America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture: America’s Forgotten History, #2

By Mark David Ledbetter

From its small government, non-aggressive, republican beginnings, America has become a garrison state devoted to remaking the world in its own image. While Republicans and Democrats quibble over the details of policing the world and running a nanny state, Ledbetter looks at another way, a forgotten way, the way invented during a tiny window of opportunity by the Enlightenment philosophers who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. America's Forgotten History is their story, a story once well-known but now lost to both historians and the general populace in the course of America's mad rush into the future. Part One, Foundations, examined the Enlightenment underpinnings of the American system, the colonial period, the Revolution and Constitution, and the first generation of presidents. Part Two, Rupture, continues the story up through Lincoln and the Civil War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark David Ledbetter
• Release date: May 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386736585

Mark David Ledbetter

In 2016, Mark Ledbetter returned to America after a forty year sojourn in Japan, raising a family and keeping an eye on America with both the knowledge of an insider and the eyes of an outsider, capping his career with three years as a visiting professor of linguistics at Hosei University in Tokyo. He arrived back in the United States in October of 2016, just in time to witness a political earthquake, one of those historical episodes rife with potential and danger, which give life, and sometimes death, to the story of a nation. Either way, he intends to monitor the process, doing what he can in his small way to save the Great American Experiment. He has written extensively on both linguistics and history, publishing in both English and Japanese.

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Copyright © 2014, 2015 Mark David Ledbetter

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Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Series Preface: America’s Forgotten History

Preface: Rupture

CHAPTER ONE. The 5th President: James Monroe

JAMES MONROE

1817

TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTION

BACKGROUND TO FLORIDA

European Wars

John Quincy Adams

Henry Clay

John Calhoun

Andrew Jackson

Taking Florida

NATIONAL BANKING and THE PANIC OF 1819

JOHN MARSHALL

McCulloch v. Maryland

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE

Unexpected Crisis and Compromise

Second Crisis, Second Compromise

TOO DANGEROUS FOR WORDS

Tariff of 1816

Tariff of 1824

FOREIGN POLICY

Monsters to Destroy

The Monroe Doctrine

CHAPTER TWO. The 6th President: John Quincy Adams

THE CORRUPT BARGAIN

LIKE FATHER LIKE SON

THE SPIRIT OF IMPROVEMENT

THE ERIE CANAL

Specific Gains, Theoretical Losses

The Wider Picture

PANAMA, MEXICO, TEXAS, CUBA

PAYBACK FOR ’24

Martin Van Buren

The Tariff of Abominations

The Election of 1828

CHAPTER THREE. The 7th President: Andrew Jackson

THE PEOPLE’S PRESIDENT

The Petticoat War

REFORM, RETRENCHMENT, and ECONOMY

The Maysville Road

TRAIL OF TEARS

KNELL OF THE UNION

Nat Turner and the Southern Slavery Debate

David Walker and William Lloyd Garrison

KING ANDREW THE FIRST

Cabinet Massacre

The Power of the Presidency

NULLIFICATION and THE TARIFF OF 1832

The South Carolina Exposition

Calhoun resigns

Webster-Hayne Debate

Aversion to Manufacture

The Compromise Tariff and the Force Bill

THE BANK WAR

Suffolk bank

Mandate

Pet Banks

ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

A New Jerusalem

LEGACY

CHAPTER FOUR. The 8th President: Martin Van Buren

ELECTION OF 1836

Whigs

Jackson’s Third Term?

Beyond Those Limits I Shall Never Pass

RECESSION

The Panics of 1837 and 1839

Suffolk Bank and New England

THE INDEPENDENT TREASURY

THE SLAVERY DEBATE

Petitions

Gag

Amistad

INDIAN REMOVAL

Second Seminole War

Trail of Tears

SAM HOUSTON

TEXAS

President Houston

MAY ALL HER PATHS BE PEACE

The Caroline Affair

The Aroostook War

LEGACY

CHAPTER FIVE. The 9th President: William Henry Harrison

CHAPTER SIX. The 10th President: John Tyler

THE BANK AGAIN

TARIFFS and DISTRIBUTION

TEXAS and A THIRD PARTY

An English Monkey Wrench

John Calhoun

LEGACY

CHAPTER SEVEN. The 11th President: James Polk

JAMES POLK

INAUGURAL

CABINET

MARK OF GREATNESS

Tariffs

Independent Treasury

The Great Contradiction

Oregon

California

THE MEXICAN-AMERICAN WAR

First Shot

Match-ups

Matamoros

New Mexico, California, and Northern Mexico

Quagmire

Secession

Wilmot Proviso

All Mexico

On To Mexico City

Legacy of the War

Henry David Thoreau and Karl Marx

The Way Not Taken: Lysander Spooner

JAMES POLK’S LEGACY

CHAPTER EIGHT. The 12th President: Zachary Taylor

THE LOST DECADES

THE IRONY AND THE TRAGEDY

ZACHARY TAYLOR

FOREIGN POLICY: EXPANSION OR NEUTRALITY?

DOMESTIC POLICY: FREE OR SLAVE?

No Morbid Sympathy For the Slave

Statehood Crisis

CHAPTER NINE. The 13th President: Millard Fillmore

PLUMES and SABERS

THE CROSS

MILLARD FILLMORE

THE COMPROMISE OF 1850

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

Slave and Freeman, North and South

Jury Nullification

ECONOMIC POLICY: NOT MUCH

FOREIGN POLICY: OPENING JAPAN

ELECTION OF 1852

CHAPTER TEN. The 14th President: Franklin Pierce

CABINET

OSTEND MANIFESTO

THE ROAD TO SECESSION

TRANS-CONTINENTAL RAILROAD

Stephen Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act

Jefferson Davis and the Gadsden Purchase

Abraham Lincoln Returns to Politics

Whigs Implode; Reborn as Republicans

DRED SCOTT and ROGER TANEY

Dred Scott

The Decision

ELECTION OF 1856

CHAPTER ELEVEN. The 15th President: James Buchanan

PANIC OF 1857

THE FORGOTTEN SECESSION

BLEEDING KANSAS

LINCOLN RISES: THE ELECTION OF 1860

WAR OR PEACE?

The Riddle of Calhoun

Secession

War of Tariffs

CHAPTER TWELVE A. The 1st President: Jefferson Davis

CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA

Constitution

Second Wave

GOVERNING THE CONFEDERACY

Cotton Communism

Conscription

Class Conflict Within the Confederacy

FIGHTING THE WAR

Black Soldiers

Tears Spoiled Their Aim

CHAPTER TWELVE B. The 16th President: Abraham Lincoln

INAUGURAL ADDRESS: TARIFFS OR ANGELS?

THE QUESTION OF WAR

Fort Sumter

Blockade

Militia Call-up and Second Secession

Stemming the Tide

THREE NEEDS OF OFFENSIVE WAR

THE FIRST NEED: MONEY

Control of the Money Supply

Income Tax

THE SECOND NEED: SUPPRESSION OF RIGHTS

John Merryman and Roger Taney

Clement Vallandigham

THE THIRD NEED: CONSCRIPTION

Economic Elites and America’s First Drafts

THE WAR

Death and Destruction

Mid-Term Elections

The Pope Doctrine: Collective Responsibility

Another Pope Doctrine: Utter Extermination

THE WAR SHIFTS TO A HIGHER PLANE

Emancipation Proclamation

Gettysburg Address: Poetry, not Logic

Second Inaugural Address

LEGACY

Bibliography

Notes On Usage

Acknowledgments

Other Books By the Author

Series Preface: America’s Forgotten History

Though he wrote books on theology, C. S. Lewis denied he was a theologian. In that spirit I deny I am a historian though I write books on history. Granted, the untrained outsider is often wrong but he is also less constrained and every once in a while may stumble onto a truth or perspective missed by the experts. So I pursue this inquiry into the roots of America.

It really began after 9-11 with a look at the history of foreign policy in: Globocop: How America Sold Its Soul and Lost Its Way. That inquiry opened for me the vistas of America’s forgotten history. My teachers became not modern historians so much as Americans and thinkers from an earlier age. What was important to them became important to me. And that led me to write, if I may be so presumptuous, their history, a forgotten history, not the one that most modern historians are concerned with but one earlier Americans might have written if they could be transported to our time to look back at what has happened to their great experiment.

For contrast, to show the reader what my history is and what it is not, let us look at one of the great recent success stories in history writing, A People’s History of the United States, by a thoroughly modern historian, Howard Zinn. Before I proceed to trash A People’s History, let me just say that it is a really good book. It is well-written, it turns history into a compelling story, it gives voice and life to the people. I only hope that the same can be said of my books.

As a real history of America, though, there are serious problems with Zinn’s work, gaping holes and disingenuous implications. Right off the bat, for example, he gives us an evocative picture of the dying times in the early days of both Virginia and Massachusetts. He does this soon after lauding the communalism of Indian culture that had Indians living well in the same times and places in which Europeans were starving. (Anti-private property communalism is one of the underlying themes of A People’s History – in fact the central theme that ties the whole book together, that and class struggle.)

Zinn’s comparison of vibrant Indian communities with degraded and desperate English communities is actually quite accurate as far as it goes. But, by withholding information, he accomplishes the appearance of objectivity while avoiding the need to explicitly defend his thesis. Rather, he lets his history itself testify mutely to the superiority of communalism over a private property-based system. Though this is misleading in the extreme, Zinn really had no choice. If he, or just about any modern day historian, had told us how Europeans contrived to starve in the midst of plenty or how they finally extricated themselves from the dying times, it would have made mush of his (and their) anti-property thesis.

Englishmen starved, you see, in both Virginia and Massachusetts precisely because both colonies started off as communalistic experiments. When all drew equally from the communal pot, no matter how much or how little they worked, no one wanted to work and the pot remained empty.

Zinn mentions in passing that Virginia advanced from starvation to mere poverty through the good offices of Captain John Smith’s ruthless authoritarianism. Again true, as far as it goes. But it would be nice to have been told that communalism made the authoritarianism necessary. However, that bit of information would again threaten Zinn’s thesis so it is nowhere to be found.

This sort of obfuscation is standard in modern histories; the connection between authoritarianism and communalism must be concealed. For though the intellectual mainstream condemns authoritarianism and holds communalism a splendid ideal, human nature dictates that, for large complex societies, you cannot have communalism without authoritarianism. This terrible secret must be hidden at all costs, even if it means punching holes in history.

After Virginia progressed from communalistic starvation to authoritarian poverty, it finally achieved relative prosperity by allowing ownership of private property. It still left itself crippled by extending property rights only to certain members of society, leaving others without even the most fundamental right: ownership of self.

Massachusetts, on the other hand, by the standards of the time, largely skipped the authoritarian stage and it never adopted outright slavery to the same extent as Virginia. With widespread property rights and relative freedom, it was able, in a few short decades, to rocket up from communalistic starvation to become what may have been the most prosperous society on the face of the Earth. At a time when a few were superrich and most were poor even in prosperous countries, in Massachusetts no one was superrich and few were poor.

Zinn’s history and to some extent most modern histories are built on Marxist analysis. That is not all bad, actually. Marxist political and economic systems are generally all bad but Marxist historical analysis has its good points.

This history, though, is pre-Marxist. It is born of the Enlightenment, the 18th century answer to the question of how to bring peace and freedom to a world made up of people driven by greed and power-hunger. Marxism, and most modern ideologies, whether liberal or neo-conservative, see greed and power-hunger as products of social systems. So they propose new and superior social systems. When those fail, as they must, modern ideologies, Marxist, liberal, and neo-conservative, resort to authoritarianism.

Enlightenment thinkers, on the other hand, recognized that greed and power-hunger are innate human characteristics and designed a political system that would control those characteristics not with the heavy hand of authority but with, counterintuitive though it seems, freedom. Natural Law and innate God-given Rights must limit the power of government since government is composed of those same greedy and power-hungry humans. If men were angels, Madison reminds us, we would not need government. Neither can government make us angels or our society angelic, not when it is in the hands of non-angelic humans. The best government can do is protect our rights and otherwise leave us free. Only freedom gives the better angels of our nature a chance to lift human society rung by rung in an ecological evolution only possible where authority is suppressed.

Where some, like Zinn’s, are histories of class friction; where most nowadays are histories of activist government, this is a history of the political clash between a Hamiltonian mercantilist state and a Jeffersonian libertarian state. Whether they envision a Zinnish people’s state or a Hamiltonian mercantilist state, modern historians veer towards centralized power and activist war-like presidents and justify it with a loose reading of that great Enlightenment-inspired document, the American Constitution. This series unabashedly does the opposite. The implications and issues of the Hamiltonian-Jeffersonian clash are forgotten history, lost to the modern consciousness. These books hope to rectify that loss and reintroduce America to its Enlightenment roots.

Preface to Part Two: Rupture

Part Two of America’s Forgotten History finds the country on its own. Power has moved out of the hands of the founding generation. It is up to their descendents to prove whether the great experiment will work.

If the founding had come a few decades later, the Constitution and the theoretical underpinning of the new republic would certainly have been different. The founding, though, occurred during a tiny window of opportunity when Enlightenment philosophy dominated, and dominated not only the thinking of the intellectual class but of the people in general.

The people in general. This is a critical point. Most of the copious and failed revolutions that followed America’s were the work of the intellectual class, not the people in general. The intellectual class typically claims to represent the people but also recognizes that the people aren’t ready yet. So they act in the people’s name, take power in the people’s name – and keep and build power for themselves in the people’s name. It turns out that whatever their superior intelligence and intellectual achievements, they are as susceptible as the human race has always been to the insidious whisperings of the ego and the dictum that power corrupts.

America’s, though, was a different sort of revolution. It was built from the bottom up as much as from the top down, by the actual people as much as by self-designated representatives of the people. And it was built on Enlightenment principles that dominated during that tiny window of spatial and temporal opportunity on the east coast of North America at the end of the 18th century.

Enlightenment philosophy was not much concerned with what government could do for us. It was concerned with shackling government so we could do for ourselves. Its thinkers were seeing first hand the early fruits of people unshackled and also the unchanging horrors of government unshackled. They saw that mind freed was engendering an expansion of knowledge; trade freed was engendering wealth creation. They also saw that religious wars backed by governments were devastating a continent.

Enlightenment political philosophers would seek a way to encourage freedom of the mind and commerce while diminishing war and its results. It is the contention of this series of books that the Enlightenment solution is superior to any of the subsequent systems in accomplishing this and that we have not advanced beyond Enlightenment political philosophy but rather we are slowly reverting back to older ways merely lacquered over with modern terminology and intellectual pretensions. Where we are freer, richer, and less warlike than we once were, it is because vestiges of Enlightenment philosophy still underpin our society, not because we have advanced beyond the Enlightenment to find better ways.

Pre-Enlightenment, there were three important centers of power: government, church, and commerce. All three had always been conjoined in an impenetrable and indivisible system of centralized authority too powerful for the common man to oppose. Their combined power meant oppression and corruption. The Enlightenment thinkers who established the American system separated state, church, and commerce but recognized mere separation was not enough. Government still retained its dangerous monopoly on raw power. A way must be found to somehow firmly bind the state itself within the limits prescribed by Natural Law. A constitution that would limit the state’s power to the protection of our God-given rights and very little else must be devised. The towering pyramid of centralized power must be lowered and the loci of power spread throughout society, even and especially down to the smallest unit: the individual.

The word early generations used for a single dominant and towering pyramid of power was consolidation. Their answer to consolidation was a constitutional web of intricate vertical and horizontal checks and balances designed to diffuse centralized power to numerous smaller power centers, especially the smallest. In other words, the power pyramid must be lowered and power itself scattered.

Opposition to deconsolidation, or what we would call decentralization, was quick to form. Just as God must lead his children, as kings must lead their subjects, as fathers must lead their families, even a republic must have a strong center or fall into chaos and anarchy. The sheep needed a shepherd.

The Constitution, though, was not written that way so consolidationists became interpreters, loose constructionists, and sought to change the Constitution from what it was to what they thought it should be. Alexander Hamilton led that movement for change under the banner of the Federalist Party. Thomas Jefferson led the strict constructionists who would keep the Constitution as written as the foundation of American government. His movement became the Democratic-Republican Party, usually shortened to Republican Party.

Though party names would change, the struggle over which kind of government would continue for most of the 19th century. Old Republicans would later be reorganized by Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson as the Democratic Party and remain true to the Constitution and Jeffersonianism. The Federalists would self-destruct and reappear as a Federalist wing of the Republican Party, National Republicans, before breaking away to become Whigs and finally form their own Republican Party, the one we have today.

From the 1850s, the Jeffersonian Democratic Party and the Hamiltonian Republican Party provided a clear ideological choice until the constitutionalist roots of the Democratic Party disintegrated at the Democratic convention of 1896. Thereafter, the Democrats complemented the Republicans as an alternative Hamiltonian Party, retaining only their traditional regard for the little guy but pursuing the authoritarian solutions of Hamilton and the Republican Party.

Authoritarianism became the wave of the future as Enlightenment principles were replaced within the intellectual class by communalism. It had become clear that freeing people had not made people less greedy. It had also become clear that, unexpectedly, greed without the power of government behind it, something absolutely new in history, was powering an explosion in human productive capacity and well-being. Freedom would free not just the people but the individuals who make up that amorphous body. Those individuals, in pursuit of their own interests, would do more for the common good than any other system ever had or would.

The power of greed to do good was not an altogether welcome discovery. That freedom led inexorably to a vibrant and productive capitalist system fueled by greed was the intellectual’s new dilemma. They began a search for a way to escape greed as an organizing principle but could find only two alternatives. The first, common in the 19th century, was voluntary associations based on higher values. Whether religious or secular, such associations never attracted large numbers. If people would not voluntarily form greedless societies, then, the raw power of the state must do it for them. Freedom must be replaced by authoritarianism. People must be forced to do good, compelled to turn away from greed.

Unfortunately, though, there is no escape from greed if it is, in fact, a driving force of all humans who have not attained enlightenment, which it certainly seems to be. Any system ruled by humans, no matter how perfect in theory, will be ruled by greed. It is difficult, though, for intellectuals to see themselves in the ranks of the greedy, as members of the unenlightened. Once they see themselves as enlightened, it is easy for them to imagine an authoritarian government in the hands of similarly enlightened people – Plato’s philosopher-kings.

Intellectuals tend not to realize that in actuality they are usually not so enlightened as they believe and will succumb to greed and power hunger if given the opportunity. Nor do they realize that they are not normally the type of people who can rise even to the copious lower positions of political power that their systems require, let alone the pinnacles of power. Positions of power generally fall not to the intellectuals that created them but to legions of petty bureaucrats and pip-squeak tyrants under the control of the occasional demagogue. Neither do intellectuals generally understand the ecological complexity of the system they imagine themselves altruistically ruling, a complexity far beyond human comprehension or the possibility of beneficial human manipulation.

Historians, too, are intellectuals in search of a system that manifests higher values. They need, most of them, an explanation of history that will point towards a system not so dependent on greed. If they are hopelessly idealistic, they may choose voluntary greedless associations but those have thus far failed to attract more than a tiny segment of society. So most historians join the intellectual class in choosing governmental solutions, i.e. authoritarianism. They find good in a centralized and powerful authority. They end up evaluating highly activist governments and presidents. They especially like successful war presidents.

This history comes from a different perspective so it emphasizes what has been unemphasized and finds what has been ignored. It does not overlook what has been accomplished without government or excuse what has been hindered by government. It does not praise war presidents or ignore peace presidents. It is a forgotten history of America.

Chapter One

The 5th President: James Monroe

1816-1824

To the seabirds above , Johnny’s wooden vessel must have looked corklike - tiny, aimless, and lost on an endless expanse. Closer up, sails full with wind proved there was purpose to the bobbing, purpose made manifest by the city of Boston one day rising miraculously if slowly from the far off edge of the watery world.

Two years earlier, there had been a gauntlet of British Man-O’-Wars to run, manned by captains eager for the glory of bringing home for hanging - or worse – a prize such as Johnny’s father, the notorious rebel John Adams. At least this return voyage would be on the relative safety of a French ship. Still, even without an empire for an enemy, travel in those days was plagued by contrary weather, poor food, horrendous accommodations, uncomfortable or non-existent roads, and stormy seas. It would be good to finally set foot on home ground.

Two years earlier, despite the danger, the senior Adams had taken nine-year-old John Quincy with him on his diplomatic mission to Paris. Father and son, he felt, needed more time together. Besides, the experience would be educational. For the Adams family, education, both moral and intellectual, was the key to a good life. A good life was first a godly life, a life of service and good acts; and then a life that would do credit to the family name. Material success came a poor third. The pressure cooker that was the Adams method for moral and intellectual development would, over the course of a century, produce one genius each generation but at the cost of numerous failures, alcoholics, and suicides among the less blessed siblings. John Quincy Adams was that one for the second generation.

John and John Quincy were accompanied home by the new French envoy to America and his secretary. During the long voyage, little Johnny cheerfully took on the role of English teacher to the two impressed if bemused diplomats. The intelligence and charm they recognized in this still miniature American would, before long, win friends and supporters in many European courts. The intelligence would shine forth until the last days of his long life; the charm would later recede before the native Adams obstinacy and gruff, remaining as a reserve he could draw upon when the need arose.

All three attributes, the superior intelligence, the occasional charm, and the overbearing obstinacy, were nicely portrayed by Anthony Hopkins as the aged Adams in the movie Amistad. (The movie, a good mood setter for this book, also captured nicely John Calhoun, as well as the issues, the life and times, and the sights and sounds of the 1840s. However, the otherwise excellent movie failed miserably with its silly caricature of Martin Van Buren.)

Soon after arriving in Boston, though, John Adams was sent to Paris once more to join Benjamin Franklin and John Jay preparing for peace negotiations with England. This time, he brought both John Quincy and his younger son, Charles. From Paris, John Adams took his family and delegation to Amsterdam, where he successfully pursued diplomatic recognition and loans for his struggling republic, and where John Quincy thrived as a young student at the prestigious University of Leyden.

Meanwhile, Congress decided to seek recognition also from Czarina Catherine the Great, requiring that a small team be quickly put together to journey to St. Petersburg. Francis Dana would lead the mission but he needed a secretary who was American, familiar with the needs and etiquette of diplomacy, fluent in French (the language of the Russian court), and resident in Europe. Only John Quincy Adams fit the bill. At the age of 14, he was off to the crystal city of the frozen north to begin his career as a diplomat.

The Czarina, it turned out, was not much interested in some silly little republic across the seas so after fourteen months the mission was called off and John Quincy was left to make his way alone across Europe back to The Hague. With a little judiciously applied youthful rebellion, the suddenly free boy managed to extend his unsupervised trip to a glorious six months with lengthy stays in Stockholm and other European cities. The young traveler was celebrated in courts and diplomatic circles as that rare person in Europe: an American, a citizen of this unlikely New World republic that had risen to challenge the British Empire.

When worried father and newly confident son were finally reunited, he was no longer Johnny. He was a worldly, if young, intellectual. They reestablished their relationship more as trusted friends and equals than as father and son. The deep connection would last nearly four decades until the elder John passed away.

After Yorktown, the two returned together to Paris to join Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson negotiating the treaty that would confirm the independence of a republic in a world of kings and tyrants. John Quincy, not yet 16, served his father as aide, reading and researching documents, meeting the top diplomats of France, and navigating the nuances of the French language for the American delegation at this pivotal juncture. Evenings, he dined with Franklin and Jefferson, holding numerous and lengthy discussions with the latter, not only on politics and history but science and the arts.

Such was the early training of the man who would become America’s greatest secretary of state. He could not have become that, though, without a president able to recognize and utilize his attributes.

JAMES MONROE

James Monroe was the only president besides the first who actually fought in the Revolution. In 1775, at the age of 18, he left the College of William and Mary to become a lieutenant in the Third Virginia Regiment of the Continental Army under General Washington. He saw action in the battles of Harlem Heights, White Plains, Trenton (where he received a significant wound), Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth, and spent the winter of ’77-78 at Valley Forge. In 1779, Major Monroe left the army to become an aide to Governor Thomas Jefferson of Virginia and also his protégée and student.

At age 24, Monroe began his political career with election to the Virginia state legislature. He subsequently served in the national Congress, the Virginia legislature again, and the Virginia ratifying convention for the new national Constitution. He opposed the Constitution for giving too much power to the national government and for its lack of a bill of rights but easily accepted the judgment of the people and supported the new government. He was defeated by James Madison for a seat in that government’s House of Representatives but soon after was chosen to serve in its Senate.

In 1794, Monroe was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to France, where America needed a steady hand. His youthful exuberance in over praising the French Revolution, though, while it thrilled the French Directory, struck many back home as far from steady and dimmed for a time his rising star. Ten years later, after a term as Governor of Virginia, it was back to France to help Robert Livingston complete negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase. He stayed in Europe to pursue treaties of peace and commerce with Great Britain and the possible purchase of Florida from Spain.

In 1808, Monroe was defeated by Madison once again, this time for the presidency. Prior to the War of 1812, though, bridges were mended and Madison, in desperate need of competence in his cabinet, appointed Monroe secretary of state. He later served concurrently, for a time, as secretary of war.

Suffice it to say, James Monroe was well trained in revolutionary theory under the personal tutelage of both Jefferson and Madison and was experienced enough in the direct application of theory so as to forge, with John Quincy Adams as his secretary of state, a foreign policy that would guide America in accordance with republican principles for 80 years.

1817

James Monroe and his presidency were transitional, bridging the first and second generations. The first wave of that generational changing of the guard entered Congress in 1812 during the Madison administration. 34-year old Kentuckian Henry Clay became Speaker of the House. The new Speaker then appointed new Congressman John Calhoun, a 29-year old South Carolinian, to the Committee of Foreign Relations, of which he soon became Chairman. The young war hawks (as they were called) of the South and West were now in control of Congress and were able to move President Madison to ask for a declaration of war on Great Britain.

In opposition, another new member of Congress, 30-year old Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, would speak passionately against war in an odd reversal of roles for the two political parties. He stood with Federalist New England for peace and decentralization while the Republican South and West sacrificed Republican principles to nationalist fervor and imperialist-tinged imaginings. They dreamed of expansion and Canada. Canada could be had only by war; war could be prosecuted only by a strengthening of central government. Thus Federalists acted republican and Republicans acted federalist.

Clay, Calhoun, and Webster would dominate Congress and much of American politics for the next four decades and come to be called The Great Triumvirate. None would achieve the presidency, passed over in later years for, it is commonly declared, lesser men. Clay and Calhoun would lose their chance in the battle with Andrew Jackson that started in and over Florida.

The Federalist Party had been severely hurt by the electoral defeat which Jefferson called the Revolution of 1800. What few hopes it retained of regaining national prominence evaporated completely after Andrew Jackson’s victory over the British at New Orleans. The victory strengthened both unionist feelings and the sense of America’s manifest destiny to expand westward. Both sentiments were in opposition to recent anti-administration Federalist positions.

Though Federalist candidate for President Rufus King did win three northern states in the presidential election of 1816, the victory of Republican Secretary of State James Monroe was a foregone conclusion. The secretary of state, not the vice president, had become the heir apparent after both Jefferson and Madison proceeded to the presidency from that office.

The campaign had been uncharacteristically gentlemanly both because of its inevitability and because of Monroe’s lack of personal enemies. He had political adversaries, of course, but no one of any political persuasion denied his basic honesty, decency, and incorruptibility, and few could dispute his personal and professional qualifications for the job. With such a man, without a viable party of opposition, and for the first time no serious foreign threat, this would be the era of good feelings.

Like Madison, Monroe had come to support a national bank after the near disaster of being hardly able to finance an unpopular war without one. Otherwise, on domestic issues, he was a true Republican in favor of limited government, minimal taxes, non-intervention in the lives of the people or the business of the nation, and a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Like Madison, he would veto road building by the national government as unconstitutional. He did little to involve the national government in the financial Panic of 1819, leaving solutions to the marketplace. And he left leadership during the great domestic political crisis of his presidency, the admission of Missouri as a free or slave state, to Henry Clay and the House of Representatives.

Monroe’s real concerns and areas of expertise were defense and foreign policy. Here he was more Washingtonian than Republican. As Washington would certainly have done, he had opposed the War of 1812 but once it became inevitable he worked vigorously for victory. As Washington had done, Monroe always advocated a stronger defense structure including more reliance on a standing army than was palatable to the nation. As with Washington, it would be an army only for defense, not for foreign adventures or involvement in the feuds and intrigues of Europe or the world.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall administered the oath of office on March 4 1817, making James Monroe the fifth President of the United States. President Monroe delivered his inaugural address from a temporary portico that looked out over ruins and scaffolds and half-built structures, reminders of how recently the capital had been burned to the ground and how close the great experiment had come to ending.

Reflecting the man, there were no rhetorical flights or grand visions in Monroe’s inaugural address. The National Register described it thus: "As to the style of the speech, it is, like the suit of clothes which president Monroe wore on the occasion, very good home-spun, and quite fine enough."

The new president congratulated the nation on its progress, its dedication to liberty, and its recent victory in war. As had Madison, he expressed a vague belief that government should help bind the nation through a system of roads and canals, but only after passing a constitutional amendment giving it the power. And he talked extensively of defense. He proposed a system of forts and defense facilities and proposed that the prewar 10,000-man regular army be doubled.

Monroe’s cabinet would be one of the most exceptional in American history. It included John Calhoun as secretary of war, William Crawford as secretary of the treasury, and of course John Quincy Adams as secretary of state. Monroe also consulted regularly with his friends and mentors, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Even with all the intellectual firepower around him, he was strong enough to make final decisions, wise and flexible enough to defer to the cabinet when it seemed best.

TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTION

After the inauguration , President Monroe set off on a tour of the country to promote reconciliation and unionism, and to survey defense installations. Though travel was still hard work, it was much easier for him than for earlier presidents who had made similar tours: the new President was on the cusp of a revolution in transportation.

For decades, politicians had been noisily but unsuccessfully pushing for taxes to build roads that would benefit the nation. Meanwhile, private entrepreneurs had been quietly and successfully building roads that would benefit actual people, and thereby themselves. There were now tens of thousands of miles of turnpikes crisscrossing the country. Even more important to the relative ease of Monroe’s tour, there were steamboats.

Both Monroe and John Quincy Adams, in their private papers, gushed over how quick and comfortable transportation was suddenly becoming up and down the coast and on inland waterways. Both felt, as did most progressive and visionary politicians, particularly Henry Clay, that government should support such wonderful new technologies as this. The motivations of the visionary politicians were often pure. They were interested only in the good of the nation. In recognition of their vision and good intentions they are given high marks by the great majority of historians.

Historians also honor Robert Fulton for his steamboat and the company he founded. Fulton had spent the early years of the century looking for support from the French and British governments. Failing to get it, he returned to America with well-connected New York politician Robert Livingston to woo a willing New York state legislature. In 1807, the pair were given government support and a 30-year monopoly to ply the Hudson River. A decade later, though, his boats were hardly better, faster, or safer than in 1807, and prices hardly lower. His comfortable situation had stifled progress and his own inventive mind.

The Fulton-Livingston consortium had also obtained a government monopoly on the Mississippi. Business languished, though, as their boats were ill-designed for that river. Henry Shreve, a young river trader, had hired a lawyer to challenge the monopoly and in 1817 was finally able to legally conduct his business by steamboat. He encountered the same technical problems as Fulton but, dependent on the market rather than government protection for success, set about redesigning his boats to make them Mississippi riverboats. The steamboat trade on the river took off as others followed in his footsteps. The town named Shreveport Louisiana is his legacy.

Possibly inspired by events on the Mississippi, young Cornelius Vanderbilt saw his chance. With private backing he acquired a steamboat and, in 1817, went into business between Elizabeth New Jersey and New York City. For 60 days his outlaw boat flew a flag inscribed New Jersey Must Be Free as he evaded the law and carried passengers more cheaply than Fulton’s company. Then it was off to a long slog through the legal system. John Marshall’s Supreme Court stuck down Fulton’s Hudson monopoly in 1824 in Gibbons v. Ogden freeing New Jersey and much more.

New competitors backed by private entrepreneurs flooded the market not only in New York but throughout the nation. Ticket prices plummeted. Technological advances proliferated. Speed, size, comfort, and safety ratcheted upward. Destinations and timetables multiplied, as did the numbers of passengers. And Fulton’s politically-based line went belly up.

Ticket prices for Vanderbilt’s New York-to-New Brunswick run fell to six cents – with free meals. The Niles’ Register commented sardonically, times must be hard indeed when a traveler who wishes to save money cannot afford to walk. On his New York-to-Albany run Vanderbilt tried a different tack – tickets were free, food was not. He calculated that free rides would attract a hundred passengers a trip, enough to make money off just food and drinks.

Vanderbilt is portrayed by historians as a robber baron because his motives were not pure, because he was not nice to competitors, and because he made obscene amounts of money. Historians are generally much more comfortable with people like themselves, intellectuals and politicians (and especially intellectual politicians) who only want to do what is best for the nation. Being driven themselves by motivations far more elevated than the mere desire to make money, historians generally encounter difficulty in admitting that base motives can often do more for the people than pure motives, or that a money-driven system finds solutions much more efficiently than a politically driven system.

Because of that difficulty, mainstream historians are rarely equipped intellectually to distinguish between what libertarian historian Burton W. Folsom calls political entrepreneurs, for example Robert Fulton, and market entrepreneurs such as Cornelius Vanderbilt. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, political entrepreneurs would haunt the halls of governmental power, finding ways to enrich themselves at the expense of the common man. Market entrepreneurs, on the other hand, would bring the perks and comforts of kings to the common man but bear the brunt of condemnations slung through two centuries by intellectuals who simply could not accept their motives or personalities.

Be that as it may, this history of political freedom must inevitably become a story of the physical freedom it engenders. Steamboats, railroads, telegraphs, and electric lights would, before long, give to the simplest of people powers beyond those of the gods of old.

History books would not dwell overly much on that. They much prefer such grand governmental projects as the Erie Canal and the Transcontinental Railway, the first an ambiguous success, the second an expensive failure.

BACKGROUND TO FLORIDA

Spanish Florida had once stretched east almost to New Orleans. America officially maintained that Florida had been included in the Louisiana Purchase, that nice little windfall of