Even though we barely escaped in the War of 1812, a war that really accomplished very little, and no territorial adjustments, no admissions of guilt, and very few other diplomatic advancements being made from it. The United States viewed the war as a clear victory. A lot of that can be credited to the success of Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812. Jackson made a name for himself in that war as the hero of New Orleans, one of the few clear victories that the United States had in that war.
The ironic thing was that Jackson was able to capture the city of New Orleans in 1814, two weeks after the war was technically over, two weeks after the peace treaty had been signed. But it didn't matter. It didn't matter. It didn't matter that the United States had lost most of the battles in that war.
It didn't matter that the national capital had been burned by the British when they invaded Washington, D.C. It didn't matter that we didn't gain anything that we wanted in that war. The fact that we had won this single victory was enough to charge the Americans at the time with a kind of overwhelming sense of American independence, a ratification of America's nationhood at that time. And so we see in the years after the War of 1812 an increasing sense of national authority and policies that are meant to demonstrate not only to ourselves but to the world community that the United States is a permanent and important presence on the world stage. The war did have an effect on the political system. The Federalists, which, I mean, if you consider the 1790s as the decade of the Federalists when Washington and Adams were president, the actions of Federalists with the Alien and Sedition Acts, the alleged treason of Federalists in holding the Hartford Convention.
and the demands that they were willing to make upon the federal government to change the Constitution, the threat of secession should the war not be ended, was enough to signal the death knell of the Federalist Party. The Federalist Party, for all intents and purposes, disappears after the War of 1812, leaving only the Democratic-Republican Party. But even within the Democratic-Republican Party, there is a fracturing that takes place. There are a group known as the National Republicans, who, if you want to say, assume the position of the old Federalists, National Republicans tended to support a stronger...
National government, a more centralized federal government, a more proactive federal government than the old Democratic-Republican party had supported. And the national Republicans are led by James Madison, the president, at the end of the war. The other... fraction.
The other part of this split are a group known as the old Republicans, sometimes they're referred to as the quids, led by John Randolph. They tended to be more traditional in their ways of thinking about national government, much more in line with the original thinking of the Democratic Republican Party when Thomas Jefferson was in charge of it. So these are much more about a weak federal government, a decentralized national government, limited national authority, states'rights, if you want to phrase it that way. Now, amongst the national Republicans, Henry Clay quickly becomes one of the most important individuals.
It's Clay who comes up with this. The major policy initiative of the National Republican Party, known as the American system. The American system takes from the old Federalist Party the idea of tariffs, the idea of protective tariffs. Clay understood and agreed with Hamilton that tariffs could be used for more than simply raising money, that tariffs could be used to protect American business. to protect American industry until it had matured enough to be self-supporting and tariffs could then be removed.
The money from those tariffs could then be funneled into national infrastructure projects. Typically before the American system, typically what would happen is if a road needed to be built or if someone wanted to build a canal. It was a private venture.
It would be up to individuals to form a corporation to build a road. It would be up to a corporation to build a canal. It would be up to a local community to oversee the project, to maintain the road once it was built. These were local projects that existed within discrete geographic areas, right? A road being built in Alabama would be built by Alabamians, and it would extend only so far as those Alabamians would use it.
So certainly a road built by Alabama would not extend into Georgia or into Florida or any of the other neighboring states. What Clay recognized was that if we were going to become a true nation, right, of states that are linked together in a national economy, We can't rely on this kind of haphazard development. There has to be some kind of centralized voice for planning this. And much like what Hamilton had seen before with his ideas on assuming state debts and funding the national debt, that by the by the central government assuming the responsibility for these projects, that the states and the localities would become more closely tied to the national government, that it would be a form of nation building. And so one of the earliest of these national infrastructure projects is the National Road that was to be built from Cumberland.
on the border between Maryland and Virginia, through Ohio, Indiana, and down into southern Illinois. Now, again, typically, if there was a need seen for an extensive road system like this, it would be up to these several states to come together and to agree to a plan, and then each individual state would oversee the construction. of their particular part of that road.
But under the American system, money that was raised from the tariff system could be funneled to sponsor, to finance, a national construction of this road. And a lot of the justification comes from Clay in the constitutional mandate that the federal government has responsibility for interstate. commerce, right? It's up to the federal government to oversee trade between states.
And for him, the construction of a road and transportation as a whole between states fell under federal oversight. It was a highly controversial program. There were lots of people at the time who did not agree with this. But let's say, for example, you do live in Alabama or Georgia at the time.
And you come to realize that federal money and the energy of the national government is being expended building a road that runs through regions that you will never use. Why should you, as a Georgian, support the construction of a road through Illinois and Indiana and Ohio? Why should you, as an Alabamian, agree to use federal tax money, tariff money, to build a road that you will never use?
It was seen as favoritism, that the government was showing favoritism on the states where these projects were taking place. So there was a lot of jealousy about this. and a lot of concern about the mismanagement, the mismanagement of federal money. Another example of nationalism after the war is the rebirth of the Bank of the United States. We talked before about Alexander Hamilton's plan to create the first bank of the United States back in the 1790s.
That bank's charter had expired in 1811. There had been no effort made to recharter the bank, and so the bank was allowed to die. It disappeared. Then, of course, we get involved in the War of 1812, and what President Madison finds out is that it's extremely difficult to finance the war.
without some kind of a national institution in place to handle that finance. He regretted seeing the death of the first bank. And so no sooner is the War of 1812 over than there is a new initiative, led by Clay and other national Republicans, to charter a second bank of the United States.
And so now we have a second bank. And again, its task was to kind of assist in the oversight of national monetary policy, to create a kind of national currency that could be used anywhere that you traveled in the country, and through the use of this currency to bind individuals and state governments more closely. to the national government.
Another example of this kind of birth of nationalism comes after the election of 1816 when James Monroe is elected president. One of the things that Monroe noticed throughout his administration, if you look back to the world community, particularly in the Western Hemisphere, If you look back to the Western Hemisphere before the War of 1812, there were only two republics. There was the United States and there was Haiti. After the War of 1812, the process of decolonization, the process by which European states are beginning to lose control of their new world colonies, has accelerated.
And by the time we get to 1819, 1820, there's really only two places in the New World that are not republics, one of those being Brazil. So Monroe feels this sense of responsibility. really, to not only help facilitate decolonization, but to protect those republics, those newly independent regions, once they are decolonized.
And so, let's take the Adams-Onís Treaty, 1819, for example. The Adams-Onís Treaty 1819 It serves two purposes, really. The first is, let me define what the treaty is first.
Adams-O'Neill's Treaty 1819, this is the treaty by which the United States gains Florida. So both western Florida, which was southern Mississippi, southern Alabama, western Florida, and then east Florida, which is the Florida peninsula itself. Both of those have been controlled. either by France, although the French portion had come to the United States with the Louisiana purchase, or by Spain. And by 1819, Monroe was able to negotiate a treaty removing Spain from every portion of the eastern United States.
So there is no Spanish holding east of the Louisiana Purchase now. And Monroe kind of saw this not only from the standpoint of Now that we control everything east of the Louisiana Purchase, there's really no threat to the U.S. economy, to American ports in the Gulf or on the Atlantic. We've truly kind of solidified American control over the eastern continent. So there's that kind of dual.
that dual purpose, protecting the port in New Orleans, there's no threats now, but also decolonizing Florida from Spanish control. But then how do we protect it, right? I mean, it's one thing to gain this property, and it's one thing to recognize that other former colonies in Central and South America are gaining their independence, but how do we preserve that?
How do we prevent these European countries from coming back? In 1823, President Monroe issues his Monroe Doctrine, and this was kind of a grand statement of American diplomatic principle over the Western Hemisphere. Monroe spells out that the age of colonization, at least European colonization, let's phrase it that way, the age of European colonization in the New World, is over, is over.
Anything that happens in the new world is considered to be within the purview of the United States. The doctrine says we consider anything that affects any territory in North and South America as having direct implications. on the United States.
And so Europe will not be allowed to create new colonies anywhere in the New World. Now we will not mess, we will not interfere with existing colonies. So Brazil, for example, which is still a Portuguese colony, we are not threatening to go in and kick Portugal out of Brazil. We're not threatening to go into the American Southwest and remove the Spanish.
Those will be allowed to remain, but Spain and Portugal have to realize that that's it. They can't come in and try to reclaim colonies that they have lost in the past. And the same goes for the English and the British, I mean the English and the French and the Dutch and anyone else who used to have colonies in the New World. All right, so.
Anything that happens in the Western Hemisphere is deemed of special interest to the United States, as having a direct impact on the United States. The Western Hemisphere is off-limits to future European colonization. And in return, three, we will remain neutral in all European affairs.
So, you know, you don't, I always phrase it this way, we put a fence around the new world. And we said this is... this is our yard and you can't come in it. We won't go in your yard. You don't come in our yard.
Now, what he doesn't do is specify what would happen if anyone tried. Okay. So this is, this is in some ways a lot of bluster with very little to back it up, because I think Monroe kind of realized that we may have survived the war of 1812. But we're certainly in no position to go through something like that again, at least not yet, to defend the new world. And so we are hopeful. We are hopeful that this kind of grand statement of independence, of American nationalism, is going to be enough, enough to lead the potential rival European states to back away.
All right, so short lecture. After the exam, we will pick up and start talking about the presidency of Andrew Jackson.