We left off last time with the Federalists and the administration of John Adams and the controversy over the Alien and Sedition Acts. We're going to pick up today with the election of 1800 and the beginning of the Jeffersonian administrations. The election of 1800 was, for people at the time, seen as an extremely dangerous election.
It's the first time that political power will change hands between two rival parties. And if you think about what has happened in the past, you'll see that the political power has changed. Within the experience of these people, the transition of power between opposing factions, between opposing groups, has tended to be quite violent. Anytime governmental authority shifted hands between groups who had in some way...
oppositional views, it had not gone well. It had either been a coup of some kind or an assassination or a revolution. And yet here we have an election that hands over power from federalists, Washington and Adams and their supporters, to the Democratic Republicans. Adams was extremely scared. about what might happen.
As head of the Federalist Party, he started sending word out to his supporters in the various states to be prepared, right? I mean, he wrote letters saying, we should be ready to mobilize the militia in order to defend ourselves when the Democrats take control. Because if you think about Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans had been quite supportive of the French Revolution. And the fears were still there, that now that Jefferson is the president, that the French Revolution was going to come to the United States.
And so the Federalists needed to be ready, militarily, to defend themselves. Adams went a step further, even. Really, the election of 1800 saw not only the transition of power in the executive branch, it saw a transition of power in the legislative branch as well.
Democratic Republicans gained control of Congress for the first time. And Adams is extremely concerned about what is going to happen. The only branch that's left that the Federalists might... be able to control, might be able to exert some influence and limit the excesses that a democratic president and a democratic Congress might engage in.
The only branch that's left is the judiciary. And so Adams, in his lamed up period, right, in the lamed up period, that's the period between the election and the inauguration of the new president. Back then, it was much longer than it is today. The election is held in November, but inauguration did not happen until March. And so we have, what, December or January?
We have, what, four months that Adams is still in office as the outgoing president. And he gains passage in Congress of a judicial reform act. a judicial reform act.
It's called the Judiciary Act of 1801. One of its stipulations was to create a new series of courts. Most of them are at the local level. Most of them are justice of the peace courts for federal territories like the District of Columbia. All right, for Washington, D.C. These are key positions.
If you look at early political organization at the local level, generally the person who is in control of political organizations at the town level is the justice of the peace. And so for Adams to now create a whole new group of justice courts. in Washington, D.C., and also scattered around in other states and territories, he can now fill those courts with Federalist justices. That's what he does.
He starts nominating, and the Senate confirms a whole slew of new local judges that would fill these new justice courts with Federalists. And legend has it that he stays up until midnight on the last day in office, signing the official documents, giving these judges their commissions. They would have a document commissioning them as a judge. So they're called the midnight judges, right? Because Adams stayed up till midnight signing their commissions.
Now, what happened is once the president had signed the commissions. They would then go to the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State was tasked with handing out those commissions, delivering those commissions to who they went to. Well, not all of them were delivered on time.
Some of them still sat on the Secretary of State's desk when Thomas Jefferson was sworn in. Jefferson told his new Secretary of State, James Madison, do not deliver the rest of these commissions. Well, one of those judges, one of those judges that was supposed to get a commission but did not, was William Marbury.
William Marbury was going to be named a Justice of the Peace in... Washington, D.C., and Marbury decided he was going to sue, to force Madison to deliver his commission. Now, another stipulation of the Judiciary Act of 1801 gave the Supreme Court jurisdiction over certain activities that it had not had in the past, okay? And one of those was to issue writs of mandamus.
Now, a writ of mandamus is, it's an official court order to perform a duty. And so William Marbury files a lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court requesting a writ of mandamus to force James Madison to give him his commission.
All right. Well, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Court is this man on the screen here. This is John Marshall.
John Marshall was also a midnight judge. He had been nominated and placed on the Supreme Court by Adams last minute. It was John Marshall who had been Adams's Secretary of State, the man who was supposed to deliver those commissions and didn't finish.
And here he now sits on the court. that is going to decide whether those undelivered commissions must be delivered now. Instead, what Marshall does is he issues one of the most famous rulings in Supreme Court history, Marbury v. Madison. Marbury v. Madison tells William Marbury, yes, you should have gotten your commission. You should have.
But I can't give it to you. And the reason is this. When Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1801, it gave this court jurisdiction over something that it should not have. We are a Supreme Court. We are an appellate court, right?
We see cases on appeal. Cases have to go through local courts. They have to go through district. Courts, they have to work their way through the system before they get to us.
You didn't do that. And Congress illegally gave you permission to do that. And so the Judiciary Act of 1801, which gave you permission, is unconstitutional.
Typically in the history books, you will see this listed as the case that created judicial review. The case that gave the Supreme Court permission and authorization to rule of acts of Congress unconstitutional, that's not correct. Judicial review had existed for a hundred years or more.
The idea that a court can rule a case unconstitutional, that had existed well before the U.S. Supreme Court and well before Marbury v. Madison. What this case does, though, is it gives that oversight and recognizes that oversight in the Supreme Court, right? It had been recognized in other courts, so the concept was there. But the Supreme Court, there was a lot of question as to whether the Supreme Court would be able to exercise that kind of right, that kind of power.
And Marshall's saying, yes. We do have the right to pass judgment on acts of Congress. And that's the importance of Marlboro v. Madison. It recognizes in the Supreme Court the ability to rule acts of Congress unconstitutional, not creating it, but recognizing where it lay. All right.
Next thing I want to talk about with Jefferson's administration is the Louisiana Purchase. But before we get to that, I have to kind of divert a little bit and give some background. All right. Just like... The French Revolution was inspired by the American Revolution.
The Haitian Revolution was inspired by the American Revolution. Haiti was one of the most lucrative sugar colonies belonging to France, but inspired by America's ability to throw off colonial shackles and claim independence. The slaves on Haiti decided that they could do the same thing. Led by a Haitian slave named Toussaint Louverture, Haitian slaves were able to arm themselves, organize, rebel against their white colonial masters, killing many of them.
It was an extremely brutal, bloody massacre. during this revolution. In fact, if you look, if you kind of peek forward several decades to the American South, the number one fear that Southern slave owners had was slave rebellion.
And any time someone spoke about slave rebellion, the first thing that comes to mind is Haiti and the Haitian rebellion. It was an extremely scary. proposition to think that the Haitian Revolution might be duplicated amongst southern slaves here in the United States, okay?
But the revolution is successful. Haiti's slaves are able to throw off French masters, and they create really the first, or excuse me, the second, the second republic in the Western Hemisphere. The United States was the first, Haiti was the second.
All right, now let's... Go over to France. The French Revolution has passed. Napoleon is rising to power, and Napoleon is starting to move out from France and starting to create a French empire, a European-wide empire. Napoleon needs the financial resources that Haiti had produced, right?
That's how profitable the Haitian colony was, that it could finance Napoleon's efforts to... create empire in Europe. Napoleon needed to get Haiti back. So what, well, let me find my map here.
Here we go. What Napoleon does is he looks to the New World and he thinks, what's the best way that I can send troops over there and regain possession? this island.
I know that if I send troops over and I send them directly to Haiti, that's an extremely long trip and the likelihood is that the troops would not be prepared to fight as soon as they come off the ships. So I need a staging ground. I need a place where we can go and the troops can recuperate and then go down and fight.
So France negotiates a deal with Spain. Spain, which controls New Orleans, controls all of this area, in fact, all of this area west of the Mississippi. France brokers a deal with Spain to transfer possession of half of Spanish possessions, all of this area and what will be the Louisiana Purchase, over to French control.
I mean, really all Napoleon's worried about is this down here at New Orleans. Because if he can control New Orleans, then that's a good staging ground. He can move troops in, he can let them recuperate there in New Orleans, and then go down to Haiti to reclaim the island.
So, now that France has possession of New Orleans, he sends troops over, they disembark, they start to rest up, resupply, and most of them fall ill with diseases like yellow fever, typhus, typhoid. They're not used to that kind of subtropical environment. And they're just kind of thrown into it, and they all fall sick and start to die.
Napoleon realizes that it's going to be extremely difficult in order for him to regain the island of Haiti. All right, so that's kind of the backdrop. So let's go to to this.
So Jefferson now is president. He's looking west, and he's very concerned about what he sees in the area of the Mississippi River Valley, and especially down at New Orleans. New Orleans, at first controlled by Spain, then controlled by France.
It didn't matter as far as Jefferson was concerned. As far as Jefferson was concerned, all he knew and all he understood was that half of the U.S. economy flows into the Mississippi River and down to New Orleans. And to have New Orleans in the possession of a European competitor was a threat. I mean, already in the wake of...
of the American Revolution, Spain had been issuing threats to shut down the Mississippi River, to close off American access to New Orleans. And France probably was going to do nothing different, right? So Jefferson desperately sought some way to guarantee that the United States would have free access to the Mississippi River and to New Orleans.
So we commissions two agents, James Monroe and Robert Livingston, to go to Paris in March of 1803 to negotiate a settlement with Napoleon on American access. They were given a couple of different options to negotiate. At first, they were supposed to offer $10 million for the purchase of New Orleans.
and the Floridas. So what he meant by that was the southern part here, the Orleans territory, this area in blue, and then the Floridas, what they referred to was the western panhandle area of southern Mississippi, southern Alabama over into western Florida. If Napoleon didn't accept that, Offer seven and a half million dollars just for the city of New Orleans.
If he refuses that, At least get some kind of a treaty that guarantees us the right of transit at New Orleans, the ability to pass through New Orleans. And if Napoleon refuses to negotiate at all, then leave Paris, go to London, and open negotiations with the British, because we might be willing to ally with the British and declare war on France in order to gain New Orleans. So that's what they were tasked with.
That's what they were authorized. But when they get there, they meet with the French officials, and they're dumbfounded. Because the French officials counter and say, what would you give us for all of Louisiana, right?
Monroe and Livingston didn't really understand. We weren't aware of what had happened with the French troops. We weren't aware that Napoleon had...
had reached a place where he was willing to let Haiti go, and there was really no need to have a New World presence anymore. So they go into this meeting ready to negotiate with all of these different deals, and the French say, what if we just sold you the whole thing? Monroe and Livingston didn't know what to do.
They send word back to Jefferson, they want to sell us everything. What we finally agree on is for the purchase of Louisiana for 12 million dollars. That includes everything in this dark outlined area. The inhabitants who lived in that area, most of them are down here in the southern area, the Orleans territory, those inhabitants would be guaranteed the rights of American citizenship and the region would be promised eventual admission into the Union as a new state or states.
Now, there's some real problems with this. The people who lived in that area were Spanish, and nobody had really asked them their opinion, right? All they knew was they woke up one day And they were subjects of Spain under Spanish control. And they woke up the next day and they're Spanish people who now are living under French control. And then they woke up the third day and they're Spanish people, but now they're under American control.
Nobody had bothered to ask them what they wanted to happen to the city of New Orleans. And there was a significant concern. that, you know, what happens if these people decide to rebel against these transitions of power?
Second problem was the boundaries were ill-defined, right? I mean, eastern boundary, yeah, you knew where the Mississippi River was. You knew where that boundary was.
But on the west, it was extremely ill-defined. There were some people who said, And they'll say this up until the 1840s. There were some people who said that it included down into Texas, you know, most of Texas, parts of New Mexico. Where did it extend here?
It goes to this line, but maybe it actually goes to the Rocky Mountains. And how far into the Rocky Mountains? Nobody really knew. So we didn't really know where the boundaries were on the property. Third problem was that...
Under the French Constitution, Napoleon was supposed to go to the French Parliament and get permission before selling off any territory. He never did that. So the sale was actually illegal under French law.
And there was a lot of question as to whether the sale was illegal under U.S. law. Remember Jefferson? Think back to the 1790s in the last lecture when Jefferson...
complained to Alexander Hamilton, who wanted to create a Bank of the United States. And Jefferson said, nowhere in the Constitution does it say you can create a Bank of the United States. You don't have the authority to do that. Well, where in the Constitution does it say that the president has the authority to buy massive amounts of territory? It doesn't.
It doesn't. And so Jefferson is now caught, in the modern parlance, he's caught in a flip-flop. Right? He engaged in a deal that violated the exact principles that he tried to hold Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists to.
But even though Jefferson knew that there was some question about its constitutionality, he also knew that this was too good of a deal to pass up. It was too good of a deal, and he had to do it. And so he did it. So he did it.
Now there were lots of people out there who saw an opportunity in the addition of all of this territory. People who, for example, maybe have had their dreams thwarted when it came to political power. Maybe it was people who had grand notions of creating their own states, their own countries.
People who wanted to just move out to the frontier and... rediscover themselves or create themselves anew. The purchase of Louisiana sparked the imaginations of thousands upon thousands of people who saw opportunities in the West. One of the most infamous and, to me, more interesting of these people was Aaron Burr. If you remember, Aaron Burr had had run for the presidency a couple of times and had not succeeded.
He's now serving as Jefferson's vice president, but he still had these kind of grand notions of becoming president of the United States. He viewed himself as a legitimate founding father, right, that had not gotten his due. And he sees In the West, in the frontiers, an opportunity.
Now, it's not the first time that he starts plotting. Burr had started plotting almost from the day that he lost the presidential election in 1800 to gain leadership somewhere. One of the more famous of these plots occurred in 1803. It's called the Essex Hunto.
The Essex Hunto was a tertium quid. All right, now tertium quid, it's Latin, it means the third way. And during this time in the early 1800s, any kind of third party was deemed a tertium quid.
All right, so we've got Federalists, we've got Democratic Republicans, and then we've got a whole variety of Tertium quids that exist dotted throughout the states. And in New York, the Tertium quid was known as the Essex Hunto. Well, what Burr decided to do was that Burr would ally himself with the Essex Hunto. He would run for the governor's office in New York.
And once he won, he would take New York out of the Union. So he's already plotting a secession of New York from the Union. He would declare New York an independent republic, a new nation.
He would be the leader of that republic. And he would then convince the other New England states to secede from the United States and join with him and to create a kind of New England confederacy. Well, Aaron Burr found out about this plan. And Burr starts in the midst of, I mean, Hamilton starts writing letters to the New York newspapers in the midst of Burr's campaign. And Hamilton would say things like Burr is a conspirator.
Burr is a secessionist. Burr is a traitor. Burr is, and he would kind of spelled out what Burr's plans were going to be. And, of course.
Burr loses the election because of that, and Burr was furious. Burr thought that Burr knew that Hamilton was behind this, right? And he publicly accused Alexander Hamilton of defaming his character, and he challenges Hamilton to a duel.
So this is where the famous Burr-Hamilton duel comes from in 1804, where Aaron Burr kills Alexander Hamilton. It is kind of a follow-up to a failed secession plot planned by Aaron Burr to create a New England Confederacy. The big conspiracy, though, comes in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase. Burr decides that the Louisiana Purchase territory would be a prime area for him to create a new nation. So he allies himself this time with General James Wilkinson.
Now, Wilkinson was the American agent in charge of New Orleans. He's the military officer who's sent down to New Orleans to oversee the transfer of power and the establishment of American authority there in New Orleans. Wilkinson is also a spy for the Spanish government. What Burr and Wilkinson decide is that they can create their own army, and they could march on New Orleans, seize control, declare New Orleans independent, and then use New Orleans as a base from which they can expand out and claim authority over the Louisiana Purchase and to create their colony.
kind of Western country. And they went pretty far in the organization. Burr issued a call for militia to organize on a place called Blannerhasset Island, which is up in the Ohio River.
And there were lots of, there were some famous names who went there as a part of this movement. William Henry Harrison, future president, was there. If I'm not mistaken, Andrew Jackson was there for a short time.
But they organized, and once they had organized, they would then sail down the Ohio, they would sail down the Mississippi to New Orleans and seize control. Well, Wilkinson gets cold feet, and Wilkinson writes a letter to... President Jefferson and says Burr is in the midst of a plot to seize control of New Orleans. And I just wanted to make you aware of this and completely spills the beans about what their plans were to the president. So now the sitting vice president of the United States is charged with treason against the United States.
and is placed on trial in 1806. They have a treason trial, and of course the punishment for treason is death. They find him innocent. The Supreme Court finds him innocent.
The reason is, the reason is, the Constitution declares that for a treason trial, you have to have two witnesses. They can really only produce one witness who could testify to the fact that Burr was behind the plot. James Wilkinson. They didn't have the two that were required by the Constitution.
And so Burr is able to escape execution for treason in plotting this conspiracy. But this gives you a good example of a couple of things. This gives you a good example of how the expansion of territory might foster in people these kinds of grand notions of nation building. that we'll see duplicated time and time again. I think about Texas in the 1830s and the 1840s, when Texas declares its independence from Mexico and then comes into the United States.
It sparked the same kind of fervor with the admission of California and the Western Frontiers. It's a kind of early version of Manifest Destiny, which... we don't really see Manifest Destiny until the 1840s. Manifest Destiny is the belief that God has ordained that the United States should expand over the entire continent and bring Christianity and civilization to the, quote, savage people. Certainly this doesn't have such grand notions.
This is very self-serving, what Burr is doing. But it is driven by that same kind of idea. that we're building a nation.
Second thing that it illustrates is secession. We normally think of the idea of secession as a southern idea, that it was tied with the Civil War in the mid-1800s, when it's not. Secession as an idea... I don't know.
is evident here in the early 1800s. We'll see it again in just a few slides in New England. There was talk of secession in the late 1700s when people were debating whether the Constitution should be ratified or not. Secession is not a Southern idea.
It is an American idea. That is, that is deployed in all sorts of different places under different circumstances. All right, let's talk some about the War of 1812. Last time, in the last lecture, we talked about the tensions that existed between the United States and France and England, and how those tensions manifested themselves in international trade, right?
England passing orders and counsel to intercept American ships. The French doing something very similar in response to Jay's Treaty, sparking the Quasi-War in the 1790s. Those problems still exist.
Parliament still has the orders and counsel in place. British ships are still stopping American merchant vessels and searching them. There are still interferences in trade. And we've tried to work our way around it.
We've tried to use certain countermeasures like embargoes, right? There were lots of pieces of legislation that the Jefferson administration put into place that would simply stop importing European goods, right? If England is going to stop American ships, well, then we're just going to stop importing English goods.
If France is going to stop American ships, then we're just going to stop importing French goods. And Every law had a different kind of implement. You know, one law would say we're not going to import from either party.
One law would say, well, we're not going to import from the French, but we are from the British. And the next would flip-flop it and do the exact opposite. They tried all sorts of different ways of using embargoes to convince, force England and France to remove their...
their laws stopping American trade. And none of them worked. None of them worked.
The only thing that they accomplished was angering New England shippers. Because remember, New England's economy is based primarily in shipping. And so every time that the Jefferson administration passed a new embargo law, and every time the Jefferson administration did anything to affect trade, it had a direct impact on the economy of New England.
When the embargo shut down trade, New England's economy shut down. And what made it doubly hard was that New England was kind of the last remaining center of Federalist politics. Most of the United States had come over to the Democratic-Republican side, all except New England.
New England kind of stayed behind the Adamses and with the Federalist Party. And so if you're a Federalist shipping agent in Boston, and you look to Washington, and you see a Democratic-Republican president passing laws that are cutting off your income, you don't see this as... a normal aspect of diplomatic relations. No, you see this as something personal. Right?
Adams had warned us about the dangers of the Democrats when they came into office. Adams had warned us that Democratic Republicans were going to be the downfall of the United States. And Federalists in New England were seeing that happen. They were seeing their livelihoods die. The other thing that was happening was impressment was continuing.
British ships were still impressing Americans into the British Navy. And here again, Federalists see that the impressment of New England sailors was an extension of the problems that were created by Jefferson's policies dealing with trade. By 1811 or so, 1810, 1811, Patience with the embargoes was running thin. It was becoming quite apparent that diplomacy and trade restrictions were not going to work, that war might actually be necessary.
And by 1812, there is a group of freshman congressmen who come into office known as the Warhawks. included people like this man here on the screen, Henry Clay from Kentucky, John C. Calhoun from South Carolina. These freshman congressmen are going to push the United States into war with Great Britain.
And what's odd about this is these are not freshman congressmen, these war hawks. are not Federalists from New England. These are Westerners and Southerners.
These are people who live out on the frontier. So why is it that Southern and Western frontiersmen would become ardent supporters of a war that revolves predominantly around maritime trade and shipping? What's the connection? Well, there is. It has to do with Indians.
Because these war hawks, these are people who are starting to move out onto the frontier, right? Henry Clay lives in Kentucky. That's the frontier.
John C. Calhoun, he's from western South Carolina, the frontier regions of South Carolina. Most of the war hawks. come from these frontier regions where whites and Native Americans live side by side. And one of the other things that Americans are upset about is that British have not withdrawn their troops from the frontier.
The British still have troops stationed up in the Great Lakes, in fortifications. Troops are still dotted down the Mississippi River Valley. in British fortifications.
And these war hawks believe that the British are responsible for inciting Native Americans to declare war on the United States. Now, that's not really what's happening, but that's what these frontiersmen believe, that the British are inciting Indian violence. In reality, what's happening is there is a growing movement. amongst the native populations to push Americans back to the East Coast.
And we see these kinds of movements pop up every once in a while. There was one that popped up after the French and Indian War, 1763, with Pontiac's Rebellion up in the Great Lakes region. This one here is is being led by a man named Tecumseh.
Tecumseh and his brother, Tenskwatawa. Tenskwatawa was a half-blind medicine man who had a vision. And this is a commonality amongst these kinds of movements. There will be a prophet, a medicine man. who will have a vision that the native peoples are to do something, and that that activity would restore the Native people to their natural place and push the white man back to the sea, right? Pontiac had had a vision in 1763 telling him that he should unite all of the Indian peoples together into a big confederation.
Tenskwatawa had the same vision, to unite the Native people together in a pan-Indian confederation, and that if all of the Native Americans were united together, that they would be able to defend their homelands, push the white man back to the sea. We see it again in the 1890s with the ghost dance, with Wovoka and the ghost dance out west. So Tecumseh throughout 1810, 1811 is traveling throughout from the Great Lakes all the way down into Virginia, throughout Kentucky, Tennessee, gradually building this confederation.
And he creates a capital at a place called Prophet Town at the junction of the Wabash River and Tippecanoe Creek. in the Indiana Territory. There is an attempt to crush this confederation. November of 1811, the Battle of Tippecanoe, Indiana Governor William Henry Harrison leads Indiana militia in an assault on Prophetstown. Tecumseh is not there.
But Harrison does destroy the town, kills several women and children who were there at the time. And this is going to lead Tecumseh to more closely ally himself with the British in that region, which only goes to foster, right, the Warhawks'belief that there is a direct link between the British and Native American uprisings. So when the Warhawks get into Congress, they understand all of the concerns that the Federalists in New England have, that the shippers have with maritime trade, and that that maritime trade is linked with Britain.
But the Warhawks see it as British ties with Native American uprisings. And so those two things become linked together. They become linked together in 1812 with the rise of these new representatives in Congress.
And they push through Congress a bill, an act of war, starting the War of 1812. So what do we hope to accomplish? Well, obviously, the War of 1812 hopes to end all of those issues that were involved with maritime trade. We're going to gain an end to the orders in council. We're going to gain an end to the policy of impressment.
We're going to gain an end to the orders in council. We're going to end the Indian menace in the West. And maybe, right, this ties into the kind of westward expansion that we see with Louisiana Purchase. Maybe we can even open up.
more territory for expansion. Because the war hawks are thinking, why just eliminate all of these? Why not expand up into Canada? I mean, the British still possess Canada.
If the British are still in Canada, there's every possibility they might come back again in the future. So what if we can gain possession of Canada at the same time? There's some books that talk about the War of 1812 along the U.S.-Canadian border as a kind of civil war. I don't know that I agree with that. It's certainly a war of territorial expansion, as far as the United States is concerned, in that region, right, to the north.
Well, the Federalists, the Federalists never really supported this war. I mean, they blamed this war on Democratic-Republicans. They blame the war on all of the false policies.
policies, all of the failed policies of the Democratic Republicans. They see expansion as a Democratic Republican policy, right, linked with the Louisiana Purchase. There is nothing that they see that is good to come out of this war.
In fact, things get even worse. At least with the embargoes, they came and they went. Trade opened up this month with one law, but they closed the next month with the next law.
Now we're at war, and there's no trade whatsoever. There is a group of Federalists who call a convention in Hartford, Connecticut in 1814 to discuss how they should respond to the War of 1812. And they pass a resolution. They pass a resolution that is...
That's an ultimatum. The resolution demands that Congress pass an amendment to the Constitution that would protect New England's interests, and that if Congress failed to do that, New England would secede from the United States. and create its own independent New England Confederacy.
All right? So end the war, amend the Constitution so that our interests as New England Federalists are treated with the same respect that the interests of Southerners and Democratic Republicans are treated, and we'll stay. Otherwise, we're leaving.
Fortunately, even though the resolution passed at the convention, it did not make it to Washington in time. The war ended before the resolution could be acted upon by Congress. So it becomes really a kind of a moot point. But again, this demonstrates that earlier point that I made about secession. The ties that are linking these states together.
in the early 1800s are so loose, so tenuous, that at any moment an individual might rise up that senses an opportunity to prosper by taking a region out. A section might decide that it doesn't like what national policy at that time is and decide to break off and create something new. We don't have this real sense of nationalism, not yet. We'll see it.
We'll see it coming. And that's what the extra lecture that I'm going to, that's what the next lecture is going to be, is about the growth of nationalism, at least the early stages of nationalism that takes place in the wake of the War of 1812. All right, so do we accomplish our goals? No, we don't. The treaty that ends the War of 1812 essentially takes us back to what's called the status quo antebellum, to the way things were before the war.
We do not gain or lose any territory. We suffer some damage, right? The British invade and burn Washington, D.C., but we do not win or lose any new territory. Great Britain slowly loses interest.
in interdicting American trade. So trade does open up again, but there is no overt statement by the British that their policy was wrong, right? There's no acceptance that American neutrality is permanent.
There's no acceptance that America has continuous free trade. There's no admission like that. Things kind of go back to the way they were before. Probably the one big thing that happens as a result of this war is that it ratifies the American Revolution. And this will lay a foundation for the next lecture.
There was always the question about whether the American Revolution would be permanent, that independence would be permanent. Britain had always believed that it wouldn't. But here, we survived the War of 1812. Barely, but we survived. And it kind of puts the period at the end of the sentence that says the United States is now independent.
And Britain's not happy about it, but they're accepting it. They're accepting it. All right. We'll pick up in the next lecture with nationalism.