Lecture: Jeffersonian & Jacksonian America
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 9
Opening
Think about a business student watching a new rail line remake a town's trade, or a future teacher serving a community whose nation survived a forced removal. Both of them face one question. When a country grows, who gains, and who pays? That's the question at the center of this lecture.
In Week 1 you learned the four moves for reading any source: sourcing, contextualization, close reading, and corroboration. In Week 7 you followed the first parties to Jefferson's First Inaugural Address in 1801. In Week 8 you reviewed the course so far. In this lecture I'll pick up the story right after 1801 and follow it to 1832.
Here's the story in one line. The country doubled in size, built canals and mills, and widened the vote for white men. In the same years it forced Native nations from their homelands. We'll read three documents along the way: a treaty, a President's message, and a proclamation. Next week, in Week 10, the course turns to the reform movements of these same decades.
1. A treaty of cession: the Louisiana Purchase
Imagine buying a house from someone who bought it last year, while other people still live in it. The deed changes hands in an office far away. Nobody asks the people inside. Keep those people in mind.
In 1803 the United States bought Louisiana from France. The Louisiana Purchase is the United States' purchase from France, by a treaty of 1803, of the territory of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River. The National Archives gives the land as 828,000 square miles and the price as 15,000,000 dollars. The document is a treaty of cession: a treaty in which one nation hands land to another.
Let's source it. The United States and the French Republic made it, and the National Archives keeps the transcript. Its closing line dates it twice, once in the French Republic's own calendar and once in ours. The text was first agreed in French. The pinned passage says France "doth hereby cede to the United States in the name of the French Republic for ever and in full Sovereignty the said territory". Now read for what's missing. The land was home to many Native nations. The treaty names them only as parties to Spain's old treaties.
There's a Week 7 twist, too. Jefferson favored strict construction, reading the Constitution for only the powers it names. The National Archives notes he doubted the Constitution let the government acquire territory, and he set the doubt aside.
Pause and try this. Does the treaty show what the Native nations living in Louisiana agreed to?
Think about who signed it.
Here's the answer. No, because only two governments made it, and the nations on the land had no part in it.
2. A war and a contested peace: the War of 1812
Picture a trading firm whose ships keep getting stopped by a bigger rival. Sailors are pulled off the decks. After years of protest, the owners decide talking has failed.
That's how many Americans saw Britain. The War of 1812 was the war the United States declared on Britain in 1812 over impressment and trade, with western expansion and Native nations also at stake. Impressment is the British navy's practice of seizing sailors, American sailors among them, and forcing them to serve. British forces burned the White House. The Treaty of Ghent is the treaty signed in 1814 that ended the War of 1812 and restored the old boundaries.
Here's a corroboration lesson. The State Department's history office says the treaty made peace with Indian nations on the frontier. A chief of the Whitecap Dakota First Nation, speaking for the Canadian War Museum, says the First Nations allied with Britain were left out of the peace talks. Both can be true. They describe one treaty from two vantage points.
Pause and try this. Which of those two accounts speaks from inside a Native nation?
Think about who is talking in each.
Here's the answer. The chief's account does, because it comes from a member of the Whitecap Dakota First Nation.
3. Canals, mills, and cotton: the market revolution
Picture a merchant on a canal dock in western New York, deciding what to ship east. Not long ago a barrel took weeks by wagon. Now a canal boat carries it in days, for far less.
That merchant is living through the market revolution: the change, from about 1815 to 1850, by which canals, steamboats, early railroads, and factories tied farms and towns into national markets. The building of those canals and rail lines is the transportation revolution, which made moving people and goods faster and cheaper. The Erie Canal, opened in 1825, linked the Great Lakes to the Hudson River and New York City.
Now follow one bale of cotton. In a Massachusetts mill town, young women from farm families tend the spinning machines. The cotton they spin was grown in the South, by enslaved people. The market revolution deepened the South's dependence on enslaved labor, because the mills wanted more cotton every year.
Pause and try this. Did the market revolution belong only to the North?
Follow the cotton back to the field.
Here's the answer. No, because the northern mills ran on cotton that enslaved people grew in the South.
4. Two rules for the territories: the Missouri Compromise
Think about a club that admits new members in pairs, so two quarreling sides stay even. When one member applies, the club finds a partner to admit. Then it writes a rule for everyone after.
That's the shape of the Missouri Compromise: the measure of 1820 that admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state and barred slavery north of 36 degrees 30 minutes in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase. The Missouri Compromise line is that line of latitude, drawn by Congress. The National Archives says Congress paired the two states to keep the balance between slave and free states.
Here's the trap I want you to see coming. A later rule, popular sovereignty, left slavery to the settlers' votes. A later week takes it up. The Missouri Compromise line is a different rule, because Congress drew it.
Pause and try this. Under the Missouri Compromise, who decided where slavery was barred: Congress, or the settlers?
Ask who drew the line.
Here's the answer. Congress decided, because it drew the line at 36 degrees 30 minutes itself.
5. A word to test: Jacksonian democracy
Picture a county seat on election day in the 1830s. Men crowd the courthouse steps, a band plays, and voting is loud and public. Now look at who's missing from the crowd.
Jacksonian democracy is the widening of the vote to most white men in the 1820s and 1830s and the rise of mass party politics around Andrew Jackson. Notice who that leaves out. In the same years, free Black men lost voting rights in several states. Women could not vote at all. And the Native nations of the Southeast were being driven from their homelands. Even the Missouri act had limited the voters for Missouri's convention to free white men.
So the word democracy covers two movements at once. The vote widened for white men, and the rights of others narrowed.
Pause and try this. A classmate says Jacksonian democracy gave everyone the vote. What's the slip?
Name the groups at the courthouse.
Here's the answer. It widened the vote for white men only, while free Black men lost ground and women stayed shut out.
6. A President's argument: Jackson's removal message
Think about a company's annual report to its shareholders. It describes the year's biggest decision in the best light. You'd never read it as the workers' view of that decision.
In 1830 Congress passed, and Jackson signed, the Indian Removal Act: the law of 1830 that authorized the President to negotiate treaties for the removal of Native nations east of the Mississippi River to land in the west. Months later Jackson reported on it in an annual message, the President's yearly report to Congress. The National Archives keeps it, and it's the week's Primary Source Workshop document.
Let's read it. Jackson calls removal "the benevolent policy of the Government", and he says it is approaching a happy consummation. Benevolent means kind. Now ask who speaks. The President speaks to Congress. No Native nation speaks anywhere in the message. It also uses the language of its time about Native peoples, and we quote it only to read the document.
Here's the plain sentence I want you to keep. Jackson's message shows how the President justified removal to Congress; it is evidence of his argument, not of the Cherokee Nation's view.
Pause and try this. Does the message prove that removal was benevolent?
Separate the claim from the world.
Here's the answer. No, because it shows what Jackson claimed, not what removal did to the people removed.
7. Naming the removals plainly: the Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears
This part of the lecture is about forced removal and the deaths of thousands of people. Take it at your own pace.
The Cherokee Nation is a Native nation of the Southeast that resisted removal in the courts, was forced west on the Trail of Tears, and governs itself today from Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Before removal it had a written constitution and its own newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, printed in Cherokee and English. It took Georgia to the Supreme Court and won. Removal went ahead anyway.
In 1835 a small group of Cherokee people who held no elected office signed the Treaty of New Echota, giving up the homeland. Most of the Cherokee Nation protested it. The Senate ratified it in 1836. In 1838 soldiers forced more than 16,000 Cherokee people from their homes. The Trail of Tears is the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation to Indian Territory in 1838 and 1839, during which thousands of Cherokee people died. The sources give different estimates, so we say it in words and key no figure.
The Muscogee, or Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations were also forced west. These nations remain nations today.
Pause and try this. How does the Cherokee Nation's own record complicate Jackson's word benevolent?
Think about what the Cherokee Nation did before removal.
Here's the answer. It shows a people who governed themselves, went to court, and protested a treaty they never approved.
8. Defending the Union: the nullification crisis
Imagine a town council voting that a state tax does not apply inside its limits. Every other town watches to see what the governor does next.
That's the nullification crisis: the conflict that began in 1832 between South Carolina, which declared the federal tariffs void, and President Jackson. Nullification is the claim that a state may declare a federal law void and refuse to enforce it inside its borders. A tariff is a tax on goods brought into a country from abroad. A South Carolina convention declared the tariff acts of 1828 and 1832 void inside the state.
Jackson answered with a presidential proclamation: a formal public announcement issued by a President. The Avalon Project keeps it, and its note says Secretary of State Edward Livingston wrote it. So you source it as Jackson's proclamation in Livingston's words. It calls a state's claimed power to annul a federal law "incompatible with the existence of the Union". Set that beside the removal message. The same President defended federal law against one state, while the law he signed drove Native nations from their homelands.
Pause and try this. Who does Avalon's note name as the proclamation's writer?
Remember the note under the text.
Here's the answer. Edward Livingston, the Secretary of State, wrote it, even though Jackson issued it.
9. Putting the years in order
Picture four folders on a shelf, each with a year on its spine. Before you open one, you put them in order.
Here are the week's four years. First 1803, the Louisiana Purchase Treaty. Then 1820, the Missouri Compromise. Then 1830, the Indian Removal Act and Jackson's message. Then 1832, the Proclamation on Nullification. The gaps are 17 years, then 10, then 2. Add them and you get 29, the span from 1803 to 1832. And from Jefferson's First Inaugural in 1801 to the purchase is 2 years.
Now two claims from the course's evidence-claims set. Item 5 says Jackson's message calls removal a benevolent policy. That shows what the source says. Item 6 says removal was benevolent because the President said so. That goes beyond the source.
Pause and try this. How many years separate the Missouri Compromise from the Indian Removal Act?
Count from 1820 to 1830.
Here's the answer. It's 10 years, since 1830 minus 1820 is 10, which puts the compromise first.
Closing
Let me pull it together. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 ceded land without the nations living on it, and Jefferson bent his own strict reading to take it. The War of 1812 ended with the Treaty of Ghent, and First Nations allied with Britain were left out. The market revolution tied northern mills to cotton grown by enslaved people. The Missouri Compromise line was drawn by Congress, which is not popular sovereignty. Jacksonian democracy widened the vote for white men, not for everyone. Jackson's message is evidence of his argument, not of the Cherokee Nation's view. The Cherokee Nation and other nations were forced west, and they remain nations today. Jackson's proclamation called nullification incompatible with the Union.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Then Week 10, Reform, Religion & Reawakening, turns to the reform movements of these same decades.
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