Lecture 2.3+
- 1. America’s first two political parties were the federalists who favoured a strong President and central government and the Democratic Republicans who defended the rights of the individual states.
- 2. The first president of the United States, George Washington, governed in a Federalist style. When Pennsylvania farmers refused to pay a federal liquor tax Washington sent an army of 15,000 men to put down the “Whiskey Rebellion”. Under his Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, the federal government set up a national bank. These financial measures were made to encourage investment and to persuade business interests to support the new government. .
- 3. In 1797 Washington was succeeded by another federalist, John Adams. In 1801 Thomas Jefferson, a Republican, was elected President. In 1803 he bought the huge Louisiana territory from France for $ 15 million. Now the United States would extend as far as the Rocky Mountains
- 4. In 1812 President James Madison went to war with Britain. During the War of 1812 American warships had some impressive victories but British Navy blockaded American ports. Attempts to invade British Canada ended in disaster, and British forces captured and burned Washington, the nation’s new capital city. Britain and the United States agreed on a compromise peace in December 1814. After the war the United States enjoyed a period of rapid economic expansion. A national network of roads and canals was built, steamboats traveled the rivers and the first steam railroad opened in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1830.
- 5. The Industrial Revolution reached America. There were textile mills in New England, iron foundries in Pennsylvania. By the 1850s factories were producing rubber goods, sewing machines, shoes, clothing, farm implements, guns and clocks.
- 6. Portrait of Andrew Jackson by Thomas Sully in 1824. The frontier of settlement was pushed west to the Mississippi River and beyond. In 1828 Andrew Jackson became the first man born in a poor family and born in the West to be elected President.
- 7. Jackson and his new Democratic party promoted democracy and appealed to the humble members of the society – farmers and laborers. Jackson broke the power of the Bank of the United States, which had dominated the nation’s economy He made land available to western settlers – mainly by forcing Indian tribes to move west of the Mississippi. 1837 cartoon shows the Democratic Party as donkey.
- 8. Civil war and Reconstruction The Jacksonian era of optimism was clouded by the existence in the United States of a social contradiction – slavery. The words of the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal” were meaningless for the 1,5 million black people who were slaves.
- 9. In 1828 Southern and Northern politicians disputed the question of whether slavery would be legal in the western territories. Congress agreed on a compromise: slavery was permitted in the new states of Missouri and the Arkansas territory, and it was barred everywhere west and north of Missouri.
- 10. Abraham Lincoln In 1846 the United States got the southern part of the Oregon Country: the present states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Thus America became a truly continental power, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In 1861 Abraham Lincoln was elected President. South Carolina voted to leave the Union. It was soon joined by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. These 11 states proclaimed themselves an independent nation – the Confederate States of America – and the American Civil War began. Southerners proclaimed that they were fighting not just for slavery. The war was for independence.
- 11. Lincoln’s two concerns were to keep the United States one country and to rid the nation of slavery. He realized that by making the war a battle against slavery that is why he could win support for the Union at home and abroad. On January, 1, 1863 he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which granted freedom to all slaves in areas still controlled by the Confederacy.
- 12. The Civil War was the most dramatic episode in American history. This conflict devastated the South and subjected that region to military occupation. America lost more soldiers in this war than in any other – a total of 635,000 dead on both sides. The war resolved two fundamental questions that had divided the United States since 1776. It put an end to slavery, which was completely abolished by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. It also decided, once and for all, that America was not a collection of semi-independent states, but a single indivisible nation.
- 13. President Andrew Johnson Immediately after a Civil War, legislatures in the Southern States attempted to block blacks from voting. They did this by enacting “black codes” to restrict the freedom of former slaves. Although “radical” Republicans in Congress tried to protect black civil rights and to bring blacks into the mainstream of American life, their efforts were opposed by President Andrew Johnson, a Southerner who had served as the Republican vice president, and became the President after assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
- 14. Nevertheless, by 1870, many Southern blacks were elected to state legislatures and to the Congress. These “reconstructed” state governments did much to improve education, develop social services and protect civil rights. Reconstruction was disliked by most Southern whites, some of which formed the Ku Klux Klan, a violent secret society that hoped to protect white interests and advantages by terrorizing blacks and preventing them from making social advances. By 1872, the federal government had put an end to the Klan, but white Democrats continued to use violence and fear to return control to their state governments. Reconstruction came to an end in 1877, when new constitutions were ratified in all Southern states and all federal troops were withdrawn from the South.
- 15. Toward the end of the century, the system of segregation and oppression of blacks grew far more rigid. Blacks accused of minor crimes were sentenced to hard labour, and violence was sometimes used against them. Most Southern blacks, as a result of poverty and ignorance, continued to work as tenant farmers. Although blacks were legally free, they still lived and were treated very much like slaves.
- 16. Despite Constitutional guarantees, Southern blacks were now “second-class citizens” – that is, they still had limited civil rights. There was racial segregation in schools and hospitals, but trains, parks and other public facilities could still generally be used by people of both races.