Unit 4 · The Early Republic

On April 30, 1789, George Washington stood on a balcony of Federal Hall in New York City. New York was the nation’s first capital. A crowd filled the street below. Washington placed his hand on a Bible and took the oath of office. The crowd cheered. The United States had its first president under the new Constitution.

The Constitution described the job of president in just a few paragraphs. It did not explain many everyday details. Washington knew that his choices would set a precedent. A precedent is an action or decision that later people follow as an example. He wrote that he walked on untrodden ground, meaning a path no one had walked before.

Even small questions mattered. What should people call the president? Some senators, including Vice President John Adams, wanted a grand title that sounded like a king’s. Others thought that was dangerous in a republic, a nation where citizens choose their leaders. In the end, the simple title "Mr. President" was used. Washington also chose to serve only two terms. That precedent lasted for almost 150 years.

The president could not run the government alone. Congress created three departments in 1789: State, Treasury and War. It also created the job of attorney general, the government’s chief lawyer. Washington picked strong leaders. Thomas Jefferson ran the State Department, which handled relations with other countries. Alexander Hamilton ran the Treasury, which handled money. Henry Knox led the War Department, and Edmund Randolph became attorney general.

Washington met with these leaders to hear their advice. This group became known as the cabinet. The Constitution does not use that word. The cabinet grew out of Washington’s habit of asking for advice. Every president since has had one.

The Constitution created a Supreme Court but gave few details. The Judiciary Act of 1789 filled them in. It set the Supreme Court at six justices and created lower federal courts around the country. John Jay became the first chief justice. That same year, Congress also sent a list of amendments to the states. In 1791 these ten amendments were approved as the Bill of Rights.

The Constitution says the government must count the people every ten years. This count is called the census. The number of seats each state gets in the House of Representatives depends on it. In 1790 officials called marshals went door to door. They rode on horseback to farms, towns and frontier cabins.

The first census counted about 3.9 million people. Most lived on farms near the Atlantic coast. Cities were small by today’s standards. New York City was the largest, with about 33,000 people. Philadelphia was second. Virginia had more people than any other state.

The census also showed how deeply slavery was built into the nation. About 700,000 people were enslaved, most of them in the South. About 60,000 free African Americans were counted, too. Because of the Three-Fifths Compromise, each enslaved person counted as three-fifths of a person for deciding House seats. Most Native Americans were not counted at all.

The Revolution was expensive. The national government and the states had borrowed huge sums to pay for it. They owed money to other countries and to their own citizens. Alexander Hamilton believed the nation had to pay its debts. If it did not, no one would ever lend it money again.

Hamilton’s plan had two big parts. First, the national government would pay back its war debts in full. Second, it would take over, or assume, the debts of the states. Many people objected. Some states, such as Virginia, had already paid off much of their debt. Why should they help pay for states that had not? Critics also pointed out that speculators had bought old war bonds cheaply from soldiers and farmers. Now the speculators would earn big profits.

James Madison and Thomas Jefferson worked out a deal with Hamilton in 1790. Southern members of Congress would support Hamilton’s debt plan. In return, the nation’s permanent capital would be built in the South, on the Potomac River. Philadelphia would serve as the capital for ten years while the new city was built. In 1800 the government moved to Washington, D.C.

Hamilton also wanted a national bank. It would keep the government’s money safe, make loans and print paper money people could trust. In 1791 Congress created the Bank of the United States. It was based in Philadelphia and was allowed to operate for 20 years.

Jefferson and Madison said the bank was unconstitutional. The Constitution does not mention a bank. Jefferson believed in strict construction, meaning the government could do only what the Constitution clearly says. Hamilton believed in loose construction. He pointed to the clause that lets Congress make all laws that are "necessary and proper" for carrying out its powers. Collecting taxes and borrowing money were listed powers, so a bank could help do them.

Washington agreed with Hamilton and signed the bill. Hamilton also asked for a tariff, a tax on goods from other countries. Tariffs raised money and helped American makers compete. The debate over strict and loose construction did not end in the 1790s. Americans still argue about it today.

To help pay the debts, Congress passed a tax on whiskey in 1791. This was an excise tax, a tax on a product made inside the country. The tax hit western farmers hard. Roads over the mountains were rough. It was easier to turn corn and rye into whiskey and carry it to market in barrels. Some farmers even used whiskey in place of money.

In western Pennsylvania, angry farmers refused to pay. Some attacked tax collectors. In 1794 the protest grew into an armed uprising. Several thousand rebels gathered near Pittsburgh. People called it the Whiskey Rebellion.

Washington remembered Shays’s Rebellion, when the old government under the Articles of Confederation could not act. This time he called up about 13,000 militia soldiers from several states and rode out with them. The rebels scattered before any battle. A few were arrested, and Washington later pardoned the two men found guilty. The message was clear. The new national government could enforce its laws.

The writers of the Constitution did not plan for political parties. Many of them feared that parties would split the nation. But by the mid-1790s, two groups had formed. A political party is a group of people who share ideas about government and work to elect leaders.

The Federalists followed Hamilton. They wanted a strong national government. They supported the bank and the growth of trade, cities and manufacturing. Many merchants and business owners in the Northeast joined them. In foreign affairs, they leaned toward Britain, America’s biggest trading partner.

The Democratic-Republicans followed Jefferson and Madison. They wanted a smaller national government and more power for the states. They believed the nation’s future lay with small farmers. Many Southerners and Westerners joined them. They leaned toward France, which had helped win the Revolution. Each party started newspapers that attacked the other, sometimes in very harsh words.

In 1789 the French Revolution began. The French people overthrew their king. At first many Americans cheered. But the revolution turned violent, and in 1793 France and Britain went to war. Democratic-Republicans wanted to help France. Federalists wanted to stay close to Britain.

Washington believed the young nation was too weak for war. In 1793 he declared that the United States would stay neutral, meaning it would not take sides. A French diplomat named Edmond Genêt tried to get Americans to fight for France anyway. Washington asked France to call him home. Jefferson disagreed with the president’s policies and left the cabinet at the end of 1793.

Britain still caused trouble. British ships seized American ships trading with France. British soldiers also stayed in forts on U.S. land near the Great Lakes. Washington sent John Jay to London. In Jay's Treaty (1794), Britain agreed to leave the forts. But it did not stop seizing ships, and many Americans were furious. A year later, Pinckney's Treaty with Spain went over much better. It let Americans ship goods down the Mississippi River and through the port of New Orleans.

Settlers were pouring into the Northwest Territory, the land north of the Ohio River. This was the homeland of Native nations such as the Miami, Shawnee, Delaware and Potawatomi. They had not agreed to give it up. Led by the Miami leader Little Turtle and the Shawnee leader Blue Jacket, they formed a confederacy, an alliance of nations.

The confederacy won major battles. In 1791 its warriors crushed an American army led by General Arthur St. Clair. Hundreds of U.S. soldiers died. It was one of the worst defeats the U.S. Army ever suffered. Washington then sent General Anthony Wayne with a larger, better-trained army.

In 1794 Wayne’s army won the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near today’s Toledo, Ohio. The Native nations had hoped British soldiers at a nearby fort would help them, but the British closed the gates. In 1795 leaders of the nations signed the Treaty of Greenville. They gave up most of present-day Ohio. The treaty also handed over small pieces of land for American forts. One was a square of land six miles wide where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan.

By 1796 Washington was tired. He had served two terms as president. Many people wanted him to stay, but he decided to go home to Mount Vernon. By stepping down, he showed that power in a republic passes peacefully from one leader to the next.

Before he left, Washington wrote a long letter to the American people. It was printed in newspapers in September 1796. It became known as his Farewell Address. Hamilton helped him write it. Washington used it to share lessons he hoped the country would remember.

First, he warned against the spirit of party. He feared that angry political parties could tear the nation apart. Second, he warned against sectionalism, or putting the interests of one region above the whole country. Third, he said the nation should avoid permanent alliances with foreign countries. For many years afterward, American leaders followed this advice about alliances.

In the election of 1796, the Federalist John Adams won the most electoral votes and became president. Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, came in second. Under the rules of that time, second place became vice president. So the president and vice president came from rival parties.

France was angry about Jay’s Treaty. French ships began seizing American ships. Adams sent three diplomats to Paris to make peace. Three French agents met them and demanded a large bribe before talks could even begin. The Americans refused. When Adams told Congress, he called the agents X, Y and Z instead of using their names. The scandal became known as the XYZ Affair.

Americans were outraged. Congress built up the navy and created a Navy Department. From 1798 to 1800, American and French ships fought an undeclared war at sea. Some Federalists wanted a full war. Adams instead sent new diplomats, and they made peace with France in 1800. Many historians praise that choice. But it split his own party.

During the crisis with France, Federalists in Congress passed four laws in 1798. They were called the Alien and Sedition Acts. An alien is a person from another country who is not a citizen. One law raised the time immigrants had to wait to become citizens from 5 to 14 years. Most new immigrants voted for Democratic-Republicans. Other laws let the president jail or expel aliens he considered dangerous.

Sedition means speech or writing that stirs up people against the government. The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish false or harmful statements about the government. Federalists used it against Democratic-Republican newspaper editors. Matthew Lyon, a congressman from Vermont, was jailed for criticizing President Adams. His voters re-elected him anyway.

Jefferson and Madison said the laws broke the First Amendment. They secretly wrote the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. These argued that states could judge whether a national law was unconstitutional. Other states did not agree, and the laws stayed in place. The Sedition Act expired in 1801. But the idea that states could challenge national laws would come back again and again.

The election of 1800 was one of the nastiest in American history. The Federalist John Adams ran against the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson. Newspapers on each side printed insults and wild rumors. Federalists warned that Jefferson would bring chaos. Democratic-Republicans said Adams wanted to rule like a king.

Jefferson won more electoral votes than Adams. But there was a problem. At that time, electors cast two votes each and did not mark which one was for president. Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, tied with 73 votes each. The House of Representatives had to break the tie. It voted 36 times before choosing Jefferson in February 1801. Alexander Hamilton, who disliked Jefferson but distrusted Burr even more, helped sway the vote.

To prevent another tie, the states approved the Twelfth Amendment in 1804. Now electors cast separate votes for president and vice president. The bigger lesson of 1800 was the peaceful transfer of power. The losing party handed over the government without violence. In many countries at that time, that almost never happened.

Jefferson was the first president to take office in the new capital, Washington, D.C. The city was mostly mud, woods and half-built buildings. Jefferson wanted his presidency to feel plain and close to the people. He greeted visitors with a handshake instead of a bow.

Jefferson believed a small national government protected liberty best. He dreamed of a nation of independent farmers who owned their land and ran their own lives. He called this kind of government limited government. With the help of Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, he cut costs. He shrank the army and navy. Congress ended the unpopular whiskey tax. The government paid down much of the national debt.

Jefferson did not undo everything the Federalists had built. He kept the national bank, which he had once opposed. He also found that governing was harder than criticizing. Jefferson spoke of liberty, yet he enslaved more than 600 people during his lifetime. Like many leaders of his time, his actions did not match his words about freedom.

Just before leaving office, President Adams appointed many Federalist judges. Some of their official papers were never delivered. When Jefferson took office, he told his secretary of state, James Madison, not to deliver them. One of the men who did not get his job was William Marbury. He asked the Supreme Court to order Madison to hand over his papers.

The chief justice was John Marshall, a Federalist appointed by Adams. Marshall faced a tricky problem. If he ordered Madison to act, Jefferson might ignore him, and the Court would look weak. If he did nothing, he would seem afraid of the president.

Marshall’s answer was clever. He ruled that Marbury deserved his job. But he said the law that let Marbury bring his case straight to the Supreme Court went against the Constitution. So the Court could not help him. In doing this, Marshall claimed an important power called judicial review. That is the power of the courts to decide whether a law is unconstitutional. It made the Supreme Court a much stronger branch of government.

By 1800 hundreds of thousands of Americans lived west of the Appalachian Mountains. Their crops floated down the Mississippi River to the port of New Orleans. Whoever controlled New Orleans controlled their future. Spain had owned the city and the land west of the river, called Louisiana. Then Spain secretly gave Louisiana back to France. France was led by Napoleon Bonaparte, a powerful and ambitious general.

Jefferson sent James Monroe to join Robert Livingston in France. They were told to try to buy New Orleans. But Napoleon had lost interest in America. In Haiti, enslaved people led by Toussaint Louverture had risen up and defeated French armies. Without Haiti, Napoleon’s American plans fell apart. He needed money for war in Europe. So France offered to sell all of Louisiana.

The Americans agreed to pay $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase nearly doubled the size of the United States. Jefferson worried because the Constitution did not say the government could buy land. In the end he decided the deal was too good to lose. The land was not empty. Many Native nations lived there, and they had not been asked about any of it.

Jefferson chose Meriwether Lewis, his secretary, to lead an expedition west. An expedition is a long trip for a special purpose. Lewis chose William Clark to share command. Jefferson gave them a list of goals. Map the rivers. Look for a water route to the Pacific. Record plants, animals and weather. Meet Native nations and tell them the United States now claimed the land.

The Corps of Discovery left from near St. Louis in 1804. Over two years, they traveled up the Missouri River, over the Rocky Mountains and down the Columbia River to the Pacific. The journals of Lewis and Clark described more than 100 animals and more than 170 plants that were new to scientists back east.

The expedition depended on Native help. The Mandan let the Corps winter near their villages. Sacagawea, a Shoshone woman, helped them talk with Shoshone leaders and get horses. The Nez Perce fed them when they were starving. The Corps did not find an easy water route to the Pacific, because none existed. But their maps and reports drew Americans’ attention to the West.

Lewis and Clark were not the only explorers. In 1806 the army sent Lieutenant Zebulon Pike to explore the southern part of the Louisiana Territory. He and his small group followed the Arkansas River west across the Great Plains. The land was flat, dry and covered with grass.

In late 1806, Pike saw a tall mountain rising in what is now Colorado. He tried to climb it but turned back in deep snow. Later it was named Pikes Peak in his honor. Pike and his men suffered through a bitter winter with little food.

Pike’s group then wandered into land claimed by Spain. Spanish soldiers arrested them and took them to Santa Fe and farther south into Mexico. Pike was released in 1807. His report described Spanish towns, trade and soldiers. It also described the Plains as dry and hard to farm. For years afterward, some maps labeled the Plains a "Great American Desert."

American ships traded all over the world, including in the Mediterranean Sea. Along the coast of North Africa were four states: Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Europeans called this region the Barbary Coast. Its rulers sent ships to capture merchant vessels and hold sailors for ransom. Many countries, including the United States, paid tribute, or protection money, to keep their ships safe.

In 1801 the ruler of Tripoli demanded more money. Jefferson refused. Tripoli declared war, and Jefferson sent warships. In 1803 the American ship Philadelphia ran aground near Tripoli, and its crew was captured. The next year, a young officer named Stephen Decatur led a small group into the harbor at night. They set the captured ship on fire so Tripoli could not use it.

In 1805 a small force of U.S. Marines and hired soldiers marched across the desert and captured the town of Derna. Soon after, Tripoli signed a peace treaty. The United States still paid money to free the captured sailors. But the war showed that the young nation would use force to protect its ships.

Britain and France went to war again in 1803. Each tried to stop the United States from trading with the other. Both seized American ships. Britain also practiced impressment. That means forcing sailors to serve in its navy. The British said they were only taking back deserters from their navy. But thousands of American sailors were kidnapped too.

In 1807 a British warship fired on the American ship Chesapeake off the coast of Virginia. Three Americans were killed, and four sailors were taken. Many Americans wanted war. Jefferson did not. He tried a different weapon: an embargo. The Embargo Act of 1807 stopped American ships from carrying goods to other countries.

Jefferson hoped Britain and France would suffer without American goods. Instead, Americans suffered. Ships sat empty in harbors. Sailors lost their jobs. Farmers could not sell crops overseas. New England merchants were hit hardest, and some turned to smuggling. Congress ended the embargo in early 1809, just before Jefferson left office.

As settlers moved into Indiana and Ohio, Native nations kept losing land through treaties. Two Shawnee brothers set out to stop this. Tenskwatawa, known as the Prophet, was a religious leader. He urged Native people to turn away from American goods and customs. His brother Tecumseh was a gifted speaker and leader.

Around 1808 the brothers started a village called Prophetstown on the Tippecanoe River in Indiana. People from many nations came to live there. Tecumseh traveled far, even to the South, to build an alliance. He argued that the land belonged to all Native peoples together. No single nation had the right to sell it.

William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory, saw the alliance as a threat. In 1811, while Tecumseh was away, Harrison marched soldiers toward Prophetstown. Warriors attacked the army’s camp. In the Battle of Tippecanoe, Harrison’s troops held on and then burned the village. Tecumseh joined the British when war came in 1812. He was killed fighting in Canada in 1813, and his alliance fell apart.

By 1812 James Madison was president. A group of young members of Congress wanted war with Britain. They were called War Hawks. Their leaders included Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. They were angry about impressment and the seizing of ships. Many also blamed Britain for arming Tecumseh’s alliance. Some hoped to take Canada from Britain.

In June 1812, Congress declared war. The vote was close. Many New England members voted no, because war would hurt their trade. The United States was not ready. Its army was small, and attempts to invade Canada failed. In August 1812, American soldiers leaving Fort Dearborn, at the site of today’s Chicago, were attacked by Potawatomi warriors. Many were killed, and the fort was burned.

The navy did better than expected. The warship USS Constitution defeated a British ship in 1812. Its sides seemed so strong that sailors nicknamed it "Old Ironsides." In 1813 Oliver Hazard Perry won a naval battle on Lake Erie. That victory let Harrison’s army push into Canada, where Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames.

In 1814 Britain defeated Napoleon in Europe. Now it could send more soldiers to America. In August 1814, British troops marched into Washington, D.C. Government leaders fled. Before leaving the President’s House, Dolley Madison made sure a famous portrait of George Washington was saved. Enslaved and free workers helped carry out valuables. The British set fire to the Capitol and the President’s House.

Next the British attacked Baltimore, a busy port. Fort McHenry guarded the harbor. In September 1814, British ships began a bombardment of the fort. For about 25 hours, they fired rockets and bombs. Francis Scott Key, an American lawyer, watched from a ship nearby. He did not know who was winning.

At dawn Key saw a huge American flag still flying over the fort. The defenders had held. Key wrote a poem about that moment. It was later set to music and called "The Star-Spangled Banner." In 1931 Congress made it the national anthem, the official song of the United States.

By late 1814 both sides were tired of war. Diplomats met in Ghent, in what is now Belgium. On December 24, 1814, they signed the Treaty of Ghent. It ended the war but changed almost nothing. Each side gave back land it had taken. The treaty did not mention impressment.

News traveled slowly by ship. Before word of peace reached America, a British army attacked New Orleans. General Andrew Jackson defended the city on January 8, 1815. His mixed force included soldiers, frontier riflemen, free Black militia, Choctaw warriors and even pirates led by Jean Lafitte. The British lost about 2,000 soldiers killed, wounded or captured. American losses were small. Jackson became a national hero.

The war had lasting effects. Americans felt a new sense of nationalism, or pride in their country. The Federalists had opposed the war, and some met at the Hartford Convention to complain. As the war ended in victory, they looked disloyal, and their party faded away. Native nations of the Northwest lost their British ally. That left them facing American settlers alone.

In the late 1700s, Britain began using machines powered by water to spin thread and weave cloth. This change from making goods by hand to making them with machines in factories is called the Industrial Revolution. Britain wanted to keep its machines secret. It banned people who knew how to build them from leaving the country.

Samuel Slater was a young British mill worker who knew the machines well. In 1789 he sailed to America anyway, disguised as a farm worker. He carried no drawings. He had memorized how the machines were built. In 1790, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, he built spinning machines powered by a river. New England had many fast rivers to turn waterwheels.

Another change came from the idea of interchangeable parts. These are parts made exactly alike, so any one can replace another. Before this, a gunsmith made each gun by hand, and its parts fit only that gun. Eli Whitney promoted the idea when he signed a contract to make muskets for the army in 1798. Government armories later perfected it. Interchangeable parts made mass production, making large numbers of the same product, possible.

In the 1820s, a group of Boston businessmen built a factory town on the Merrimack River in Massachusetts. They named it Lowell, after Francis Cabot Lowell, who had helped bring power looms to America. Here, every step of turning raw cotton into cloth happened under one roof. The owners needed many workers.

They hired young, unmarried women from New England farms. These workers became known as the mill girls. Many were in their teens or early twenties. They lived in company boardinghouses with strict rules and curfews. For many, it was their first chance to earn their own wages. Some sent money home or saved for school.

The work was hard. Days often lasted 12 hours or more, six days a week. The mills were loud and hot, and the air was full of cotton dust. When owners cut pay in 1834 and raised boardinghouse charges in 1836, many women walked out in protest. These early strikes did not win much. But they showed that workers could act together.

In 1800 most roads were dirt paths. They turned to mud in the rain and were full of stumps and holes. It could cost more to haul goods 30 miles over land than to ship them across the Atlantic. Americans called for better internal improvements, meaning roads and canals built to help trade.

In 1811 workers began building the National Road, paid for by the national government. It started in Cumberland, Maryland, and reached Wheeling on the Ohio River by 1818. Later it was pushed west across Ohio and Indiana and ended at Vandalia, Illinois. Wagons, stagecoaches, herds of animals and families heading west crowded onto it.

Rivers were even better highways, once boats could go upstream. Robert Fulton’s steamboat traveled up the Hudson River in 1807. The trip from New York City to Albany took about 32 hours, far faster than sailboats. Soon steamboats carried people and goods up and down the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri Rivers. Shipping costs dropped, and river towns boomed.

New York’s governor, DeWitt Clinton, had a bold plan. He wanted to dig a canal, a human-made waterway, across New York State. It would connect the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo. Critics laughed and called it "Clinton’s Ditch." Work began in 1817.

Thousands of workers, including many Irish immigrants, dug the canal mostly by hand with shovels and horse-drawn tools. They built locks, which raise and lower boats like water elevators, to climb hills. The Erie Canal opened in 1825. It was 363 miles long. Mules on a towpath beside the water pulled the boats.

The canal was a huge success. Shipping costs from the Great Lakes to New York City fell sharply. Crops from Ohio and other western states flowed east, and manufactured goods flowed west. New York City became the nation’s busiest port. Towns along the canal, such as Rochester and Buffalo, grew fast. Other states rushed to build canals of their own, including Illinois.

Canals had limits. They froze in winter, and they could only be built where there was enough water. Railroads had neither problem. In 1827 businessmen in Baltimore started the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, one of the first in the country. Its first short section of track opened in 1830.

Early trains were small and bumpy. In 1830 Peter Cooper built a tiny steam locomotive called the Tom Thumb. It raced a horse-drawn railcar. The engine was pulling ahead until a belt slipped, and the horse won. But people could see that steam engines would soon beat horses.

Railroads spread fast. Sparks from engines set fires, and crashes were common. Still, trains were faster than canal boats and could run in any season. By 1840 the United States had nearly 3,000 miles of track. By 1860 it had about 30,000 miles, more than any other country. In the 1850s, Chicago would become the railroad center of the nation.

In the 1790s, slavery seemed to be growing weaker in some places. Northern states were ending it, and tobacco had worn out much Southern soil. Then came a small machine with huge effects. In 1793 Eli Whitney built the cotton gin. It used a turning drum with wire teeth to pull cotton fibers away from the sticky seeds.

Before the gin, one worker could clean only a pound or so of cotton a day by hand. With a gin, far more cotton could be cleaned. Factories in Britain and New England wanted all the cotton they could get. Growing cotton suddenly became very profitable. People called it King Cotton.

Planters rushed to new lands in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and later Texas. Much of this land had been taken from Native nations. Cotton needed many workers to plant, weed and pick it. Planters used enslaved people to do this work. The gin saved labor in cleaning cotton, but it led to far more slavery overall. The number of enslaved people in the United States grew from about 700,000 in 1790 to nearly 4 million by 1860.

The Constitution allowed Congress to ban bringing enslaved people from other countries starting in 1808. Congress did so. But slavery itself was still legal in the South. As cotton spread, planters in the Deep South wanted more workers. Many enslaved people lived in older states such as Virginia and Maryland.

A large domestic slave trade grew up. Domestic means inside the country. Traders bought enslaved people in the Upper South and sold them in the Deep South. Historians estimate that about one million people were moved this way between 1790 and 1860. Many were forced to walk hundreds of miles, chained together in lines called coffles. Others were shipped by sea or down the Mississippi River.

The trade tore families apart. Husbands, wives, parents and children could be sold to different owners and never see each other again. At auctions, people were sold to whoever paid the most. For enslaved families, the fear of being sold away was one of the worst parts of slavery. After freedom came, many spent years searching for lost relatives.

Enslaved people worked from sunrise to sunset under the threat of punishment. Yet they built strong communities. They formed families, even though the law did not protect their marriages. They told stories, sang songs and passed down traditions. Many became Christians and met, sometimes in secret, to worship. Their religious songs, called spirituals, often carried messages of hope and freedom.

Enslaved people also practiced resistance, meaning actions taken against slavery. Some worked slowly on purpose, broke tools or pretended to be sick. Some secretly learned to read. Many ran away, hiding in swamps and woods or heading north. A few planned revolts. In 1800 a blacksmith named Gabriel planned an uprising near Richmond, Virginia, but it was discovered before it began.

In 1831 Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher in Virginia, led the largest revolt of the era. His group killed about 55 white people before militia stopped them. In the panic that followed, white mobs and militias killed many Black people, including some who had nothing to do with the revolt. Turner was caught and executed. Southern states then passed harsher laws, including laws against teaching enslaved people to read.

In 1816 James Monroe, a Democratic-Republican, was elected president. The Federalist Party was fading, so for a few years there was really only one party. A Boston newspaper called this time an Era of Good Feelings. Monroe was re-elected in 1820 with almost no opposition.

Nationalism was strong. Congress created the Second Bank of the United States in 1816. It also passed a protective tariff, a tax on imports meant to help American factories compete. Henry Clay of Kentucky called his plan for a bank, a tariff and internal improvements the American System. He hoped it would tie the regions together, with each one helping the others.

The Supreme Court, led by John Marshall, also strengthened the national government. In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), it ruled that a state could not tax the national bank. In 1819 Spain agreed to give Florida to the United States. But the good feelings were thinner than they looked. Sharp arguments were coming over tariffs, money and, above all, slavery.

Illinois was part of the old Northwest Territory. It became its own territory in 1809. At that time most American settlers lived in the south, near the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Many had come from Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. On December 3, 1818, Illinois became the 21st state. Its first capital was Kaskaskia. The capital moved to Vandalia in 1820 and to Springfield in 1839.

Nathaniel Pope, the territory’s delegate to Congress, made one change with huge effects. He got the state’s northern border moved about 41 miles north. That put the land at the mouth of the Chicago River, and a stretch of the Lake Michigan shore, inside Illinois. Chicago was only a tiny settlement then. It became a town in 1833 and a city in 1837.

The Northwest Ordinance had banned slavery in the territory. Illinois’s first constitution also banned bringing in new slavery. But the rules had gaps. Some people who were already enslaved stayed that way. Others were held as indentured servants, forced to work for years under contracts that were close to slavery. In 1824 Illinois voters decided whether to call a convention that might allow slavery. Governor Edward Coles led the fight against it, and the voters said no.

In 1819 the United States had 11 free states and 11 slave states. That balance gave each side equal votes in the Senate. Then Missouri, part of the Louisiana Purchase, asked to join as a slave state. That would tip the balance. A New York congressman proposed slowly ending slavery in Missouri. Southern members were furious. The debate grew bitter.

Henry Clay helped work out a deal in 1820. It was called the Missouri Compromise. A compromise is an agreement where each side gives up something. Missouri would join as a slave state. Maine, which had been part of Massachusetts, would join as a free state. The balance in the Senate would stay even.

The compromise also drew a line across the rest of the Louisiana Purchase at 36°30′ north latitude. Slavery would be banned north of the line, except in Missouri. For the time being, the crisis was over. But the fight showed the growing power of sectionalism, the loyalty to one’s own region. Many leaders feared that slavery could one day split the nation.

In the early 1800s, many colonies in Latin America won independence from Spain and Portugal. Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and others became new nations. Americans cheered. But some leaders worried that European powers might try to take these lands back.

Secretary of State John Quincy Adams helped President Monroe shape an answer. In December 1823, Monroe gave a message to Congress. It later became known as the Monroe Doctrine. A doctrine is a statement of official policy. Monroe said the Americas were closed to new European colonies. The United States would stay out of Europe’s affairs. In return, Europe should stay out of the Western Hemisphere.

At the time, the United States did not have a strong navy to back up these words. Britain’s navy, which also wanted to keep other European powers out, did much of that job. But the Monroe Doctrine became a lasting part of American foreign policy. Later presidents used it to claim a special role in Latin America, which many Latin Americans came to resent.