Meanwhile, in 1814, U.S. Gen. Andrew Jackson defeated the British-supported Creeks in the Southwest in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. The war itself ended in a draw that left American territory intact. Thereafter, with minor exceptions, there was no major Indian resistance east of the Mississippi. After the lusty first quarter century of American nationhood, all roads left open to Native Americans ran downhill.
The United States from 1816 to 1850
The Era of Mixed Feelings
United States: 1812–22The United States, 1812–22.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
James Monroe, oil sketch by E.O. Sully, 1836, after a contemporary portrait by Thomas Sully; in Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia.Courtesy of the Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia
Adams, John QuincyJohn Quincy Adams; daguerreotype by Mathew Brady.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.The years between the election to the presidency of James Monroe in 1816 and of John Quincy Adams in 1824 have long been known in American history as the Era of Good Feelings. The phrase was conceived by a Boston editor during Monroe’s visit to New England early in his first term. That a representative of the heartland of Federalism could speak in such positive terms of the visit by a Southern president whose decisive election had marked not only a sweeping Republican victory but also the demise of the national Federalist Party was dramatic testimony that former foes were inclined to put aside the sectional and political differences of the past.
Effects of the War of 1812
Later scholars have questioned the strategy and tactics of the United States in the War of 1812, the war’s tangible results, and even the wisdom of commencing it in the first place. To contemporary Americans, however, the striking naval victories and Jackson’s victory over the British at New Orleans created a reservoir of “good feeling” on which Monroe was able to draw.
Abetting the mood of nationalism was the foreign policy of the United States after the war. Florida was acquired from Spain (1819) in negotiations, the success of which owed more to Jackson’s indifference to such niceties as the inviolability of foreign borders and to the country’s evident readiness to back him up than it did to diplomatic finesse. The Monroe Doctrine (1823), actually a few phrases inserted in a long presidential message (see original text), declared that the United States would not become involved in European affairs and would not accept European interference in the Americas; its immediate effect on other nations was slight, and that on its own citizenry was impossible to gauge, yet its self-assured tone in warning off the Old World from the New reflected well the nationalist mood that swept the country.
Note from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison commenting on the Monroe Doctrine, October 1823.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Internally, the decisions of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Marshall in such cases as McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) promoted nationalism by strengthening Congress and national power at the expense of the states. The congressional decision to charter the second Bank of the United States (1816) was explained in part by the country’s financial weaknesses, exposed by the War of 1812, and in part by the intrigues of financial interests. The readiness of Southern Jeffersonians—former strict constructionists—to support such a measure indicates, too, an amazing degree of nationalist feeling. Perhaps the clearest sign of a new sense of national unity was the victorious Republican Party, standing in solitary splendour on the national political horizon, its long-time foes the Federalists vanished without a trace (on the national level) and Monroe, the Republican standard-bearer, reelected so overwhelmingly in 1820 that it was long believed that the one electoral vote denied him had been held back only in order to preserve Washington’s record of unanimous selection.
National disunity
For all the signs of national unity and feelings of oneness, equally convincing evidence points in the opposite direction. The very Supreme Court decisions that delighted friends of strong national government infuriated its opponents, while Marshall’s defense of the rights of private property was construed by critics as betraying a predilection for one kind of property over another. The growth of the West, encouraged by the conquest of Indian lands during the War of 1812, was by no means regarded as an unmixed blessing. Eastern conservatives sought to keep land prices high; speculative interests opposed a policy that would be advantageous to poor squatters; politicians feared a change in the sectional balance of power; and businessmen were wary of a new section with interests unlike their own. European visitors testified that, even during the so-called Era of Good Feelings, Americans characteristically expressed scorn for their countrymen in sections other than their own.
Economic hardship, especially the financial panic of 1819, also created disunity. The causes of the panic were complex, but its greatest effect was clearly the tendency of its victims to blame it on one or another hostile or malevolent interest—whether the second Bank of the United States, Eastern capitalists, selfish speculators, or perfidious politicians—each charge expressing the bad feeling that existed side by side with the good.
If harmony seemed to reign on the level of national political parties, disharmony prevailed within the states. In the early 19th-century United States, local and state politics were typically waged less on behalf of great issues than for petty gain. That the goals of politics were often sordid did not mean that political contests were bland. In every section, state factions led by shrewd men waged bitter political warfare to attain or entrench themselves in power.
The most dramatic manifestation of national division was the political struggle over slavery, particularly over its spread into new territories. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 eased the threat of further disunity, at least for the time being. The sectional balance between the states was preserved: in the Louisiana Purchase, with the exception of the Missouri Territory, slavery was to be confined to the area south of the 36°30′ line. Yet this compromise did not end the crisis but only postponed it. The determination by Northern and Southern senators not to be outnumbered by one another suggests that the people continued to believe in the conflicting interests of the various great geographic sections. The weight of evidence indicates that the decade after the Battle of New Orleans was not an era of good feelings so much as one of mixed feelings.
The economy
The American economy expanded and matured at a remarkable rate in the decades after the War of 1812. The rapid growth of the West created a great new centre for the production of grains and pork, permitting the country’s older sections to specialize in other crops. New processes of manufacture, particularly in textiles, not only accelerated an “industrial revolution” in the Northeast but also, by drastically enlarging the Northern market for raw materials, helped account for a boom in Southern cotton production. If by midcentury Southerners of European descent had come to regard slavery—on which the cotton economy relied—as a “positive good” rather than the “necessary evil” that they had earlier held the system to be, it was largely because of the increasingly central role played by cotton in earning profits for the region. Industrial workers organized the country’s first trade unions and even workingmen’s political parties early in the period. The corporate form thrived in an era of booming capital requirements, and older and simpler forms of attracting investment capital were rendered obsolete. Commerce became increasingly specialized, the division of labour in the disposal of goods for sale matching the increasingly sophisticated division of labour that had come to characterize production. Edward Pessen