Thus, as the Marshall era came to a close, the Supreme Court had chipped away at some state powers, but Marshall himself enthusiastically admitted that when it came to the federal government, “the powers of the government are limited, and…its limits are not to be transcended.” To those who complained about Marshall’s aggrandizement of power at the federal level, the chief justice in clear Hamiltonian tones stated guidelines: “Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means, which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are constitutional” [emphasis ours].6 It is equally true, though, that Marshall—later aided and abetted by Taney—enhanced the broader and more important mechanisms of the free market over state government, and in the process solidified the critical premise of “sanctity of contract.”7 Without John Marshall, whom John Taylor, one of his severest critics, denigrated as part of a “subtle corps of miners and sappers [working] to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric,” that fabric would have unraveled in a frenzy of property rights abridgments at the state level.8
The Virginia Dynasty, Continued
In December 1816, James Monroe of Virginia perpetuated the dominance of Virginians in the office of the presidency, defeating the Federalist, Rufus King of New York, in a landslide (183 to 34 votes in the electoral college). Virginia’s continued grip on the nation’s highest office had in fact been ensured earlier when Monroe bested William H. Crawford of Georgia in a narrow vote for the Republican nomination. That meant that of America’s first five presidents, all had come from Virginia except Adams. Following the Burr fiasco, the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution eliminated the possibility that a president and vice president could come from different parties, meaning that the Republicans’ choice for vice president, Daniel D. Tompkins of New York, helped initiate a common practice of adding sectional balance to a ticket.
Monroe (born 1758) had attended William and Mary College before leaving to serve in the Continental Army under Washington. He saw action at many of the Revolution’s famous battles, including White Plains, Trenton (where he was wounded), Germantown, Brandywine, and Monmouth, attaining the rank of colonel. A deliberate, even slow, thinker, Monroe gathered ideas and advice from associates and subordinates before proceeding, a trait that kept him from a field command in the Revolution. He therefore resigned his commission to study the law under Jefferson and then won a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates(1782), the Continental Congress (1783–86), and the Virginia state convention(1788). Working under Jefferson led to a friendship between the two, and drew Monroe somewhat naturally into the Sage’s antifederal views. Consequently, he was not a delegate at the Constitutional Convention, yet when Virginia needed a U.S. senator in 1790, Monroe won the seat. Senator Monroe proved an able lieutenant to Secretary of State Jefferson and clashed repeatedly with Alexander Hamilton and President Washington himself.
A natural successor to Jefferson as the minister to France (1794), Monroe failed to assuage French concerns over the pro-British treaty negotiated by John Jay, and thus was recalled after two years, although he returned as an envoy extraordinaire in 1802. During the gap in his years abroad, Monroe became governor of Virginia. He joined Robert Livingston during the negotiations over Louisiana, then made ministerial journeys to England and Spain. None of these overtures accomplished their intended purposes, indeed failing miserably to placate the French over Jay’s Treaty, settle the boundary dispute with Spain, or obtain a commercial treaty with England. In the case of the British negotiations conducted with special envoy William Pinkney, Monroe was convinced he had obtained reasonable terms easing trade restrictions. Jefferson, however, dismissed the effort as unworthy of submission to the Senate—an act by Monroe’s mentor that stung him deeply. Whether a better diplomat might have succeeded, of course, is speculation. By the time Monroe had become Madison’s secretary of state in 1811, he had as much experience as any living American with diplomatic issues and much experience at failing at such undertakings. It is ironic, then, that Monroe is best remembered for a foreign policy success, the Monroe Doctrine.
Lacking the fiery oratorical skills of his fellow Virginian Patrick Henry, the unceasing questioning mind of Jefferson, or the wit and intellect of Franklin, Monroe nonetheless possessed important qualities. He had a reputation for the highest integrity (Jefferson once said that if Monroe’s soul was turned inside out there would not be a spot on it), and at the same time the man refused to bear a grudge. It was this genial personality and willingness to work with others that inspired him to take a goodwill tour of the Northeast in 1816, initiating the Era of Good Feelings. Old-fashioned in his dress (he was the last president to wear his hair in a queue), Monroe in many ways was a throwback to the pre-Revolutionary period. Above all, he valued productivity and practicality, which accounted for his policies and his toleration—even embrace—of those who held sharply different views but with whom he thought compromise possible. Unlike either Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower—two twentieth-century advocates of limited or small government—Monroe favored a weak executive, seeing the power as emanating from the people through the legislature.
Monroe’s past failures at diplomacy notwithstanding, he quickly secured an arrangement with Great Britain limiting warships on the Great Lakes.9 This he followed by an equally rapid settlement of the U.S.–Canadian boundary dispute. Then came Andrew Jackson’s campaigns against Indian incursions in Florida, which led to the Adams-Onis Treaty in 1819, all of which gave Monroe the international capital to issue the famous doctrine that bore his name.
It also helped that Monroe’s own sense of security led him to name some of the most powerful and politically contentious men in the nation to his cabinet: John C. Calhoun of South Carolina as secretary of war; his rival William H. Crawford as secretary of the treasury; and John Quincy Adams as secretary of state. Only a man unintimidated by powerful personalities would tolerate such characters, let alone enlist them. Ultimately, they jointly failed to live up to their potential, although individually Adams and Calhoun achieved reputations apart from the Monroe administration. Inside the cabinet they bickered, eventually turning the atmosphere poisonous.
Monroe acceded to a legislative program of internal improvements—a name given to federally funded harbor and river clearing efforts, road building, and otherwise upgrading infrastructure, to use the twenty-first-century buzzword. Although he disapproved of government activism, he thought it proper to facilitate a climate of cooperation that funded construction of coastal forts, which fell perfectly within the constitutional mandates of national defense. In other areas, however, Monroe’s strict constructionist side would not approve, without a constitutional amendment, appropriations for internal improvements that did not relate directly to national defense, maintaining that the Constitution had not given the government the authority to spend money for such programs.
In the short term, minor government-funded construction programs paled beside the phenomenal economic explosion about to envelop the country. Despite the lingering economic dislocations of the War of 1812, already one could sense a restless, growing, entrepreneurial nation replete with its share of vigor, vice, and virtue. This stirring occurred largely outside of Monroe’s influence, although he certainly kept the government out of the way of growth. During the Madison-Monroe years, the United States gained ground on the British in key industries, so much so that by 1840 the Industrial Revolution that had started in England had not only reached American shores, but had accelerated so fast that Yankee shippers, iron merchants, publishers, and textile manufacturers either equaled or exceeded their John Bull competitors in nearly all categories.
The Restless Spirit
From the outset, America had been a nation of entrepreneurs, a country populated by restless souls. No sooner had settlers arrived along the port cities, than they spread inland, and after they had constructed the fi
rst inland forts, trappers and explorers pressed farther into the forests and mountains. The restless spirit and the dynamic entrepreneurship fed off each other, the former producing a constant itch to improve and invent, the latter demanding better ways of meeting people’s needs, of organizing better systems of distribution and supply, and of adding to the yearning for still more, and improved, products.
In a society where most people still worked the land, this incessant activity worked itself out in the relationship with the land—cutting, clearing, building, irrigating, herding, hunting, lighting (and fighting) fires, and populating. Unlike Europeans, however, Americans benefited from a constantly expanding supply of property they could possess and occupy. Unlike Europeans, Americans often never saw themselves as permanently fixed to a location. Alexis de Tocqueville, the observant French visitor, remarked,
An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on…. He will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he will clear a field and leave others to reap the harvest; he will take up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere with his changing desires. If his private business allows him a moment’s relaxation, he will plunge at once into the whirlpool of politics.10
To some degree, money (or the lack of it) dictated constant churning. The same desire to experience material abundance drove men and women to perpetually invent and design, innovate and imagine. The motivations for moving, though, were as diverse as the country itself. For every Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett who constantly relocated out of land fever, there was a Gail Borden, a New York farm boy who wound up in Galveston, Texas, where he invented the terrapin wagon, a completely amphibious vehicle, before returning to New York to invent his famous condensed-milk process.11 In the same vein, Vermonter John Deere, who moved his farm-implement business steadily westward, developing the finest farm implements in the world, epitomized the restless frontier spirit observed by Tocqueville.
This restless generation produced a group of entrepreneurs unparalleled in American history, including Andrew Carnegie (born 1835), J. P. Morgan (1837), John D. Rockefeller (1839), and Levi Strauss (1829). Most came from lower-to middle-class backgrounds: Carnegie arrived in America virtually penniless, and Strauss worked his way up with a small mercantile store. They typified what a Cincinnati newspaper stated of this generation: “There is not one who does not desire, even confidently expect, to become rich.”12
Yet the lure of the land had its own dark side, turning otherwise honorable men into scalawags and forgers. Jim Bowie, who would die at the Alamo with Davy Crockett in 1836, surpassed everyone with his ingenuity in developing fraudulent land grants. (One writer noted that whereas Bowie was “hardly alone in forging grants…he worked on an almost industrial scale compared to others.”)13 Through a labyrinth of forged documents, Bowie managed to make himself one of the largest landowners in Louisiana—garnering a total holding of 45,700 acres. An official smelled the rat, but Bowie managed to extract all the suspicious documents before they landed him in jail.
Land attracted small farmers to Indiana, then Illinois, then on to Minnesota and Wisconsin. Assuming that the minimal amount of land for self-sufficiency was forty to fifty acres, it took only a few generations before a father would not bequeath to his son enough land to make a living, forcing countless American young men and their families westward. Southern legal traditions, with vestigial primogeniture, or the custom of bequeathing the entire estate to the eldest son, resulted in fewer landowners—and a smaller population—but much larger estates. Men like Bowie thus dealt not only in land, but also in slaves needed to run the plantations. Whether it was the Yazoo in Mississippi or the forested sections of Michigan, land hunger drew Americans steadily westward.
Abundant land—and scarce labor—meant that even in agriculture, farmer-businessmen substituted new technology for labor with every opportunity. Handmade hoes, shovels, rakes, and the like, soon gave way to James Wood’s metal plow, whose interchangeable parts made for easy repair. This, and other designs, were mass-produced by entrepreneurs like Charles Lane of Chicago, so that by the 1830s metal plows were commonplace. Pittsburgh had “two factories…making 34,000 metal plows a year even in the 1830s,” and by 1845, Massachusetts had seventy-three plow-manufacturing firms turning out more than 60,000 farm implements a year.14 No more important, but certainly more celebrated, the famous McCormick reaper, perfected by Cyrus McCormick, opened up the vast prairies to “agribusiness.” McCormick began on the East Coast, but relocated to Chicago to be closer to the land boom. After fashioning his first reaper in 1834, he pumped up production until his factory churned out 4,000 reapers annually. In an 1855 exposition in Paris, McCormick stunned Europeans by harvesting an acre of oats in twenty-one minutes, or one third of the time taken by Continental machines.15
If land provided the allure for most of those who moved to the Mississippi and beyond, a growing, but important, substrata of mechanics, artisans, inventors, salesmen, and merchants soon followed, adapting their businesses to the new frontier demands.
No one captured the restless, inventive spirit better than Eli Whitney. After working on his father’s farm in Connecticut, Whitney enrolled in and graduated from Yale. There he met Phineas Miller, who managed some South Carolina properties for Catherine Greene, and Miller invited the young Whitney to take a position as a tutor to the Greene children on a plantation. His cotton gin—in retrospect a remarkably simple device—shook the world, causing an explosion in textile production.
In 1810, 119 pounds of cotton per day could be cleaned, and by 1860 that number had risen to 759 per day.16 Mrs. Greene soon came to say of Whitney, “He can make anything.” Indeed he could. Whitney soon tried his hand at musket production, using a largely unskilled workforce. What emerged was the American system of manufacturing, which served as the basis for a powerful system.17
Advances in mass production, steam power, and management techniques coalesced in the textile mills founded in New England by Samuel Slater, a British emigrant. Slater built a small mill in Rhode Island with the support of Moses Brown, a Providence candle manufacturer, first using water wheels, then replacing water with steam power. Within twenty years, Slater and his close circle of associates had 9,500 spindles and controlled nearly half of all American spinning mills—Brown even wrote to his children that the mill founders had “cotton mill fever.”18 Francis Cabot Lowell exceeded even Slater’s achievements in texile production, employing young girls who lived on site. Lowell further advanced the organizational gains made by Whitney and Slater.19
Gains in manufacturing resulted in part from widespread application of steam power. Steam revolutionized transportation, with Robert Fulton’s Clermont demonstrating steam propulsion on water in 1807.
Within a decade, Cornelius Vanderbilt began using steam technology to cut costs in the New York–New Jersey ferry traffic, and steam power started to find its way to inland waterways. Entrepreneurs had already started to shift the focus of water travel in the interior from natural rivers to man-made canals. The period from 1817 to 1844 has been referred to as the canal era, in which some 4,000 miles of canals were constructed at a cost of $200 million. States collaborated with private interests in many of these projects, usually by guaranteeing state bond issues in case of default. But some of the earliest, and best, were built by private businesses, such as the Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts and the Santee and Cooper Canal in South Carolina. The most famous, the Erie Canal, linked the Hudson River and Lake Erie and opened up the upstate New York markets to the coast. Unlike some of the other early privately financed canals, the Erie was built at state expense over an eight-year period, and its completion was so anticipated that the state collected an advance $1 million in tolls before the canal was even opened.20 It was a massive engineering feat: the canal was 40 feet wide, 4 feet deep, and 363 miles long—all bordered by towpaths to allow draft animals to pull barges and flatboats;
86 locks were used to raise and lower boats 565 feet. When the Erie opened in 1825, it earned 8 percent on its $9 million from the 3,000 boats traversing the canal. After the board of commissioners approved enlarging the canal in 1850, it reached its peak tonnage in 1880.21
Steam power soon replaced animal power on all the nation’s waterways. Well before steam power was common, however, canals had driven down the costs of shipping from twenty cents per ton mile to a tenth of that amount, and even a “noted financial failure like the Ohio Canal yielded a respectable 10 percent social rate of return.”22 Steam vessels on the Great Lakes, where ships occasionally exceeded 1,000 tons, and in the case of the City of Buffalo, displaced a whopping 2,200 tons, also played an important role. By midcentury, “The tonnage on the Mississippi River and on the Great Lakes exceeded that of all shipping from New York City by over 200 percent.”23 The canal era provided the first model of state government support of large-scale enterprise (through bond guarantees), often with disastrous results. In the Panic of 1837, many states were pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by their canal-bond obligations.
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