The Circle of Knowledge: A Classified, Simplified, Visualized Book of Answers

Part 156

Chapter 1563,808 wordsPublic domain

April 27, York (Toronto) was captured by the Americans under General Pike.

October 5, General Harrison forced General Proctor to retreat into Canada, and October 5 at the battle of the Thames routed the British and their Indian allies. Tecumseh was killed, the territory lost by Hull regained, and Upper Canada was retained to the end of the war.

November 11, the Americans moved on Montreal, but were defeated at Chryslers Field, and retreated.

=1814.=--July 25, Winfield Scott again invaded Canada and gained victories at Chippewa (July 5) and at Lundy’s Lane.

August 24, capture of Washington and burning of the Capitol, the White House, and other buildings.

=1815.=--January 8, a large body of English veterans were landed in Louisiana, and attacked New Orleans; in this battle, which took place before the news of the treaty of peace reached the combatants, Jackson won a decisive victory.

=Principal Naval Battles=

=1812.=--August 19, the _Constitution_ destroys the British _Guerriere_, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

October 18, the American _Wasp_ captures the _Frolic_.

October 25, Captain Decatur in the _United States_ took the _Macedonian_.

December 29, the _Constitution_ captures the _Java_.

=1813.=--February 24, the American _Hornet_ captures the _Peacock_.

June 1, the _Chesapeake_ is captured by the British _Shannon_.

September 10, Commodore Perry with a fleet of nine vessels destroys the British squadron of six vessels on Lake Erie.

=1814.=--September 3, naval attack on Fort McHenry by the British fails.

September 11, Captain Macdonough, on Lake Champlain, completely defeated a British fleet stronger than his own; this checked a serious invasion of the enemy.

=Treaty and Results of the War=

December 24, 1814, a treaty of peace was made at Ghent, the end of the Napoleonic wars having removed the cause for England’s offensive policy at sea.

The provisions included:

(1) A return of captured territory.

(2) Nothing was said about impressment.

(3) No compensation was secured by the Americans for ships captured previous to 1812.

The results of the war were:

(1) An increase of debt.

(2) An outburst of national patriotism.

(3) The removal of America from participation in European politics.

(4) The development of manufacturing.

(5) The establishment of the protective tariff policy.

=With the Cessation of Hostilities Another Epoch in Our History Begins.=--From the day when Washington proclaimed neutrality in 1793, to the day when the people celebrated, with bonfires and with fireworks, and with public dinners, the return of peace, in 1815, the political and industrial history of the United States is deeply affected by the political history of Europe. It was questions of foreign policy, not of domestic policy, that divided the two parties, that took up the time of Congress, that raised up and pulled down politicians. But after 1815 foreign affairs sank into insignificance, and for the next thirty years the history of the United States is the history of political and economic development of the country to the east of the Mississippi River.

=Fall of the Federalists, or Pro-British Party.=--The opposition which the Federalists made to the war completed their ruin. In 1816 for the last time they put forward a presidential candidate, carried three states out of nineteen, and expired in the effort. During the eight years of Monroe’s administration (1817-1825) but one great and harmonious party ruled the political destinies of the country. This remarkable period has come down to us in history as the “era of good feelings.” It was indeed such an era, and so good were the feelings that in 1820 when Monroe was re-elected no competitor was named to run against him. Every state, every electoral vote save one was his. Even that one was his. But the elector who controlled it threw it away on John Quincy Adams lest Monroe should have the unanimous vote of the presidential electors, an honor which has been bestowed on no man save Washington.

=Rise of the Protective Tariff Policy.=--In the midst of this harmony, however, events were fast ripening for a great schism. Under the protection offered by the commercial restrictions which began with the embargo and ended with the peace, manufactures had sprung up and flourished. If they were to continue to flourish they must continue to be protected, and the question of free trade and protection rose for the first time into really national importance.

The rush of population into the West led to the admission of Indiana (1816), Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818), Alabama (1819), and Missouri (1820) into the Union, and brought up for serious discussion the uses to be made of public lands lying within them.

The steamboat, which had been adopted far and wide, had produced a demand for some improved means of communication by land to join the greater water highways of the country and opened the era of internal improvements.

The application of Missouri for admission into the Union brought up the question of the admission of slavery to the west of the Mississippi. A series of decisions of the Supreme Court, setting aside acts of the state legislatures, gave new prominence to the question of state rights.

=A Decade of Great Political Contests.=--The Missouri question was settled by the famous Compromise of 1820 (the first great political compromise), which drew the line thirty-six degrees thirty minutes from the Mississippi to the hundredth meridian, and pledged all to the north of it, save Missouri, to freedom. But the others were not to be settled by compromise, and in the campaign of 1824 the once harmonious Republican party was rent in pieces. Each of the four quarters of the Republic put a candidate in the field and “the scrub-race for the presidency” began.

The new manufacturing interests of the East put forward John Quincy Adams. The West, demanding internal improvements at public expense, had for its candidate Henry Clay. William H. Crawford of Georgia (nominated by a caucus of Congressmen) represented the old Republican party of the South. Andrew Jackson of Tennessee stood for the new Democracy, for the people, with all their hatred of monopolies and class control, their prejudices, their half formed notions, their violent outbursts of feeling.

Behind none of them was there an organized party. But taking the name of “Adams men” and “Clay men,” “Crawford men” and “Jackson men,” the friends of each entered the campaign and lost it. No candidate secured a majority of the electoral college, and the House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams.

=The Triumph of Democracy and Industrial Expansion.=--Under the administration of Adams (1825-1829) the men who wished for protection and the men who wished for internal improvements at government expense united, took the name first of National Republicans, and then of Whigs, and, led on by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, carried through the high protection tariffs of 1828 and 1832. The friends of Jackson and Crawford took the name of Democrats, won the election of 1829, and during twelve years governed the country.

In the course of these years the population of the United States rose to seventeen million, and the number of states to twenty-six. Steam navigation began on the ocean; two thousand miles of railroad were built in the land; new inventions came into use; and the social and industrial life of the people was completely revolutionized. The national debt was paid; a surplus accumulated in the Treasury; the sale of public lands rose from three million dollars in 1831 to twenty-five million dollars in 1836; and the rage for internal improvements burned more fiercely than ever. A great financial panic spread over the country; the charter of the National Bank expired, a hundred “wild-cat banks” sprang up to take its place, and the question of the abolition of slavery became troublesome.

=Early Troubles in Our System of Public Finance.=--On the great questions which grew out of this condition of affairs the position of the two parties was well defined. The Democrats demanded a strict construction of the Constitution; no internal improvements at public expense; a surrender of the public lands to the state in which they lay; no tariff for protection; no National Bank; no agitation of the question of the abolition of slavery; the establishment of subtreasuries for the safe keeping of the public funds, and the distribution of the surplus revenue. The Whigs demanded a recharter of the National Bank; a tariff for protection; the expenditure of the surplus on internal improvements; the distribution of the money derived from the sale of public lands; a limitation of the veto power of the President; and no removals from office for political reasons.

The Democrats, true to their principles, and having the power, carried them out. They destroyed the Bank; they defeated bill after bill for the construction of roads and canals; they distributed thirty-eight million dollars of the surplus revenue among the states, and by the cartage of immense sums of money from the East to the far distant West, hastened that inevitable financial crisis known as the “panic of 1837.”

Andrew Jackson had just been succeeded in the presidency by Martin Van Buren (1837-1841) and on him the storm burst in all its fury. But he stood it bravely, held to a strict construction of the Constitution, insisted that the panic would right itself without interference by the Government, and stoutly refused to meddle. Since the refusal of Congress to recharter the Bank of the United States, whose charter expired in 1836, the revenue of the Government had been deposited in certain “pet banks” designated by the Secretary of the Treasury. Every one of them failed in the panic of 1837. Van Buren therefore recommended “the divorce of Bank and State,” and after a struggle of three years his friends carried the “subtreasury” scheme in 1840. This law cast off all connection between the state banks and the Government, put the collectors of the revenue under heavy bonds to keep the money safely till called for by the Secretary of the Treasury, and limited payments to or by the United States to specie.

=National Conventions and Rise of Slavery Issue.=--The year 1840 was presidential year, and is memorable for the introduction of new political methods; for the rise of a new and vigorous party; and for the appearance of a new political issue. The new machinery consisted in the permanent introduction of the national convention for the nomination of a president, now used by the Democrats for the second time, and by the Whigs for the first; in the promulgation of a party platform by the convention, now used by the Democrats for the first time; and in the use of mass meetings, processions, songs, and all the paraphernalia of a modern campaign by the Whigs.

The new party was the Liberty Party, and the new issue the “absolute and unqualified divorce of the general Government from slavery, and the restoration of equality of rights among men.” The principles of that party were: slavery is against natural right, is strictly local, is a state institution, and derives no support from the authority of Congress, which has no power to set up or continue slavery anywhere; every treaty, every act, establishing, favoring, or continuing slavery in the District of Columbia, in the territories, on the high seas, is, therefore, unconstitutional.

=The Short-lived Era of the Whigs.=--The candidate of this party was James Gillespie Birney. The Democrats nominated Martin Van Buren. The Whigs put forward William Henry Harrison and elected him. Harrison died one month after his inauguration, and John Tyler, the Vice-President and a Democrat of the Calhoun wing, became President.

The Whig policy as sketched by Clay was the repeal of the Subtreasury Act; the charter of a National Bank; tariff for protection; and the distribution of the sales of public lands. To the repeal of the Subtreasury Act Tyler gladly assented. To the establishment of a bank even when called “Fiscal Corporation,” he would not assent, and, having twice vetoed such bills, was read out of the party by a formal manifesto issued by Whig congressmen.

It mattered little, however, for the question of the hour was not the bank, nor the tariff, nor the distribution of the sales of lands, but the annexation of the republic Texas. Joined to the demand for the reoccupation of Oregon, it became the chief plank in the Democratic platform of 1844. The Whig platform said not a word on the subject, and the Liberty Party, turning with loathing from the cowardice of Clay, voted again for Birney, gave the State of New York to the Democrats, and with it the presidency.

=The Annexation of Texas, and Wilmot Proviso.=--Accepting the result of the election as “instruction from the people,” Congress passed the needed act and Tyler in the last hours of his administration declared Texas annexed.

The boundary of the new state was ill-defined. Texas claimed to the Rio Grande. Mexico would probably have acknowledged the Nueces River. The United States attempted to enforce the claim of Texas, sent troops to the Rio Grande, and so brought on the Mexican war.

At the close of the Mexican war the boundary of the United States was carried south from forty-two degrees to the Gila River, and what is now California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and more than half of Wyoming and Colorado were added to the public domain. While the war was still raging, Polk, who had succeeded Tyler, asked for two million dollars to aid him in negotiating peace. Well knowing that the money was to be used to buy land from Mexico, David Wilmot moved in the House of Representatives that from all territory bought with the money slavery should be excluded. This was the famous Wilmot proviso. It failed of adoption and the territory was acquired in 1848, with its character as to slavery or freedom wholly undetermined.

=The Preliminary Struggle over the Slave Problem.=--And now the old parties began to break up. Democrats who believed in the Wilmot proviso, and Whigs who detested the annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico, and the extension of slavery went over in a body to the Liberty Party, formed with it the Freesoil Party, nominated Martin Van Buren, and gave him three hundred thousand votes. In their platform they declared that Congress had no more power to make a slave than to make a king; that they accepted the issue thrust on them by the South; that to the demand for more slave states and more slave territories they answered, no more slave states, no more slave territories; and that on their banner was inscribed “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men.” As the defection of Whigs to the Liberty Party in 1844 gave New York state to the Democrats and elected Polk, so the defection of Democrats to the Free Soilers in 1848 gave New York to the Whigs and elected Taylor. As Harrison, the first Whig president, died one month after taking office, so Taylor, the second Whig president, died suddenly when a little over one year in office, just as the great Whig compromise of 1850 was closing. The imperative need of civil government in the new territory, the discovery of gold in California, the rush of men from all parts of the earth to the Pacific Coast forced Congress to establish organized territories. The question was: shall they be opened or closed to slavery? But, as the soil had been free when acquired from Mexico, the question really was: shall the United States establish slavery?

THE MEXICAN WAR, 1846-1848

Causes of the War

(1) Long-standing irritation over claims of American citizens upon Mexico, which the latter refused to pay.

(2) The annexation by the United States of Texas, which Mexico claimed as still a part of her territory.

(3) Disputes as to whether the Rio Grande or Nueces River was the boundary of Texas.

Results of the War

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, closed the war. Its chief provisions were:

(1) The Rio Grande was made the boundary between Texas and Mexico.

(2) California and New Mexico were ceded to the United States.

(3) The United States paid Mexico $15,000,000, and assumed $3,500,000 due American citizens.

The slavery question was intensified in American politics.

=PRINCIPAL BATTLES=

_NOTE: The Americans were victorious in every conflict._

The only naval engagements of importance during the war with Mexico were the bombardment of Vera Cruz, by Commodore Conner, which lasted four days, and the bombardment of Monterey, Commodore Sloat, both cities being forced to surrender.

The Democrats, holding that slaves were property, claimed the right to take them into any territory, and asserting the principle of “squatter sovereignty,” claimed the right of the people living in any territory to settle for themselves whether it should be slave or free. The Free Soilers demanded that the soil having been free when a part of Mexico, should be free as a part of the United States. Between these two Clay now stepped in to act as pacificator. Taking up the grievances of each side, he framed and carried through the measure known as the Compromise of 1850, the third great political compromise in our history. The fruit of this was the admission of California as a free state; the passage of a more stringent law for the recovery of fugitive slaves; the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia; and the organization of Utah and New Mexico on the basis of “squatter sovereignty.”

This done, senators and representatives of all parties joined in a manifesto declaring that the issues resting on slavery were dead issues, and that they would neither vote for, nor work for any man who thought otherwise. But thousands did think otherwise. The action of Clay pleased none. Anti-slavery men deserted him in the North; pro-slavery men deserted him in the South; and in 1852 the Whig party carried but four states out of thirty-one and perished. Even its two great leaders, Clay and Webster, were, by that time, in their graves.

Excited by such success, the Democrats, led on by Stephen A. Douglas, now broke through the compromise of 1820 and in 1854 applied “squatter sovereignty” to the organization of the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Against this violation state legislatures, the people, the pulpit, and the press protested vigorously, for every acre of Kansas and Nebraska lay to the north of 36° 30′ and was solemnly pledged to freedom. But the Democratic leaders would not listen and drove from their ranks another detachment of voters. The effect was soon manifest. The little parties began to unite and when, in 1856, the time came to elect another president, the Republican Party of to-day was fully organized and ready. Once more and for the last time for twenty-eight years the Democrats won.

=Buchanan’s Administration the Prelude to the Civil War.=--The administration of James Buchanan (1857-1861) marks an epoch. The question before the country was that of the extension of slavery into the new territories. Hardly had he been inaugurated when the Supreme Court handed down a decision on the case of Dred Scott, which denied the right of Congress to legislate on slavery, set aside the compromises of 1820 and 1850 as unconstitutional, and opened all the territories to slavery.

=Rise of the Republican Party and Election of Lincoln.=--From that moment the Whig and Democratic parties began to break up rapidly till, when 1860 came, four parties and four presidential candidates were in the field. The Democratic party, having finally split at the national convention for nominating a president and vice-president, the southern wing put forward Breckenridge and Lane and demanded that Congress should protect slavery in the territories. The northern wing nominated Stephen A. Douglas and declared for squatter sovereignty and the compromise of 1850. A third party, taking the name of “Constitutional Union,” declared for the Constitution and the Union at any price and no agitation of slavery, nominated Bell and Everett, and drew the support of the old Whigs of the Clay and Webster school. The Republicans, declaring that Congress should prohibit slavery in the territories, nominated Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin and won the election.

=Secession, and the Formation of the Confederacy.=--The State of South Carolina immediately seceded and before the end of February, 1861, was followed by Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Taking the name of the Confederate States of America, they formed first a temporary and then a permanent government, elected Jefferson Davis president, raised an army, and besieged Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The attempt to relieve the fort brought on the bombardment and surrender (April 19, 1861). The Confederate States were now joined by Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Richmond was made the capital, and the Civil war opened.

=Civil War between the Union and the Confederacy.=--The line of separation between the states then became the Potomac River, the Ohio River, and a line across southern Missouri and Indian Territory to New Mexico. Along this line the troops of the Union were drawn up in many places under many commanders. Yet there were in the main but three great armies. That of the East or Potomac under General McClellan, that of the Center or the Ohio under General Buell, that of the West or Missouri under General Halleck. In command of all as Lieutenant-General was Winfield Scott. Confronting them were the troops of the Confederacy, drawn up in three corresponding armies: that of North Virginia under Johnston and Lee, that of the Cumberland under Albert Sidney Johnston, and that of the trans-Mississippi under McCulloch and Price.

Yielding to the demand of the North for the capture of Richmond before the Confederate Congress could meet there (July 20, 1861), McDowell went forth with thirty-eight thousand three-months volunteers to the ever memorable field of Bull Run.