Readings #1- Jefferson's First Term, Neutrality under Jefferson and Madison, The War of 1812 PDF Fall 2024

Readings #1: Jefferson's First Term, Neutrality under Jefferson and Madison, The War of 1812 Jefferson's First Term The inauguration of Thomas Jefferson as the nation's third president marked a turning point in American politics. For the next two dozen years, Republican leader...

Readings #1: Jefferson's First Term, Neutrality under Jefferson and Madison, The War of 1812 Jefferson's First Term The inauguration of Thomas Jefferson as the nation's third president marked a turning point in American politics. For the next two dozen years, Republican leadership guided the nation through peace and war. While the Federalists faded as a political force, their ideology continued to influence the country for decades in the decisions handed down by the Supreme Court. Indeed, the judiciary finally attained coequal status as one of the branches of government after 1800. The period of Republican ascendancy witnessed the doubling of the size of the country through the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the addition of eight states (1803–21). The admission of Maine and Missouri raised the expansion of slavery into a national issue and set the stage for the sectional debates that raged in the decades before the Civil War. :  Jefferson' s first term. Jeffe rson had been alarmed by the growth of the national debt under Federalist rule. Albert Gallatin, his secretary of the treasury, agreed that the debt created high taxes that creditors manipulate d to their own advantage. Gallatin promised to eliminate the national debt in sixteen :  years by reducing both military expenditures and the size of government. The Republicans also repealed internal taxes, including the hated excise on whiskey. These policies bore fruit; early in the administration, both military and other governmental spending dropped, and debt declined modestly. Despite his strict constructionist views, Jefferson did not dismantle important elements of the Federalist program. He saw no need, for example, to abolish the Bank of the United States; it was working well. Nor did Jefferson systematically replace Federalist officeholders with Republicans; rather, he filled vacancies with his supporters as Federalists resigned or died. A number of Federalists even served in his cabinet. In making judicial appointments, however, Jefferson took the upper hand. Marbury v. Madison and judicial review. In an effort to maintain influence at the national level, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1801 at the end of February, just before Jefferson took office. The legislation reduced the number of justices on the Supreme Court from six to five, and also created sixteen federal judgeships, which President Adams quickly filled with Federalists. No Republicans were on the federal bench at the time, and Jefferson would have virtually no opportunity to appoint any during his term in office. The appointing of “midnight judges” on Adams's last day in office prompted Jefferson to challenge the Judiciary Act. Secretary of State James Madison refused to issue William Marbury his commission to serve as justice of the peace in the District of Columbia. Marbury then petitioned the Supreme Court to get his judgeship. Chief Justice John Marshall, a Federalist who had recently been appointed to the Supreme Court, rejected Marbury's plea on the grounds that the Judiciary Act of 1789 had incorrectly given the Supreme Court the power to take such action. Meanwhile, Congress repealed the Judiciary Act of 1801. At first impression, it might seem that by rejecting Marbury's claim, Marshall was not acting in the interest of a fellow Federalist. Marshall, however, had a greater goal in mind. By overturning part of a congressional law, he established the Supreme Court's power of judicial review—the power to declare federal laws invalid if they violated the Constitution. Until Marbury v. Madison (1803), the Supreme Court had not been considered an especially important branch of the federal government. In fact, Marshall was the fourth chief justice to serve in a dozen years. The decision established the Court as a major force in American politics. :  The Barbary pirates. American merchant ships entering the Mediterranean Sea were subject to seizure by pirates operating out of Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco. The United States had paid tribute to the rulers of the North African states since the 1790s. Although maintaining peace was a cornerstone of Republican foreign policy, Jefferson took action when the pasha of Tripoli made extraordinary demands for payment and declared war on the United States (1801). The conflict, which led to an American naval blockade and bombardment of Tripoli as well as a land assault by marines, ended in 1805 when a new treaty was signed and the United States agreed to pay a ransom for its captured soldiers and sailors. During the same time, a threat much closer to home was also resolved by paying cash. The Louisiana Purchase. Napoleon Bonaparte, who came to power in France in 1799, dreamed of reestablishing the French empire in North America. In the following year, he negotiated a secret treaty, the Treaty of San Ildefonso, with Spanish King Charles IV, which returned the Louisiana Territory, lost at the end of the Seven Years' War, to France. But the agreement did not remain secret for long. This turn of events just a few years after the successful Pinckney Treaty had opened the Mississippi River and port of New Orleans to American traffic justifiably alarmed Jefferson. His concern was reinforced when a Spanish official in New Orleans forbade the deposit of American produce there for transshipment to other countries, an action many Americans incorrectly believed was ordered by Napoleon. Jefferson feared that France might leave the Mediterranean to British influence in return for a new opportunity on the North American :  continent. U.S. expansion might be blocked by France to the west and by British Canada to the north. In 1803, Jefferson sent James Monroe to join Robert Livingston, the American minister in Paris, to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans and West Florida. By this time, Napoleon had given up his plans for a colonial empire. His trying to restore French rule after a slave revolt in Saint Domingue (Haiti) cost him a great deal in both money and men, his troops having been decimated by tropical diseases. The two American representatives were therefore surprised to find the French government willing to sell all of Louisiana—280,000 square miles between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains—for a paltry $15 million. Jefferson was unsure whether the United States could legally buy the Louisiana territory because the Constitution said nothing about purchasing land. He considered proposing a constitutional amendment but dropped the idea because it might take too much time, and the opportunity could vanish. The bargain was too good to pass up. Jefferson approved the purchase, the Senate ratified it, and the United States abruptly doubled in size. :  The Lewis and Clark expedition. The Louisiana Purchase was then unknown; neither France nor Spain had mapped its rivers, mountains, or plains, and the important sources of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and their tributaries were still a mystery. Jefferson quickly made plans for its exploration, appointing his secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, :  to head the expedition. Lewis asked his friend Lieutenant William Clark to serve as coleader. In the spring of 1804, the fifty-man Corps of Discovery left St. Louis, heading up the Missouri River. Although military men, Lewis and Clark had received crash courses in botany, zoology, and astronomy, enabling them to carefully collect plant and animal specimens and map the rivers. In addition, every literate man on the expedition was ordered to keep a diary. The expedition spent the first winter among the hospitable Mandan on the Upper Missouri River and then headed west for the Pacific coast in the spring of 1805. Accompanying them were a French fur trader, Toussaint Charbonneau, as guide and interpreter; his wife, a Shoshone Indian named Sacajawea; and their infant son. The presence of the baby and a fortuitous meeting with Shoshone tribesmen reinforced Lewis and Clark's claim that they came in peace. They distributed medallions to the tribal chiefs along with other gifts and pledged their friendship. On reaching the Pacific in November 1805, the expedition returned eastward. The journals kept by Lewis and Clark and other members of the expedition provided a wealth of information about the geography, the plant and animal life, and the customs of native tribes in the trans-Mississippi west. In addition to stimulating later settlement and trade in the region, the expedition reinforced the American claim to the Oregon Country that was first made by Lieutenant Robert Gray, who came upon the Columbia River in 1792. Jefferson authorized other expeditions as well. He sent Lieutenant Zebulon Pike to map the source of the Mississippi River. Pike's map was later proved incorrect, however, due mainly to the complexity of the rivers and lakes at the headwaters. Pike also headed west to explore the area between the Arkansas and Red rivers, but he became lost and was taken into custody by Spanish soldiers on the Rio Grande. Although his maps and papers were confiscated, Pike remembered enough to reconstruct a good deal of his records after he was released. Neutrality under Jefferson and Madison Jefferson had no problem trouncing his Federalist opponent in 1804. Obtaining the Louisiana Purchase and accomplishing a reduction of the national debt assured him of an overwhelming electoral victory. A troubled second term. The Republicans' elation at the results of the election did not last long. A disaffected Aaron Burr, whose political career ended when he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, became involved in a plot either to create an independent nation in the :  Louisiana-Mississippi-West Florida region or invade Mexico. Historians remain unsure. Burr was indicted in two states for Hamilton's death, and in early 1807, he was arrested on Jefferson's order and charged with treason. His trial before Chief Justice John Marshall ended in an acquittal because Marshall defined treason under the Constitution very narrowly. The Burr case is interesting from another constitutional perspective: Jefferson refused to turn over documents or appear in court to testify based on a claim of executive privilege. With the Federalist party rapidly declining, Jefferson had to meet the challenge of growing factionalism within his own party. One group, known as the Quids, criticized the president for compromising Republican ideology. John Randolph, the Quid leader, refused to accept the idea that a political party on taking power might have to view things differently than when it was in opposition to the party in office. For example, Jefferson endured Randolph's attacks for agreeing to a compromise on the Yazoo land fraud, a Georgia-area land speculation scheme in which innocent buyers of fraudulently purchased land would have lost their investments. Foreign policy, rather than party or domestic issues, dominated his second term and the administration of his successor, James Madison. War between France and Great Britain. The renewed fighting between Great Britain and France (1803) severely tested American neutrality. The situation became even more difficult when the British navy under Lord Nelson defeated the French fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and gained control of the seas. American merchants had been profiting from the war by shipping sugar and coffee brought from French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean to Europe. Great Britain protested because the prices it was getting for its West Indies products were declining. Noting that French ports visited by neutral U.S. merchant ships (to preserve the French merchant marine from Great Britain) would have been closed to the United States in peacetime (allowing only French deliveries), Britain invoked the Rule of 1756, stating that such ports should not be open during war to neutral replacements. American traders got around the rule by taking French and Spanish products to American ports, unloading them, and then reloading them for European ports as “American” exports. By 1805, Britain had had enough of such deceptions, and through a series of trade decrees began a blockade of French-controlled European ports. The British as well as the French ignored U.S. neutrality claims and seized American merchant ships. Great Britain resumed the policy of impressment, taking alleged British navy deserters off American vessels and returning them to British service. The life of an American sailor was hard but nothing like :  that in the Royal Navy with its harsh discipline and low pay. Many British deserters had become American citizens, but this did not stop British officials from impressing them, nor did the British hesitate in taking U.S.-born citizens, who could even prove their American birth. Between 1807 and 1812, the Royal Navy impressed some six thousand American seamen. In June 1807, the British warship Leopard attacked the Chesapeake, an American navy frigate, and four alleged deserters were removed. Prior impressment actions had involved merchant ships; this one, however, involved a U.S. navy ship. Amid the public's cry for war against Britain, Jefferson turned to economic pressure to resolve the crisis. The Embargo Act. Jefferson's solution to the problems with Great Britain and France was to deny both countries American goods. In December 1807, Congress passed the Embargo Act, which stopped exports and prohibited the departure of merchant ships for foreign ports. The act also effectively ended imports because foreign ships would not bring products to the United States if they had to leave without cargo. The British got around the Embargo Act by developing trade connections in South America, while in the United States, thousands of sailors were thrown out of work, merchants declared bankruptcy, and southern and western farmers had no outlet for their crops. At the time, the Embargo Act was generally viewed as a failure. While the economic costs to Americans were high, trade did continue. Enforcement was lax, and American captains used a loophole in the law to claim that they had legally sailed into European ports only after being “blown off course” by adverse winds; there were a suspiciously great many instances of bad weather between 1807 and 1809. The Embargo Act did, however, result in an increase in manufacturing. The number of cotton mills in the United States, for example, increased from fifteen to eighty-seven in just two years, and other domestic industries took root to replace foreign imports. The mood of the country in 1808 encouraged Jefferson not to seek a third term. Despite the nation's unhappiness over the embargo, Republican James Madison was elected president and the Republicans kept control of both houses of Congress. The Embargo Act was repealed on March 1, 1809, just before Madison took office. Madison and neutrality. Madison was just as committed as Jefferson to staying out of the European war, and he continued to rely on economic pressure. The Non-Intercourse Act of 1809 replaced the Embargo Act. The logic behind the law was that the United States :  would open its ports to all nations except Britain and France. If either of those two nations stopped violating American neutrality rights, the United States would reestablish commercial ties. Britain and France ignored the Non-Intercourse Act, and other seafaring nations had no desire to confront the Royal Navy. Many American merchants simply found ways to evade the law. Congress tried another tack in May 1810 with Macon's Bill No. 2. This time, the United States would trade with Britain and France, in spite of their neutrality violations. Should one of them end their restrictions on neutral shipping, the United States would stop trading with the other. A cynical Napoleon responded by promising to end French restrictions, and Congress proclaimed non-intercourse against Britain in February 1811, but France continued to seize American ships. Problems in the west. While Madison and Congress grappled with the neutrality issue, Native Americans renewed their objections to American settlement north of the Ohio River. Tribes were still being coerced into giving away or selling their land. Through the Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809), the Delaware and Miami gave up much of the central and western parts of the new Indiana Territory for only ten thousand dollars. Two Shawnee leaders, Tecumseh, a brilliant chief, and his half-brother Tenskwatawa, known as the Prophet, took a stand against further encroachment by settlers. While Tecumseh did receive aid from the British in Canada, he was less their pawn than a man who clearly saw what alcoholism, disease, and loss of land were doing to his people. Tenskwatawa was a recovered alcoholic who urged Indians to reaffirm their traditional values and culture. William Henry Harrison, the governor of the Indiana Territory, perceived in Tecumseh and the Prophet a dangerous combination of military and religious appeal. In September 1811, Harrison set out with about one thousand men to attack Tecumseh's stronghold at Prophetstown on the Tippecanoe River. The Shawnee struck first, but Harrison was able to beat them back and claim a major victory. Tecumseh was away from the village trying to recruit tribes to join the confederacy, and Tenskwatawa fled. The Battle of Tippecanoe, as Harrison preferred to call the engagement, clearly did not resolve the conflict with the Indians on the frontier. It did, however, intensify anti-British feeling in the Northwest. Western senators and congressmen urged a more aggressive policy against Great Britain. Henry Clay of Kentucky became the leader of a faction in Congress called the War Hawks, which demanded an invasion of Canada and the expulsion of Spain from Florida. The War Hawks feared that the British in Canada were once again intriguing with the Indians, a :  concern that had provoked Harrison's move against Tecumseh. Voting for war. On June 1, 1812, President Madison sent a war message to Congress. Frustrated at the failure of the neutrality measures and pressured by the War Hawks, Madison felt he had no choice. Ironically, Great Britain repealed its Orders in Council on June 23, 1812, relaxing its trade restrictions in the face of an economic depression. American leaders ignored this belated attempt at compromise, however. Few Republicans wanted war, but long-standing grievances and insults could no longer be tolerated. Madison's war message cited impressment, violation of neutral rights, Indian aggression, and British meddling in American trade as causes for war. The vote proceeded along party lines, the majority of Republicans voting for war and a Federalist minority voting against it. A somewhat divided United States thus fought Great Britain for a second time. War of 1812 The War of 1812 - Crash Course US History #11 Although the dispute leading to the War of 1812 was over freedom of the seas, the war itself was fought chiefly on land. Madison believed that the motive behind British policy had been to eliminate the United States as a maritime trading rival, while the British, occupied with fighting France in a battle for survival, considered the war with the United States a sideshow, at least initially. The Canadian campaign. For the United States, the most obvious British target was :  Canada. Its population was small, many Canadians were actually Americans by birth, and a quick victory there would stop British plans to ruin American trade. The military facts painted a different picture, however. Thousands of Native Americans in the northwestern territories sided with the British when the war began, bolstering their strength, while the small U.S. army was composed of poorly trained state militiamen led by elderly and incompetent generals. In July 1812, an American army led by General William Hull moved from Detroit into Canada. Almost immediately the Shawnee cut his supply lines, forcing him back to Detroit. Although Hull commanded two thousand men, he surrendered to a considerably smaller British and Native American force. Other embarrassments followed as the United States suffered defeat at Queenston Heights in western New York, and the militia under General Henry Dearborn refused to march to Montreal from northeastern New York. The United States fared better on Lake Erie in 1813. The Royal Navy could not reach the lake from the St. Lawrence River, so both the British and Americans raced to build ships on opposite sides of the lake. On September 10, 1813, the small American fleet under Oliver Hazard Perry defeated the British in the Battle of Lake Erie. “We have met the enemy, and they are ours,” he reported, a victory statement that became legendary. Less than three weeks later, on October 5, William Henry Harrison (a general by then) defeated a combined British and Native American force at the Battle of the Thames. Tecumseh was killed in this battle, ending Native Americans' hopes for a coalition that could stand against the advance of U.S. settlement. Despite these victories, U.S. efforts to capture Canada ended in stalemate. The British land offensive. In April 1814, Napoleon abdicated the French throne and went into exile on the island of Elba, allowing Great Britain to devote its full attention to the war in the United States. The British sent a fleet to Chesapeake Bay and landed an army at Bladensburg, Maryland, on August 24, 1814. The American militia troops fled before the British, who then headed for the U.S. capital. Madison fled Washington, D.C., along with the militia, while his wife Dolley rescued silverware, a bed, and a painting of Washington before leaving the presidential home at the last minute. The British burned the mansion and other public buildings, partly in retaliation for an American act of arson at the Canadian capital of York (now Toronto) during the previous year. Continuing north in Chesapeake Bay, the British fleet intended to capture Baltimore after :  first taking Fort McHenry. The British bombarded the fort all through the night of September 13. Francis Scott Key, an American attorney who had boarded a British ship to negotiate the release of a civilian prisoner, watched the battle rage. At dawn, the British broke off the attack, unable to take the fort. Key scribbled down a poem about the event, which became the national anthem “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Almost simultaneously, a British naval force under General Sir George Prevost advanced from Canada along Lake Champlain. They met the Americans under Commander Thomas Macdonough at Platts-burgh, New York, on September 11. Macdonough won a decisive victory, forcing Prevost to retreat to Canada. Earlier American victories near Niagara had halted a British offensive there. The British also planned a major sea and land offensive at New Orleans. The plan stemmed from victories by Andrew Jackson's army against the Creek Indians in Florida in March 1814 and the subsequent capture of the Spanish fort at Pensacola in November, denying its use as a base to the British. A British force of more than seven thousand men landed near New Orleans in December with the goal of seizing Mississippi. Jackson's defensive strategy was excellent. By placing his outnumbered troops behind earthworks and cotton bales, he was able to cut down more than two thousand British soldiers in short order during their engagement on January 8, 1815. The Battle of New Orleans was seen as the victory that ended the war. In fact, a peace treaty had been signed several weeks earlier. A battle that never would have been fought if international communications had been faster made Andrew Jackson a national hero. Ending the war. At about the same time the British were besieging Fort McHenry, American and British commissioners were meeting at Ghent, Belgium, to work out an agreement to end the war. With Napoleon out of the picture (he did not escape from Elba until March 1815), the British had little reason for continuing the war. While the British initially called for the surrender of some American territory, news of their loss in the Battle of Plattsburgh made them more conciliatory. The American commissioners, led by John Quincy Adams, hammered out the details of the peace settlement. Essentially, the treaty simply ended the conflict. It said nothing about the impressment of American sailors, freedom of the seas, or neutral rights, all of which had led to the war. The commissioners signed the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, 1814, in time to celebrate Christmas Eve. A Federalist error. The election of 1812 had seen a Federalist comeback in national politics. Although Madison won reelection against DeWitt Clinton, the electoral vote was the :  closest since 1800: 128 to 89. During the war, New England had become a Federalist stronghold. Federalists there had opposed the Louisiana Purchase for its potential threat to New England's economic importance. New England's commerce had been wrecked by the Embargo Act, and some unhappy New Englanders called the war “Mr. Madison's War.” Despite the complaints, New Englanders had profited from the war, sending grain to feed the British army and building factories with war profits. New England banks refused to accept paper money and consequently amassed huge amounts of silver and gold, causing a scarcity of specie (hard money) in the rest of the United States. New England's opposition to the war prompted the Federalists to call a special convention in Hartford, Connecticut, on December 15, 1814, where they proposed a series of constitutional amendments that would have severely limited the power of the national government. Their resolutions were badly timed, for hardly had they announced their proposals when news came that the war was over, making the Federalist resolutions seem unpatriotic at best and treasonable at worst. At the next presidential election (1816), voter rejection of the Federalist party was nearly complete. James Monroe, yet another Virginia Republican, defeated Rufus King by 183 electoral votes to 34. The Federalist party was through in national politics. :