Whigs and Democrats

Chapter 11

Lecture 1: Post-War of 1812 Political Events

National Republicans

By the end of the War of 1812, the Federalist Party was no longer a significant force in American Politics
Era of Good Feelings (one-party dominance)
Irony: Republicans adopt Federalist policies after Federalists disappear

📖 Understanding This Slide

Main idea: After the War of 1812, the Federalists fade, and Republicans briefly dominate—ironically adopting some Federalist-style policies during the Era of Good Feelings. Think of it like a team keeping its rival’s playbook because it works.

⚡ Content Breakdown

Federalists decline: By 1815, they’re no longer a major force.
Era of Good Feelings: One-party dominance means fewer open partisan fights, but tensions still simmer.
Policy irony: Republicans begin backing nation-building measures once linked to Federalists.

🏛️ Big Picture Synthesis

This slide sets up a political realignment: labels stay “Republican,” but the governing toolkit borrows from the old Federalist emphasis on national capacity. This means later debates won’t be about whether the nation should build; they’ll be about who has the power to do it and who benefits.

🎓 Historians Weigh In

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought

Howe emphasizes how national development and communications reshaped politics—clarifying why Republican adoption of “national” policies felt natural in this moment.

Henry Clay's American System (1816)

Three interconnected policies to build American economic power.

1) Protective Tariff

2) Second Bank of the United States

3) Federal Internal Improvements

📖 Understanding This Slide

Claim: Clay’s American System is a three-part package—protective tariff, national bank, and federal internal improvements—meant to work together, not as à la carte policies.

Framing move: Introduce this as a design for a national market economy after the War of 1812, when the U.S. is trying to stabilize money, protect infant industry, and knit regions together.

⚙️ Talking Points (brief)

Protective Tariff: Buys time for manufacturers to scale by raising the price of competing imports; politically touchy for export-oriented regions.
Second Bank of the U.S.: Coordinates currency and credit; aims to prevent post-war chaos of state bank notes and speculative swings.
Internal Improvements: Federal support for roads/canals to connect producers to markets; constitutional fight over federal authority vs. states.

🧭 Why it mattered

Interdependence: Finance enables industry; industry needs transport; transport pays off when goods move cheaply and widely.
Politics: Shifts debate from “growth or not” to who pays/who benefits and what the Constitution permits.
Regional tension: Tariffs feel like a tax on consumers/exporters; improvements look like federal favoritism unless fairly distributed.

🧪 Classroom prompts

“If you remove one leg (tariff, bank, or improvements), what fails first and why?”
“Which region would embrace this package? Which would balk, and on what grounds?”

🎓 Historians Weigh In

Daniel Walker Howe reads the American System as deliberate nation-building through infrastructure and finance—an effort to align republican governance with market expansion.

➡️ Transition to Slide 5B

Next, use the three-legged stool image to make the reinforcement logic explicit; keep the constitutional and regional fault lines in view as the key sources of conflict.

How the Three Parts Work Together

Three-legged stool illustrating interdependence of tariff, bank, and internal improvements — Tariff • Bank • Internal Improvements

How the System Reinforces Itself:

The Tariff protects American factories from foreign competition.

Those factories, in turn, depend on a stable Bank to finance production and investment.

Both industry and finance require Internal Improvements—roads, canals, and ports— to move goods efficiently and connect markets.

📖 Understanding This Slide

Main idea: The “three-legged stool” metaphor captures how tariff policy, national banking, and internal improvements interlock to create a national market economy.

🏛️ Big Picture Synthesis

Each leg of the stool represents one element of Henry Clay’s American System. The strength of the nation depends on all three—protective tariffs, financial stability, and modern infrastructure—working together.

The Tariff protects American factories from foreign competition. Those factories, in turn, depend on a stable Bank to finance production and investment.

Both industry and finance require Internal Improvements—roads, canals, and ports— to move goods efficiently and connect markets. As trade expands, tariff revenues rise and strengthen the system again.

🎓 Historians Weigh In

Daniel Walker Howe in What Hath God Wrought interprets the American System as an attempt to harmonize republican governance with market expansion—a deliberate nation-building project through finance and transportation.

Internal Improvements: The Nationalist Dream Fails

The Constitutional Problem:

The Sectional Problem:

The Result: Federal government largely stays out • States build their own infrastructure (Erie Canal built by New York) • First crack in post-war nationalism

📖 Understanding This Slide

Main idea: Even supporters of development balk at the constitutional question: does Congress have power to fund roads and canals? Regional interests then sharpen the dispute.

⚡ Content Breakdown

Textual gap: No explicit clause authorizing federal construction → Madison vetoes the Bonus Bill; Monroe concurs.
Sectional divide: North/West favor national funding; many Southerners resist paying for projects that mainly help other regions.
Outcome: States (e.g., New York’s Erie Canal) take the lead; first cracks in post-war nationalism.

🏛️ Big Picture Synthesis

The fight isn’t about whether roads are useful—it’s about who has the authority and who reaps the gains. This is where it gets interesting: constitutional scruples become proxies for regional power.

🎓 Historians Weigh In

John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement

Larson shows how arguments over constitutional authority masked deeper concerns about regional advantage and political leverage.

John Marshall Reshapes American Government

John Marshall, Chief Justice (1801–1835)

Serves 34 years—spanning the Jefferson through Jackson administrations
Appointed by John Adams (Federalist), outlasts his party

📖 Understanding This Slide

Main idea: As Chief Justice, John Marshall uses landmark decisions to strengthen federal power and stabilize a national market. Think of him as the system architect hardening the operating system.

⚡ Content Breakdown

Long tenure: 1801–1835 bridges party eras.
Project: Shift from fragmented state authority to a coherent national framework.
Three case themes: bank creation, sanctity of contracts, and control of interstate commerce.

🏛️ Big Picture Synthesis

Marshall’s pattern—favoring national over state authority—lays legal tracks for the kind of economy the American System envisions. This means courts become a critical venue for deciding who governs growth.

🎓 Historians Weigh In

R. Kent Newmyer, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court

Newmyer underscores how Marshall fused legal reasoning with a nation-building vision—crafting doctrine to sustain a unified market.

John Marshall Reshapes American Government

Marshall's Project: Building Federal Power

Before Marshall → Weak federal government, strong states

After Marshall → Strong federal government, national economy

How? Three landmark cases:

Can Congress create a national bank?
Can states break contracts?
Who controls interstate trade?

Watch for the pattern: Marshall consistently chooses federal power over state power

📖 Understanding This Slide

⚡ Content Breakdown

Long tenure: 1801–1835 bridges party eras.
Project: Shift from fragmented state authority to a coherent national framework.
Three case themes: bank creation, sanctity of contracts, and control of interstate commerce.

🏛️ Big Picture Synthesis

🎓 Historians Weigh In

R. Kent Newmyer, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court

Newmyer underscores how Marshall fused legal reasoning with a nation-building vision—crafting doctrine to sustain a unified market.

McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)

The Case:

State of Maryland levies tax on Baltimore branch of the Bank of the United States
Maryland's goal: Tax the Bank out of existence

Two Questions:

1. Does Congress have the right to charter a bank?
2. Can states tax federal agencies?

Significance: Establishes doctrine of "implied powers" • Federal law is supreme over state law

📖 Understanding This Slide

Main idea: Implied powers permit Congress to charter a bank, and states cannot tax federal instruments—because taxation could destroy what the nation creates.

⚡ Content Breakdown

Issue 1: Congress may charter a bank under implied powers.
Issue 2: States may not tax federal entities (“the power to tax is the power to destroy”).
Significance: Confirms federal supremacy and a flexible Constitution capable of meeting national needs.

🏛️ Big Picture Synthesis

By endorsing implied powers, the Court legitimizes tools required for a growing economy. This means national solutions need not be spelled out verbatim to be constitutional.

🎓 Historians Weigh In

R. Kent Newmyer, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court

Newmyer reads McCulloch as Marshall’s clearest statement that constitutional text carries the means to accomplish national ends.

Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819)

The Case:

New Hampshire tries to take over Dartmouth College
Wants to convert private college into state university

Marshall's Decision:

Original charter is a protected contract
States cannot violate or break private contracts
Even if "public good" might be served

Significance: Businesses can hold charter privileges indefinitely • States cannot revoke corporate charters • Protects private property from state interference • Lays groundwork for corporate power

📖 Understanding This Slide

Main idea: Corporate charters are contracts protected from state interference—fortifying private institutions against political swings.

⚡ Content Breakdown

State attempt: Convert a private college into a public one.
Ruling: The charter stands as a protected contract.
Significance: Stabilizes corporate rights and encourages investment.

🏛️ Big Picture Synthesis

Protecting contracts lowers uncertainty for businesses and schools alike. This means the rules of the game won’t be rewritten every election—good for long-term planning.

🎓 Historians Weigh In

Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860

Horwitz argues that nineteenth-century doctrine increasingly favored entrepreneurial interests—Dartmouth being a key step in that shift.

Gibbons v. Ogden (1824): Who Controls Trade?

The Conflict:

Aaron Ogden: Operates steamboats with New York state monopoly license
Thomas Gibbons: Operates steamboats with federal license
Both run steamboats in same waters (Hudson River/NY harbor)
Question: Whose license wins—state or federal?

Early 19th-century steamboat on a river, circa 1824

Steamboat on the Mississippi River (c. 1824)

Gibbons v. Ogden (1824): Who Controls Trade?

Why It Matters:

If states control trade → 13+ different trade rules, barriers between states
If federal government controls trade → unified national market

Marshall's Decision: Federal government has exclusive power over interstate commerce • State monopoly is unconstitutional • Federal law > State law

📖 Understanding This Slide

Main idea: The federal government controls interstate commerce, striking down state monopolies that impede a unified market.

⚡ Content Breakdown (Decision & Significance)

Decision: Federal authority governs interstate trade.
Significance: Clears barriers so goods, people, and ideas move across state lines under one set of rules.

🏛️ Big Picture Synthesis

Knocking down state monopolies fosters a national marketplace. This means entrepreneurs can scale beyond state borders without a patchwork of permissions.

🎓 Historians Weigh In

R. Kent Newmyer, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court

Newmyer shows how Gibbons operationalized the Commerce Clause to make the market national in practice, not just on paper.

Marshall Court: Winners and Losers

Who Benefits?

Federal government (more power)

Businesses and corporations (protected contracts, free trade)

Nationalists (unified country, strong center)

Who Loses?

State governments (less autonomy)

States' rights advocates (especially in South)

Those who fear concentrated power

The Legacy: Sets up conflicts that will explode in the Nullification Crisis and ultimately the Civil War

📖 Understanding These Slides

Main idea: Across the Marshall Court cases, federal supremacy and business security rise as state autonomy recedes. The Court becomes an engine of national consolidation—rebalancing American law toward a unified, market-driven order.

⚡ Content Breakdown

Winners: Federal institutions, corporations, and nationalists who benefit from stable contracts and a uniform economic field.

Losers: States’-rights advocates and those wary of centralized authority or concentrated wealth.

Legacy: These rulings shift the legal framework from local autonomy to national coherence—tensions that will resurface in the Nullification Crisis and the Civil War.

🏛️ Big Picture Synthesis

Legal doctrine did not merely reflect politics—it shaped them. Marshall’s decisions rewrote the architecture of power so that court-made rules determined economic winners and losers long before ballots or legislation did.

⚖️ Power Shift Summary

Federal Power ↑ — Constitutional interpretation expands national authority.
State Power ↓ — Local sovereignty yields to federal supremacy.
Corporate Power ↑ — Contracts and charters gain legal protection from state interference.
Commerce Power ↑ — Interstate trade becomes a federal domain, binding the states into one market.

💡 Key Principle

Federal supremacy over states in all disputes. This animating idea links every major Marshall case and defines the judicial legacy of the early Republic.

🎓 Historians Weigh In

Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860

Horwitz interprets this era as a structural rebalancing of law toward market development—explaining the distributional “winners and losers.”

R. Kent Newmyer, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court

Newmyer sees the Marshall Court as forging a nationalist legal system that translated Hamiltonian ideals into enduring constitutional doctrine.

🧭 Looking Ahead

The Marshall Court’s framework endures—defining the balance between liberty, law, and economic growth. Its tensions will drive the next generation of political battles over sovereignty, commerce, and sectional identity.

The Argument over Missouri

The Request:

Missouri applies for statehood (first state from the Louisiana Purchase)
Would enter as a slave state

The Challenge:

Rep. James Tallmadge Jr. (NY) proposes amendments:

Ban on importing enslaved people into Missouri
Gradual emancipation for those born after statehood (freedom at age 25)

Result: Would make Missouri a free state

📖 Understanding This Slide

Main idea: Missouri’s statehood request triggered the first great sectional crisis over slavery’s expansion, when Tallmadge’s amendments sought to limit slavery in the new state.

⚡ Content Breakdown

The Request: Missouri petitions to join as a slave state.

The Challenge: Tallmadge Amendments—ban slave importation, establish gradual emancipation.

The Reaction: Congress fractures along sectional lines; debate reveals the fragility of national unity.

🏛️ Big Picture Synthesis

The argument over Missouri was less about the territory itself and more about the future balance of political power between North and South. This means every new state admission became a struggle for national direction.

🎓 Historians Weigh In

Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath

Forbes contends that the Missouri controversy was a crisis of equilibrium—an attempt to preserve political balance rather than moral reform.

Missouri: It's About Power, Not Morality

Why This Debate Mattered: POLITICAL POWER

The Three-Fifths Compromise gives South extra representation:

Enslaved people count as 3/5 of a person for representation
In 1790: South holds 47% of House seats with only 40% of white population
North fears this advantage grows with each new slave state

The Sectional Balance:

North dominates House (more total population)
South controls Senate (equal state representation: 11 free, 11 slave states)
Each new state tips the balance

📖 Understanding This Slide

Main idea: The fight over Missouri is about political power—the Three-Fifths Compromise amplifies Southern representation, and each new state could tilt national control.

⚡ Content Breakdown

Representation bonus: Counting enslaved people at three-fifths boosts Southern seats.
House vs. Senate: North holds the House by population; the South protects parity in the Senate.
Implication: Every admission threatens the balance.

🏛️ Big Picture Synthesis

When rules of representation magnify one side’s power, policy fights become existential. This means the Missouri controversy set patterns that repeated into the 1850s.

🎓 Historians Weigh In

Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath

Forbes shows how numerical advantages—not just ideas—drove strategy on both sides of the sectional divide.

The Missouri Compromise (1820)

The Deal:

Missouri admitted as slave state

Maine separated from Massachusetts, admitted as free state

Maintains Senate balance: 12 free states, 12 slave states

Slavery banned in Louisiana Purchase territory above

Drew a line across the western territories

The Reaction:

Temporarily resolves the crisis
But exposes deep rift between North and South
Thomas Jefferson: "a fire bell in the night"—warning of disaster ahead

📖 Understanding This Slide

Main idea: The Missouri Compromise balances the Senate by admitting Missouri (slave) and Maine (free) and sets a geographic line (36°30′) for slavery’s expansion.

⚡ Content Breakdown

Admissions: Missouri as slave; Maine as free → parity preserved.
Line: Slavery banned north of 36°30′ in the Louisiana Purchase (with Missouri’s exception).
Reaction: Crisis cools but deep divisions remain.

🏛️ Big Picture Synthesis

Drawing a line postpones conflict by managing it rather than resolving root disagreements. This means future politics will orbit that line until it breaks.

🎓 Historians Weigh In

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought

Howe treats the Compromise as a tactical pause that stabilized national politics without healing the sectional wound.

The Missouri Compromise Line (36°30')

Missouri Compromise (1820) – Expansion of slavery and sectional balance

The Panic of 1819: America's First Depression

First nationwide economic depression in U.S. history

The Perfect Storm (Three Causes):

1. International: European farms recover after Napoleonic Wars

Less demand for American grain
Crop prices collapse

2. Latin America: Revolutions disrupt gold/silver supplies | Destablizes Currency

3. Domestic: U.S. banks expand credit recklessly

Everyone borrows to buy land
Speculation creates inflation bubble

The Trigger: Cotton prices collapse → Credit bubble bursts → Banks demand immediate repayment

📖 Understanding This Slide

Main idea: A convergence of global recovery, monetary disruption, and domestic over-lending pops a speculative bubble—triggering the first national depression.

⚡ Content Breakdown

International: European farm recovery lowers demand for U.S. grain.
Latin America: Revolutions unsettle precious-metal flows and money supply.
Domestic: Reckless credit expansion fuels land speculation and inflation.
Trigger: Cotton price collapse bursts the bubble; banks call in loans.

🏛️ Big Picture Synthesis

Interconnected markets mean local prosperity hinges on global currents and financial discipline. This means monetary policy and credit practices become political flashpoints.

🎓 Historians Weigh In

Murray N. Rothbard, The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies

Rothbard emphasizes how credit expansion and policy responses shaped both the downturn and the politics that followed.

The Panic of 1819: Human Cost and Political Fallout

The Bank's "Solution":

Langdon Cheves (president of Second Bank) demands immediate repayment
Forces state banks to pay in specie (gold/silver coins, not paper)
Result: Saves the Bank BUT destroys local economies

The Human Toll:

Philadelphia: 75% unemployed
Tent cities spring up in Baltimore and other cities
Farms foreclosed, sold for pennies on the dollar
Families lose everything overnight

The Panic of 1819: Political Consequences

Political Consequences:

Public rage turns toward the Second Bank
Nicknamed "The Monster"
"The Bank was saved—and the people were ruined"
Plants seeds of Jackson's Bank War (1830s)

Legacy: Banking policy becomes a moral and political issue — trust in national institutions fractures.

Whigs and Democrats

National Republicans

Henry Clay's American System (1816)

1) Protective Tariff ⓘ

2) Second Bank of the United States ⓘ

3) Federal Internal Improvements ⓘ

How the Three Parts Work Together

How the System Reinforces Itself:

Internal Improvements: The Nationalist Dream Fails

The Constitutional Problem: ⓘ

The Sectional Problem: ⓘ

John Marshall Reshapes American Government

John Marshall, Chief Justice (1801–1835)

John Marshall Reshapes American Government

Marshall's Project: Building Federal Power

How? Three landmark cases:

McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)

The Case:

Two Questions:

Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819)

The Case:

Marshall's Decision:

Gibbons v. Ogden (1824): Who Controls Trade?

The Conflict:

Gibbons v. Ogden (1824): Who Controls Trade?

Why It Matters:

Marshall Court: Winners and Losers

Who Benefits?

Who Loses?

The Argument over Missouri

The Request:

The Challenge:

Missouri: It's About Power, Not Morality

Why This Debate Mattered: POLITICAL POWER

The Three-Fifths Compromise gives South extra representation:

The Sectional Balance:

The Missouri Compromise (1820)

The Deal:

The Reaction:

The Missouri Compromise Line (36°30')

The Panic of 1819: America's First Depression

The Perfect Storm (Three Causes):

The Panic of 1819: Human Cost and Political Fallout

The Bank's "Solution":

The Human Toll:

The Panic of 1819: Political Consequences

Political Consequences:

1) Protective Tariff

2) Second Bank of the United States

3) Federal Internal Improvements

The Constitutional Problem:

The Sectional Problem: