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Historical Background

An Emergent Nationalism, 1815-1828

The War of 1812 proved to a fresh generation of Americans that theirs was a free and independent Nation. It had stood up to the world's strongest power and come away unbowed. Isolationist nationalism, territorial expansion, and intensifying sectionalism characterized the postwar years 1815-28. The ardent new nationalism was expressed in Madison's fiscal program, in the "Era of Good Feelings," and in a diplomacy that sought to isolate the country from Europe and extend the national domain westward.

To keep pace with the westward movement, new roads, canals, and even rudimentary railroads came into being. The application of steam power and waterpower to the manufacturing process, inventions, and ready capital signaled the beginnings of industrialization. Expanding markets, additional lands, and technical innovations revolutionized Southern agriculture and made cotton king of the exports. Competition—North against South—for Western lands, markets, and political support intensified sectional disharmonies. Statesmen of the period worked to control the forces of sectionalism by bolstering those of nationalism.

"Democracy" was another increasingly powerful movement with which statesmen had to reckon after the War of 1812. The interplay of emergent public attitudes—the romance of frontier individualism and self-reliance, an optimistic faith in progress, and new humanitarian and social ideas—helped bring about institutional reforms, the extension of suffrage, and the rise of the common man.

DOMESTIC PROGRAMS AND PROBLEMS

The nationalism that swept over the United States after the war found political expression in the program that President Madison outlined in his Seventh Annual Message to Congress, December 1815. It was a Hamiltonian program. The war had exposed patches and tears in the national fabric that needed mending: In the armed services, banking, transportation, and manufacturing. Congressmen were well aware of the situation. Were they not meeting in the Patent Office Building, the only suitable one in the Nation's Capital that the British raiders had spared in 1814? To avoid the repetition of raids on the Capital, and protect the country as a whole, Madison proposed to strengthen the land and naval forces. Congress authorized a standing Army of 10,000, only half the number recommended. It revised the militia system and strengthened the Military Academy at West Point. It also authorized more ships and better facilities for the Navy, the strongest barrier to European interference in U.S. affairs.

To strengthen the national financial structure, Madison proposed the revival of the United States Bank. After the expiration of the charter of the first bank in 1811, State banks had proliferated. They often lacked adequate gold and silver reserves to back their notes, the paper money of the time. The result was inflation. As a bewildering variety of paper notes and certificates flooded the country, both the Government and private individuals found it difficult to conduct business effectively. Few denied the need for corrective measures. Congressional leaders, including Clay and Calhoun as well as Jeffersonians who had once opposed a national bank on principle, supported the bank measure, and in 1816 the Second Bank of the United States received a 20-year charter. The bank was expected to strengthen the national financial structure by helping to curb inflation and speculation and by providing a safe depository for Federal funds.

Because the War of 1812 had drastically reduced foreign sources of manufactured goods, domestic industries had sprung up—$40million worth—in New England and the Middle States. After the war, British merchants attempted to destroy U.S. industry by flooding the country with cheap manufactured goods. To encourage national self-sufficiency by protecting the war-born domestic industries, Madison asked Congress for a protective tariff on foreign manufactures. Congress responded by enacting the Tariff of 1816—a mild measure but one that represented a departure from the traditional Jeffersonian belief in free trade.

On one question, the matter of Federal authority over internal improvements, Madison remained a prewar orthodox Jeffersonian. To help unite the country and provide for the expeditious movement of troops and supplies in time of war, Congress, led by John C. Calhoun, passed the Bonus Bill of 1817. It provided for the use of Federal funds to finance the building of roads and canals. Madison, though a strong advocate of internal improvements, vetoed the Bonus Bill. He believed that the Constitution did not grant to the National Government the power to finance directly the construction of roads and canals.

Except on this key issue, Madison's postwar program and the congressional response to it showed that the party of Jefferson, in less than a decade, had moved from a philosophy of Federal restraint to one of Federal action in the Hamiltonian tradition. The third branch of the Federal Government, the judiciary, had to make no such change. It had been ardently nationalistic since John Marshall had been appointed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1801.

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall. During his long term (1801-35), the Court asserted its power and handed down decisions of far-reaching importance that established fundamental principles of constitutional interpretation. From an engraving by W. G. Jackman. Courtesy, Library of Congress.

From then until 1835 Marshall dominated the nationalistic Court. It set many major precedents, particularly in fields where the Constitution required elaboration and further definition. It tended to interpret Federal powers broadly, and promulgated a body of doctrine that was essentially Hamiltonian. In so doing it confounded Hamilton's prediction that the judiciary would be the weakest of the three branches of Government. In several landmark cases, Marshall and the Court progressively broadened the constitutional powers of the Federal Government, especially in the nationalistic period that followed the War of 1812.

In 1810, in the case of Fletcher v. Peck, the Court had annulled a law of the Georgia Legislature and thus asserted the Constitution's superiority to the powers of State legislatures. In 1816, in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, the Court extended this doctrine to include State courts by overruling a Virginia court decision. Two decisions in 1819 further strengthened Federal authority under the Constitution. In the Dartmouth College case, the Court denied the right of a State legislature to pass a law violating the constitutional guarantee of the sanctity of contracts. In a test of the constitutionality of the Second Bank of the United States, McCulloch v. Maryland, it denied the right of the State of Maryland to tax a branch of the bank. This decision affirmed the right of the Federal Government to maintain national institutions within State boundaries without State interference. In 1824 the Court further enhanced the edifice of national supremacy in the case of Gibbons v. Ogden. Its decision cost Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston their Hudson River steamboat monopoly, but it established the U.S. Government as arbiter of interstate navigation and opened the way to Federal activity in the area of interstate commerce.

After two terms, Madison retired from the Presidency and recommended another Virginian, James Monroe, as his successor. In 1816 the Nation was prosperous, and Monroe, a member of the party in power, won the election easily. Rufus King, the Federalist candidate, carried only Connecticut, Delaware, and Massachusetts. Indeed, it seemed that the Federalist opposition to Monroe was a mere formality. In 1817, when Monroe toured the old Federalist stronghold, New England, he was cordially received. Boston's Federalist Columbian Centinel alluded to the "good feelings" that accompanied his visit. Taking their cue from the Centinel, many have called Monroe's 8 years in the White House the "Era of Good Feelings." Recent scholarship has cast doubt on this interpretation. From 1817 to 1819 there was apparent national harmony and prosperity. But the Panic of 1819 and the growing sectional tensions, exemplified by the Missouri debates of 1819-21, are strong indicators that serious political disharmony existed during Monroe's final 6 years as President.