Rebound AIPeriod 4 · 1800–1848
Nationalism and the Market Revolution
The War of 1812 left the country more confident and more nationalist, and Henry Clay's American System tried to bind it together with a national bank, a protective tariff, and roads and canals. Steamboats, canals, factories, and new machines turned households into customers and let the North, South, and West specialize, while cotton and the Missouri crisis showed how slavery could pull them apart. By 1828 the one-party Era of Good Feelings had broken into Jackson's Democrats and their opponents.
After the War of 1812
Northerners blamed the war on the South's slave power, boosted by the three-fifths compromise. Relations with Britain improved quickly after 1815, and nationalism grew as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper wrote distinctly American stories.
Henry Clay's American System
Henry Clay's American System proposed a new national bank, a protective tariff, and federally funded roads and canals. Congress chartered the Second Bank of the United States (1816) and passed the tariff, but Madison vetoed internal improvements as unconstitutional; the National Road was the exception.
Good feelings and the Panic of 1819
Monroe's presidency (1817–1825) was the one-party Era of Good Feelings, ending the First Party System. Easy state-bank loans for western land collapsed in the Panic of 1819, which hit the South and West hardest and left Westerners blaming the banks.
The Missouri Compromise
With the states split eleven slave and eleven free, Missouri's 1819 application set off a crisis. Clay's Missouri Compromise (1820) admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state and banned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36°30′.
The Marshall Court
Chief Justice John Marshall (1801–1835) strengthened federal power: Fletcher v. Peck (1810) struck down a state law, McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) barred states from taxing the national bank and upheld implied powers, and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) left interstate commerce to Congress.
The Monroe Doctrine
As Haiti, Mexico, and new South American republics won independence, the Monroe Doctrine (1823) closed the Western Hemisphere to new European colonization and promised American neutrality in European wars. The United States could not enforce it alone, and it mattered little until the 1890s.
Industry and invention
Samuel Slater rebuilt British textile machines from memory, and the Lowell mills hired young women. Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1793) made cotton so profitable that slavery expanded. The sewing machine, Morse's telegraph, McCormick's reaper, and Deere's steel plow followed.
Roads, rivers, canals, and rails
Most roads were private toll paths. Robert Fulton's Clermont (1807) showed steamboats could travel upriver, the Erie Canal (begun 1817) linked the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, and early railroads struggled with fires, braking, and mismatched track gauges.
The market revolution
The market revolution replaced home production and barter with stores and cash. The North manufactured and traded, the West grew food, and the South grew cotton, each depending on the others. The cult of domesticity pushed women back toward the home, an ideal mostly wealthier families could afford.
Immigration and nativism
The old immigration of 1840–1860 was mostly Irish and German. Poor Irish Catholics fleeing the potato famine stayed in port cities, while Germans often bought western land. Nativism against Irish Catholics produced the Know-Nothing (American) Party, which won local and state offices but never a national election.
The elections of 1824 and 1828
In 1824 Andrew Jackson won a plurality but not a majority, so the House chose John Quincy Adams, who made Henry Clay secretary of state: the corrupt bargain. In 1828 Jackson's Democrats beat Adams's National Republicans, later the Whigs, opening the Second Party System.