America's Unending Civil War: The Enduring Conflict from Jamestown through to Recent Elections

By William Nester

Explores the Civil War’s related and enduring conflicts of ideas and principles through four centuries of a nation’s history.

The Civil War fascinates Americans like no other war in their history. Many Americans are still fighting some of the war’s issues in an Odyssey that stretches back to the first settlement and will persist until the end of time. The war itself was an Iliad of brilliant generals like Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan for the Union, or Lee, Jackson, and Forrest for the Confederacy; epic battles like Gettysburg and Chickamauga; epic sieges like Vicksburg and Petersburg; and epic naval combats such as Monitor versus Merrimack, or Kearsarge versus Alabama.

It was America’s most horrific war, with more dead than all others combined. Around 625,000 soldiers and 125,000 civilians died from various causes, bringing the total to 750,000 people. Of 31 million Americans, 2.1 million northerners and 880,000 southerners donned uniforms.

Why did eleven states eventually ban together to rebel against the United States? President Jefferson Davis began an answer when he said: ‘If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, Died of a Theory.’ That theory justified the enslavement of blacks by whites as a natural right and duty of a superior race over an inferior race; a theory, it was believed, that morally and economically elevated both races. Although slavery was the Civil War’s core cause, there were related chronic conflicts over the nature of government, citizenship, liberty, property, equality, wealth, race, identity, justice, crime, voting, power, and history – some of which issues have never entirely gone away.

America’s Unending Civil War is unique among thousands of books on the subject. None before has explored the Civil War’s related and enduring conflicts of ideas and principles through four centuries of a nation’s history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Mar 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9781399081191

William Nester

Dr. William Nester, a Professor at the Department of Government and Politics, St. John’s University, New York, is the author of thirty-seven books on history and politics. His book George Rogers Clark: I Glory in War won the Army Historical Foundation's best biography award for 2013, and Titan: The Art of British Power in the Age of Revolution and Napoleon, won the New York Military Affairs Symposium's 2016 Arthur Goodzeit Book Award.

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America’s Unending

Civil War

America’s Unending

Civil War

The Enduring Conflict from Jamestown through to Recent Elections

William R. Nester

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by

Frontline Books

An imprint of Pen & Sword Books Limited

Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © William R. Nester 2024

ISBN 978 1 39908 118 4

eISBN 978 1 39908 119 1

mobiISBN 978 1 39908 119 1

The right of William R. Nester to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Tables

Introduction

Part I: Conflicts and Violence, 1607–1860

Chapter 1 Colonists and Slaves

Chapter 2 The Early Republic

Chapter 3 The Industrial Revolution

Chapter 4 The Old South

Chapter 5 Abolitionism

Chapter 6 Manifest Destiny

Chapter 7 Lincoln and the 1860 Election

Part II: The Civil War, 1861–5

Chapter 8 Enemy Nations

Chapter 9 Strategies

Chapter 10 The 1861 Campaigns

Chapter 11 Soldiers

Chapter 12 The 1862 Campaigns

Chapter 13 Auxiliaries

Chapter 14 The 1863 Campaigns

Chapter 15 The 1864 Campaigns

Chapter 16 Traitors

Chapter 17 The 1865 Campaigns

Chapter 18 Death and Destruction

Part III: Conflict and Violence, 1865–Present

Chapter 19 Reconstruction and Resistance

Chapter 20 Civil Rights and Fulfillments

Chapter 21 New Battles in Old Wars

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Iwould like to express my deep gratitude and pleasure at having had yet another opportunity to work with the outstanding editorial team of Alison Flowers, Lisa Hoosan, John Grehan, and Martin Mace, who were always as kind as they were professional. I am especially grateful to Alison for her meticulous editing of my book.

List of Tables

9.1 Top Twelve American Wars by Financial Costs

11.1 Livelihoods of Union Soldiers

11.2 Livelihoods of Confederate Soldiers

18.1 Top Ten American Wars Ranked by Total Number of American Military Deaths

Introduction

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

William Faulkner

Faulkner was a wise man. His insight is certainly true of America’s Civil War. Whether Americans realize it or not, they are still fighting many of the Civil War’s issues that stretch back to the first settlement and will persist until the end of time.

The Civil War was America’s Iliad leading from and to Odysseys. The war itself was an Iliad of brilliant generals like Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan for the Union, and Lee, Jackson, and Forrest for the Confederacy; epic battles like Gettysburg and Chickamauga, sieges like Vicksburg and Petersburg, and naval combats like the Monitor versus the Merrimack and Kearsarge versus the Alabama. Although most military campaigns were east of the Mississippi River, fighting nearly spanned the continent: a Confederate army invaded New Mexico; California volunteers occupied forts across the West as regular soldiers were withdrawn east, and often skirmished with local tribes; General James Carleton led 2,350 men across 900 miles of mostly desert from Los Angeles to El Paso, and fought Apaches along the way; rebels from Canada raided St Albans, Vermont. Meanwhile Confederate warships hunted and destroyed scores of American merchant and whaling vessels on churning seas around the world.

It was America’s most horrific war with more dead than all others combined. At least 618,222 troops, 360,222 Union and 260,000 Confederate, died, and possibly around 750,000 soldiers and civilians from combat and disease during four years of war.¹ Battle and accidents maimed hundreds of thousands of men. The war destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of businesses, railroads, barns, factories, warehouses, stations, crops, bridges, courthouses, livestock, and homes across swaths of the South and elsewhere, with entire cities gutted like Richmond, Atlanta, Jackson, Chambersburg, and Columbia. Of 31 million Americans, 2.1 million northerners and 880,000 southerners donned uniforms. An astonishing three of four southern men of military age fought three of ten northern men. Among survivors, countless veterans as well as civilians with ruined lives suffered what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder that mingled sorrow, lassitude, and rage, while tens of thousands of amputees struggled to find work with many begging on street corners.

Fortunately, Abraham Lincoln was America’s president. Lincoln was a brilliant politician, statesman, strategist, and humanist; his wisdom, wit, and eloquence inspired Americans then and ever since. His leadership culminated with the Confederacy’s destruction and slavery’s abolition. Atop those stunning achievements, he also helped initiate the Homestead Act, land grant colleges, modern banking system, and transcontinental railroad. Tragically, an assassin murdered Lincoln just days after Lee surrendered his army to Grant at Appomattox, effectively ending the war.

An Odyssey led to and from the Civil War. It began in 1607 with the Jamestown settlement followed a dozen years later when colonists purchased the first shipload of African slaves. Although slavery was the Civil War’s core cause, there were related chronic conflicts over the nature of government, citizenship, liberty, property, voting, equality, wealth, race, identity, crime, justice, power, and history from the nation’s origins. Over the first seventeen decades, American liberalism and nationalism developed, leading to the war for independence then the Constitution and early republic. Thereafter crises erupted over whether new states should allow or forbid slavery, Bloody Kansas, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, John Brown’s attempt to incite a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, the 1860 election with Lincoln’s victory, the secession of slave states, formation of the Confederacy, and attack on Fort Sumter. Nearly as divisive an Odyssey followed the Civil War that spanned Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, election of the first black president, battles over Civil War and other historical monuments, and recently the 2020 election with its stark choice between candidates, beliefs, policies, and visions for America.

Indeed, an attempted insurrection marred the 2020 election. President Donald Trump refused to accept his overwhelming defeat and called on his followers to prevent Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021. A mob of 20,000 Trumpians swarmed around the Capitol, many waving Confederate flags, and around 2,000 broke in to vandalize that symbol of American democracy before police expelled them. Fortunately, the members of Congress fled to safety before the rioters could assault them and that night reconvened to certify the election results. That horrifying scene of anarchy and terrorism recalled a similar attempt to destroy America’s electoral process 160 years earlier. On February 13, 1861, a pro-Confederacy mob threatened to prevent the certification of Abraham Lincoln’s victory. That time, General Winfield Scott ringed the Capitol with troops armed with Springfield rifles bristling with bayonets, and the mob dispersed.

For all the preceding reasons, the Civil War fascinates Americans like no other war in their history. Millions are buffs who devour Civil War books and explore battlefields. Many got hooked when they were kids on some family or school trip to a site. Among buffs, two groups stand out. Academic and amateur scholars alike eagerly meet at scores of annual conferences and over 200 Civil War Round Tables across the nation to discuss and debate their cherished latest findings. Reenactors gather around campfires or charge across fields in mock battles. The hardcore among them eat the same wretched food and abstain from bathing and shaving just like the men who actually fought a century and a half ago.²

What explains America’s Civil War?³ The beginning was clear enough. Starting with South Carolina on December 20, 1860, legislatures or conventions in one southern slave state after another voted to secede from the United States. On February 8, 1861, delegations met in Montgomery, Alabama to form the Confederate States of America. On April 14, Confederate artillery began bombarding Fort Sumter, garrisoned by American troops in Charleston Bay. That sparked a war that lasted 4 years, caused 750,000 deaths, and resulted in the destruction of both the Confederacy and slavery.

That begs the question, why did eleven states eventually band together to rebel against the United States? President Jefferson Davis began an answer when he said: If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, Died of a Theory.⁴ That theory justified the enslavement of blacks by whites as a natural right and duty of a superior race over an inferior race that morally and economically elevated both races. Slavocrats pointed to Bible passages that called on masters to care for their slaves and for slaves to obey their masters. That right was so fundamental that proponents had to fight by any means any attempt to abolish or even limit it.

Slavocrats increasingly faced and felt threatened by a contrary theory that slavery was morally wrong and should be abolished. That theory was perhaps best expressed in America’s Declaration of Independence with the line: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Increasing numbers of Americans wanted to realize that ideal for all people in the United States. One by one, the northern states abolished slavery for themselves and, with the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, banned slavery in territory north of the Ohio River that would eventually be populated and transformed into states.

For decades preceding the rebellion, demagogue politicians and newspaper editors, then called fire-eaters, condemned Yankee financiers for dominating the South’s economy and abolitionists for trying to free their slaves. In doing so, slavocrats martyrized themselves and scapegoated despised northerners. Slavocrats reacted in rage and paranoia to Abraham Lincoln’s election to the White House in November 1860. Although Lincoln’s Republican Party accepted slavery where it then existed, it was committed to preventing its spread to new territories and future states out West. But that was the excuse that slavocrats wielded to justify their rebellion. Charleston socialite Mary Chesnut explained: We are divorced, North from South, because we hated each other so.⁵

Three of four southern men of military age fought in that war even though only one of four were slaveowners. Indeed, the 4 million slaves amidst millions of hardscrabble farmers and laborers actually depressed their wages. Why would men fight for a system of slavery that actually worsened their own poverty? With 22 years old the average enlistment age, peer pressure, especially from young women, and a chance to prove one’s manhood were the most powerful motives, along with a lifetime of hearing about states’ rights and identity with one’s state rather than the nation.

Ironically, slavery both caused the war and contributed to the South’s defeat. Slavocracy, like communism, nurtured the seeds of its own eventual destruction. One reason for this was philosophical. The practice violated the fundamental principles of natural law and America’s Declaration of Independence with most Americans deploring that hypocrisy. Another was psychological. To varying degrees, most people prefer freedom to subjection, enterprise to exploitation. The third and most critical was economic. Slavocracy condemned the South to a mostly stagnant agrarian economy when modern warfare demanded sophisticated mass finance, manufacturing, transportation, and communications. After forming and declaring independence, the Confederacy initiated a war against the United States without the material power to win it.

However, none of that made the Confederacy’s defeat inevitable. Leaders and luck, good and bad, shape human events often in unexpected ways. After Lincoln, no man was more responsible for crushing the rebellion than Ulysses Grant who captured three armies. How would the war have unfolded and ended had a bullet killed Grant at, say, Belmont in November 1861?

America’s Unending Civil War: The Enduring Conflict from Jamestown through Recent Elections is unique among thousands of books on the subject as it explores the Civil War over four centuries of the nation’s history from its inception to the latest headlines.

Part I

Conflicts and Violence, 1607–1860

Chapter 1

Colonists and Slaves

One-hundred-sixty-eight years separated Jamestown’s founding in 1607 and the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775.¹ During that time, what became the United States underwent extraordinary transformations in values, institutions, and identities. Originally, the colonists were authoritarian, not libertarian, communitarian, not individualistic, theocratic, not freethinking, elitist, not pluralist, and English, not American. Gradually, that changed. By 1775, most colonists identified themselves as Americans, cherished an array of civil rights, and had quasi-republican governments with elected assemblies and governors appointed by the king; Connecticut and Rhode Island voters actually elected their own governors. Property qualifications for voting and running for office varied among the colonies and were confined to white males 21 years and older. Most Americans were the middling sort who owned their own homes and farms or businesses. Of course, slaves and common laborers were mostly poor. Nonetheless, the average American was far wealthier and less taxed than the average Briton.

American nationalism developed naturally. The vast Atlantic Ocean separated the colonists from the mother country. Each generation born in what became thirteen colonies increasingly saw themselves as Americans. A series of wars with the neighboring French and Spanish empires and their Indians allies reinforced American identity. The Americans largely fought all those wars except the last on their own.

The British did send over large armies and navies for the war that erupted in 1754. Ironically, the fighting began when Lieutenant Colonel George Washington ordered his men to encircle and fire on a French patrol in disputed territory. What began as the latest struggle between the rival British and French empires eventually involved the other European powers and campaigns in North America, Europe, the West Indies, India, West Africa, Argentina, the Philippines, and the seas connecting those lands. The fighting in North America ended in 1760 with the conquest of Canada by British armies with large contingents of American troops. The fighting ended in Europe in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris. Under that treaty, the French ceded Canada and its lands east of the Mississippi River to Britain, and its land west of the Mississippi along with New Orleans to Spain.

That latest war and especially its aftermath swelled American nationalism. Most British officers sneered at their American counterparts like Washington, wounding their pride. Then from 1763 to 1775, King George III and Parliament imposed a series of taxes and restrictions on the colonists and ever more troops to enforce them. The excuse was the need to pay for Britain’s national debt that doubled during the war. Yet many British leaders feared that America’s swelling population, prosperity, and nationalism would lead colonial leaders to demand more autonomy and eventually outright independence. They thought they could smother that with more hard power. Instead, they enflamed it.

The colonists split among loyalists who obeyed, moderates who protested, and radicals who committed violence against British officials and officers who upheld the repressive measures. The acts of moderate and radical patriots succeeded in forcing Britain’s government to rescind the 1765 Stamp Act and 1767 Townsend Acts. Then in 1770, Parliament enacted the Tea Act with a tax and monopoly for the East India Company to sell tea in the colonies. In December 1773, a group of radicals swarmed aboard three vessels packed with tea and dumped it in Boston Harbor. London sought to make an example of Massachusetts by imposing martial law, suspending its general assembly, doubling the number of redcoats in Boston, and shutting off Boston’s trade for all products except food and firewood until the colonists paid for the destroyed tea.

That provoked moderates and radicals in the other colonies to unite with Massachusetts in protest. In September and October 1775, representatives met in the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia and issued a petition that called on Britain’s government to respect American rights. They planned to reconvene in May 1775.

General Thomas Gage was Massachusetts’s military governor headquartered in Boston. Learning of a munitions depot in Concord 20 miles west, he sent a thousand redcoats to capture it. Word of that approaching force caused militia companies across the region to muster and march to intercept it. At dawn on April 19, 1775, the British column marched into Lexington where the town’s military company deployed on the common. When someone fired a shot, the British opened fire then charged, routing the company. That shot heard round the world began a war that resulted in America’s independence.

Extraordinary individuals led the extraordinary liberal and nationalist transformations in the American colonies from 1607 to 1775. No one alone exemplified them but two did. John Smith was in the governing council that founded Virginia and took over, when starvation, disease, and Indian attacks threatened to destroy the colony. Smith’s enterprise, courage, decisiveness, curiosity, vision, pragmatism, and adventurous spirit not only saved Virginia but became core American characteristics. Benjamin Franklin’s long life spanned most of the eighteenth century and exemplified the Age of Enlightenment values of reason, science, humanism, and liberalism. His Americanism blossomed during a decade in London as a lobbyist for Pennsylvania and several other colonies. He returned to Philadelphia as Congress convened in May 1775. He was instrumental in nurturing America’s Declaration of Independence in 1776, France’s alliance with the United States in 1778, and the Constitution in 1787.

Slavery is likely as old as humanity. Anthropologists and historians find slavery in virtually all premodern societies around the world.² Europeans did not invent African slavery. From 30 to 60 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population were slaves when the trans-Atlantic trade began.³ What Europeans did was buy from, and thus expand, the existing continental network. The guns and chains that Europeans exchanged for slaves empowered African kings and chiefs to launch more expeditions that netted more slaves.

The Spaniards initiated the triangular trans-Atlantic trade that exchanged manufactured goods for African slaves, then exchanged the slaves for colonial products like sugar and tobacco that they exchanged in Europe for more manufactured goods. Eventually the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Americans developed their own triangular trans-Atlantic trade systems. The best estimate is that over 4 centuries from 1451 to 1870, Africans sold Europeans around 9,391,100 slaves of whom at least 1 in 10 perished along with 1 in 20 sailors during 54,200 voyages to the New World.⁴ Slaves referred to that harsh voyage as the middle passage.

Slavery in what became the United States originated when a Dutch sea captain sold twenty slaves to Virginians in 1619.⁵ The purchasers treated the Africans as indentured servants and released them after seven years with 50 acres of land for each because the colony then had no slave laws. Gradually, more Africans were sold as servants in Virginia and other colonies. In 1641, Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize and regulate slavery with its Body of Liberties. One by one the other colonies enacted similar laws with Virginia’s in 1661.

From 1619 to 1770, 122,735 African slaves were officially brought to the 13 colonies, although likely thousands more arrived unrecorded.⁶ Slavery’s relative economic importance, and thus its political, social, and cultural importance, varied considerably among the colonies. The portion of slaves to the population was greater the further south one journeyed. Slaves were about 2.6 percent of New England’s population, 6 percent of the mid-Atlantic colonies, and 40 percent of the southern colonies. By 1770, blacks numbered 459,822 of 2,148,076 people.⁷ A free black population emerged as owners manumitted their slaves. Overall, about one of ten people of African descent were free, and three of five in New York and other ports.

Chapter 2

The Early Republic

The American Revolution unfolded through two phases.¹ Americans won independence in the first and formed a less imperfect union in the second. The first took eight years and ended decisively. The second also took eight years but twenty-four decades later remains a work of mostly progress.

The fighting that began at Lexington on April 19, 1775, resulted in an American victory. Ever more militia companies converged, fought the redcoats at Concord, then harassed them as they retreated to Boston. They then besieged the British in Boston. Militia regiments from other New England colonies joined the siege. Congress appointed George Washington to command that growing army. The delegates sent an olive branch petition to George III, assuring him of their loyalty and requesting the withdrawal of British troops. The king replied by declaring the colonies in rebellion.

Washington was able to force the British army to abandon Boston in March 1776. Elsewhere, British governors and redcoats fled American troops and governments. Word arrived that the king had rejected any compromise and instead condemned them as rebels. Congress declared independence on July 4, 1776. In justifying that act, Thomas Jefferson drafted and the other Congressmen refined the document that eloquently and rofoundly expressed the philosophy of natural law and rights:

We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed with their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.

For nearly two and a half centuries since those lines were penned, Americans have struggled over what they mean and who should enjoy them.

American victory in its war for independence was not inevitable. Two forces were critical to how and when the Americans won independence. One was George Washington whose indomitable character kept the American army together for eight years of war despite more defeats than victories and a chronic lack of enough munitions, arms, provisions, and other equipment. The other was the American capture of a British army at Saratoga in September 1777 that encouraged France to openly ally with the United States against Britain. A French fleet bottled up a British army at Yorktown and a French army joined the American army led by Washington in forcing the British army to surrender in October 1781. Britain formally granted the United States independence with the Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783.

With independence, America’s leaders turned to the next great challenge, framing a government that fulfilled the Declaration of Independence’s ideals. The existing Congress was a confederation of thirteen sovereign states. Each state had one vote on all issues with unanimity required for any resolution or law. Congress had no powers of taxation and limited power to impose trade tariffs for revenue. In 1787, Congress did agree that a convention could suggest a more efficient government.

Representatives from twelve of the thirteen states met at Philadelphia from May to September. During that time, they debated, compromised, devised, and revised a constitution. They soon agreed to ground sovereignty ultimately in the people who would manifest it through the national government. Thus in ratifying the Constitution, the states surrendered their sovereignty to that new government. They also agreed to spread power among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches so that none was superior and they had to work together. For weeks, they argued over how to distribute legislative power among states with greatly varying populations. They finally decided on a bicameral Congress in which states had equal power in the Senate with two members each while each state’s members in the House of Representative was proportional to its population. What would become a controversial decision was to make the president indirectly elected by an electoral college based on the states.

It took longer to forge the government’s six great duties. The preamble reads: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justices, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the General Welfare, and ensure the Blessing of Liberty for ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America. Ever since Americans have debated just how to realize each of those goals.

The final great issue was slavery.² The 1790 census counted 3,929,000 people including 757,000 blacks of whom slaves were nine of ten.³ Although the population was split nearly equally between 1,968,000 northerners and 1,961,000 southerners, among blacks, 67,000 lived in the North and 690,000 in the South. Although nearly one of five Americans was enslaved, the words slave and slavery are mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. The framers were too ashamed explicitly to insert them. However, in opaque language the Constitution upheld slavery in three ways. First, slaves were counted as three-fifths of a human when determining the allocation of representatives. Second, slaves who escaped to another state had be returned to their masters. Third, the United States could not abolish its international slave trade before 1808.

After approving the Constitution, the Convention sent copies to each state government for ratification. In late 1788, the ratification was completed and the states held elections. The first Congress convened on March 4 and George Washington took the oath as the first president on April 30, 1789. The most important issue for the new government was to amend the Constitution with an explicit list of Rights for all Americans. Ten amendments defining that Bill of Rights were ratified by December 15, 1791. And ever since Americans have debated the meaning and assertion of those rights.

Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson had conflicting visions for America’s economic future.⁴ Hamilton wanted to transform the United States into an increasingly powerful, diversified, urban, middle-class economy fueled by inventors, entrepreneurs, financiers, manufacturers, and merchants. Government policies that promoted financial stability, infrastructure, innovation, education, and exports were critical to that transformation. High tariffs protected infant American industries from cheap foreign goods that could destroy them while providing government revenues to invest in infrastructure that promoted economic development. A United States Bank would be a joint venture between the Federal government and private investors to maintain a stable currency, keep inflation low, and give low-interest loans to entrepreneurs. Jefferson wanted to keep America’s economy largely agrarian, the products of which would be exchanged for European manufactured goods. For that, low tariffs kept import prices low. He adamantly opposed a national bank.

Their differences did not end there. Hamilton favored a muscular problem-solving national government while Jefferson sought a weak national government with most power in the states. For defense, Hamilton called for an army and navy large enough to deter foreign or domestic threats and swiftly expanded to defeat them should deterrence fail. Jefferson wanted a military confined to state militia and gunboats in ports. Although both men considered slavery morally wrong, Hamilton opposed slavery’s expansion and hoped for its eventual extinction while Jefferson saw equal evils in blacks enslaved or free.

As for the Constitution, Hamilton explained that it empowered the Federal government to do anything that it did not expressly forbid, while Jefferson insisted that the Federal government could only do what it specifically enumerated. Which view was correct? The Federalist Papers were 85 essays, of which Hamilton penned 51, James Madison 29, and John Jay 5 to explain the Constitution and so build support for its ratification. All three men had attended the Convention, with Madison’s role in drafting the Constitution’s key tenets so crucial that later he was dubbed its father. All three then espoused a muscular problem-solving Federal government. Jefferson did not attend the Convention, as he was then minister to France.

Those rival views grounded rival political parties. Hamiltonism inspired the Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans while Jeffersonism inspired the Republican-Democrats and then the Democrats.

The Federalist Party lasted only from 1790 to 1800 then disappeared for three decades before its reincarnation as the Whig Party, which lasted from 1832 to 1852 before its reincarnation as the Republican Party in 1854. Jeffersonians shed the Republican part of their name to celebrate themselves as Democrats and politically dominate the early nineteenth century.

The prevalence of Jeffersonism and the Democratic Party does not reflect the practical effects of the rival philosophies. By that measure, America’s economy develops with Hamiltonian policies and distorts with Jeffersonian policies. The policies that Treasury Secretary Hamilton implemented transformed the economy from a vicious cycle of depression, poverty, debt, trade deficits, and joblessness into an expanding middle class, exports, manufacturing, and hard money. The policies that Presidents Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson imposed devastated the economy. Jefferson’s 1807 trade embargo provoked a depression, high joblessness, and bankruptcies. The elimination of the First United States Bank by Madison in 1811 and the Second United States Bank by Jackson in 1836, unleashed speculation, inflation, bankruptcies, and depression. Atop this, Madison and a Democratic Congress declared war against Britain in June 1812. The War of 1812 was disastrous for the United States. Americans endured horrific death, destruction, and debt for no practical gain of territory or compensation from Britain. Yet, voters did not penalize the Democratic Party but instead enthusiastically supported it for a couple of generations through what became known as the Era of Good Feelings and the Jacksonian Era.

So what explains that vast discrepancy between the political popularity and economic performance of the two philosophies and the parties that conveyed them? Human nature is one critical cause. Feelings and prejudices dominate most people’s perceptions and here one outlook was far more appealing. Jeffersonism and its cousin Jacksonism were populist movements that claimed to uplift the people, and most people fervently believed that. Atop that was the Federalist Party’s self-destruction at the national level by the 1800 election. Mingled organization, philosophical, and political reasons explain that. Hamilton failed to develop a party organization that extended to grass-roots voters in every state. It was a party that espoused policies that championed financers, shippers, innovators, and manufacturers but gave nothing specific to small businesses, farmers and slaveowners. President John Adams dealt the party’s deathblow by pushing through a Federalist-dominated Congress the Alien and Sedition Acts whereby his administration prosecuted Democratic newspaper editors who criticized him.

Henry Clay resurrected Hamiltonism and the Federalist Party with his American System and Whig Party from 1832.⁵ Yet Clay failed in each of his three presidential runs. Three presidents – John Quincy Adams and Whigs William Henry Harrison and Zachery Taylor – did espouse Hamiltonian ideas but failed to implement any of them; Adams mostly because of Democratic opposition and Whigs Harrison and Taylor because they died shortly after taking office.

Chapter 3

The Industrial Revolution

An industrial revolution transformed the United States during the nineteenth century’s first half despite the prevailing Jeffersonian and Jacksonian hostility or indifference to it.¹ A number of innovators and entrepreneurs initiated that revolution, and that ingenuity was mostly Yankee. The first was Eli Whitney who, in 1793, invented the cotton gin that separated seeds from fiber. That device revolutionized cotton production on southern slave plantations and thus the textile industries in New England and Britain. Francis Lowell spent two years in Britain studying mass manufacturing techniques then, in 1814, established a factory with partners Patrick Jackson and Nathan Appleton in Waltham, Massachusetts. Lowell died in 1817. Jackson and Appleton founded what became the factory town of Lowell on the Merrimack River in 1821. Other entrepreneurs like Samuel Slater opened their own textile factories. Arial Bragg devised machinery and techniques to mass-produce shoes. Cincinnati entrepreneurs devised a factory system for transforming pigs into brine-barreled pork, hides for leather, lard for soap and lubricants, bones for buttons, bristles for brushes, intestines for sausages, and chops and bacon for the table. Some inventions made farming much more productive like Cyrus McCormick’s reaper in 1831 and John Deere’s plow in 1837. Precision tools mass-produced parts so refined that they were interchangeable.

Although America’s industrial revolution began a couple of generations after Britain’s and emulated it, at least one American industry surpassed its British rival – firearms. During the late 1830s, Samuel Colt developed first a five-shot then a six-shot revolver that he mass-produced at a factory outside Hartford, Connecticut. In the 1840s, the invention of percussion caps replaced the unreliable flintlock system for firing. In 1855, Springfield’s arsenal began producing the .58 caliber rifle that used a Minnie ball, a cone-shaped bullet. Britain produced an improved copy of the Springfield at a factory in Enfield. Springfield’s 1861 model incorporated those and other improvements.

Far-sighted state governments enacted their own Hamiltonian policies. The most ambitious and lucrative was New York’s 363-mile long Erie Canal that linked the Hudson River and Lake Erie.² Governor Dewitt Clinton rallied a majority in the state’s legislature to underwrite the project. The construction began on July 4, 1817 and ended eight years later with the first transit on October 26, 1825. The canal included eighty-three locks with the highest 675ft above sea level. The economic result was as extraordinary as the engineering. Tolls paid the construction cost within nine years. New York City boomed with the population soaring from 122,000 in 1820 to 813,669 in 1860. The canal transformed several towns along the route into cities like Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo along with Cleveland and Toledo on Lake Erie. That inspired other northern states like Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and Illinois to build their own canals although with more modest results.

Steam power fueled a transportation revolution that accelerated the industrial revolution.³ In 1807, after years of development, Robert Fulton launched a steamboat on