Gregory Bodenhamer Mechanicsburg Pa On reaching the Pacific in November 1805, the expedition returned eastward. The journals kept by Lewis and Clark and other members of the expedition provided a wealth of information about the geography, the plant and animal life, and the customs of native tribes in the trans-Mississippi west. In addition to stimulating later settlement and trade in the region, the expedition reinforced the American claim to the Oregon Country that was first made by Lieutenant Robert Gray, who came upon the Columbia River in 1792.

On reaching the Pacific in November 1805, the expedition returned eastward. The journals kept by Lewis and Clark and other members of the expedition provided a wealth of information about the geography, the plant and animal life, and the customs of native tribes in the trans-Mississippi west. In addition to stimulating later settlement and trade in the region, the expedition reinforced the American claim to the Oregon Country that was first made by Lieutenant Robert Gray, who came upon the Columbia River in 1792.

Jefferson authorized other expeditions as well. He sent Lieutenant Zebulon Pike to map the source of the Mississippi River. Pike's map was later proved incorrect, however, due mainly to the complexity of the rivers and lakes at the headwaters. Pike also headed west to explore the area between the Arkansas and Red rivers, but he became lost and was taken into custody by Spanish soldiers on the Rio Grande. Although his maps and papers were confiscated, Pike remembered enough to reconstruct a good deal of his records after he was released.

Neutrality under Jefferson and Madison

Jefferson had no problem trouncing his Federalist opponent in 1804. Obtaining the Louisiana Purchase and accomplishing a reduction of the national debt assured him of an overwhelming electoral victory.

A troubled second term. The Republicans' elation at the results of the election did not last long. A disaffected Aaron Burr, whose political career ended when he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, became involved in a plot either to create an independent nation in the Louisiana-Mississippi-West Florida region or invade Mexico. Historians remain unsure. Burr was indicted in two states for Hamilton's death, and in early 1807, he was arrested on Jefferson's order and charged with treason. His trial before Chief Justice John Marshall ended in an acquittal because Marshall defined treason under the Constitution very narrowly. The Burr case is interesting from another constitutional perspective: Jefferson refused to turn over documents or appear in court to testify based on a claim of executive privilege.

With the Federalist party rapidly declining, Jefferson had to meet the challenge of growing factionalism within his own party. One group, known as the Quids, criticized the president for compromising Republican ideology. John Randolph, the Quid leader, refused to accept the idea that a political party on taking power might have to view things differently than when it was in opposition to the party in office. For example, Jefferson endured Randolph's attacks for agreeing to a compromise on the Yazoo land fraud, a Georgia-area land speculation scheme in which innocent buyers of fraudulently purchased land would have lost their investments. Foreign policy, rather than party or domestic issues, dominated his second term and the administration of his successor, James Madison.

War between France and Great Britain. The renewed fighting between Great Britain and France (1803) severely tested American neutrality. The situation became even more difficult when the British navy under Lord Nelson defeated the French fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and gained control of the seas. American merchants had been profiting from the war by shipping sugar and coffee brought from French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean to Europe. Great Britain protested because the prices it was getting for its West Indies products were declining. Noting that French ports visited by neutral U.S. merchant ships (to preserve the French merchant marine from Great Britain) would have been closed to the United States in peacetime (allowing only French deliveries), Britain invoked the Rule of 1756, stating that such ports should not be open during war to neutral replacements. American traders got around the rule by taking French and Spanish products to American ports, unloading them, and then reloading them for European ports as “American” exports.

By 1805, Britain had had enough of such deceptions, and through a series of trade decrees began a blockade of French-controlled European ports. The British as well as the French ignored U.S. neutrality claims and seized American merchant ships. Great Britain resumed the policy of impressment, taking alleged British navy deserters off American vessels and returning them to British service. The life of an American sailor was hard but nothing like that in the Royal Navy with its harsh discipline and low pay. Many British deserters had become American citizens, but this did not stop British officials from impressing them, nor did the British hesitate in taking U.S.-born citizens, who could even prove their American birth. Between 1807 and 1812, the Royal Navy impressed some six thousand American seamen.

In June 1807, the British warship Leopard attacked the Chesapeake, an American navy frigate, and four alleged deserters were removed. Prior impressment actions had involved merchant ships; this one, however, involved a U.S. navy ship. Amid the public's cry for war against Britain, Jefferson turned to economic pressure to resolve the crisis.

The Embargo Act. Jefferson's solution to the problems with Great Britain and France was to deny both countries American goods. In December 1807, Congress passed the Embargo Act, which stopped exports and prohibited the departure of merchant ships for foreign ports. The act also effectively ended imports because foreign ships would not bring products to the United States if they had to leave without cargo. The British got around the Embargo Act by developing trade connections in South America, while in the United States, thousands of sailors were thrown out of work, merchants declared bankruptcy, and southern and western farmers had no outlet for their crops.

At the time, the Embargo Act was generally viewed as a failure. While the economic costs to Americans were high, trade did continue. Enforcement was lax, and American captains used a loophole in the law to claim that they had legally sailed into European ports only after being “blown off course” by adverse winds; there were a suspiciously great many instances of bad weather between 1807 and 1809. The Embargo Act did, however, result in an increase in manufacturing. The number of cotton mills in the United States, for example, increased from fifteen to eighty-seven in just two years, and other domestic industries took root to replace foreign imports.

The mood of the country in 1808 encouraged Jefferson not to seek a third term. Despite the nation's unhappiness over the embargo, Republican James Madison was elected president and the Republicans kept control of both houses of Congress. The Embargo Act was repealed on March 1, 1809, just before Madison took office.

Madison and neutrality. Madison was just as committed as Jefferson to staying out of the European war, and he continued to rely on economic pressure. The Non-Intercourse Act of 1809 replaced the Embargo Act. The logic behind the law was that the United States would open its ports to all nations except Britain and France. If either of those two nations stopped violating American neutrality rights, the United States would reestablish commercial ties. Britain and France ignored the Non-Intercourse Act, and other seafaring nations had no desire to confront the Royal Navy. Many American merchants simply found ways to evade the law. Congress tried another tack in May 1810 with Macon's Bill No. 2. This time, the United States would trade with Britain and France, in spite of their neutrality violations. Should one of them end their restrictions on neutral shipping, the United States would stop trading with the other. A cynical Napoleon responded by promising to end French restrictions, and Congress proclaimed non-intercourse against Britain in February 1811, but France continued to seize American ships.

Problems in the west. While Madison and Congress grappled with the neutrality issue, Native Americans renewed their objections to American settlement north of the Ohio River. Tribes were still being coerced into giving away or selling their land. Through the Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809), the Delaware and Miami gave up much of the central and western parts of the new Indiana Territory for only ten thousand dollars.

Two Shawnee leaders, Tecumseh, a brilliant chief, and his half-brother Tenskwatawa, known as the Prophet, took a stand against further encroachment by settlers. While Tecumseh did receive aid from the British in Canada, he was less their pawn than a man who clearly saw what alcoholism, disease, and loss of land were doing to his people. Tenskwatawa was a recovered alcoholic who urged Indians to reaffirm their traditional values and culture. William Henry Harrison, the governor of the Indiana Territory, perceived in Tecumseh and the Prophet a dangerous combination of military and religious appeal. In September 1811, Harrison set out with about one thousand men to attack Tecumseh's stronghold at Prophetstown on the Tippecanoe River. The Shawnee struck first, but Harrison was able to beat them back and claim a major victory. Tecumseh was away from the village trying to recruit tribes to join the confederacy, and Tenskwatawa fled. The Battle of Tippecanoe, as Harrison preferred to call the engagement, clearly did not resolve the conflict with the Indians on the frontier. It did, however, intensify anti-British feeling in the Northwest.

Western senators and congressmen urged a more aggressive policy against Great Britain. Henry Clay of Kentucky became the leader of a faction in Congress called the War Hawks, which demanded an invasion of Canada and the expulsion of Spain from Florida. The War Hawks feared that the British in Canada were once again intriguing with the Indians, a concern that had provoked Harrison's move against Tecumseh.

Voting for war. On June 1, 1812, President Madison sent a war message to Congress. Frustrated at the failure of the neutrality measures and pressured by the War Hawks, Madison felt he had no choice. Ironically, Great Britain repealed its Orders in Council on June 23, 1812, relaxing its trade restrictions in the face of an economic depression. American leaders ignored this belated attempt at compromise, however. Few Republicans wanted war, but long-standing grievances and insults could no longer be tolerated. Madison's war message cited impressment, violation of neutral rights, Indian aggression, and British meddling in American trade as causes for war. The vote proceeded along party lines, the majority of Republicans voting for war and a Federalist minority voting against it. A somewhat divided United States thus fought Great Britain for a second time.

War of 1812

Although the dispute leading to the War of 1812 was over freedom of the seas, the war itself was fought chiefly on land. Madison believed that the motive behind British policy had been to eliminate the United States as a maritime trading rival, while the British, occupied with fighting France in a battle for survival, considered the war with the United States a sideshow, at least initially.

The Canadian campaign. For the United States, the most obvious British target was Canada. Its population was small, many Canadians were actually Americans by birth, and a quick victory there would stop British plans to ruin American trade. The military facts painted a different picture, however. Thousands of Native Americans in the northwestern territories sided with the British when the war began, bolstering their strength, while the small U.S. army was composed of poorly trained state militiamen led by elderly and incompetent generals.

In July 1812, an American army led by General William Hull moved from Detroit into Canada. Almost immediately the Shawnee cut his supply lines, forcing him back to Detroit. Although Hull commanded two thousand men, he surrendered to a considerably smaller British and Native American force. Other embarrassments followed as the United States suffered defeat at Queenston Heights in western New York, and the militia under General Henry Dearborn refused to march to Montreal from northeastern New York.

The United States fared better on Lake Erie in 1813. The Royal Navy could not reach the lake from the St. Lawrence River, so both the British and Americans raced to build ships on opposite sides of the lake. On September 10, 1813, the small American fleet under Oliver Hazard Perry defeated the British in the Battle of Lake Erie. “We have met the enemy, and they are ours,” he reported, a victory statement that became legendary.

Less than three weeks later, on October 5, William Henry Harrison (a general by then) defeated a combined British and Native American force at the Battle of the Thames. Tecumseh was killed in this battle, ending Native Americans' hopes for a coalition that could stand against the advance of U.S. settlement. Despite these victories, U.S. efforts to capture Canada ended in stalemate.

The British land offensive. In April 1814, Napoleon abdicated the French throne and went into exile on the island of Elba, allowing Great Britain to devote its full attention to the war in the United States. The British sent a fleet to Chesapeake Bay and landed an army at Bladensburg, Maryland, on August 24, 1814. The American militia troops fled before the British, who then headed for the U.S. capital. Madison fled Washington, D.C., along with the militia, while his wife Dolley rescued silverware, a bed, and a painting of Washington before leaving the presidential home at the last minute. The British burned the mansion and other public buildings, partly in retaliation for an American act of arson at the Canadian capital of York (now Toronto) during the previous year.

Continuing north in Chesapeake Bay, the British fleet intended to capture Baltimore after first taking Fort McHenry. The British bombarded the fort all through the night of September 13. Francis Scott Key, an American attorney who had boarded a British ship to negotiate the release of a civilian prisoner, watched the battle rage. At dawn, the British broke off the attack, unable to take the fort. Key scribbled down a poem about the event, which became the national anthem “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Almost simultaneously, a British naval force under General Sir George Prevost advanced from Canada along Lake Champlain. They met the Americans under Commander Thomas Macdonough at Platts-burgh, New York, on September 11. Macdonough won a decisive victory, forcing Prevost to retreat to Canada. Earlier American victories near Niagara had halted a British offensive there.

The British also planned a major sea and land offensive at New Orleans. The plan stemmed from victories by Andrew Jackson's army against the Creek Indians in Florida in March 1814 and the subsequent capture of the Spanish fort at Pensacola in November, denying its use as a base to the British. A British force of more than seven thousand men landed near New Orleans in December with the goal of seizing Mississippi. Jackson's defensive strategy was excellent. By placing his outnumbered troops behind earthworks and cotton bales, he was able to cut down more than two thousand British soldiers in short order during their engagement on January 8, 1815. The Battle of New Orleans was seen as the victory that ended the war. In fact, a peace treaty had been signed several weeks earlier. A battle that never would have been fought if international communications had been faster made Andrew Jackson a national hero.

Ending the war. At about the same time the British were besieging Fort McHenry, American and British commissioners were meeting at Ghent, Belgium, to work out an agreement to end the war. With Napoleon out of the picture (he did not escape from Elba until March 1815), the British had little reason for continuing the war. While the British initially called for the surrender of some American territory, news of their loss in the Battle of Plattsburgh made them more conciliatory. The American commissioners, led by John Quincy Adams, hammered out the details of the peace settlement. Essentially, the treaty simply ended the conflict. It said nothing about the impressment of American sailors, freedom of the seas, or neutral rights, all of which had led to the war. The commissioners signed the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, 1814, in time to celebrate Christmas Eve.

A Federalist error. The election of 1812 had seen a Federalist comeback in national politics. Although Madison won reelection against DeWitt Clinton, the electoral vote was the closest since 1800: 128 to 89. During the war, New England had become a Federalist stronghold. Federalists there had opposed the Louisiana Purchase for its potential threat to New England's economic importance. New England's commerce had been wrecked by the Embargo Act, and some unhappy New Englanders called the war “Mr. Madison's War.”

Despite the complaints, New Englanders had profited from the war, sending grain to feed the British army and building factories with war profits. New England banks refused to accept paper money and consequently amassed huge amounts of silver and gold, causing a scarcity of specie (hard money) in the rest of the United States.

New England's opposition to the war prompted the Federalists to call a special convention in Hartford, Connecticut, on December 15, 1814, where they proposed a series of constitutional amendments that would have severely limited the power of the national government. Their resolutions were badly timed, for hardly had they announced their proposals when news came that the war was over, making the Federalist resolutions seem unpatriotic at best and treasonable at worst. At the next presidential election (1816), voter rejection of the Federalist party was nearly complete. James Monroe, yet another Virginia Republican, defeated Rufus King by 183 electoral votes to 34. The Federalist party was through in national politics.

A Spirit of Nationalism

Monroe's presidency brought one-party rule to the United States, but the unanimity was more apparent than real. Although the Republicans controlled the presidency and Congress, some Republican leaders were developing their own political program. Henry Clay endorsed what he called an American System, which included tariff protection for new industries, federal support for internal improvements such as roads and bridges, and renewal of the national bank, ideas not far removed from what Federalists advocated. Many Republicans agreed with Clay. Congress approved the Second Bank of the United States in 1816 for a twenty-year period and passed a moderate tariff in the same year.

Internal improvements were another matter. Federal spending on roads began under Jefferson when Congress agreed to fund the construction of the National Road from the Atlantic coast into Ohio, but Republicans were never comfortable with the idea. Although roads and canals could be justified as “necessary and proper” to carry out such legitimate functions of the federal government as the promotion of commerce, they believed these programs really were the responsibility of the states, absent a constitutional amendment. Madison used this argument in vetoing a bill that would have appropriated money for internal improvements.

The Era of Good Feelings. With the embargo in the past and the country at peace, a Boston newspaper editor called the postwar period the “Era of Good Feelings.” Monroe sought reconciliation of political differences, so the nickname of the era also applied to his administration. In 1820, Monroe won reelection handily by 231 votes to 1; the sole dissenting elector voted for John Quincy Adams, who ran as an Independent Republican.

Even as political leaders spoke in nationalist terms, new issues surfaced to create new political divisions. John Marshall's Supreme Court handed down decisions that clearly favored a strong national government, even though the party representing that view, the Federalist, was defunct. In the Dartmouth College case (1819), the Court ruled that charters granted by the states to private organizations were contracts protected under the contract clause of the Constitution, and state legislatures had no right to impair these contracts. The decision in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), which denied the states the power to tax a federal agency (in this case the Second Bank of the United States), recognized that while the powers of the federal government were limited, the government was “supreme within its sphere of action.”

New states and a new crisis. Since 1812, five states had been added to the Union, bringing the total to twenty-two: Louisiana (1812), Indiana (1816), Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818), and Alabama (1819). In February 1819, Missouri Territory applied for statehood, but its proposed constitution permitted slavery, and at this point, eleven of the twenty-two states were “free” and eleven were “slave” states. Admitting Missouri would thus upset the existing balance. After considerable debate, a compromise credited to Henry Clay's efforts was reached. Maine, which was cleaved from Massachusetts, was admitted as a free state, followed by Missouri's admission as a slave state; the balance between free and slave states was thus preserved by the Missouri Compromise. Southerners agreed that slavery would not be permitted north of the 36°30′ line in the Louisiana Purchase. The next six territories to become states would continue the fragile balancing act.

Monroe's foreign policy. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams successfully concluded the Transcontinental Treaty (also called the Adams-Onís Treaty) with Spain, in which Spain gave up its unprofitable and troublesome Florida colony in return for $5 million and a clear boundary line running from the Sabine River between Spanish Texas and Louisiana across to the Pacific Ocean.

Adams followed this successful negotiation with a policy statement regarding the new Latin American republics. Approached by the British to join an alliance supporting Latin American independence, Adams proposed instead to create a policy that would inform Europe that the Western Hemisphere was no longer open to colonization and that any such attempt would be viewed by the United States as an unfriendly act. In return, the United States pledged not to get involved in European problems. Because these ideas were written into Monroe's annual message to Congress, the policy eventually became known as the Monroe Doctrine.

The Era of Good Feelings did not survive Monroe's two terms as president. By 1824, nationalism was being replaced by the growth of sectionalism, or the sense of one's place being in a portion of the nation rather than in the nation as a whole. Thus, even as developments in transportation and communication worked to unite the nation, political differences threatened to pull it apart.

Improvements in Transportation

The period between the end of the War of 1812 and the Civil War was a time of swift improvement in transportation, rapid growth of factories, and significant development of new technology to increase agricultural production. Americans moved with relative ease into new regions and soon produced an agricultural surplus that changed them from subsistence farmers into commercial producers. Manufacturing became an increasingly important sector of the economy and set the stage for rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century. The economic and technological developments brought important changes to American society.

The growth and expansion of the United States in the decades before the Civil War were closely tied to improvements in the nation's transportation system. As farmers shifted from growing just enough to sustain their families ( subsistence agriculture) to producing crops for sale ( commercial agriculture), demand grew for cheaper and faster ways to get goods to market. Steamboats made river ports important commercial points for entire regions; canals had a similar impact in the Northeast and the Midwest, particularly near the Great Lakes. Railroads, which carried mostly passengers at first, became essential for moving both farm products and manufactured goods by 1860.

Inland waterways. As settlers moved into the trans-Appalachian region, they found the river systems crucial for exporting products to distant markets. Many streams were navigable, and they led to larger rivers such as the Tennessee and Cumberland, which in turn fed into the Ohio, which merged with the Mississippi River and flowed past the port of New Orleans. With roads unable to handle bulk traffic, farmers in Tennessee, Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and the Ohio Valley could take their harvest to an eastern city such as New York by riding down river to New Orleans and then taking a ship around Florida. The Mississippi River was thus a major means of transporting agricultural products from the Old Northwest to the East Coast, and its free navigation was vital to American interests.

The simplest means of river transport were rafts, but they were unstable, and rapids especially posed a serious danger. Flatboats could carry more cargo, providing an interior space for the storage of products and supplies. Real improvement, however, came with the keelboat. Its design made it more controllable, and a small crew using poles could propel a keelboat downstream at a fairly rapid rate. As many as one thousand keelboats a year headed down trans-Appalachian tributaries and rivers to New Orleans in the early 1800s. Unfortunately, rafts, flatboats, and keelboats had one major disadvantages—they could make only a one-way trip. After arriving in New Orleans, the rafts and flatboats were broken up and sold for wood. Poling upriver in a keelboat was possible, but a trip from New Orleans to Louisville, Kentucky, could take as long as four months, so return trips were usually over land. The Natchez Trace led travelers from north of New Orleans to Nashville. A map from the time would have shown the barest outline of roads radiating from New Orleans and Mobile, a city located about one hundred miles to the east. To call these byways “roads” is misleading though; they were often little more than trails, unsuitable for wagons in many places.

Two-way river transportation came with the invention of the steamboat, or riverboat. A number of inventors had attempted to use steam engines to power boats, but the most successful design was created by Robert Fulton in 1807 and used on the Clermont. Fulton demonstrated the watercraft on the Hudson River and won a monopoly from the New York legislature to form a steamboat ferrying service between New York and New Jersey. The monopoly was broken in 1824 when Marshall's Supreme Court, in Gibbons v. Ogden, declared that regulation of interstate commerce, a federal power, also applied to navigation.

Steamboat transportation on trans-Appalachian rivers met with great enthusiasm. Steamboats quickly succeeded rafts, flatboats, and keelboats as the main vehicle for river travel. (Keelboats continued to be used in the upper reaches of tributary streams.) As steamboats evolved, they were built with shallower drafts, so they could operate in as little as three feet of water. Enormous above water, they could carry hundreds of tons of freight and dozens of passengers. Towns along the rivers benefited greatly from the economic exchange provided by steamboats. Cincinnati, Ohio, for example, grew from a small settlement in 1770 to the sixth largest city in the country in 1840 on the strength of river travel. A common scene was the loading and unloading of furniture, farm machinery, bales of cotton, and bulk agricultural products at the town wharf.

The canal craze. After the War of 1812, DeWitt Clinton of New York boldly suggested that a canal be constructed from Lake Erie to Albany (363 miles) using the Mohawk River and then the Hudson River to connect with New York City. Such a project had no precedent in the United States. Clinton obtained a subsidy from the New York legislature and began construction on July 4, 1817. Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal was an instant success, bringing prosperity and additional settlement to its western terminus at Buffalo and helping to make New York City the preeminent American seaport. Philadelphia merchants, jealous of New York's success, pressed for a canal between eastern Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, but this waterway presented even greater obstacles than the New York project. The 395-mile Pennsylvania Canal required 174 locks—more than double the number on the Erie Canal—and a funicular railway to get cargo over the Allegheny Mountains. Completed in 1834, it carried considerable traffic but never rivaled the Erie Canal in terms of total tonnage or economic impact.

The success of these projects fed a craze for canal construction throughout the Midwest. By 1837, companies had built 750 miles of canals in Ohio alone. Canals linked Toledo to Cincinnati, Evansville to Fort Wayne, and Akron to Cleveland. While financially risky private investments, canals benefited farmers throughout the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region by providing a relatively inexpensive means to get their produce to market. Even though the barges that carried lumber, coal, hay, wheat, corn, and oats traveled only two miles an hour (they were towed by mules walking along the banks), the canals greatly reduced shipping costs, time, and distances. They also contributed to a shift in population as cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee grew at the expense of such river ports as Louisville.

Railroads. Railroad construction began in the United States in 1825; by 1860, more than thirty thousand miles of track had been laid. Originally concentrated in the Northeast, by the eve of the Civil War, lines reached as far west as St. Joseph, Missouri. In the South, railroad building lagged just as much as canal building.

Railroads had several advantages over canals. They required a smaller initial capital investment; offered more direct routes; and provided fast, year-round service (rivers and canals froze in winter). There was little coordination among the different railroads though, which worked against creation of a uniform rail system. Because the companies selected their own track gauge, freight often had to be unloaded at the terminus of one line and reloaded at the start of another line, adding to costs. Despite this shortcoming and their comparatively high maintenance costs, railroads expanded and eventually moved ahead of canals in total tonnage shipped in the late 1840s.

Roads. Although road building was the earliest sign of the impending transportation revolution, it was not an important factor in economic development prior to the Civil War. The Lancaster Turnpike (1794), which started in Philadelphia, spurred similar private toll roads. Around the same time, the Wilderness Road into Kentucky was opened to wagon traffic and figured in the settlement of the lower Ohio River Valley. The National Road, a paved highway extending west from Cumberland, Maryland, was financed and maintained through congressional appropriations. It was completed as far as Wheeling on the Ohio River in 1818 and then extended over the next twenty years to Vandalia, Illinois. The federal funding of the National Road was an exception rather than the norm; throughout the nineteenth century, roads were either the responsibility of local government or were built under charters granted by the states.

With the exception of the important east-west and north-south turnpikes, roads throughout the country were often narrow and un-paved, muddy in wet weather and dusty in dry. Moving freight by road was expensive and slow. Roads between towns were often neglected after the railroad arrived, and only the use of the automobile in the twentieth century created the public demand for a modern highway system.

Toward a Market Economy

Several factors played a role in the development of the market economy in the United States. Millions of acres of land belonging to Native Americans in the Old Northwest and Southeast were taken over by the federal government. Federal land policy, though often benefiting speculators more than individual homesteaders, certainly encouraged settlement. American agriculture experienced an unprecedented boom from the introduction of new staple crops, such as cotton, and productivity advancements in farm equipment. Although the United States remained overwhelmingly rural, the country experienced significant urban growth between 1815 and 1860.

Removal of Native Americans. The economic growth of the United States was achieved to a great degree at the expense of Native Americans. Despite giving up tens of thousands of acres through treaties, the tribes found the demand for land by settlers and speculators insatiable. Even the willingness of Native Americans to acculturate did not relieve the pressure on their land. The Cherokee—one of the “Five Civilized Tribes” along with the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole—were farmers and even owned slaves. They developed a written language in which books, tribal laws, and a constitution were published, and they were ready to press the case for their sovereignty in court. Even though the Supreme Court found in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that the Cherokee were entitled to federal protection of their lands against state claims, President Andrew Jackson did not enforce the decision.

Jackson's solution to the land question was to resettle the tribes west of the Mississippi, which Congress authorized through the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Within a few years, the Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw had given up their lands in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi and were moved to the Indian Territory in what is today Oklahoma. The Cherokee held out until 1838. Of the approximately fifteen thousand Cherokee who took the grueling trek from Georgia to the west, a route that became known as the Trail of Tears, a quarter died of disease and exposure. Some tribes resisted relocation. The Sauk and Fox were easily defeated by U.S. troops and militia forces in the Black Hawk War (1832), and the Seminoles fought a guerrilla action in Florida for seven years (1835-42). In the end, however, more than 200 million acres of Indian land passed into the control of the United States.

Federal land policy. The sale of public lands, which the federal government offered at $2 per acre (for a minimum of 160 acres) with four years to pay, increased quickly after the War of 1812. Land speculators were encouraged by the credit provisions, and they bought up land with the expectation of turning a profit when its value rose. The Panic of 1819 and the economic depression that followed led to legal changes intended to make the direct purchase of land easier for small farmers. The price was cut to $1.25 an acre, and the minimum amount of land that could be purchased was reduced first to eighty acres (1820) and then to forty acres (1832), but payments had to be made in cash, which many settlers did not have. Speculators continued to buy up most of the available land and then loan money to small farmers for the purchase price and farm equipment.

Aside from the terms of purchase, an important issue was the claims of squatters, who had settled and begun to work the land before it was surveyed and auctioned. The Pre-Emption Act, enacted as a temporary measure in 1830 and made permanent in 1841, allowed squatters to buy up to 160 acres at the minimum price of $1.25 an acre.

A boom period for agriculture. The period from 1815 to 1860 proved a golden age for American agriculture. Demand for American farm products was high, both in the United States and Europe, and agricultural prices and production rose dramatically. A key factor was the increasing importance of cotton. Until the 1790s, cotton was a relatively minor crop because the variety that grew best in the more southerly latitudes contained seeds that were difficult to remove from the cotton boll. In 1793, Eli Whitney of Connecticut learned of the seed problem while visiting friends in South Carolina; he devised a simple machine known as the cotton gin to separate the fiber from the seeds. With cotton demand high from the textile industry in Great Britain and soon mills in New England, Whitney's invention led to the expansion of cotton production across Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and into Texas. The Cotton Kingdom, as this vast region was called, produced most of the world's cotton supply and more than fifty percent of American exports by 1860.

The cotton boom also revitalized slavery. Despite the end of the foreign slave trade in 1808, more than four times the number of slaves lived in the United States on the eve of the Civil War than on the day Thomas Jefferson took office. Cotton was a labor-intensive crop, causing the demand and price for field hands to skyrocket. Planters in Virginia found it very profitable to sell their surplus slaves farther south.

Cotton was not the only sector of agriculture to benefit from technological innovations. In 1831, Cyrus McCormick invented the mechanical reaper, which harvested considerably more wheat with less labor. John Deere developed a steel plow (1837) that was far more efficient in turning the soil than cast iron and wooden moldboards. The new equipment allowed American farmers to put more land under cultivation and increase production to meet the growing world-wide demand for wheat, corn, and other cereal grains.

Changing demographics. During the nineteenth century, the United States became a country on the move. By 1850, almost half of all Americans did not reside in the state where they were born, and the population had made a clear shift to the west. About a third lived west of the Appalachian Mountains, and two million people were already west of the Mississippi River. Rapid urbanization also characterized the pre-Civil War decades. According to the 1850 census, cities (defined as towns with a population of 2500 or more) were home to one in five Americans. Although the nation's largest cities were in the Northeast—New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston—the population of St. Louis had already topped one hundred thousand. The midcentury urban growth was caused by improvements in transportation, industrial opportunities, and renewed immigration.

U.S. immigration, which had been sharply curtailed during the Napoleonic wars, began to increase in the 1820s and then rose dramatically—to well over two hundred thousand people a year—in the 1840s and 1850s. Irish Catholics, fleeing the effects of the potato famine that started in 1846, and Germans, seeking either economic opportunity or refuge from the failed liberal revolution of 1848, were the two largest immigrant groups. The Irish were an important part of the labor force that built the canals and railroads, and they tended to remain in the eastern cities. The Germans, on the other hand, moved west and contributed to the growth of St. Louis and Milwaukee. Scandinavians, who had also begun to leave their homelands, established farming communities in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Growth of Manufacturing

American industry grew phenomenally in the first half of the nineteenth century. A series of tariffs enacted by Congress between 1816 and 1828 protected manufacturing, particularly textile milling, from foreign competition. As manufacturing work sites were gradually relocated from the home and small workshop to the factory, the makeup of the labor force changed. The number of artisans and craftsmen declined, and reliance on semiskilled or unskilled workers, including women, to operate machines increased. Just as in agriculture, advances in technology helped boost manufacturing production and increase efficiency. Indeed, the manufacture of such agricultural inventions as the reaper and steel plow became important sectors of the industrial economy.

Technological innovation. Machines for spinning cotton into thread were developed in Great Britain in the eighteenth century, and how they were built and operated were closely guarded secrets. Although the British prohibited the emigration of anyone with a knowledge of their design, Samuel Slater arrived in the United States from England with the plans in his head. In 1790, he established the first American cotton mill in Rhode Island.

“Borrowed” technology aside, Americans made their own inventive contributions to industrial development. Eli Whitney, already famous for the cotton gin, developed machine tools capable of producing parts so precisely that they were interchangeable. Interchangeable parts significantly increased industrial efficiency and cut labor costs. Charles Goodyear developed a process known as vulcanization that made natural rubber stronger (1839). The sewing machine was invented by Elias Howe (1846) and improved on a few years later by Isaac Singer.

Perhaps the most significant American invention of the first half of the nineteenth century was Samuel Morse's electric telegraph, which had its first practical application in 1844. Within twenty years, telegraph lines stretched from coast to coast and ushered in a communications revolution. Combined with improvements in printing, the telegraph was a boon to journalism. The number of daily newspapers in the United States soared from eight in 1790 to nearly four hundred in 1860, and many sold for just a penny.

The factory system. New England's textile industry led the way in developing new forms of manufacturing. The factory system as it evolved in the Northeast had three characteristics—the breakdown of an item's production into phases, the use of machines in all phases of production, and the division of labor. Division of labor meant that a worker performed the task required by one phase of the production, no longer creating the entire product from start to finish. In 1813, the first factory in which spinning and weaving were performed by power machinery all under one roof was established in Waltham, Massachusetts. In Lowell, which was planned and built as a model factory town in 1822, young women made up the majority of the workforce at the mills. The women lived in dormitories or boarding houses provided by the company and worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. Although the women were paid much less than the men, even when doing comparable work, their wages were enough to give them a measure of independence that their mothers and grandmothers never enjoyed. The young women were not a permanent labor force in the mills, however. Most of them worked for only a few years and were gradually replaced by immigrants, mainly Irish men, in the 1840s and 1850s.

Textile manufacturing was the leading American industry before the Civil War and was concentrated in the Northeast because the region's rivers provided both water power and transportation. The cloth produced in New England mills was turned into shirts, pants, and other articles of clothing in smaller factories in New York and Philadelphia. Proximity to raw materials influenced industrial development in other parts of the country. For example, Pittsburgh was a center of the iron industry because it was close to both ore and coal fields, while Cincinnati was an early hub for meatpacking in agricultural Ohio.

The development of the factory system produced tensions. Craftsmen were threatened by manufacturing's increasing reliance on machines and cheap labor, so they began to form trade unions and political parties in the 1830s to protect their interests. Although initially antagonistic toward unskilled workers, the craftsmen often discovered that they were on common ground over such issues as hours, wages, and working conditions. The first general strike in the United States took place in Philadelphia in 1835, when artisans joined with coal heavers to support the ten-hour workday. A shorter workday was the principal demand of the early trade unions, and most industries accepted it by the 1860s, with the exception of the New England textile mills.