I. Jeffersonian Democracy (1800-1824)

In this period, the rule of the "Virginia dynasty" (Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe) brought the triumph of the Republicans -- usually called the "Jeffersonian Republicans" to avoid confusion with the Republican Party that began in 1856 -- and spelled the end of the Federalist party. These twenty-four years are crowded with "great events": the disputed election of 1800, the "midnight judges" in 1801, Marbury v. Madison and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the quelling of the Barbary Pirates and the Hamilton-Burr duel in 1804, the failed impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase in 1805, the Embargo in 1807, the War of 1812, the burning of Washington in 1814, the Battle of New Orleans and the Treaty of Ghent in 1815, McCullough v. Maryland in 1819, the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, and the disputed election of 1824 (which brought a major party realignment in its wake). But what are the great themes that might be obscured by too-relentless focus on "great events"?

First, by the election of 1800, the American people accepted political parties as the focus of national public life. But the repudiation of the Federalists in that election, exacerbated by their repeated political defeats and leading ultimately to their disintegration as a political party by 1816, suggested briefly that American public life would be dominated by one-party consensus politics. Ironically, the supposed consensus dominated by the Republicans shattered after only eight years.

Second, the Republicans tried to reduce the role of the federal government in public life, causing a corresponding rise in importance of state and local governments. To be sure, this goal was not achieved across the board, nor were the Republicans uniform in their commitment to it. One major exception was the Jefferson administration's frantic, sweeping, and largely unavailing series of attempts to enforce the Embargo of 1807; this measure produced "big government" of a kind barely imagined by Alexander Hamilton in his most theoretical musings, and not paralleled until the Civil War in 1861-1865 and the New Deal in the 1930s.

Third, both federal and state courts developed judicial review as a key component of constitutional government. In the hands of Chief Justice John Marshall, the last great Federalist in national politics (and a particularly painful thorn in Jefferson's side), judicial review was a powerful and flexible instrument with which to bring about national constitutional supremacy over the states.

Fourth, under Jefferson's leadership in his first term, the United States grew prosperous and maintained its peaceful relations with most of the rest of the world. Unfortunately, during his second term, the nation experienced severe economic difficulties tied to Jeffersonian foreign policy -- especially the Embargo.

Fifth, the nation's commercial and manufacturing strength in the North grew slowly yet steadily. Both in its economic success and in the development and spread of economic dislocation and hardship for many working men and women, this growth helped spur the first stirrings of American labor in the direction of union organization.

Sixth, the revolutionizing of the cultivation of cotton in the South (due to Eli Whitney's cotton gin) dashed the hopes of enlightened Southern whites for the end of chattel slavery. The cotton gin helped to foster the expansion of slavery into the Deep South -- the so-called "cotton belt." Conditions in the Deep South exacerbated the brutality of slavery as a labor system -- while helping to entrench the interests of slaveowners as the central determinants of Southern politics in the states and the nation, and augmenting the power of the slavery interest in national politics.

Seventh, the nation decisively began to grow westward. The acquisition of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 only provided official government endorsement and backing for what for two generations (at least since 1765, when the British attempted to seal of the region beyond the Alleghenies) had been a powerful social, economic, and demographic reality. Americans knew that their destiny lay westward, and hurried to embrace it. Assuming (as generations of later scholars have done) that the westward regions were empty wildernesses waiting for settlement, instead of the homelands of Indian nations with fundamentally differing ideas about the use and ownership of land, white emigrants sought to build a new, rough-hewn America beyond the mountains and through out what they deemed the West (and what we now call the Middle West).

Eighth, diverging economic bases of life in the North, South, and West gave new impetus to the enduring problem of sectional rivalry. These issues were complicated by the growth of disunionist sentiment. Pressures for disunion varied with the particular political crises confronting the nation. In 1798-1799, the seeds of disunion were planted by the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in 1798-1799. The New England states' resistance to the War of 1812 and the potentially disunionist Hartford Convention of 1814-1815 shifted the focus of disunionism to New England. Disputes between free and slave states on a national scale brought the crisis of Union to the breaking point in the Missouri crisis that led to the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

Ninth, the United States began to make wary ventures into world politics. The classic question of the "problem readers" on this topic is, "Were these diplomatic initiatives naively idealistic, or soundly realistic?" There is no easy or consistent answer. Some of these initiatives were notably successful -- for example, the Louisiana Purchase and the quelling of the Barbary Pirates. Others were partly or wholly failures -- the most famous being the Jeffersonian attempt (1805-1809) to bring peace to Europe by denying the warring powers American trade, a failure that culminated in the War of 1812. Near the close of the Jeffersonian era, the foreign policy of President James Monroe's administration, guided by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, once more scored a notable triumph -- the closing of the American Hemisphere to European intervention to protect the new republics of Latin America from reconquest by the European powers. This was the original meaning of the Monroe Doctrine (1823).

Finally, although Jeffersonian Republicans celebrated the growing democracy of America, they still conceived of politics and governance as concerns reserved for the educated, well-bred elite; the great body of the people were relegated to the role of appreciative observers who, at election time, would reward virtuous and public-spirited officials with re-election. The next period of the nation's history would shatter these complacent assumptions.