Using Federal Power, 1789–1848

militiamen—about the size of his old Continental Army—to suppress the whiskey tax disorder in western Pennsylvania. The policy of asserting federal supremacy finally came to ahead in 1798–99 in response to the war crisis with France besides taking powers to control immigrants and restrain the expression of political opinion through the Alien and Sedition Acts, the
Federalists also imposed a federal graduated property tax, levied on land,
houses, and slaves, and collected directly by federally appointed assessors and collectors. The tax roused remarkably little serious resistance, with opponents objecting to the tax as inequitable rather than illegitimate.
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The Democratic Republicans opposed the nationalist thrust of Federalist policy, insisting that the Union was intended to be a decentralized confederation based on the principles of states rights. When they took power in they changed the tax policy and repealed the legislation of but they also asserted federal power whenever necessity required. The basic institutions—the bank (until its charter expired in 1811), the national debt,
the army and navy—were all preserved, if in more modest form. Though a strict constructionist, President Jefferson proved perfectly willing, in national emergencies, to exercise powers beyond the strict letter of the Constitution—
as over the Louisiana Purchase, the naval campaign against the Barbary corsairs, and the Burr conspiracy. The embargo of 1808–09 required more extensive measures of enforcement than even the whiskey excise had in the previous decade and Jefferson became the only president in American history to use federal troops for routine law enforcement in peacetime, in areas where there was no insurrection or domestic violence or breakdown in normal civil procedures.
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In effect, the diplomatic, maritime, and economic difficulties that the
United States faced during the Napoleonic Wars in Europe were converting many Democratic Republicans to a more nationalist outlook. The war hawks who appeared in Congress after 1810 demanded stronger federal military and naval preparations, militant defiance of European superpowers, and measures to promote greater economic independence. Involvement in the second war against Britain, 1812–15, forced the parsimonious majority in Congress to adopt some energetic policies, and war expenditure had to be met by direct federal taxes imposed between 1813 and 1817. Despite its apparently glorious end at the battle of New Orleans, most Democratic
Republicans recognized that the war had almost proved disastrous because of the republic’s inadequate infrastructure in effect, the conflict had starkly demonstrated how continuing economic underdevelopment created major obstacles to national survival and integration. Thus the difficulty of defending the country against Britain while remaining dependent on Britain for manufactured goods prompted a shift in favor of tariff protection for
American industry the obstacles to transporting men and supplies around the country encouraged support for federal sponsorship of roads and canals;
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and the lack of an effective means of transferring funds and credits during the latter stages of the war demonstrated the value of the earlier national bank. As a consequence, in 1815 President Madison advocated strong federal policies to remove these persisting obstacles to greater national strength,
and Congress in 1816 duly adopted the first openly protectionist tariff and chartered a second national bank.
In this postwar afterglow, American patriotism seemed rampant:
delighted that the republic had survived the trials of separatism and invasion,
nationalist spokesmen became more fulsome, more optimistic, more rhetorically extravagant, though still concerned to define the true character of the republic and uncertain of its moral integrity in the face of rapid material development.
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The exercise of power on an interstate scale now seemed appropriate not just to Congress but also to voluntary associations such as the American Colonization Society and the many evangelical organizations that began to operate on a national basis. The Federalists, embarrassed by their record of obstruction during the war, ceased to function as an opposition party, applauding the adoption by the Democratic Republicans of policies once considered Federalist. During this Era of Good Feelings,
the creed of national republicanism became part of a virtually nationwide consensus and resulted in the formulation of the American System,”
a program that advocated advancing economic independence by means of enhanced tariff protection and promoting internal integration through a grand scheme of federally financed internal improvements. The word
“nation” increasingly seemed appropriate to describe the United States in the decade after However, as the governments of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams endeavored to press the American System ever further in the s, so resistance swelled. The South, initially part of the nationalist consensus in 1816, shifted its position after 1818: a severe credit crunch and economic depression persuaded many southerners to blame federal economic policy for their financial embarrassment, while the Missouri crisis taught them to fear federal interference in their relations with the South’s racial minorities. Some southerners—notably in South Carolina and
Georgia—even began to calculate the value of the Union. They were joined by states rights advocates and old Jeffersonians—in both North and South—
who wished to return to the old landmarks of Democratic Republicanism,
and reduce the powers that the Union had recently taken unto itself.
With the assistance of malcontents of many kinds, this strict-constructionist coalition won power under Andrew Jackson in 1828 and proceeded to cutback the power of the central government.
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As a consequence, by the mid-1830s the acute French political observer and analyst Alexis de Tocqueville could report that under Jackson the federal government was losing strength, retiring gradually from public affairs, and narrowing its circle of action.”
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The 1828 Tariff of Abominations—the
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highest tariff of the antebellum years—was cutback considerably in and 1833. Jackson’s Maysville veto of 1830 ended schemes fora great federal program of internal improvements. His bank veto of 1832 and subsequent war on the national bank destroyed that possible instrument of central management. Opposition to this decentralizing program gained expression through the Whig Party of the sands, which continued to argue that the federal government represented a potentially effective instrument for promoting the general welfare and strengthening the Union. The Whigs won the political argument in the severely depressed conditions of when they promised anew burst of federal activity comparable with the
1790s and the s, but the early death of President William Henry
Harrison in 1841 brought to power a proponent of states rights, Vice- president John Tyler, who prevented them from reversing the cutbacks of the s. After 1845 the Democratic President James K. Polk consciously renewed the Jacksonian policy of limiting federal power in domestic affairs,
and never again would the Whigs secure the full control of Congress that they needed in order to implement positive national policies.
The process of retraction by the federal government during the s shifted responsibility for economic development onto the state governments,
and revealed that the Jacksonian Democrats believed that the Union could be kept together best by a process of devolution. As Jackson himself conceived, a self-denying federal government that limited itself to a few and simple, yet important, objects would be most likely to hold together a Union made up of increasingly dissimilar parts. Thus states rights policies were quite compatible with devotion to the Union, as Jackson demonstrated by his stout defense of federal authority when South Carolina obstructed the collection of tariff duties within its limits in the Nullification crisis of. In the process Jackson redefined the nature of the Union. Whereas the Federalist tradition saw the Union as a corporate entity expressing the oneness of the American people—which presumably would always exist—
the dominant Democratic Republican ideology traditionally emphasized the voluntary nature of the Union, which tacitly implied that states could choose to leave if they wished. Since 1815, however, the growth of national republicanism had seen many Democratic Republicans supporting active federal policies that presumed a continuing future for the common interest of the Union. President Jackson offered a resolution of this ambiguity when, in the face of South Carolina’s challenge to federal authority, he made it clear that the reduction of central government was not meant to cast doubt on the Union’s perpetuity. In his Nullification Proclamation of December he asserted its permanence in away no previous President had felt necessary, and so established the principle of states rights Unionism that would enable many Northern Democrats to support the Union in the
Civil War.
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The State of the Union
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