Rise of the New West, 1819-1829

by Frederick Jackson Turner

This ability to make a triangular voyage, with profits on each transaction, gave such advantage to British ships that they were able to carry on the trade between the United States and England at a rate below that which American vessels could afford. Driven to seek some remedy, the Yankee merchants and skippers turned to the Orient. The trade with China and the East Indies developed rapidly, and our tonnage registered for foreign trade increased from 583,000 tons in 1820 to 758,000 in 1828. [Footnote: Marvin, American Merchant Marine, chap. ix.] Ninety per cent. of our foreign commerce was carried in our own vessels, and, from this point of view, American shipping enjoyed one of the most prosperous periods in its history. [Footnote: Pitkin, Statistical View (ed. of 1835), 363; Soley, "Maritime Industries," in Shaler (ed. of 1894), United States, I., 538.] Smuggling was extensively carried on in the West Indies, and a war of retaliatory legislation in regard to shipping characterized the whole decade.

In 1825 Parliament passed a somewhat obscure act which opened the ports on a more liberal system of reciprocity. To nations without colonies she offered the same shipping rights in her colonies which such nations gave to England and her possessions. The act provided that it must be accepted within a year by nations who desired to avail themselves of its provisions. President Adams preferred to deal with the question by diplomacy, and Congress neglected to pass the legislation necessary to accept the offer. When Gallatin, who had been sent to England to treat of this matter, opened his negotiations in 1826, he was informed that it was too late. The stipulated time having elapsed, American vessels were definitely excluded from the West Indies in 1826 by orders in council. [Footnote: Adams, Gallatin, 615-620; cf. MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy (Am. Nation, XV.), 201.] In the campaign of 1828 Adams was blamed for the failure to seize this opportunity, but the generally prosperous condition of our shipping not only moderated the discontent, but even led to a law (May 24, 1828) intended to place American vessels in complete control of our foreign commerce by providing for the abolition, by proclamation of the president, of all discriminating duties against such nations as should free ships of the United States from corresponding discriminations. In the long run, this reciprocity act proved a mistake; the end of Adams's administration marked the beginning of a decline in the prosperity of the merchant marine. [Footnote: Soley, in Shaler, United States, I., 540.]

American commerce during this period by no means kept pace with the growing wealth and population of the country. [Footnote 2: Sterns, Foreign Trade of the United States, 1820-1840, in Jour. Pol. Econ., VIII., 34, 452.] As we have seen, the staple states produced the lion's share of the domestic exports, and the internal exchange favored by the protective tariffs restrained the foreign importations. Aside from the depression in 1821, following the panic of 1819, and the extraordinary rise in 1825, the exports in general exhibited no marked increase or decline between 1820 and 1829. Imports showed a value of nearly seventy-four and one-half million dollars in 1820, ninety millions in 1825, and sixty-seven millions in 1829. [Footnote 3: Soley, in Shaler, United States, I., 538; cf. Pitkin, Statistical View (ed. of 1835), 177; W. C. Ford, in Depew, One Hundred Years of Am. Commerce, I., 23.] During the whole of Adams's administration, New York preserved its easy lead in domestic exports, although, as the west leaped up to power, New Orleans rose rapidly to a close second in exports of domestic origin. The southern cities retained merely the same proportion of the exports of domestic origin which they had in 1820, in spite of the great increase of cotton production. New York and New Orleans gained a large fraction of this trade, and Massachusetts changed its proportion of domestic exports only slightly during the whole decade. Over three-fourths of the cotton went to the British Isles, while almost all the pork and beef, and two-thirds of the flour, went to the West Indies, South America, and Great Britain's American colonies. [Footnote: Pitkin, Statistical View, 121-137.]

The statistics of commerce repeat the same story of increasing national self-dependence which was told by the development of manufactures, internal trade, and transportation, and even by the diplomatic policy of the United States. The nation was building an empire of its own, with sections which took the place of kingdoms. The west was already becoming the granary of the whole country. But in the development of this "American system," the navigating portions of New England and the staple states of the south and southwest found themselves at a disadvantage. Their interest lay in a free exchange across the ocean.

Although many minor treaties of commerce and navigation were negotiated by Clay during this administration, all his other diplomatic efforts met with failure, among them attempts to purchase Texas and to procure a treaty with England for the rendition of fugitive slaves who had escaped to Canada—strange evidences of the political concessions of the northern president.

CHAPTER XVIII

REACTION TOWARDS STATE SOVEREIGNTY (1816-1829)

From the close of the War of 1812, an increasing reaction was in progress in various states against the ardent nationalism which characterized the country at that time. The assertion of the doctrine of state sovereignty by the Hartford Convention in 1814 [Footnote: Babcock, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. xv.] so aroused the other sections of the country that particularism was for the time discredited. Leaders of Virginia politics even approved a rumor that Madison would march troops against New England; Judge Roane, later a champion of Virginia's sovereignty, denounced the "anarchical principles" of the section. [Footnote: Randolph-Macon College, John P. Branch Hist. Papers, II., 18.] In that period, when Calhoun and the other leading statesmen of South Carolina supported the protective tariff and the bonus bill, when Madison, the author of the Virginia resolutions of 1798, signed the bill for the recharter of the national bank, when Chief-Justice Marshall, a son of Virginia, was welding firm the bonds of nationalism in his great series of decisions limiting the powers of the states and developing the doctrine of loose construction of the Constitution, [Footnote: Babcock, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. xviii.] and when New England itself was explaining away the particularistic purposes of the Hartford Convention, it might well seem that the days of state sovereignty had come to an end.

Even then, however, the pendulum was starting to swing in the opposite direction. The crisis of 1819 and the decisions of the supreme court asserting the constitutionality of the national bank under the broad national conception of the Constitution, produced protests and even resistance from various states whose interests were most affected. Ohio in 1819 forcibly collected a tax on the branch bank of the United States, in defiance of Marshall's decision rendered earlier in the year in the case of McCulloch vs. Maryland; and in 1821 her legislature reaffirmed the doctrines of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, and passed an act withdrawing the protection of the laws of the state from the national bank, [Footnote 2: Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 3, p. 5.] and even persisted in her resistance after the decision (Osborn vs. Bank of U. S., 1824) against the state. But the proceeds of the tax were ultimately restored. Nor was Ohio alone in her opposition to this decision. Kentucky was almost equally excited, and Senator R. M. Johnson made a vain attempt in 1821 to procure an amendment to the Constitution providing that in controversies in which a state was a party the Senate of the United States should have appellate jurisdiction. [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 17 Cong., I Sess., I., 23, 68, 96; Ames, State Docs., No. 3, p. 17; Ames, Amendments to the Const., in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report 1896, II., 161; Niles' Register, XVII., 289, 311, 447.] Judge Roane, chief-justice of Virginia, in a series of papers in the Richmond Enquirer, challenging the nationalistic reasoning of the court, asserted that the Constitution resulted from a compact between the states, [Footnote 2: Randolph- Macon College, John P. Branch Hist. Papers, II., 106-121.] and in this attack he was heartily supported by Jefferson. [Footnote 3: Jefferson, Writings (Ford's ed.), X., 140, 189, 229.] Justice Marshall, in Cohens vs. Virginia [Footnote 4: 6 Wheaton, 264.] (1821), decided that the supreme court had appellate jurisdiction in a case decided by the state court where the Constitution and the laws of the United States were involved, even though a state was a party.

Virginia's attorneys maintained, on the contrary, that the final construction of the Constitution might be given by the courts of every state in the Union; and Judge Roane, whose own decision had been overturned, again appealed to his fellow-citizens in a strong series of articles. Again Jefferson denounced the consolidating tendencies of the judiciary, "which, working like gravity without any intermission, is to press us at last into one consolidated mass." Virginia entered her solemn protest against the decision, and her House of Delegates reaffirmed the argument of Virginia's counsel, and asserted that neither the government of the state nor of the United States could press the other from its sphere. In effect, Virginia's position would have given the state a veto on the will of the federal government, by the protection which her courts could have extended to the individual subject to her jurisdiction under the interpretation placed by the state upon the Constitution. [Footnote: Randolph-Macon College, John P. Branch Hist. Papers, II., 28; Jefferson, Writings (Ford's ed.), IX., 184; cf. ibid., X. passim; Madison, Writings, III., 217-224; Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 3. p. 15; Niles' Register, XX., 118; 6 Wheaton 385.] The leading expositor of Virginia reaction in this period was John Taylor of Caroline, the mover of the resolutions of 1798. His "Construction Construed", published in 1820, was introduced by a preface in which the editor said: "The period is indeed by no means an agreeable one. It borrows new gloom from the apathy which seems to run over so many of our sister states. The very sound of State Rights is scarcely ever heard among them; and by many of their eminent politicians is only heard to be mocked at." Taylor himself was led to write the book by the agitation over the Missouri question and the case of McCulloch vs. Maryland. One of its purposes was to insist that sovereignty was not divided between the separate spheres of the state and federal government, but rested rather in the people of the several states. Two years later, in his "Tyranny Unmasked", Taylor developed the idea that the division of the power of the people between the federal and state governments would be nugatory if either Congress or the supreme court could exclusively determine the boundaries of power between the states and the general government. His remedy for usurpation was the "state veto," which was to be "no mere didactic lecture," but involved the right of resisting unconstitutional laws. He met the difficulty that the people of one state would construe the Constitution for the people of all the states, by the answer that it was the lesser evil. [Footnote: Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, 258, 262.] Again in 1823, in his "New Views of the Constitution", he expounded the same ideas, and dwelt upon the position of the states as the defenders of separate geographical interests against oppression by the majority of the nation. He saw a grave danger in the relinquishment to Congress of the power to deal with local and dissimilar geographical interests by loose-construction legislation upon such subjects as banks, roads, canals, and manufactures. It would tend to produce geographical combinations; sections by combining would exploit and oppress the minority; "Congress would become an assembly of geographical envoys from the North, the South, and the West." Against these evils, the Constitution, according to his view, had provided by confining geographical interests within state lines instead of "collecting them into one intriguing arena." The states, reposing on their sovereignty, would interpose a check to oppressive action and to the combination of sectional interests against the minority. [Footnote 1: Taylor, New Views (ed. of 1823), 261 et seq.]