged from its conservative period.  American isolationism and expansionism led to what has been described as the “Rise of the Common Man.”  Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson, despite his own aristocratic origins, was thought to represent common working class people.  Reflecting the role of common people in politics in 1828, five of the eastern states removed property restriction to the vote (the newer states, such as Mississippi and Alabama did not include such restrictions in their constitutions).

A. Martin Van Buren was the Secretary of State.

B. The Jackson administration is known for the following:

1) use of the spoils system, whereby government bureaucratic posts were given to persona loyal to Jackson (according to the president, they more readily represented the will of the common people than civil servants who had their jobs for a long time).

2) Indian Removal; as we have discussed in class, only a small number of Indians remained east of the Mississippi River by the end of his terms.

3) Internal improvements and land policies.

a) Jackson favored the creation of road systems on state and local levels, and not on a federal level.

b) Jackson favored “liberal” land policies such as pre-emption, allowing “pioneers” to have the first right to the purchase of public lands that they occupied.  Eastern moderates (including the Kentuckian Henry Clay) preferred to sell public lands at market rates, distributing the income from such sales among the states for their uses.

4) The “Tariff Controversy” (re: the Tariff of 1828).

a) South Carolina, the home of John C. Calhoun, the Vice President, adamantly opposed the “Tariff of Abominations.”

Enmity developed between the President and the Vice President when John Calhoun supported nullification and when his wife snubbed Peggy Eaton (see foot note).  Jackson was further enraged when he found out that Calhoun was the only member of the J. Q. Adams presidential cabinet who argued for the punishment of Jackson for his Florida aggression in 1818 (see above), thus revealing a long-standing dislike on the part of Calhoun.

With the brewing controversy over nullification, Jackson chose Martin Van Buren to be his running mate in the elections of 1832.

Since the Tariff of 1828 brought in record amounts of revenue for the federal government, allowing a budget surplus for the first time in U.S. history (and since Jackson’s veto of internal improvement spending, the money could not be touched), President Jackson asked the Congress to revise it in the Tariff of 1832.

The State of South Carolina, led by Senator-elect John C. Calhoun (who by then had quit the Vice Presidency), called a convention whereby they declared the Tariff of 1832 null and void.

Jackson responded by issuing a Nullification Proclamation, calling on South Carolinians to support the Union, and he pushed for the passage of his "Force Bill," allowing for Congressional "authorization to deploy the military" against nullificationist South Carolina. (1832)

Henry Clay drafted the Compromise Tariff (1833), that ordered the gradual reduction of tariffs until 1842, providing a remedy for increasing hostilities that caused Jackson to send “General Winfield Scott to Charleston, [and] order military and naval forces to concentrate near the State boundary, and openly avowed his intention, if matters went too far, of hanging Calhoun ‘higher than Haman [of the Bible].’ . . .When [S. C. nullification leader Robert Young] Hayne [1791–1839] heard of this threat, he told Benton that he doubted whether the President would really hang anybody.  ‘I tell you, Hayne,’ the Missouri Senator replied, ‘when Jackson begins to talk about hanging, they can begin to look for the ropes.’”

Jackson later regretted not jailing the South Carolina nullification leaders.

5) The Jackson–Biddle Bank War (1832)

a) Andrew Jackson opposed the re-charter of the Second Bank of the United States (head-quartered at Philadelphia with 29 branches; the first charter was set to expire in 1836).  The Bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle, nevertheless sought a re-charter on the advice of Daniel Webster (Webster and Clay “were on the bank’s payroll”) who saw a political advantage (an election issue) in the likelihood of Jackson’s veto.

b) Jackson opposed the Bank because he thought that it represented elite moneyed interests that used banks to oppress the poor, generally.

i) The Bank often foreclosed on creditors who were unable to repay their debts in a timely manner.

ii) The Bank forbade the state banks from issuing their own currency of the liberal granting of loans.

iii) Nicholas Biddle did not hesitate to freely loan money to anti-Jackson Congressmen and anti-Jackson publications.

The Election of 1832:

1) Democrat – President: Andrew Jackson, V. P. Martin Van Buren
2) National Republican – President: Henry Clay, V. P. John Sergeant (with the FIRST party platform in U.S. history).
3) Anti-Masonic – President: William Wirt, V. P. Amos Ellmaker

Though the popular vote was 687,502 for Jackson and 530,097 for Clay, the President was reelected by a landslide in the Electoral College (210 to 49).  Said Wirt of Jackson’s widespread popularity: “He may be President for life if he chooses.”

Having a mandate, as far as he was concerned, Jackson immediately dismantled the Second Bank of the United States (even though the charter was not set to expire until 1836), by removing all of its deposits and turning them over to the Secretary of the Treasury Robert B. Taney, who deposited them in a series of “carefully selected state banks” (the Independent Treasury System) called pet banks by Jackson’s critics.

“Businessmen all over the country begged Congress to revoke Jackson’s order, committees besieged the President with protests, and the Senate passed Clay’s resolutions censuring him for his action” in 1834 (the first President to be censured by the Senate until 1998).  In 1837 Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton successfully proposed to strike the Senate censure against Jackson from the record.

The result of this development was “wildcat banking” (especially in the West), as small banking spread like wildfire between 1830 and 1837 (as also did their shaky loans and increase in the amount of currency in circulation); inflation skyrocketed.  This inflationary period (and short-term prosperity in the upper income levels) also resulted in great the expansion of internal improvements (financed by eastern U.S. and English banks).  The simultaneous surplus (over $5 million) of money from the collection of import duties was distributed to the states in proportion to their populations under the Distribution Bill (1836), which had the effect of stimulating more spending and inflation.

In his attempt to check the rise of inflation, President Jackson issued the Specie Circular (1836), which required that all land purchases be made in gold and silver coin.  Nevertheless, this and other preemptive economic measures were unable to stop the Panic of 1837 that began soon after Andrew Jackson left office.

His successor, Martin Van Buren (nicknamed Martin “Van Ruin” by his detractors), inherited the financial mess of the Jacksonian economy.