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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 11
The Expanding Republic,
1815–1840
Copyright © 2012 by Bedford/St. Martin's
I. The Market Revolution
A. Improvements in Transportation
1. Changes in commerce, travel, and politics
2. Steamboats
3. Canals
4. Railroads
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railroad companies began to give canals competition in the 1830s; three thousand miles
of tracks were constructed in the 1830s; generally short and inefficient, but quickly
became popular; railroads and other transportation advances encouraged change by
linking the country culturally and economically.
B. Factories, Workingwomen, and Wage Labor
1. The Lowell mills
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targeted young women as employees because they were cheaper to hire and had limited
employment options; town of Lowell was founded in 1821 by a group of entrepreneurs;
Lowell mills centralized all aspects of cloth production and employed more than 5,000
young women; workers lived in company-owned boardinghouses under close
supervision; women were required to join the church; women worked there to earn
spending money and gain unprecedented, though still limited, personal freedom of living
away from parents and domestic tasks; contributed to the company newspaper, the
Lowell Offering.
2. Worker protest
competition in the cotton market led mill owners to speed up work and
decrease wages; workers protested, emboldened by communal living
arrangements and relative independence as temporary employees; on the
other hand, they could easily be fired and replaced, which undermined
their bargaining power.
I. The Market Revolution
C. Bankers and Lawyers
1. The explosion of banks
2. The revolution in commercial law
3. Opposition to change
D. Booms and Busts
1. The panic of 1819
• politicians could not control the volatile economy; speculation held
the possibility of financial collapse; when the bubble burst in 1819,
the overnight rich became the overnight poor; some blamed the
panic of 1819 on the second Bank of the United States for failing
to control state banks; the national bank started calling in loans
and insisted states do the same; contraction of the money supply
was made worse by a financial crisis in Europe; prices of American
exports plummeted; debtors couldn’t pay back their debts, and
banks failed.
2. Recovery
• was driven by increases in productivity, consumer demand for
goods, international trade, and a restless and calculating people
moving goods, human labor, and capital in expanding circles of
commerce.
II. The Spread of Democracy
A. Popular Politics and Partisan Identity
1. Popular participation
2. New campaign styles
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gave speeches at rallies, picnics, and banquets; partisan
newspapers increasingly defined issues and publicized political
personalities as never before; improved printing technologies and
increasing literacy made this possible.
3. New parties
honoring the fiction of Republican Party unity; party lines solidified
by the mid-1830s with two new parties, the Whigs and the
Democrats.
B. The Election of 1828 and the Character Issue
1. The importance of character
2. Jackson and Adams
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Adams was vilified by his opponents as an elitist, a bookish
academic, and even a monarchist; Adams’s supporters played up
Jackson’s violent temper.
3. The triumph of political parties
won a sweeping victory with 56 percent of the popular vote; after
1828, national politicians no longer deplored the existence of
political parties; believed parties mobilized and delivered voters,
sharpened candidates’ differences, and created party loyalty; the
Whigs were seen as the top-down party, whereas the Democrats
embraced individualism.
II. The Spread of Democracy
C. Jackson’s Democratic Agenda
1. The common man
2. The spoils system
• Jackson appointed only loyalists, even
replacing competent civil servants with party
loyalists; became known as the spoils system.
3. Jacksonian government
• believed in a limited federal government;
anticipated the rapid settlement of the
nation’s interior, where land sales would
spread economic democracy to settlers; led
to anti-Indian policies; exercised presidential
veto over Congress.
III. Jackson Defines the Democratic Party
A. Indian Policy and the Trail of Tears
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1. The Indian Removal Act
Congress backed Jackson’s goal and passed the Indian Removal Act of
1830; appropriated $500,000 to relocate eastern tribes west of the
Mississippi.
2. Petitions against removal
3. Indian resistance
deadly battle killed more than four hundred Indians; Creeks, Chickasaw,
Choctaw, and Cherokee tribes in the South refused to relocate; second
Seminole War in Florida broke out as Indians there took up arms against
relocation.
4. Georgia Cherokees
a legal challenge to being treated as subjects; in 1831, the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled that Cherokee people lacked standing to sue, not being
citizens of either the United States or of any foreign state; the next year,
in Worcester v. Georgia, the Court upheld the territorial sovereignty of the
Cherokee people; Jackson ignored the Court’s decision and continued to
press for removal.
5. The Trail of Tears
1835, an unauthorized faction of Cherokees signed a treaty selling all
tribal lands to the state; Georgia resold the land to whites; the Cherokee
faced a deadline of May 1838 for voluntary evacuation; when they
refused, they were forced on a 1,200-mile journey west under armed
guard; the hardship of this journey, which came to be called the Trail of
Tears, killed 25 percent of the traveling Cherokees.
III. Jackson Defines the Democratic Party
B. The Tariff of Abominations and Nullification
1. High tariffs and the “Tariff of Abominations”
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Federal tariffs as high as 33 percent on imports such as textiles and iron goods had been passed
in 1816 and again in 1824 to shelter American manufacturers from foreign competition; southern
congressmen believed it hurt cotton exports; Congress passed a revised tariff in 1828, which
came to be known as the Tariff of Abominations; bundle of conflicting duties
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2. The doctrine of nullification
a group of politicians headed by John C. Calhoun advanced a doctrine called nullification; argued
that when Congress overstepped its powers, states had the right to nullify Congress’s acts;
referenced the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798.
3. The nullification crisis
, Jackson ignored the statement of nullification and shut out his vice president, Calhoun, from
influence and power; Calhoun resigned in 1832 and won a seat in the Senate; South Carolina
leaders declared federal tariffs null and void as of February 1, 1833; Jackson sent armed ships to
Charleston harbor and threatened to invade the state; pushed the Force Bill through Congress,
which defined South Carolina’s stance as treason and authorized military action to collect federal
tariffs; Congress passed a revised tariff, and South Carolina responded by withdrawing its
nullification of the old tariff and nullified the Force bill; federal power triumphed.
C. The Bank War and Economic Boom
1. The bank war
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convinced the bank to apply for early charter renewal in 1832; expected Congress’s renewal
would force Jackson to issue an unpopular veto and then lose the next election.
2. The bank veto
3. A booming economy
inflation, the charter of hundreds of new banks, and the increasing density of credit and debt
relationships; national debt disappeared, and for the first and only time in American history,
between 1835 and 1837, the government had a monetary surplus.
IV. Cultural Shifts, Religion, and
Reform
A. The Family and Separate Spheres
1. Separate spheres
2. The female economy
3. Idealized notions of masculinity and femininity
B. The Education and Training of Youths
1. Public schools
2. Female teachers
3. Higher education and career opportunities
IV. Cultural Shifts, Religion, and
Reform
C. The Second Great Awakening
1. Protestantism reinvigorated
2. Charles Grandison Finney
D. The Temperance Movement and the Campaign
for Moral Reform
1. Alcohol consumption
2. Moral reform
IV. Cultural Shifts, Religion, and
Reform
E. Organizing against Slavery
1. Abolitionism
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northern challenges to slavery surfaced with increasing frequency and
resolve; writers like David Walker and public speakers like Maria
Stewart offered critiques of slavery and racism; Stewart was especially
controversial, as many Americans resented any woman, particularly a
black woman, speaking in public.
2. The Liberator
founded in Boston in 1831 by William Lloyd Garrison; took antislavery to
new heights by advocating for immediate abolition; Garrison’s
supporters started the New England Anti-Slavery Society.
3. White violence
4. Women’s activism
they raised money and circulated petitions to support the cause; the
white Grimké sisters were banned by the state leaders of the
Congregational Church from speaking in their churches; the Grimkés
and other radical abolitionists argued for women’s rights as well;
opposed by moderate abolitionists who were unwilling to mix the new
and controversial issue of women’s rights with their first cause, the
rights of blacks.
V. Van Buren’s One-Term Presidency
A. The Politics of Slavery
1. Determining Jackson’s successor
2. Slavery as a political issue
3. The gag rule
4. Van Buren’s strategy
B. Elections and Panics
1. The election of 1836
2. The panic of 1837
3. Explaining the panic
4. The election of 1840