Transcript
Good Feelings
1817–1819
Boston, July 1817. King Street is State Street now, hung with flags for a president. James Monroe is a Virginia Republican. Boston is a Federalist town. Everyone has turned out anyway.
Otis sat at the Hartford Convention, where some New Englanders talked of leaving the Union. Russell's paper attacked Jefferson and Madison for sixteen years. Today both cheer a Virginian.
July 12. Russell's Columbian Centinel names the moment: an "Era of Good Feelings." A Federalist paper, praising a Republican president, two and a half years after Hartford.
Washington, February 16, 1819. Congress is arguing about slavery in Missouri.
Thomas W. Cobb You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish.
James Tallmadge Jr. If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only say, let it come!
Nineteen months from the cheering on State Street to talk of seas of blood. How does a country with one party and one mood get there?
One Party
1815–1820
To get one party, let the other oppose a war and meet in secret.
New England Federalists did both, at Hartford, in December 1814.
They wanted two-thirds votes for war, and no president twice in a row from one state.
Then came peace. The war ended in a draw. The country decided it had won.
In 1816 Monroe beat the Federalist Rufus King, 183 electoral votes to 34.
Monroe's inauguration moved outdoors, after the House and Senate fought over chairs.
James Monroe Discord does not belong to our system.
He meant it.
Monroe was the last Revolutionary officer to be president, shot at Trenton at eighteen.
Then Republicans borrowed Federalist ideas: a national bank, a tariff, a bigger navy, all in 1816.
By 1820 the Federalists ran nobody. Monroe won every electoral vote but one.
Legend says William Plumer dissented so Washington would stay the only unanimous president. His own reason was duller.
Monroe's one party held three regions with three different economies. One of them depended on slavery.
The American System
1815–1824
The war taught Washington two lessons: no national bank to borrow from, hardly a road to march on.
Then peace came, and British cloth flooded American docks. Henry Brougham told the Commons a loss was worth it to "stifle in the cradle" America's war-born factories.
Two young War Hawks, Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, wanted Washington to fix all of it.
The Tariff of 1816 was the first meant to protect American factories. Calhoun voted yes. Webster, for New England's shipowners, voted no. By 1828 they had traded sides.
The Second Bank opened in Carpenters' Hall, where the First Continental Congress had met. Madison had called a national bank unconstitutional in 1791. In 1816, he signed one.
Calhoun's Bonus Bill would spend the Bank's charter bonus on roads.
John C. Calhoun Let us, then, bind the republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals. Let us conquer space.
On his last full day in office, Madison vetoed it.
James Madison I am constrained by the insuperable difficulty I feel in reconciling the bill with the Constitution of the United States.
He liked roads. He wanted an amendment first, and none ever came. Congress had already paid for one big road, over the Alleghenies to the Ohio. Elsewhere, states built their own.
In 1824 Clay gave the package a name.
Henry Clay But there is a remedy, and that remedy consists in modifying our foreign policy, and in adopting a genuine American System.
"This favorite American policy is what America has never tried; and this odious foreign policy is what, as we are told, foreign states have never pursued."
Webster, for New England's shipowners, did not buy the name. The plan sounded national. Every region judged it by what it did at home.
Southern planters sold cotton abroad and bought goods back. A tariff taxed what they bought, to help Northern mills. Every bale was grown by enslaved people.
1819
1816–1821
In 1815, a volcano named Tambora blew up in Indonesia, half a world away. The next June, it snowed in New England.
Europe went hungry and paid high prices for American crops. Settlers rushed west, buying federal land on credit with state banks' paper money.
Most of that land had just been taken from Native nations, by war and by treaty.
Then Europe's harvests recovered. By 1820, a pound of cotton sold for half its 1818 price.
The Second Bank called in its loans and demanded gold and silver from state banks. It had a reason: they'd printed far more paper than they could redeem.
Farms went under the sheriff's hammer. City workers lost their jobs. In Philadelphia that year, more than eighteen hundred people went to prison for debt.
In 1833, in Andrew Jackson's war on the Bank, the writer William Gouge gave his verdict. The Bank was saved, and the people were ruined.
In March 1819, the Supreme Court upheld the Bank. Congress could charter one, and no state could tax it.
John Marshall The power to tax involves the power to destroy.
The McCulloch in the case was the Bank's Baltimore cashier. He'd been lending its money to himself and his friends.
Ohio ignored the ruling. Its agents walked into the Bank's Chillicothe branch and took a hundred thousand dollars. Five years later, the Supreme Court ruled Ohio had to give it back.
In 1820, Congress ended credit and cut the price to $1.25 an acre. Across the West and the South, people blamed the Bank. They would remember.
The Line
1819–1821
Early 1819: eleven free states, ten slave states. The North holds the House, 105 seats to 81. In the Senate, one new state could tip the balance.
Missouri asks to join as a slave state. About ten thousand people there are enslaved. Only Louisiana has come from the Purchase, so Missouri sets the rule.
February 13, 1819. New York's James Tallmadge amends Missouri's statehood bill. No more enslaved people may be brought in. Children born there go free at twenty-five.
Tallmadge helped write New York's own gradual emancipation law. In 1820, New York still held about ten thousand people in slavery. So did Missouri.
The House passes it, North against South. The Senate kills it, and Missouri waits. Southerners say Congress can't set terms for a new state. They call restriction a first step.
Alabama makes it eleven states apiece. Maine asks in, and the Senate ties its bill to Missouri's. Illinois's Jesse Thomas adds a line: north of thirty-six thirty, no slavery in the Purchase, except Missouri.
The vote happens in the new Hall of the House, which Samuel Morse would paint by lamplight. The painting toured the country and lost money.
Four members are about to speak. Walk the Hall and hear them first.
Ninety to eighty-seven: Missouri may keep slavery. Every no came from a free state. Almost every member voted with his region. A few Northerners crossed, and three votes decided it.
Monroe signs on March 6. Missouri keeps slavery, Maine enters free, and slavery is barred north of thirty-six thirty. South of that line, slavery may keep spreading.
Adams backs the deal, then writes down his doubts.
John Quincy Adams If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break. For the present, however, this contest is laid asleep.
Missouri's new constitution tells its legislature to bar free Black people from the state. Clay's 1821 fix protects citizens of other states. It never says whether free Black people count.
Missouri joins on August 10, 1821. Twelve free states, twelve slave, and a line across the Purchase. Congress settled Missouri. It did not settle slavery.
A Fire Bell in the Night
1820–1824
Monticello, April 22, 1820. Thomas Jefferson is seventy-seven and has stopped following politics. A Massachusetts congressman mails him a letter about Missouri. Jefferson writes back.
Thomas Jefferson But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.
Thomas Jefferson I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.
Thomas Jefferson It is hushed indeed for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.
Thomas Jefferson A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated;
Thomas Jefferson and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.
Thomas Jefferson But as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.
Thomas Jefferson Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
Jefferson wrote this to a Northern congressman. He enslaved more than six hundred people in his life. He freed five in his will. In January 1827, his estate sold 130 people to pay his debts.
The line held for thirty-four years.
The one party didn't hold. In 1824, four Republicans ran for president, each backed by his own region.
One party hid three regions. Every national plan helped some regions more than others. Hard times turned them against Washington. And slavery was the one question nobody could split down the middle.
The good feelings lasted about two years. The question Missouri raised took a war to answer.