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The American Yawp, Volume 1, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 9 · pp. 271–303
This chapter follows the United States from 1800 to the 1820s, when the young nation tested its ideas of liberty against slavery, race, and westward expansion. It covers the challenges Black Americans posed to slavery and the new ideas about race that answered them. It then turns to Jefferson's election and presidency, the Louisiana Purchase, Native resistance led by Tecumseh, the War of 1812, and the nationalist policies that followed.
In late August 1800, an enslaved man named Gabriel led a plan to end slavery in Virginia. Close to 1,000 enslaved men were to take part in an attack on Richmond. Some would set fires in the warehouse district as a diversion. Others would seize weapons and capture Governor James Monroe. (p. 271)
The plot failed for two reasons. On August 30, two enslaved men told their enslaver about it, and he warned the authorities. Then bad weather pushed the attack back a night, which gave Monroe and the militia time to round up the conspirators. Gabriel escaped briefly but was caught, tried, and hanged with twenty-five others. The executions were meant to warn others not to challenge slavery, and Virginia also added restrictions on free people of color. (p. 271)
White Virginians drew two lessons from the plot.
The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) therefore carried two very different meanings. It terrified white Americans. It inspired free and enslaved Black Americans. Port cities filled with news and refugees. Free people of color read the revolution as a demand for full abolition and for the citizenship rights the United States denied them. For decades afterward, Black Americans pointed to Haiti as a model in their own fight for freedom. (pp. 271–272)
Black writers and speakers used Haiti as evidence. If people of color could govern themselves, then claims that they were unfit for freedom were false. Three examples show this argument:
The result was that enslaved and free Black people could no longer be left out of debates about what liberty and equality meant. Their actions on plantations and streets, and in print, shaped early national politics. (p. 272)
Many white leaders responded with alarm. They pointed to the violence in Haiti to defend white supremacy and slavery, and to justify limits on the social and political lives of Black people. White publications also mocked Black Americans as foolish and ridiculed demands for abolition and equal rights. The best-known examples are the "Bobalition" broadsides, printed in Boston in the 1810s, which crudely caricatured African Americans. These cheap, widely shared pieces helped build racist ideas that lasted through the nineteenth century. Yet the mockery also suggests that Black political voices mattered. If the difference between whites and Blacks had been obvious, there would have been less need to keep asserting it. (p. 272)
The case of Henry Moss shows how people of the time thought about race. Moss was an enslaved man in Virginia. In 1792, white spots appeared on his skin, and within about three years he looked white. He displayed himself in Philadelphia as "a great curiosity" and earned enough money to buy his freedom. (p. 272)
Scientists such as Samuel Stanhope Smith and Dr. Benjamin Rush took an interest in him. They saw Moss as proof of their theory that Black skin came from leprosy, a disease that could in principle be cured. Their reasoning shows that many Americans of this era believed race could change, not that it was fixed at birth. (p. 272)
The early republic coincided with a major shift in how people understood race. Enlightenment thought pushed against Old World hierarchies in four ways. It stressed a common humanity, the possibility of social progress, the ability of people to remake themselves, and the importance of social and natural surroundings. (pp. 272–273)
But these thinkers also loved to classify and order the natural world, and this created a tension. Carolus Linnaeus, the Comte de Buffon, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and others divided humanity into racial "types." They used skin color, skull measurements, and hair texture to sort people, and they tied each type to a place. In their account, the hot African climate darkened skin and reshaped skulls, while the cold climate of northern Europe produced the "Caucasian" race. (p. 273)
This kept the idea that all people shared a single ancestry. But it did not make them equal in rank. Differences came from environment and were placed on a scale of social progress, with the "primitive" at one end and the "civilized" at the other. (p. 273)
Americans in the 1780s and 1790s argued over where human differences came from. Two rival explanations stand out.
The environmental theory of race said that differences among people came from climate and social surroundings, not from different origins. Samuel Stanhope Smith set out this view in an essay in 1787. He argued that a better social environment would bring out the equality that all humans naturally share, and that nonwhite peoples could be dramatically uplifted. Believers thought a proper society might slowly "whiten" people, just as nature seemed to have whitened Henry Moss. The key point is that this theory treated racial difference as changeable. (p. 274)
Polygenesis is the theory that the human races had separate origins, or "multiple creations." Thomas Jefferson floated this idea in Notes on the State of Virginia. He wrote that Black people could not improve mentally and might have a different ancestry. He believed Native Americans could be "civilized," but he did not extend that hope to Black people. (p. 274)
A surprising detail is that polygenesis was not mainly a defense of slavery. Slaveholders generally rejected it because it contradicted the Bible, and they leaned on the Bible to justify slavery. Jefferson's use of the idea served a different goal: plans for a white America. The best-known plan was to send freed Black people to Africa gradually. Many Americans of the time thought nature had made whites and Blacks too different to live together peacefully. They saw colonization in Africa as the answer to what they called the nation's racial problem. (p. 274)
Jefferson's claims drew fast criticism from antislavery and Black communities.
Jefferson also had defenders. White writers such as Charles Caldwell and Samuel George Morton turned his doubts into a "biological" argument. They claimed Black and white people were separate creations, even separate species. This view was voiced more and more in the decades before the Civil War. Few Americans accepted these theories in full, but many shared a general belief in white supremacy. (p. 274)
The environmental idea faded as a result. If the Black population was growing lighter, white Americans had to admit that the cause was sexual violence by whites, not climate or society. The awe that surrounded Henry Moss in the 1790s could not have happened a generation later. (p. 274)
Jefferson's rise to the presidency was a victory for ordinary white citizens who wanted more direct say in government. Many elites opposed this. Fisher Ames, a Massachusetts Federalist, warned that democracy depends on public opinion, which changes with every whim. He said Jefferson's win meant sliding into the "mire of a democracy." Many founders feared that pure democracy would end in anarchy. (p. 275)
The voting itself was a crisis. Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr, both Republicans, each got 73 electoral votes. John Adams got 65. Because of the tie, the House of Representatives had to choose, with each state casting one vote. It took 36 ballots. Jefferson won only when James Bayard, a Federalist from Delaware, gave way. Bayard said he had a "sacred duty" not to risk the constitution. (p. 275)
Many Northern Federalists were more upset about Adams's loss than about the tie. Their target was the three-fifths clause. It counted three-fifths of the enslaved population when deciding House seats, and so also electoral votes. This gave the South, where the Republicans were strongest, extra votes. Federalists said these extra "slave" votes gave Jefferson an unfair edge and that the election had been stolen. Their anger was aimed at the added political power of the South. (p. 275)
It is easy to assume the Federalists attacked the clause out of concern for the rights of enslaved people. They did not. Their main argument was that enslaved people should not be counted at all. One newspaper said they deserved representation no more than "cattle and horses." The complaint was that the Constitution treated enslaved people as persons for representation. It was not that they were denied liberty. Later attacks kept the same line, and the aim was never freedom for the enslaved. (pp. 275–276, 281)
This argument also had a political purpose. Federalists wanted to undercut the claim that Jefferson's election was a mandate from "the people." (p. 276)
Jefferson later called his election a "revolution in the principles" of government, as real as the revolution of 1776. The difference was that it came by reform and the vote, not by the sword. (pp. 275–276)
He wanted to show the world that a government answerable directly to the people would produce lasting union, not chaos. In his view, free people could govern themselves democratically. (p. 277)
Jefferson also set his own idea of union against the Federalists'. He saw union as voluntary bonds: citizens to each other and citizens to their government. He said Federalists pictured a union built on strong state power, with the public submitting to aristocratic rule. For Jefferson, the nation drew its strength from the confidence of a "rational" people. (p. 277)
Supporters made the contrast vivid with symbols. Democratic-Republican celebrations used the image of George Washington, who died in 1799. They linked his republican virtue to Jefferson's democratic liberty, which angered Federalists. They described Jefferson as a philosopher-patriot who fought tyranny with his pen. They set him against the military display of power-hungry Federalists. (p. 277)
Jefferson's 1800 victory was celebrated as a win for self-government by ordinary people. Many citizens wanted more direct control over their government, and the meaning of citizenship was shifting. Yet early American national identity was still coded as male, white, and wealthy. Women had asked for a place in public debate since the Revolution (p. 277).
Republican Motherhood is the term historians use for the belief that women were essential to the republic because they raised children to value liberty and virtue. Mothers would hand down independence and civic virtue, so each new generation would hold the ideals of the Revolution (pp. 277–278).
This idea made women's choices political. For example, New Jersey Democratic-Republicans urged women to marry only "real republicans." A Philadelphia newspaper toasted women whose smiles should reward Republicans alone (p. 278).
The idea had limits. It rested on assumptions about women's sexuality and home life that denied them the political rights men had. But it did admit that women were active participants in party politics (p. 278).
Jefferson believed that lower taxes and a smaller budget would widen the economic opportunities of free Americans. In his first term he:
His reasoning was also about peace. He saw England as a military empire that needed heavy taxes and debt, and he did not want the United States to follow that path (p. 279).
How it happened. After the Seven Years' War, France gave Louisiana to Spain. In 1800, France secretly got it back. This alarmed Jefferson, because Western farmers relied on the port of New Orleans. Robert R. Livingston, the US minister to France, tried to work out a compromise (p. 279).
Then Napoleon's position weakened. War in Europe strained France. In Haiti, rebellious enslaved people and a yellow fever outbreak defeated French forces. Haiti's profitable sugar plantations were now out of Napoleon's control. He decided to cut his losses and offered the whole Louisiana Territory (pp. 279–280). Livingston and the French foreign minister, Talleyrand, negotiated the sale in 1803. It went far better than Jefferson or Livingston had expected (p. 280).
The numbers. The price was 250 million in today's money. The land added about 828,000 square miles. It is considered the largest real estate deal in American history and Jefferson's greatest foreign policy success. It also gave the United States control of New Orleans (pp. 279–280).
The constitutional question. Jefferson asked his cabinet whether the purchase was constitutional. But he believed he could go beyond the strict limits of the Constitution when the nation's good was at stake, because his final duty was to the American people. He said he could "throw himself on the justice of his country." This shows a flexible view of presidential power from a man who favored small government (p. 280).
The purchase renewed Federalist fears. Some of the new land might become slave states. That would mean more "slave representation," because the three-fifths clause counted enslaved people toward House seats and Electoral College votes. Federalists feared this would keep the slave South and the Republican Party dominant permanently (p. 280).
In June 1804, William Ely, a Federalist in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, proposed a constitutional amendment. It would count only "Free Inhabitants" for representation. Ely argued that the original deal was unequal and that Louisiana would make things worse by reducing the influence of the Eastern states and small states (p. 280).
The logic of the amendment was that the Constitution was wrong to treat enslaved people as "persons" in politics. They should be handled like any other property. A few critics did say slavery was evil. But most supporters denied the humanity of the enslaved. One compared them to oxen and horses, and a New Hampshire writer wanted New England cattle represented as well (pp. 280–281).
The amendment gained little traction. Jefferson won reelection in a landslide in fall 1804, and the amendment died in the Senate that December (p. 281).
As Napoleon's armies moved across Europe, Jefferson hoped the Atlantic would keep the United States at peace. Instead, Britain, France, and Spain ignored American neutrality. The worst offender was Britain. It resumed impressment, seizing thousands of American sailors and forcing them into the British Navy (p. 281).
When the British attacked the USS Chesapeake in 1807, many Americans demanded war. Jefferson chose "peaceable coercion" instead, and Congress agreed. The Embargo Act of 1807 closed American ports to all foreign trade. Jefferson hoped this would force Europe to respect American neutrality without a war (p. 281).
Results. The embargo hurt the United States far more than Europe. Exports dropped from 22 million in 1808, and the country fell into a deep depression. Even Jefferson's own finances suffered. Americans smuggled goods, so Jefferson expanded federal enforcement powers, and some critics called him a "tyrant." Within fifteen months Congress repealed the act and replaced it with smaller restrictions on trade with Britain and France (pp. 281–282, 290).
Federalists criticized Jefferson in the same style his supporters had used against Adams. They attacked the American Philosophical Society and the study of natural history as too full of Democratic-Republicans. They also complained that standards in children's education were falling (p. 282).
Some attacks were racial. James Callender accused Jefferson of a relationship with Sally Hemings, one of his enslaved workers. Later DNA evidence supported this. Callender mocked a possible son as "our little mulatto president." Earlier, William Loughton Smith wrote a 1796 pamphlet that described Jeffersonian democracy as the start of a slippery slope toward racial equality (pp. 282–283).
These attacks worked poorly when they complained that democracy itself was spreading. They worked better when they claimed Jefferson was betraying the people he said he served. This showed that the Federalist ideology was no longer workable. It rested on elite rule, virtue, and ordinary people's deference to their betters. By borrowing democratic language, the Federalists admitted that both parties now welcomed direct citizen involvement (p. 283).
The Democratic-Republicans rose to power by promising wider voting and a closer link between leaders and voters. Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe made it easier to buy land, which let more men meet property rules for voting. Seven new states joined the Union. By 1824, only three states still required a voter to own a certain amount of property (p. 283).
The Federalists never again controlled Congress or the presidency. Their last presidential candidate, Rufus King, lost to Monroe in 1816 (p. 283).
Before the Revolution, many Native nations used what scholars call the play-off system. They dealt with several European empires at once, such as Britain, France, and Spain, and shifted their support among them. No single empire could dominate them this way. In many parts of North America, Native peoples also still shaped social and political life. (p. 284)
The Revolution weakened this strategy. Native warriors fought on both sides, but no Native negotiators sat at the table when the war ended. The peace settlement therefore gave nothing to Native allies. Many white settlers and officials called Native peoples "savages" and brushed aside their land rights and sovereignty. In response, some Native communities turned away from white customs. (p. 284)
After the war, Native leaders had to manage three sets of relationships: with the United States, with Britain (or Spain in the South), and with other Native nations. Land was the main issue. Trade, crime and jurisdiction, roads, liquor sales, and alliances were also on the table. (p. 284)
Diplomacy followed Native customs. Meetings opened with rituals that renewed relationships and made honest talk possible. Councils took place in Native towns, at neutral sites on the borderlands, and in state and federal capitals. Chiefs mattered, but so did gifted speakers like the Seneca orator Red Jacket, and so did go-betweens and interpreters. Orators were admired for vivid metaphors, strong voices, and control of a room. (pp. 284–285)
Both sides usually preferred talks to war. War cost lives, money, trade, and reputation. Diplomacy let each side state its complaints and lower the risk of violence. Fighting broke out mainly when diplomacy failed. (p. 284)
Tecumseh's movement grew from earlier ones. The Delaware prophet Neolin taught that the Master of Life (the Great Spirit) wanted Native peoples to give up dependence on European goods and tools and return to Native beliefs and rituals. He also urged them to work together against white ways and to resist British expansion onto Native land, which grew worse after the Seven Years' War. His message spread fastest in the Ohio and Upper Susquehanna valleys, where refugees and migrants from many nations lived side by side. (p. 286)
The Ottawa war chief Pontiac took up this message and added military leadership. From 1763 to 1765, his confederacy attacked British forts and settlers across the Great Lakes and Ohio country. The war forced Britain to rethink how it managed trade and relations with Native peoples. Pontiac's war is a model of what Tecumseh later tried: religious renewal joined to armed resistance. (p. 286)
Other prophets kept the message alive between 1765 and 1811. They included Joseph Brant, Main Poc, and the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake. (p. 286)
The center of resistance stayed in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes. From 1791 to 1795, the Western Confederacy fought the United States. It included Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Iroquois, Ojibwe, Ottawa, Huron, Potawatomi, and others. The confederacy destroyed two American armies, which forced President Washington to change federal policy. It finally lost at Fallen Timbers in 1794. Tecumseh fought in this war, and the experience probably shaped his later push for unity. (p. 287)
The Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa (the Prophet) built a new confederacy. Tenskwatawa said the Master of Life had told him to lead Native peoples back to the true path and to remove the corrupting effects of Euro-American trade and culture. He blended Indigenous and Christian ideas and preached visions of a new world with Native power restored. For people facing steady American pressure on their land, this message gave hope. (pp. 286–287)
Tecumseh's political demand was simple: no more land cessions. He offered a shared Native identity based on a common spirituality. The brothers founded towns in Indiana, first Greenville and then Prophetstown, in defiance of the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. Tecumseh traveled from Canada to Georgia to recruit allies. (pp. 286–287)
The movement was not unified, however. The brothers used their spiritual language to strengthen their own authority. In Tenskwatawa's witch hunts of the 1800s, Native leaders who opposed him or favored getting along with the Americans were called witches. This shows that Native communities had real internal disagreements. (pp. 287–288)
In the Southeast, the Red Stick Creeks adopted these ideas. Their prophet Hillis Hadjo toured the region with Tecumseh in 1811. The Red Sticks mixed northern teachings with new Creek practices and sought to end Creek dependence on Euro-American goods. Other Creek leaders thought diplomacy with the United States would protect them better than war. Most Southeastern leaders showed little interest in Tecumseh's confederacy, so the Red Sticks ended up in a civil war with other Creeks. By 1813, Andrew Jackson had cut them off from the north. Lower Creeks and Cherokees joined Jackson's forces and helped him win at Horseshoe Bend. In the Treaty of Fort Jackson, the Red Sticks gave up fourteen million acres. (pp. 288–289)
Historian Adam Rothman argues that this defeat opened the way for American expansion west of the Mississippi. The ceded land could be used for plantations, which kept slavery alive and profitable. Native resistance and the future of slavery were therefore linked. (p. 289)
Tecumseh's confederacy was already weakened by disunity and by the loss at Tippecanoe in 1811. The War of 1812 gave it a second chance. With the United States distracted, his forces seized several American forts. After heavy losses at Fort Wayne and Fort Harrison, Tecumseh asked the British for help. But in September 1813 the Americans gained control of the Great Lakes, and British ships and reinforcements had to pull back. Tecumseh died at Moraviantown, Ontario, in October 1813. His death badly hurt Native resistance, though his example of unity was remembered. (p. 289)
The War of 1812 came from two sets of problems. One was the American wish to keep trading as a neutral country while Britain and France fought the Anglo-French wars (which began in 1793). The other was older conflicts from the colonial and Revolutionary periods, especially on the frontier. British leaders had little interest in meeting American concerns on either one. (pp. 289–291)
Impressment was one of the biggest causes. Trade with Europe made the American economy grow fast in the 1800s, which created a shortage of sailors. Pay went up, and American captains hired many British sailors, about 30 percent of the crews on American merchant ships. The two countries disagreed about citizenship. The republic said a person could give up loyalty to the old country and become American. Britain said anyone born a British subject stayed one for life. Since Britain needed sailors for its war, its navy stopped American ships and took men back. Many Americans were seized by mistake. About six thousand were impressed between 1803 and 1812, and proving one's identity could take years. (p. 290)
Trade rules made matters worse. In 1806, after France declared a blockade of Britain, Britain required neutral ships to stop in Britain and pay a transit duty before going on to France. Between 1807 and 1812, Britain, France, and their allies seized about nine hundred American ships. This provoked a swift and angry reaction in the United States. (p. 290)
On the frontier, Britain kept ties with Native peoples of the Old Northwest from its base in Canada, supplying weapons and goods. Fear of a Native uprising grew after Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa built their alliance, and British support for Native allies angered Americans. (pp. 290–291)
By 1812 the Democratic-Republicans controlled about 75 percent of the House and 82 percent of the Senate. That gave them almost a free hand in setting national policy. Within the party, a group called the "War Hawks" pressed hardest for war. They were younger men with no memory of the Revolution's horrors, and they wanted to defend the nation's rights and independence. Two of them, Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, stayed influential for decades. (p. 291)
Madison was persuaded by his party's War Hawks. He listed the country's grievances against Britain and asked Congress for war. After debate over the bill's details, he signed the declaration on June 18, 1812. Republicans hoped that invading Canada would push the British out of the region and force a change in their naval policies. (p. 291)
Historians often split the war into three stages, or theaters:
(pp. 291–292)
On land, American forces were outmatched, and the 1812 campaign did not achieve its goals. (p. 292)
The US Navy was young, but it won early duels. Britain's main fleet was fighting Napoleon, so the smaller British ships in North America often faced bigger, heavier American ones. Sailors and privateers rallied behind the slogan "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights!" (pp. 292–293)
(p. 293)
In 1814 the Americans won at Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain, which stopped a British land invasion. At Fort McHenry in Baltimore they survived 27 hours of bombardment from a 19-ship fleet almost unharmed. Francis Scott Key watched this from a British ship and wrote the poem that became "The Star-Spangled Banner." Even so, the overall American campaign was poorly run. (p. 293)
Napoleon's defeat in early 1814 let Britain turn to North America. The British blockaded American ports, burned Washington, DC, on August 24, 1814, and opened a southern front at New Orleans. They won at Lake Borgne but lost the land battle to Andrew Jackson in January 1815. (p. 293)
Common mistake: The Battle of New Orleans did not decide the war. The Treaty of Ghent had already been signed on December 24, 1814. The treaty restored prewar relations, which is called status quo antebellum. The battle mattered mainly because it raised morale and shaped how Americans remembered the war. (pp. 293–294, 296)
Not everyone backed the war. In 1814 New England Federalists met at Hartford, Connecticut, to limit the Democratic-Republicans' power. They proposed ending the three-fifths rule, limiting presidents to one term, and requiring a two-thirds vote in Congress to declare war, admit new states, or regulate commerce. A supermajority rule would let a Federalist minority block their rivals. (p. 294)
The timing was bad for them. The New Orleans victory raised support for Madison, and newspapers accused the delegates of plotting secession, with little evidence. The convention in fact claimed it wanted to preserve the Union by amending the Constitution. (pp. 294–295)
Compared with Ely's amendment (1804). William Ely's proposal blamed the Constitution's original spirit of compromise. Hartford blamed the Republicans instead. The delegates said the Constitution had worked well under a wise administration and failed only under Republican rule. That let them pose as patriots. (pp. 294–295)
White supremacy in both proposals. Neither plan would have freed anyone or given enslaved people rights. Both would only have treated enslaved people like other property when counting for representation. The Pennsylvania Senate even said the change should go further and base power on the white population alone. Because most white Northerners critical of three-fifths shared the same white supremacy that supported slavery, their argument was weakened. (p. 296)
During the war, Americans read patriotic newspaper stories, sang patriotic songs, and bought goods decorated with national symbols. They also heard that the British, their Native allies, and enslaved Black people threatened to bring violence into American homes. One rumor claimed British officers promised their men "beauty and booty" at New Orleans. On the Great Lakes frontier, many feared Native allies would kill indiscriminately. This mix of fear and patriotic affection tied citizens more closely to the nation, and it defined the nation's "people" in racial terms that left out Black and Native people. (pp. 295–296)
Albert Gallatin said the war revived national feeling and made people "more American." The country kept expanding into Native lands, and more than 6,000 post offices were added between 1810 and 1830. (p. 297)
The American System was a plan by Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun to make the country economically independent. It had three parts:
The plan favored trade among the states over trade with Europe and the West Indies. Critics called it unconstitutional or a threat to state power, and Calhoun later joined the opposition. Still, states built their own banks, roads, and canals. (p. 297)
The Monroe Doctrine (1823) declared that the whole Western Hemisphere was off-limits to new European colonization. Monroe issued it to back Latin American independence movements. It showed postwar pride and a tougher foreign policy with a stronger military than Jefferson wanted. (pp. 297–298)
Jefferson had cut the military and ended internal taxes. Monroe, though a Jeffersonian, backed a strong military and federal spending on roads and canals to make regions more dependent on each other and bind the Union together. In effect, Democratic-Republicans now used Federalist-style strong government to strengthen the nation. (pp. 297–298)
Misconception: Monroe's election did not bring an "era of good feelings" with no political conflict. The Federalists faded, and the war did build a sense of union. But divisions continued, a split in the Democratic-Republicans produced the Jacksonian Democrats, and limits on participation by class, gender, race, and ethnicity remained. (p. 298)
