Challenges Defeated, 1789–1815

mainly because they feared that Congress would not satisfy their aspirations.
Conspiracies in Vermont, Tennessee, and Kentucky largely ceased once these states had been admitted to the Union in 1791 and 1792, and Western separatism disappeared entirely once the Northwestern Indians had been defeated in 1794 and the Mississippi fully opened to Americans in 1795. The
Whiskey rebels of 1794 in western Pennsylvania—like the Shays rebels of in Massachusetts—wanted the repeal of unpopular taxes and a more responsive government, not separation from the United States, whatever seaboard interests may have feared. The Burr conspiracy of which supposedly threatened the secession of the West—lacked popular support there, and locally elected authorities were taking necessary steps to suppress it even before President Jefferson issued his admonitory proclamation.
15
Similarly, the party contest that appeared in the s acted to restrain sectional ill will as much as to express it. In practice, the hostility between the South and New England was mitigated by the divisions within the Middle
Atlantic states which gave the South the opportunity to find allies in the
North. When, in the war crisis with France in 1798–99, the Federalists passed measures that the Democratic Republicans thought unconstitutional, the legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia adopted condemnatory resolutions secretly drafted by Jefferson and Madison. Jefferson initially included in his draft the claim that a state government could nullify the operation of unconstitutional laws within its limits and so obstruct the operation of federal government, but he was persuaded to drop this assertion partly because it would lose the Democratic Republicans support in Pennsylvania and New
York. Thus the hope of national victory through coalition with allies in distant states prevented the Virginia leaders from retreating into merely regional resistance to the federal government. Furthermore, having won power after 1800, Southern Republicans grew confident in their place in the Union and became far more sympathetic to the use of federal power to achieve national ends.
16
By contrast, in New England the defeated Federalists developed a strong sense of regional distinctiveness after 1800, and in 1804 and 1808 some of the party’s leaders floated plans fora separate New England confederacy.
However, their doubts about the future of the Union arose mainly from fears about the damaging consequences of westward expansion and, for the most part, they remained loyal to the Union of the original Thirteen.
The hardships of the War of 1812 roused some popular disunionism in the region, but the notorious Hartford Convention of December, 1814, was always under moderate control and, as one participant later said, the vast majority of the members of the Convention were totally opposed to any measures tending to dissolve or impair the union of these states.”
17
In any case the Federalist leadership appreciated that the example of
Democratic Republican electoral success in 1800 showed the importance
10
•
Donald Ratcliffe

of maintaining support outside New England. They may have lapsed into sulky obstructionism after 1801, but they survived as a national party and underwent a significant popular revival in two-thirds of the states after In the process they developed interstate connections that reached out to minorities in such unlikely places as South Carolina and Virginia, and in and 1812 held interstate meetings that have been seen as embryonic national nominating conventions. Because the New England Federalist leaders now had good reason to hope for success nationally, they deliberately diverted and stifled secessionist talk at home. In any case, the Democratic
Republican party had begun to win considerable support New England since, and this large persisting body of local voters loyal to the federal administration ensured that no attempt could seriously be made to lead the region into secession even during the War of Thus the Union actually benefited from the development of two-party conflict. Though men grieved that party passion threatened the future of the
Union, in practice each side accepted the principles and rules laid down in the Constitution. Democratic Republican success in 1800–01 legitimized opposition and demonstrated that governments could be changed peacefully.
Moreover, the new constitutional system had created a centre of executive power and patronage that was both worth winning and visible to ordinary people. Politics fora generation would be focused on winning control of that center, with both competing parties taking their names and identities from national issues. Federal elections became the most important focus of popular political involvement though between 1804 and 1820 relatively few men voted in presidential elections because the result was a foregone conclusion, the largest turnouts seem to have come in congressional rather than instate elections. Moreover, between 1807 and 1814, even state politics operated according to national party lines in two-thirds of the states, despite severe factional differences within some state Republican parties. The intense rivalry between the parties down to 1815 concentrated awareness of the
Union, with federal elections serving in every state as a reinforcing ritual of national consciousness.
19
Current social and economic developments also helped the Union to survive these difficult years. For forty years immigration from Europe had been at an all-time low and during that period the use of the English language extended considerably among the relatively few non-British Europeans in the United States, furthering their cultural and political assimilation.
Over the same period the Second Great Awakening gave many thousands of
Americans anew religious awareness and drew them into local churches,
mainly Methodist, that were associated together in national organizations;
not only did these religious affiliations create formal organizational ties crossing state and regional lines, but evangelism provided a common world of experience that most Americans shared.
20
Equally, the economic
The State of the Union
•
11

boom stimulated by high European wartime demand between 1795 and furthered the economic integration of the seaboard areas. Northern shipping interests increasingly depended on the carrying trade in Southern produce;
northerners in the seaports began to provide financial, insurance, and marketing services for—and lend money to—customers in the South and
West; and parts of New England became dependent on food supplies from the middle and western states. After 1807 embargo, non-intercourse, and war encouraged the growth of manufacturing, notably in southern New
England, and its prosperity depended on free access to markets in the middle states. And as the national debt began to increase after 1807 the number of people who had a vested interest in the federal government expanded, just as Alexander Hamilton had foreseen when he restructured the debt on a sound footing in Behind the Union sentiment that so persisted between 1775 and 1815 lay the sense of outside menace. The fear of competing and intruding neighbors, ruled by hostile European empires, provided a major motivation behind the strengthening of federal government in 1787–88, and the outbreak in 1793 of a world war involving those empires created a situation menacing to American security that lasted until 1815. Only after that date did the threat of outside enemies pass away and Americans begin to enjoy
“an excess of isolation that perhaps served to weaken the bonds of Union.
22
If we add to the foreign threat before 1815 a common language, abroad- based print culture, a sense of racial unity and religious consonance, one and a half centuries of colonial history, and the heroic national past of the
Revolution, then the historic roots of American nationalism seem much more akin to those of European nations than is sometimes acknowledged.
23

Download 2.25 Mb.

Share with your friends: