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Forming the New Nation

The Treaty of Paris had recognized the United States as an independent nation. But it was not one nation as it is today. In 1783 most Americans felt more loyalty to their own state than to the new United States. They saw themselves first as Virginians or New Yorkers rather than as Americans.

Each individual American state had its own government and behaved very much like an independent country. It made its own laws and its own decisions about how to run its affairs. The first big problem that faced the new United States was how to join together these sometimes quarrelsome little countries into one united nation.

During the War of Independence the states had agreed to work together in a national Congress to which each state sent representatives. The agreement that set up this plan for the states to cooperate with one another was called the Articles of Confederation. It had begun to operate in 1781.

Under the Articles of Confederation the central government of the United States was very weak. It was given certain rights, but it had no power to make those rights effective. Congress could vote to set up a United States army and navy, but it could only obtain soldiers and sailors by asking the states for them. It could vote to spend money, but it had no power to collect taxes to raise the money. This caused serious problems. When, for example, Congress needed money to pay debts owed to France, some states refused to pay.

When the War of Independence was over, individual states began to behave more and more like independent nations. Some set up tax barriers against others. New York placed heavy import duties on firewood imported from the neighboring state of Connecticut and on chickens and eggs from another neighbor, New Jersey. In some places states even began fighting one another to decide the ownership of particular pieces of frontier land.

The weakness of its government made it difficult for new United States to win the respect or the help of foreign nations. The British felt that the American government was so weak that it was not worth dealing with. George III was sure that the Americans would soon be begging to rejoin the British Empire.

Even France, the ally of the Americans during the War of Independence, refused to recognize Congress as a real government. Thomas Jefferson, now the American representative in France, wrote home sadly that the United States was the least important and least respected of all the nations with embassies in Paris.

Many Americans became worried about the future. How could they win the trust of other nations if they refused to pay their debts? How could the country prosper if the states continued to quarrel among themselves-? George Washington was usually an optimist. But even he wrote: "I predict the worst consequences from a half-starved, limping government, always moving on crutches and tottering at every step."

It was clear that for the United States to survive there would have to be changes in the Articles of Confederation.In February 1787, Congress asked each state to send delegates to a meeting or "convention," in Philadelphia to talk about such changes. The smallest state, Rhode Island, refused, but the other twelve agreed. The meeting became known as the Constitutional Convention. It began in May 1787, and fifty-five men attended. They chose George Washington to lead their discussions.

The delegates to the Constitutional Convention disagreed about the changes that were needed. Some were anxious to protect the rights of the individual states. At the same time most wanted a stronger central government. All of them were rich men. They believed that a stronger central government would protect their property and business interests.

The original purpose of the Constitutional Convention was simply to revise the Articles of Confederation. But the delegates did more than this. They started afresh and worked out a completely new system of government for the United States. They set out the plan for this government in a document called the Constitution of the United States.

The Constitution gave the United States a "federal" system of government. A federal system is one in which the power to rule is shared. A central, or federal, authority has some of it and the rest is in the hands of local authorities in the separate regions that make up the country.

The new Constitution still left the individual state governments with a wide range of powers. But it made the federal government much stronger than before. It gave it the power to collect taxes, to organize armed forces, to make treaties with foreign countries and to control trade of all kinds.

The Constitution made arrangements for the election of a national leader called the President to take charge of the federal government. He would head the "executive" side of the nation's government. It would be his job to run the country's everyday affiirs and to sec that people obeyed the laws.

The law-making, or "legislative," powers of the federal government were given to a Congress.This was made up of representatives elected by the people.Congress was to consist of two parts, the Senate and the House of Representatives. In the Senate each state would be equally represented, with two members, whatever the size of its population. The number of representatives a state had in the House of Representatives, however, would depend upon its population.

Finally, the Constitution set up a Supreme Court to control the "judicial" part of the nation's government. The job of the Supreme Court was to make decisions in any disagreements about the meaning of the laws and the Constitution.

The Constitution made sure that there was a "balance of power" between these three main parts, or "branches," of the federal government. To each branch it gave powers that the other two did not have; each had ways of stopping wrongful actions by either of the other two. This was to make sure that no one person or group could become powerful enough to take complete control of the nation's government.

The American people had rebelled against being ruled in an undemocratic fashion by Britain. They did not want to replace the unrepresentative rule of the king and parliament in London with the rule of a tyrannical central government in the United States itself.

Many Americans had another fear. This was that the federal government might try to weaken the power of the states to run their own individual affairs. To remove this danger the Constitution said exactly what powers the federal government should have and what powers should be reserved for the states. It said that the states would be allowed to run their internal affairs as they wished, provided that they kept to the rules of the Constitution.

Before the new system of government set out in the Constitution could begin, it had to be approved by a majority of the citizens in at least nine of the thirteen states. People made speeches and wrote newspaper articles both for and against the Constitution. Finally, those in favor won the argument. In June 1788, the assembly of the state of New Hampshire voted to accept, or "ratify," the Constitution. It was the ninth state to do so.

The Constitution went into effect in March 1789. But it was still not really complete. In 1791 ten amendments, or additions, were made to it. Together these ten amendments are called the Bill of Rights.

The reason for the Bill of Rights was that the original Constitution had said nothing about the rights and freedoms of individual citizens. The Bill of Rights altered this. It promised all Americans freedom of religion, a free press, free speech, the right to carry arms, the right to a fair trial by jury, and protection against "cruel and unusual punishments."

In 1801 John Adams, who in 1797 had succeeded George Washington as President of the United States, appointed a new head of the Supreme Court.

The Court's new Chief Justice, to give him his official title, was John Marshall. Marshall was a 46-year-old lawyer and politician who had fought in the American army during the War of Independence. Marshall was to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for thirty-five years. But he made his most important decision as a judge only two years after he was appointed. In an 1803 legal case known as Marbury v. Madison, Marshall stated that the Supreme Court has the power to decide whether particular American laws are according to the Constitution. If the Supreme Court decides that any law is "repugnant (противоречащий) to the Constitution"-that is, does not agree with it —the Court can declare the law illegal, or "void," and so prevent it from being enforced.

This power became known as the "power of judicial review." In claiming it, Marshall established firmly the most important basic idea in American constitutional law. This is, that the Supreme Court is the final authority in deciding the meaning of the Constitution. If its justices decide that any law is "unconstitutional," that law can no longer be enforced.

George Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion

In 1788 George Washington was elected as the first President of the United States. New York was then the country's capital city. On April 30, 1789, Washington stood on a balcony there and swore a solemn oath "to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." When the ceremony came to an end he officially took control of the nation's government.

Washington believed that political parties were harmful. He said later that it was "the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage" them. Even so, he favored a strong federal government, so he tended to govern in a Federalist manner. The way that he dealt with the "Whiskey Rebellion" of 1794 was an example of this.

The main crop grown by farmers in western Pennsylvania was corn. Some of this they made into whiskey, which they then sold. When the federal government placed a tax on the whiskey the Pennsylvania farmers refused to pay it. They burned down the houses of the federal tax collectors, or "revenue agents," who tried to make them pay.

Washington sent an army of 15,000 men to support the rights of the federal government. Faced by soldiers, the rebels went home quietly. The Whiskey Rebellion collapsed without any fighting. The soldiers arrested a few of the leaders, but later the President pardoned them.

After this there was no more organized resistance to paying the whiskey tax. But many frontier farmers went on making whiskey that was never taxed. They made it in stills hidden away in the woods, in places that revenue agents could not find. Such illegal "moonshine" whiskey —so called because it was often made at night—continues to be made to this day.

The first political parties

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights illustrated two different sides of American political life. On the one hand people saw that the country needed a strong and efficient central authority. On the other hand they wanted to protect individual rights and freedoms. Differing ideas about the importance of these issues gave birth to the first political parties in the United States.

The Federalist Party favored a strong President and federal government. For this reason it appealed to richer people, who believed that a strong central government would make their property safer.

The Democratic Republican Party attracted the less wealthy. This was because it supported the rights of the individual states. To people such as small farmers and craftsmen this seemed likely to make it easier for people like themselves to control government actions.

Years of Growth

Land was becoming scarcer and more expensive in the American colonies by the time they quarreled with Britain. After 1783 more and more people set off for the new territories between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River that the Treaty of Paris had granted to the United States. Armed only with axes, guns, and plenty of self-confidence, they journeyed across the mountains to make new farms and settlements out of the wilderness.

Many of the new settlers moved to lands north of the Ohio River. Amerindians who already lived on these lands saw the settlers as thieves who had come to steal their hunting grounds. They made fierce attacks

on the newcomers' farms and settlements. The settlers struck back, sometimes destroying entire Amerindian villages.

The new government of the United States tried at first to keep the peace by making treaties with the Amerindians. It also tried to make sure that settlers treated them fairly. A law of 1787 called the Northwest Ordinance said that the Amerindians' "lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights and liberty they never shall be invaded or disturbed."

But the American government soon changed its ideas about not taking away the Amerindians' "lands and property." By 1817 President James Monroe was writing that their hunting way of life "requires a greater extent of territory than is compatible with the progress of civilized life and must yield to it. If the Indian tribes do not abandon that state and become civilized they will decline and become extinct."

Monroe believed that there was only one way for the Amerindians to survive. They would have to be moved from lands that white settlers wanted to other lands, further west. There, undisturbed by settlers, they would be free either to continue their old ways of life or to adopt those of white Americans.

In 1830 the United States government passed a law called the Indian Removal Act to put this policy into practice. The law said that all Indians living cast of the Mississippi River would be moved west to a place called Indian Territory. This was an area beyond the Mississippi that was thought to be unsuitable for white farmers. Some people claimed that the Indian Removal Act was a way of saving the Amerindians. But most saw it simply as a way to get rid of them and seize their land.

The Chcrokecs were an Amerindian people who suffered greatly from the Indian Removal policy. Their lands lay between the state of Georgia and the Mississippi River. By the early nineteenth century the Cherokees had changed themselves from a stone age tribe into a civilized community.

Old Hickory

The first six Presidents of the United States were all from rich families. Also, all of them came from long-settled states along the Atlantic coast. Then, in 1828, a different sort of President was elected. His name was Andrew Jackson and he had been born into a poor family on the western frontier.

Jackson had commanded the American army at the Battle of New Orleans in 1814. By 1828 he was a rich landowner. But frontier farmers always felt that he was one of them and called him "Old Hickory." Hickory is a particularly tough kind of wood that grows in American forests.

Jackson was one of the founders of the Democratic Party. He said that government should be organ­ized to benefit "the great body of the United States —the planter, the farmer, the mechanic and the laborer." It was the votes of such people that made him President in 1828 and then again in 1832.

Jackson rewarded the people who voted for him by introducing government policies to give them what they wanted. And what they wanted above all were three things —cheap money, cheap manu­factured goods and cheap land.

Jackson provided cheap money by encouraging banks to make loans at low rates of interest. He provided cheap manufactured goods by re­ducing import duties. And he provided cheap land by forcing the Cherokees and other eastern Amerindians to move west of the Mississippi.

Opinions about Jackson's motives are divided. Some believe that he was concerned only about winning popularity and the power that went with it. But others say that his policies of giving voters what they wanted—"Jacksonian democracy"-wcrc an important landmark in making the United States a more genuinely democratic country.

The Trail of Tears — Amerindians driven from their homelands.

Many owned large farms and lived in European-style houses built of brick. They had become Christians and attended church and sent their children to school. Their towns had stores, sawmills and blacksmiths' shops. They had a written language and published their own newspaper in both Cherokee and English. They even wrote for themselves a Constitution modeled on that of the United States.

None of this saved the Cherokees. In the 1830s Congress declared that their lands belonged to the state of Georgia and they were divided up for sale to white settlers. The Cherokees were driven from their homes and forced to march hundreds of miles overland to what is now the state of Oklahoma.

The worst year was 1838. In bitterly cold winter weather American soldiers gathered thousands of Cherokee men, women, and children, and drove them west. The nightmare journey lasted almost five months. By the time it was over, 4,000 of the Amerindians-a quarter of the whole Cherokee nation - were dead. This episode is still remembered with shame by modern Americans. It came to be called "The Trail ofTcars."

Long before the Indian Removal Act the federal government had begun to organize the new western lands for settlement. It ordered that the lands should be surveyed and divided into square units called "townships." Each township was to be six miles by six miles in size and each was to be further divided into smaller square units, one mile by one mile, called "sections."

As each township was surveyed and marked out in sections the land was sold by auction. Land dealers sometimes bought whole townships. They usually sold the land later, at a higher price, to settlers arriving from the East.

Every year more settlers moved in. Many floated on rafts down the westward-flowing Ohio River. They used the river as a road to carry themselves, their goods and their animals into the new lands. Others moved west along routes like the Wilderness Road that Daniel Boone's axmcn had cut through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachians. Such roads were simply rough tracks, just wide enough for a wagon and full of holes, rocks and tree stumps. The average speed at which travelers could move along them was about two miles an hour.

Samuel Slater imports the Industrial Revolution

At the end of the War of Independence the United States was mainly a land of farmers. It remained so for another hundred years. It earned its living by selling food and raw materials to other countries. In return it imported their manufactured products. Yet as early as the 1790s America's first factory opened.

During the eighteenth century an Industrial Rev­olution had come to Britain. New machines driven by water and steam power had made possible great increases in production.

In 1789 an English mechanic named Samuel Slater took the Industrial Revolution across the Atlantic to America. Before leaving England, Slater memorized the details of the latest English cotton spinning machines. He carried them in his memory because it was against the law to take plans of the machines out of England.

In the United States Slater went into partnership with a businessman named Moses Brow^Tn. To­gether they opened a mill, or factory, to spin cotton at Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Slater built the machinery for the mill from memory. It was a great success and Slater became a wealthy man.

The success of Slater's cotton mil) began a process of change in the United States. In time that process turned the northeast of the nation into its first important manufacturing region.

For purposes of government the federal authorities divided the lands between the Appalachians and the Mississippi into two. The Ohio River marked the boundary between them. The area south of the Ohio was called the Southwest Territory and that to the north the Northwest Territory.

As the number of people living in them increased, each of these two big territories was divided again into smaller ones. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin were eventually made out of the Northwest Territory. As each was formed it was placed under the rule of a governor appointed by Congress. When the number of white males living in a territory reached 5,000 it could elect its own law­making body. It could also send a representative to

give its point of view in Congress. When the population of a territory reached 60,000 it became a new state, with the same rights and powers as the original thirteen states.

These arrangements for governing new territories were first introduced by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The plan that the Ordinance laid down for controlling the growth of the United States has been followed ever since. The importance of the plan is that it made sure that the original thirteen states were not able to control for their own benefit lands that were settled later. This meant that as the United States grew bigger it went on being a democratic union of equals.

The War of 1812

Between 1803 and 1815 Britain and France were at war. Both countries' warships interfered with American trade. They stopped American mer­chant ships and sometimes seized their cargoes. Americans became angry. They were especially angry at the British because the British took seamen off American ships and forced them to serve in the British navy.

hi June 1812, Congress declared war on Britain. In the early months of this War of 1812 American ships won a number of fights at sea. But the much stronger British navy soon gained complete con­trol of the coastal waters of the United States and blockaded American ports. American attempts to invade British-ruled Canada ended in disaster. Even more humiliating for the Americans, British forces captured and burned Washington, their new capital city.

In December 1854, the United States and Britain signed a treaty of peace in Europe. Two weeks later, before the news reached America, British forces attacked the city of New Orleans. They were defeated by American soldiers led by General Andrew Jackson.

hi many ways the whole of the War of 1812 was as pointless as this last battle. But it taught Americans an important lesson. The British navy's wartime blockade of United States ports had cut off the imported European manufactured goods upon which the country relied. This forced Americans to begin making goods of their own and so gave a start to American manufacturing industry.

Thomas Jefferson was one of many people who had been against the growth of industry in the United States. Now he saw how important it was to the future safety and prosperity of the country. Soon after the War of 1812 he wrote: "We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist. "

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