Final Exam Study Guide

Final Study Guide; Birzer

History of the Early American Republic (aka, “Jacksonian America”, H302)

Final: Worth 40% of your semester grade

I will provide the blue books for the exam.  For each section, I am assuming your knowledge of the books assigned and the lectures given.  You will be graded on knowledge as well as wisdom.

Section 1.  Possible essay questions.  The essay is worth 35 percent of your final examination grade.

•   Explain why and how democracy, nationalism, and imperialism intertwined during the time period, 1807-1848.
•   Did Republican Virtue survive the Second Great Awakening?  Why or Why not?  If so, how?
•   Compare Tocqueville’s and Calhoun’s criticisms of democracy.
•   In what ways did the emerging culture of letters shape, delimit, or influence the Early American Republic, 1807-1848?

Section 2.  Ids.  You will be given six, and you will have to answer four.  In each of the four, be sure to address the how, what, who, where, when, and, most important, why (that is, the significance and context).  Each answer is worth 10 percent of your final examination grade.

Anti-masonry

Bank Veto

Battle of the Alamo

Book of Mormon

Cherokee Nation v. Georgia

Daniel Webster

Democratic Party

Force Bill

Henry D. Thoreau

Henry Clay

Indian Removal Act

James K. Polk

James Fenimore Cooper

John Tyler

John C. Calhoun

Joseph Smith

Martin Van Buren

Moses and Stephen Austin

Nathaniel Hawthorne

nativism

Nicholas Biddle

nullification

Orestes Brownson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Santa Anna

South Carolina Exposition and Protest

Tariff of Abominations

Texas Revolution

Thomas Hart Benton

Trail of Tears

Transcendentalism

Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo

Unitarianism

Ursaline Monastery Riot (Massachusetts)

Webster-Hayne Debates

Whig Party

William Leggett

Winfield Scott

Zachary Taylor

Section 3.  25 short answer questions.  This section is worth, roughly, 25 percent of your final examination grade.

Timeline Jacksonian America

Early Republic Timeline, 1807-1848 

1807 Jefferson Embargo

1809 James Madison becomes president

Jefferson Embargo repealed

1810 Henry Clay elected Speaker of the House

Fletcher v. Peck

1811 Battle of Tippecanoe

1812 War of 1812 begins

1813 Battle of the Thames

Beginning of the “Factory System” in Waltham, Mass.

1814 Burning of Washington, D.C.

Hartford Convention

1815 Battle of New Orleans

Treaty of Ghent ratified by Senate and President

1816 James Monroe elected president

1819 Depression begins

Adam’s-Onis Treaty signed

Dartmouth College v. Woodward

McCulloch v. Maryland

1820 Missouri Compromise passed

Monroe Doctrine declared

1821 American Santa Fe Trail forged

1823 The Pioneers published

1824 John Quincy Adams elected president

Accusations of “Corrupt Bargain”

Gibbons v. Ogden

1825 First portion of the Erie Canal opens; sparks ‘canal fever’

New Harmony founded

1826 Last of the Mohicans published

First American temperance society created; word “teetotaler” created

1828 Creation of the Democratic Party

Andrew Jackson elected president

Tariff of Abominations passed

1830 Webster Hayne Debates

Indian Removal Act

Mormon Church founded

1831 William Lloyd Garrison publishes The Liberator

1832 Black Hawk War

Jackson vetoes re-chartering of National Bank

Samuel Morse invents the telegraph

1833 Clay Compromise and Force Bill end the Nullification Crisis

John Randolph of Roanoke dies

1834 Lyman Beecher’s inflammatory sermons spark mob attacks against R.C.s in Mass.

1835 Vol. 1 of Democracy in America published

1836 Martin Van Buren elected president

Republic of Texas successfully revolts against Mexican oppressors

1837 Panic and six year depression begins

Emerson delivers “The American Scholar”

1838 National Road completed

1840 Liberty Party forms

Whig William Henry Harrison elected president

Vol. 2 of Democracy in America published

The Dial begins publication

1841 Harrison dies in office; John Tyler becomes president

First overland party to Oregon

1844 James K. Polk elected president

Beginnings of Hillsdale College

Joseph Smith killed by lynch mob

Anti-Rent War begins in New York

1845 Texas annexed by the United States

1846 Mexican War begins

Donner Party eats itself

Buchanan-Packenham Treaty ratified by Senate

1847 Scott takes Mexico City

1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago

Gold discovered in central California

Seneca Falls Convention; “Declaration of Sentiments”

Massive immigration from German States (R.C. and Lutheran) and Ireland (R.C.)

How Americans Viewed the Common Law

Taken from Trevor Colbourn's The Lamp of Experience, 1965; reprinted by Liberty Fund.

The American approach to medieval history, to the Goths, or, more popularly, to the Saxon chapter of their history, derived partly from this classical orientation, partly from colonial interest in common law in Saxon times. In a new country, land titles were frequently in question, leading, as David Ramsay observed, to an “infinity of disputes.” By the mid-eighteenth century, the profession of law was “common and fashionable.”15 To study law was to study its history. Sir John Vaughan’s Reports reminded colonial lawyers of the connection of law and history insofar as “much of the Saxon law is incorporated into our Common Law.” The virtues of both were duly digested by John Adams: “the liberty, the unalienable and indefeasible rights of man, the honor and dignity of human nature … and the universal happiness of individuals, were never so skillfully and successfully consulted as in that most excellent monument of human art, the Common Law of England.” In these words Adams echoed the awe and reverence of his generation toward an antique golden age of English history. Blackstone urged lawyers to investigate the “fountains” of their profession, “the customs of Britons and Germans, as recorded by Caesar and Tacitus,” wherein lay the common law as developed from the “northern nations.”16

Tacitus’s Germania enjoyed a remarkable vogue in the eighteenth century. John Adams read Tacitus frequently. Jefferson would enthusiastically tell any inquiring student to look to Tacitus as “the first writer in the world without a single exception”; his works were “a compound of history and morality of which we have no other example.”17 Tacitus was a convenient authority on many subjects—on Rome herself as well as on the Saxon tribes which emigrated from Germany to England. American admirers were not even obliged to strain their command of Latin, for they could enjoy the pleasures of Thomas Gordon’s new English translation, which came complete with moral discourses. Tacitus, Gordon explained, was “an upright Patriot, zealous for public liberty and the welfare of his Country,” a “declared enemy to Tyrants,” a historian “of extraordinary wisdom,” whose work demonstrated that “no free people will ever submit to … [tyranny] unless it steal upon them by treachery.” It was not surprising that Gordon’s new translation was on the first order list of the Library Company of Philadelphia.18

History in the Germania certainly stirred the blood of readers interested in ancient virtue. Fascinated by the virtues of the splendid Germans, Tacitus wrote at length of their purity, their independence, their democratic inclinations. True, the form of German government was monarchical, but it was an elective kingship, constrained by assemblies of the tribes. Royal authority was neither unbounded nor arbitrary, and the German kings secured obedience by the justice of their rule and the example of their behavior. Their people lived a simple, happy life, “in a state of chastity well secured, corrupted by no seducing shows and public diversions, by no irritations from banqueting.” Their private life would be acceptable to the most rigid puritan. The ancient Germans, Tacitus claimed, were “almost the only Barbarians contented with one wife.”19 It became hard to resist the frequently offered conclusion that a corrupted and depraved Roman Empire had little chance of surviving the onslaught of Germanic virtue.

Of contemporary writers on Germanic history the most popular in the colonies was a Frenchman, Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, “a Man of Learning and industry; Honesty and Candour.”20 His History of England depicted the English as direct descendants of Tacitus’s noble Germans. The fate and influence of these descendants he followed from the time they crossed the Channel to Britain until he concluded his account of English development with the eighteenth century. Rapin not only popularized Tacitus but at the same time also provided a bridge over which Americans could travel from ancient to medieval history. To an impressive roster of American admirers, Rapin in the translation by Tindal was as accessible as Gordon’s Tacitus. Although crusty John Adams questioned Rapin’s impartiality, he respected him; and John Dickinson referred to the History continually, in nearly every one of his publications.21

Rapin accepted the Germania as a basic source. He argued that the Anglo-Saxons, who were the very Germans celebrated by Tacitus, continued upon arrival in England their virtuous customs of government, banding together “to assist one another, and act in common for the good of All.” They set up a central government with an elected king and witenagemot or parliament, “where the Concerns of the whole nation only were consider’d.” Under Alfred, greatest of the Saxon monarchs, “all Persons accused of any Crime were to be tried by their Peers.” “This Privilege,” he added, “which the English have preserved to this day, is one of the greatest a Nation can enjoy.” His readers were reminded that Alfred was responsible only for securing a custom “established by the Saxons Time out of Mind.” Rapin, it might be added, was not an unreserved admirer of the Saxons. While ready to concede the virtues they brought from Germany, he noted that the Saxons also brought over their “reigning Vice,” an addiction to strong liquor.22

Rapin’s description was accepted by other historians contributing to the colonists’ portrait of their ancient ancestors. Thomas Lediard, translator of Mascou’s History of the Ancient Germans, justified his publication by proclaiming it The History of Our Great Ancestors. England’s laws, customs, and constitution were formed on the German model, according to Lediard, who issued Mascou’s work in 1737, the same decade Rapin’s appeared. A century earlier Richard Verstegan had written with the same ambition of showing what a renowned and honorable nation the Germans had been, “that thereby it may consequently appear how honourable it is for Englishmen to be from them descended.” Nathaniel Bacon, the Cromwellian lawyer, presented the same portrait of Saxons as a free people governed by laws made by themselves. Readers of Bacon’s Historical Discourse encountered a delightfully balanced and serene Saxon constitution: “a beautiful composure,” he called it, “mutually dependent in every part from the Crown to the clown, the Magistrates being all choice men, and the King the choicest of the chosen; election being the birth of esteem, and that of merit, this bred love and mutual trust.” In both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, significant political meaning lurked behind Bacon’s pious wish to know again “the happiness of our Fore-fathers the ancient Saxons.”23

There seemed general agreement on Saxon virtues in the histories Americans most often consulted. There was little need of filial piety to arrive at strong convictions on the reality of ancestral liberties. Even that cautious diplomat and statesman Sir William Temple praised the Saxon kings as “just, good, and pious Princes” who governed with such sense and moderation that “no popular Insurrection ever happened in any of the Saxon reigns.” David Hume, considered a tory historian because of his affection for the Stuarts, praised Britons and Saxons as lovers of liberty and fighters against despotism. Hume thought the Germans had carried “to the highest pitch the virtues of valor and love of liberty,” and it was inevitable that the Saxons “imported into this island [England] the same principles of independence which they inherited from their ancestors.” Like most writers Hume based his remarks on “the masterly pencil of Tacitus,” but unlike many such admirers he did not believe the Saxons especially democratic in political practices. He denied existence of a popular branch of the Saxon legislature and insisted that the House of Commons could not and should not seek its origins in Saxon times.24

Hume was an exception to the historical rule, and the colonial perspective was not changed by his doubts and reservations on the reality of Saxon democracy. His fellow Scot Lord Kames, the jurist and friend of Benjamin Franklin, endorsed the thesis of Saxon liberty. Kames in his popular British Antiquities portrayed a Saxon polity appealing to rural Americans: the Saxons, he asserted, were cultivators of corn, farmers whose economy allowed true social democracy; they elected their judges and gave security of tenure; their kings were men whose powers gradually developed, and originally the Saxon king was “no more than but the chief judge.”25 Kames contended that the Saxons migrating from Germany took only such customs and laws as suited their new English circumstances26 —an observation with point for Americans seeking parallels to their eighteenth-century circumstances.

Americans also liked the conclusions of Henry Care, whose English Liberties praised Saxon ancestors for the wisdom of their government, their “excellent Provisions for their Liberties,” and precautions against oppression. William Atwood, a seventeenth-century contemporary of Care and later Chief Justice of New York, renewed discussion of the elective nature of the Saxon king, whom he described as nothing more than a splendid general who maintained office and dignity by “hardy actions and tender Usage of his People.”27 George St. Amand, author of one of the many historical essays that flourished in the colonial bookmarket, reiterated this idea of an elective Saxon monarchy. Like Atwood, St. Amand used the Mirrour of Justices in contending for Saxon democracy. TheMirrour, considered an essential reference for the colonial lawyer’s bookshelf, professed to set forth the “ancient laws and usages” whereby Saxons governed themselves before the Conquest. First published in the sixteenth century, it claimed to be a commentary of early Saxon derivation.28 St. Amand inquired: “Why mayn’t we suppose the Book was a Translation of some Manual of the Saxon Laws, put into Norman French, with such additions as Horn [its editor, and a part-time fishmonger] thought proper, to accommodate it to the Usages of the Time he lived in?” Americans accepted the Mirrour as a contribution to Saxon history and agreed that the Mirrour’s pronouncements on Saxon government “ought to be received for Truth.”29

Obviously many historians who wrote about Saxon history found in it support for the political lessons they wished to demonstrate. Lord Somers was such a man. A Whig statesman who assisted in the arrangements for the offer to William and Mary in 1689, Somers believed people could change their rulers if they were tyrannical, and he was satisfied that history supported this belief. The many American purchasers of Somers’s Judgment of Whole Kingdoms (its twelfth and thirteenth editions were published in Newport and Philadelphia, respectively) at once knew the purpose of the book: to assure that “their Children’s children may know the Birth-right, Liberty, and Property belonging to an Englishman.” James Tyrrell, like Somers an associate of John Locke and an admirer of Saxon antiquity, felt that as a participant in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 he should contribute to justification of Parliament’s action against James II. After all, Tyrrell asked, had not the Saxon monarchs been obliged to seek the consent of their parliament to all legislation? Algernon Sidney was in the same situation. He was hardly a historian, but he was ready to praise the Saxons as lovers of liberty enjoying a government dominated by their witenagemot. Basing his remarks on that “wise author” Tacitus, he noted that Saxon “kings and princes had no other power than was conferred upon them by these assemblies.”30

As seventeenth-century writers found political satisfaction in this Saxon emphasis, so did writers in the eighteenth century. Among the most influential contributors to the Saxon myth,31 and from the colonial viewpoint among the most timely in publication, was the anonymous author of the Historical Essay on the English Constitution, whose work appeared in London and Dublin in 1771. The author’s identity has lately been a subject of some discussion—evidence points to a mysterious Obadiah Hulme—but American readers were content to accept the book for its content. They eagerly digested this summary of Saxon virtues, a veritable handbook on the historic rights of Englishmen. It rounded out the colonists’ picture of their Saxon ancestors. “Our Saxon forefathers,” according to Hulme, “founded their government upon the common rights of mankind. They made the elective power of the people the first principle of our constitution, and to protect it, they delegated power for no more than one year.” Hulme argued for annual Saxon parliaments, which he felt were the quintessence of the Saxon system along with an elective monarchy.32

After reading Hulme it was easier to agree with the conclusions of such men as Molesworth and Bolingbroke. According to Molesworth, one of the original Real Whigs, “all Europe was beholden to the Northern nations for introducing or restoring a constitution of government far excelling all others.” According to Bolingbroke, “the Principles of the Saxon Commonwealth were therefore very democratical.”33 The Saxon system epitomized freedom, a freedom consisting of “being subject to no Law but such to which the Person who is bound consents.” It was a system “agreeable to the Rules of Reason.”34 This view, expressed in England in the 1720s, became a basic Revolutionary doctrine in America in the 1760s.

One of the many charms of English history for its colonial readers was its occasional ability to furnish evidence of human happiness. They were attracted to the Saxon past because here they found an ancient political utopia; furthermore, one based on attractive economic arrangements. Tacitus wrote about Saxon land tenure as well as Saxon government; and colonial lawyers, concerned with quitrents, land titles, and rights of inheritance, were exposed to magnificently partisan accounts of the land system of their admirable ancestors.

Most of the historians popular in America described an agrarian Saxon society which was distinctly nonfeudal. Primogeniture was not practiced in ancient Germany; inheritance was “unto all their male children,” as Richard Verstegan phrased it in 1628. Migrating Saxons took this custom from Germany to England. The great seventeenth-century scholar and antiquary, Sir Henry Spelman, agreed that Saxon land tenure had been allodial in character, “according to the ancient manner of the Germans,” so that, owning their land outright, owners disposed of it as they desired, free of rents, encumbrances, or entails. He concluded that feudalism entered England with the Normans. After the Conquest of 1066, Duke William “divided all England among his soldiers,” so that “all things resounded with the feudal oppressions, which in the time of the Saxons had never been heard of.”35

American readers discovered that even when a writer considered feudalism desirable, he often conceded the nonfeudal nature of Saxon England. Spelman’s account may well have appeared more persuasive because he preferred the stability made possible by regulated feudalism—subsequent to the worst Norman excesses. This approach was somewhat similar to that later offered by David Hume. In Hume’s opinion Norman feudalism introduced into England “the rudiments of Science and cultivation,” and served as a corrective to the “rough and licentious manners” of the allodial practices of the Saxons. Hume praised feudalism for its system of primogeniture, but conceded that Norman feudalism was “destructive of the independence and security of the people.”36 Sir John Dalrymple, author of a popular eighteenth-century essay on Feudal Property, is another example of a writer who considered feudalism praiseworthy, but denied that the Saxons practiced it. Saxon land tenure, he claimed, was allodial, and descents were free. The Germanic invaders of Britain had found more land than they could use and therefore felt under no constraint to accept feudal restrictions. The Saxon nobility was “allodial, personal, and honorary,” and was presided over by a virtually elective monarch.37




Footnotes
[15.]Ramsay, History of the American Revolution, I, 43.

[16.]Edward Vaughan, ed., The Reports and Arguments of That Learned Judge, Sir John Vaughan … (London, 1706), 358; John Adams, “On Private Revenge,” Boston-Gazette, Sept. 5, 1763; William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4th ed., 4 vols. (Oxford, 1770), I, 35–36.

[17.]John Adams to Jefferson, Feb. 3, 1812, Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, II, 295; Jefferson to Mrs. Anne Carey Bankhead, Dec. 8, 1808, Jefferson Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

[18.]Gordon, trans., Works of Tacitus, I, II; John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters … , 4 vols. (London, 1748), I, 192. Note that Jefferson was so fond of Gordon’s translation that he had three sets collated with the Latin original, two going to the Library of Congress in 1815, and the other eventually reposing in the private library of the late Arthur Machen of Baltimore. Wolf, “First Books and Printed Catalogues of the Library Company,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 78 (1954): 12.

[19.]Gordon, trans., Works of Tacitus, II, xxii, 325–33, 362.

[20.]Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, History of England, trans. Nicholas Tindal, 2d ed., 4 vols. in 5 (London, 1732–47); comment by Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae, trans. John Glanvil (London, 1741), xvii.

[21.]Boston-Gazette, Feb. 1, 1773.

[22.]Rapin, History of England, I, 148, 27, 46, 42, 160–61.

[23.]John Jacob Mascou, The History of the Ancient Germans … , trans. Thomas Lediard, 2 vols. (London, 1737–38), I, xiv, 57, 64; II, 228; Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligencies in Antiquities … (London, 1628), 42; Nathaniel Bacon, An Historical Discourse of the Uniformity of the Government of England … , 2 vols. (London, 1647–51), II, 301; I, 112. The publishing history of Bacon’s work is curious and reveals the Stuarts’ hostility to such political history: the Historical Discourse was reprinted secretly with a 1651 date in 1672, and again in 1682; the last edition was suppressed, and reissued after the abdication of James II in 1689.

[24.]Jonathan Swift, ed., The Works of Sir William Temple … , 2 vols. (London, 1750), II, 584; Hume, History of England, I, ii, 141–42, 145.

[25.]Henry Home, Lord Kames, Essays upon Several Subjects concerning British Antiquities … , 3d ed. (Edinburgh, 1763), 196.

[26.]Kames, Historical Law-Tracts, 2d ed. (Edinburgh, 1761), no. 1. Transcribed by Jefferson in Gilbert Chinard, ed., The Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson, A Repertory of His Ideas on Government (Baltimore, 1926), 99–103.

[27.]Henry Care, English Liberties: or, the Free-Born Subject’s Inheritance … (London, n.d. [1680?]), 95; issued in a fifth edition in Boston in 1721 and a sixth edition in Providence in 1774. William Atwood, The Fundamental Constitution of the English Government… (London, 1690), 37–39, 73.

[28.]See William Searle Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 12 vols. (London, 1903–38), II, 284–90.

[29.]George St. Amand, An Historical Essay on the Legislative Power of England. … (London, 1724), 94, 4–5.

[30.]John, Lord Somers, The Judgment of Whole Kingdoms and Nations … (London, 1710), 8, and title page; issued in Philadelphia in 1773 and Newport, R.I., in 1774. It was brief, to the point, and cheap at sixpence a copy; see also Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, 78–80. James Tyrrell, Bibliotheca Politica … (London, 1689), 222; Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1805), II, 239. Sidney remarked that the Saxons were “lovers of liberty,” who “understood the ways of defending it.” Ibid., 238.

[31.]For a discussion of the Saxon myth, see Appendix I.

[32.]Obadiah Hulme, An Historical Essay on the English Constitution (London, 1771), 7, 24, 31. Published anonymously and long ascribed to Allan Ramsay. Also issued in Dublin, 1771. For a discussion of the authorship, see Sowerby, ed., Catalogue of Jefferson’s Library, V, 205; and Caroline Robbins, “Letter to the Editor,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 79 (1955): 378.

[33.]Robert Molesworth, An Account of Denmark as It Was in the Year 1692 (London, 1694), chap. 4, as transcribed by Jefferson, Commonplace Book, ed. Chinard, 212; Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England (London, 1747), 53.

[34.]George St. Amand, An Historical Essay on the Legislative Power of England (London, 1762), 148.

[35.]Verstegan, Decayed Intelligencies, 57; Gibson, ed., Works of Spelman, Pt. II, 5; see also Spelman, De Terminis Juridicis … (London, 1648), chap. 8, as transcribed by Jefferson, Commonplace Book, ed. Chinard, 186: “The feudal law was introduced into England at and shortly after the Conquest.”

[36.]Hume, History of England, I, 159–60, 162–63, 201.

[37.]Sir John Dalrymple, An Essay towards a General History of Feudal Property … (London, 1757), 18, 320, 336. See also, Jefferson, Commonplace Book, ed. Chinard, 149–50; and Pocock, The Ancient Constitution, 243–44.

Midterm Study Session

Dear Students, I've reserved Lane 125, 6-6:45, tomorrow (Wednesday night).  This, of course, is voluntary.  Yours, Brad

Midterm Study Guide, Jacksonian (h302) 2012

Midterm Study Guide, H302--Jacksonian; Birzer

Part I: Essay (worth 40% of your midterm grade)

• Explain the ways in which the Jefferson and Madison administrations reshaped the constitutional understanding of the United States.
• Explain the ways in which the rise of a democratic ethos remade (or attempted to remake) the American republic.
• In what ways was the War of 1812 commensurate (or not) with republican theory?

Part II: Terms (four total; worth a total of sixty percent of your midterm grade)

Terms A: Last of the Mohicans (will answer one; worth 15% of your grade; make sure you incorporate any ideas that might have been presented in lectures as well)

• Natty
• Cora
• Uncas
• Magua
• Duncan
• David
• Alice
• Battle of Fort William Henry

Terms B: Tecumseh (will answer one; worth 15% of your grade; make sure you incorporate any ideas that might have been presented in lectures as well)

• Tecumseh
• Tenskwatwa
• Prophetstown
• Shawnee culture
• Treaty of Greenville
• Battle of Prophetstown
• William Henry Harrison
• Battle of the Thames

Terms C: from What Hath God Wrought (will answer two; worth 30% of your grade; make sure you incorporate any ideas that might have been presented in lectures as well)

• Samuel Morse
• republicanism
• Santa Fe Trail
• National Road
• Creek War
• John Marshall
• Fur Trade
• Algiers War
• Madisonian Platform
• Second Bank of the U.S.
• Great Migration 

War of 1812: The War Hawks

War Hawk Felix Grundy, the representative from Tennessee, very much wanted Canada in 1811. To Congress, he said:

“It cannot be believed by an man who will reflect, that the savage tribes, uninfluenced by other Powers, would think of making war on the United States. They understand too well their own weakness, and our strength. They have already felt the weight of our arms; they know they hold the very soil on which they live as tenants at sufferance. How, then, sir, are we to account for their late conduct? In one way only; some powerful nation must have intrigued with them, and turned their peaceful disposition towards us into hostilities. Great Britain alone has intercourse with those Northern tribes; I therefore infer, that if British gold has not been employed, their baubles and trinkets, and the promise of support and a place of refuge if necessary, have had their effect. . . . This war, if carried on successfully, will have its advantages. We shall drive the British from our Continent–they will no longer have an opportunity of intriguing with out Indian neighbors, and setting on the ruthless savage to tomahawk our women and children. That nation will lose her Canadian trade, and, by having no resting place in this country, her means of annoying us will be diminished. . . . I am willing to receive the Canadians as adopted brethren: it will have beneficial political effects; it will preserve the equilibrium of the Government. When Louisiana shall be fully peopled, the Northern States will lose their power; they will be at the discretion of others; they can be pressured at pleasure, and then this Union might be endangered–I therefore feel anxious not only to add the Floridas to the South, but the Canadas to the North of this empire.” [quoted in MAJOR PROBLEMS IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC, 156-57]


“Your committee will not enlarge on any of the injuries, however great, which have had a transitory effect. They wish to call the attention of the House to those of a permanent nature only, which intrench so deeply on our most important rights, and wound so extensively and vitally our best interests, as could not fail to deprive the United States of the principal advantages of their Revolution, if submitted to. The control of our commerce by Great Britain, in regulating, at pleasure, and expelling it almost from the ocean; the oppressive manner in which these regulations have been carried into effect, by seizing and confiscating such of our vessels on the high seas, and elsewhere, and holding them in bondage till it suited the convenience of their oppressors to deliver them up; are encroachments of that high and dangerous tendency, which could not fail to produce that pernicious effect; nor would these be the only consequences that would result from it. The British Government might, for a while, be satisfied with the ascendency thus gained over us, but its pretensions would soon increase. The proof which so complete and disgraceful a submission to its authority would afford of our degeneracy, could not fail to inspire confidence, that there was no limit to which its usurpations, and our degradation, might not be carried. Your committee, believing that the free-born sons of America are worthy to enjoy the liberty which their fathers purchased at the price of so much blood and treasure, and seeing in the measures adopted by Great Britain, a course commenced and persisted in, which must lead to a loss of national character and independence, feel no hesitation in advising resistance by force; in which the Americans of the present day will prove to the enemy and to the world, that we have not only inherited that liberty which our fathers gave us, but also the will and power to maintain it. Relying on the patriotism of the nation, and confidently trusting that the Lord of Hosts will go with us to battle in a righteous cause, and crown our efforts with success, your committee recommend an immediate appeal to arms.” [quoted in MAJOR PROBLEMS IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC, 157].

Term List, D.W. Howe, What Hath God Wrought

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought, term list
Fall 2012

Pp. 1-202
Samuel Morse
Telegraphy
“communications revolution”
Ned Packenham
Thomas Mullins
Battle of New Orleans, 1815
Jedediah Morse
Vaqueros
“Middle Ground”
“little ice age”
Republican ideology
Husbandry
“agency”
Fur trade
Santa Fe Trail
Jedediah Smith
Sojourner Truth
Planter paternalism
Slave patrol
Dolley Madison
Battle of Baltimore, 1814
Old Republicans
Hartford Convention
Treaty of Ghent
Creek War
Second Treaty of Greenville
Algiers War
Madisonian Platform
Second Bank of the U.S.
14th Congress
John Randolph
Old Republicans/Tertium Quids
Tariff of 1816
National Road
Compensation Act
Bonus Bill
James Monroe
Monroe’s cabinet
Anglo-American Convention of 1818
First Seminole War
St. Mark’s
Transcontinental Treaty of Washington, 1819
Monroe Doctrine
Erie Canal
John Marshall
Joseph Story
preemption
Old Southwest
Second Middle Passage
Francis Cabot Lowell
Lowell, Mass.
Great Migration
Butternuts
John Chapman
Panic of 1819
Langdon Cheeves
Missouri Compromise
Rufus King
Denmark Vesey
Disestablishment
Temperance [American]
The Beecher Family
Charles G. Finney
“Burned-over District”
Oberlin College
“Christian perfection”
Circuit rider
Peter Cartwright
Baptists
“Second Great Awakening”
Evangelical United Front
Robert Baird
Elias Hicks
“Catholic revivalism”
John Hughes

Pp. 203-420
William H. Crawford
John C. Calhoun
John Quincy Adams
Henry Clay
Andrew Jackson
The Letters of Wyoming
National Road
Turnpike
Erie Canal
“Empire State”
United States Post Office
Sabbitarians
Washington Irving
James Fenimore Cooper
Timothy Flint
DeWitt Clinton
“Bucktails”
Chesapeake and Ohio
John McLean
American Colonization Society
Liberia
Freemasonry
Antimasons
“American System”
National Republicans
Tariff of Abominations
Democrat
“corrupt bargain”
Millennium (postm; prem)
Francis Wayland
American civil religion
William Miller
“The Great Disappointment”
Robert Owen
Associationist
Shakers
George Rapp
Amana Society
Martin Stephan
CFW Walther
Elizabeth Seton
Prophet Matthias
John Humphrey Noyes
Harriet Martineau
Frances Wright
Joseph Smith, Jr.
The Book of Mormon
Kirtland
Mormon War of 1838
Nauvoo
Mount Benedict
Nat Turner
“Age of Jackson”
“kitchen cabinet”
John Henry Eaton/Peggy Eaton
Indian Removal
Cherokee Nation
Sequoyuah
ABCFM
Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek
Cherokee Nation v. Georgia
“domestic dependent nation”
Maysville Veto Message
Pocket veto
Sovereignty
Robert Y. Hayne
Daniel Webster
Nicholas Biddle
Second Bank of the U.S.
Wildcat Banking
Martin Van Buren
Pet Banks
Great Triumvirate
Whig
Second Party System
Tariff of Abominations
Nullification proclamation
Force Bill

Pp. 410-524
John Ross
Treaty of New Echota
Black Hawk’s War
Keokuk
David Walker
William Lloyd Garrison
American Anti-Slavery Society
Amos Kendall
Mobocracy
Elijah Lovejoy
Code duello
Roger Taney
Robert Owen
American Bible Society
Alexander Campbell
Horace Mann
Edward Everett
Disestablishment
Yale Report of 1828
The Book of Nature
Joseph Henry
Miasma
Slyvester Graham
William Morton
Theodore Dwight Weld
James H. Thornwell
Martin Van Buren
Richard M. Johnson
William Henry Harrison
Amos Kendall (and again on pg. )
Deposit-Distribution Act
Specie Circular of 1836
Pet banks
Free banking
Doughface
William Leggett
Gag rule
Indian Removal
William Mackenzie
Cinque
Amistad

Pp. 525-
“Five Points”
Eli Whitney
Cyrus McCormick
John Deere
“manufactories”
Working Men’s political parties
Francis Wright
Thomas Skidmore
Locofocos
Lowell Female Reform Association
Stephen Van Rensselaer II
Anti-rent movement
Treatise on Domestic Economy
Maysville Veto
“legal person”/corporation
B&O Railroad
America’s economic “take-off”
William Henry Harrison
Log cabin/Hard Cider
Horace Greeley
Land Act of 1841
Bankruptcy Act of 1841
“Illinois System”
Dorr Rebellion
Dorothea Dix
Pp. 613-
William Ellery Channing
Laura Bridgman
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Transcendentalists 
Margaret Fuller
Henry David Thoreau
Brook Farm
Henry Wadworth Longfellow
Edgar Allen Poe
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
Frederick Douglass
Lewis Tappan
Theodore Dwight Weld
Liberty Party
Prigg v. Pennsylvania
Erasmo Seguin
Stephen Austin
Mexican Constitution of 1824
Filibuster
Santa Anna
Texian Revolution
William Travis
David Crockett
James Fannin
San Jacinto
Lone Star Republic
Webster-Ashburton Treaty
Robert Walker
James K. Polk
James G. Birney
Samuel F.B. Morse
Texas Annexation
ABCFM
Rendezvous
Hudson’s Bay Company
“Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!”
Joseph Smith
Mormonism
Nauvoo
Brigham Young
Zachary Taylor
George Wilkins Kendall
Winfield Scott
St. Patrick’s Battalion
John C. Fremont
Thomas Larkin
Stephen Watts Kearny
“No Territory”
Walker Tariff
Polk-Santa Anna Conspiracy
Cotton Whigs
Conscience Whigs
Revolutions of 1848
“All Mexico”
Nicholas Trist
Gold Rush
Irish Potato Famine
Nativism
Lewis Cass
Free Soil
Declaration of Sentiments