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James L. Roark ● Michael P. Johnson
Patricia Cline Cohen ● Sarah Stage
Susan M. Hartmann
The American Promise
A History of the United States
Fifth Edition
CHAPTER 10
Republicans in Power,
1800-1824
Copyright © 2012 by Bedford/St. Martin's
I. Jefferson’s Presidency
A. Turbulent Times: Election and Rebellion
1. An uncertain election
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remained uncertain from November until February 1801; voters in the electoral college used the single
balloting system to choose both president and vice president; gave equal number of ballots to
Jefferson and his running mate, Senator Aaron Burr of New York; Burr declined to concede.
2. The House decides
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after thirty-six ballots and six days, Jefferson got the necessary nine votes to win the election; his
victory proved that the nation could shift from one group to its rivals in a peaceful transfer of power.
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twenty-four-year-old enslaved blacksmith named Gabriel plotted rebellion in Virginia; inspired by the
Haitian Revolution; said to be organizing a thousand slaves to take Governor James Monroe hostage; a
few nervous slaves went to the authorities, and Gabriel’s Rebellion never occurred; it did, however,
scare white Virginians, who hanged 27 black men for contemplating rebellion.
3. Gabriel’s Rebellion
B. The Jeffersonian Vision of Republican Simplicity
1. Jefferson’s style
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frugal and casual; dressed plainly to strike a tone of republican simplicity; disdained female gatherings
and avoided the women of Washington City; preferred small dinners of all Republicans or all
Federalists
2. Jeffersonian government
wanted to scale back the power of the federal government; promoted policies that would benefit the
independent farmer, whom Jefferson viewed as the true source of American liberty; the independent
farmer ideal would own and work his land both for himself and for the market.
3. Dismantling Federalist innovations
4. Marbury v. Madison
Adams made 217 last-minute appointments of Federalists to various judicial and military posts;
Jefferson refused to honor “midnight judges”; jobseeker William Marbury sued the new secretary of
state James Madison; Supreme Court decided in 1803 that the president should have delivered the
valid commission, but that the Court could not compel him to do so; also declared the Judiciary Act of
1789 unconstitutional; established judicial review; the Court acted to disallow a law on the grounds
that it conflicted with the Constitution.
I. Jefferson’s Presidency
C. Dangers Overseas: The Barbary Wars
1. The Barbary States
• states—Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—controlled all
Mediterranean shipping traffic by demanding large tribute
payment for safe passage; called the Barbary States by
Americans; by the mid-1790s, the United States was
paying $50,000 per year in tribute.
2. The United States goes to war
• a U.S. ship then sunk the Philadelphia, rendering it useless
to hijackers; without the permission of the government,
American officer William Eaton raised a private force of 400
mercenaries and attacked Derne, Tripoli; leader of Tripoli
yielded, released the hostages for a fee, and terminated
tribute.
3. Defending the nation’s honor
II. Opportunities and Challenges in the West
A. The Louisiana Purchase
1. Spanish fears
2. French Louisiana
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1800, Spain returned Louisiana to France, hoping the stronger France
could create a buffer zone between Spain’s holdings in Mexico and the
land-hungry Americans.
3. A discount price
sent Robert R. Livingston to try to buy New Orleans from the French;
instead bought all of the territory for the bargain price of $15 million;
nearly doubled the size of the nation.
B. The Lewis and Clark Expedition
1. Goals
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appointed his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to explore the new territory to
establish relationships with Indian tribes and to determine Spanish
influence and presence; Jefferson told Lewis to collect plant and animal
specimens and to chart the geography of the West; Lewis chose William
Clark as his co-leader.
2. Reaching the Pacific
crew of 45, including the slave York; left St. Louis in spring of 1804;
camped for the winter in central North Dakota; soon were
accompanied by sixteen-year-old Shoshoni woman and translator
named Sacajawea; reached the Pacific in November 1805; hailed as
national heroes when they returned home
II. Opportunities and Challenges in
the West
C. Osage and Comanche Indians
1. Additional expeditions
• first ended at a hot springs in present-day Arkansas; the
second traveled to eastern Texas; the third ventured deep
into the Rocky Mountains; led by Zebulon Pike, the
Americans were arrested by the Spanish.
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2. The differing tribes
Osage ruled the land between the Missouri and the lower
Arkansas rivers; the Comanche territory stretched from the
upper Arkansas River to the Rockies and south into Texas;
Osage preferred diplomacy; the Comanche cemented
dominance through trade and readiness to employ violence.
3. Cultivating the Osage
4. Cultivating the Comanche
• Comanche managed to resist attempts to dominate them;
they welcomed the United States as a new trading partner;
the trade flourished on an extensive scale into the 1820s.
III. Jefferson, the Madisons, and the
War of 1812
A. Impressment and Embargo
1. Impressment
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ultimately, 2,500 American soldiers were “impressed” (taken by force) by the British,
who needed them for the war with France; led Jefferson to call for a nonimportation law.
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in June 1807; American ship with British deserters fired on by a British frigate; killed
three Americans.
2. The Chesapeake incident
3. The Embargo Act of 1807
4. The election of 1808
B. Dolley Madison and Social Politics
1. Social networks
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Dolley developed elaborate social networks in Washington; this was the top level of
female politicking; women couldn’t vote, so they had to work covertly; webs of friendship
and influence facilitated female political lobbying; influenced the government’s patronage
system.
2. The parties of the “Presidentress”
struck a balance between queenliness and republican openness; dressed in fancy
clothes; held weekly open-house parties, called the weekly “squeeze,” that went on for
hours; established informal channels of information and provided crucial political access;
Dolley Madison’s influence helped the symbolic value of the White House enhance the
power and legitimacy of the presidency
III. Jefferson, the Madisons, and the
War of 1812
C. Tecumseh and Tippecanoe
1. Shifting demographics in the Northwest
2. William Henry Harrison
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As territorial governor of Indiana, Harrison had negotiated a series
of treaties in a divide-and-conquer strategy extracting Indian
lands for paltry payments; the rise of Tecumseh and his brother
Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, made this strategy more difficult; in
1809, while Tecumseh was away on a recruiting trip, Harrison
assembled the leaders of the Potawatomi, Miami, and Delaware
tribes to negotiate the Treaty of Fort Wayne; falsely promised that
this was the last cession of land the United States would seek.
3. The Battle of Tippecanoe
Tecumseh was furious at Harrison and local leaders for signing the
treaty; he left his brother in charge of Prophetstown and went south
to seek alliances; Harrison took advantage of Tecumseh’s absence
and attacked Prophetstown on the Tippecanoe River in November
1811; the two-hour battle resulted in the deaths of 62 Americans
and 40 Indians; when the Indians fled, the Americans set the town
on fire; Americans heralded the glorious victory; Tecumseh was now
more ready than ever to make war on the United States
III. Jefferson, the Madisons, and the
War of 1812
D. The War of 1812
1. The War Hawks
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new Congress of March 1811 contained several dozen young
Republicans eager to avenge insults from abroad; informally
known as War Hawks, they were mostly lawyers from the West
and South who welcomed a war with England to legitimize attacks
on the Indians and to bring an end to impressment; they were
also expansionists looking to occupy Florida and threaten Canada;
led by Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun.
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2. Sectional divisions
3. The War in the North
proposed an invasion of Canada and predicted victory in four
weeks; the war lasted two and half years, and Canada never fell;
Americans first lost Detroit and Fort Dearborn, but they made
inroads back into Canada in late 1812 and early 1813; defeated
the British and the Indians at the Battle of Thames, where
Tecumseh was killed in October 1813.
4. The War in the South and the Creek War
Creek War ended in March 1814 when General Andrew Jackson
led 2,500 Tennessee militiamen in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend;
later extracted a treaty relinquishing thousands of square miles of
land to the United States.
III. Jefferson, the Madisons, and the War of 1812
E. Washington City Burns: The British Offensive
1. The British invasions
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August 1814, British ships sailed into Chesapeake Bay; landed 5,000 troops
and sent the capital into a panic; families evacuated; Dolley Madison fled with
her husband’s papers; British troops entered the city and began burning
government buildings, including the White House, before attacking Baltimore;
British troops marched to New York from Canada; a series of mistakes cost
them a naval skirmish at Plattsburgh; they retreated back to Canada.
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2. The Battle of New Orleans
Orleans—In early 1813, the British army landed in lower Louisiana and
encountered General Andrew Jackson and his militia outside New Orleans;
Jackson won a decisive victory and became an instant hero; the Battle of New
Orleans was the most glorious victory the country had experienced, even
though negotiators had actually signed a peace agreement two weeks earlier.
3. The Treaty of Ghent
4. The Hartford Convention
New England Federalists convened a secret meeting in Connecticut in December
1814; politicians discussed constitutional amendments that would have
weakened the political power of the South; even discussed seceding from the
union; coming just as peace was achieved made the Hartford Convention look
highly unpatriotic; the Federalist Party never recovered.
5. The war’s legacies
Americans celebrated as though they had; gave rise to a new spirit of
nationalism; biggest winners were the War Hawks; carried the Republican Party
in new, expansive directions; favored trade, western expansion, internal
improvements, and the development of new markets; biggest losers were the
Indians, who lost land and their British protectors.
IV. Women’s Status in the Early
Republic
A. Women and the Law
1. Feme Covert
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wives had no independent legal or political personhood; legal doctrine of feme
covert held that a wife’s civic life was subsumed by that of her husband; state
legislatures generally did not rewrite the laws of domestic relations even though
they redrafted other British laws in light of republican principles.
2. Divorce
3. Single women
could own and convey property, make contracts, initiate lawsuits, and pay
taxes; could not vote, serve on juries, or practice law.
4. Slave women
they could not freely consent to any contractual obligation, including marriage;
slave unions were informal and thus did not establish unequal power relations
between partners backed by the force of law.
B. Women and Church Governance
1. Protestant hierarchy
2. Women preachers
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1790 and 1820, a small and highly unusual set of women actively engaged in
open preaching; most were from Freewill Baptist groups in New England and
upstate New York; probably fewer than a hundred such women existed, but
several dozen traveled beyond local communities; claimed to exhort rather than
to preach; Jemima Wilkinson was best known; claimed her body was no longer
female or male; dressed in men’s clothes and did not use gender-specific
pronouns.
IV. Women’s Status in the Early
Republic
C. Female Education
1. Public schools
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states and localities began investing in public schools; young girls
attended; learned basic literacy and numeracy; by 1830, girls approached
male literacy rates in many places.
2. Private female academies
advanced female education came from private academies; there were
nearly 200 academies in the United States by 1839; attended by
daughters of elite families as well as those of middling families with elite
aspirations; curriculum included ornamental arts and solid academics;
Latin, rhetoric, logic, algebra, even chemistry and physics; by the 1820s,
the courses and reading lists equaled those at male colleges such as
Harvard and Yale; best known female academies were seminaries that
prepared female students to teach.
3. Value of female education
total annual enrollment at the female academies and seminaries equaled
male enrollment at the almost six dozen male colleges in the United
States; both groups accounted for only about 1 percent of their age
cohort in the United States; new attention to the training of female minds
laid the foundation for major changes in the gender system as girl
students of the 1810s matured into adult women of the 1830s.
V. Monroe and Adams
A. From Property to Democracy
1. Democratization of politics
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twelve of the thirteen original states enacted landed property qualifications for voting; in
the 1790s, Vermont became the first state to enfranchise all adult males, and four more
states soon broadened suffrage considerably; between 1800 and 1830, the trend for
democratization gripped all the states; many new western states abandoned property
qualifications altogether.
2. Suffrage debate
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expanding numbers of commercial men, renters, and mortgage holders of all classes
contended with entrenched landed elites who favored the status quo; still, by 1820, half
a dozen states passed suffrage reform.
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many states excluded paupers and felons; excluding women required no discussion;
except for New York, which retained existing property qualifications for black voters as it
removed it for whites; the pattern was one of expanded suffrage for whites and a total
eclipse of suffrage for blacks.
3. Persistent exclusion
B. The Missouri Compromise
1. Missouri applies for statehood
2. The Tallmadge amendments
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New York representative James Tallmadge Jr., proposed two amendments to the
statehood bill; the first stipulated that slaves born in Missouri after statehood would be
free at age 25; the second declared that no new slaves could be brought into the state;
amendments passed in the House, but fell in the Senate.
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emerged in the Senate in 1820; Maine would enter the union as a free state and Missouri
would come in as a slave state, maintaining the balance of slave and free states; the
Southern border of Missouri at the 36º30’ latitude would become the permanent line
dividing slave states and free states; temporarily solved the slavery debate.
3. The compromise
V. Monroe and Adams
C. The Monroe Doctrine
1. Obtaining Florida
2. The Monroe Doctrine
D. The Election of 1824
1. Variety of Republicans
2. Wives’ roles in campaigns
3. The popular vote
4. The corrupt bargain
V. Monroe and Adams
E. The Adams Administration
1. Diplomacy, not politics
2. Lofty ideals, few results