2. Core Objectives
1. Summarize the major domestic political developments that
took place during Thomas Jefferson’s administration.
2. Describe how foreign events affected the United States
during the Jefferson and Madison administrations.
3. Explain the primary causes of the American decision to
declare war on Great Britain in 1812.
4. Analyze the most significant outcomes of the War of 1812 on
the United States.
3. Chapter 7 Overview:
Impressment
In this video, author David Shi introduces
the issue of impressment and its role in
bringing about the War of 1812.
4. The New Early Republic in 1800
• The United States in 1800
• Population still about 90 percent rural
• Farming and landownership still priorities for many
Americans
• Economic growth
• Increasingly integrated market economy
5. Jeffersonian Republicanism
• Washington, D.C.
• A new federal city
• Jefferson’s inauguration
• Jeffersonian republicanism
• The “people’s president”
• A more democratic culture
• Jefferson as a contradictory
genius
6. Jefferson in Office
• Response to the Judiciary Act of 1801
• Marbury v. Madison (1803)
• Establishment of judicial review
• Chief justice John Marshall
• Jefferson’s economic policies
• Kept many Federalist policies in place,
but with some changes
• First national government to reduce its
own power and size
16. The War of 1812 Begins
• Causes of the War of 1812 (1812–
1815)
• American shipping rights
• Western settlements
• National honor
17. Fighting the War of 1812
• Native American conflicts
• The Battle of Tippecanoe
• Tecumseh’s Indian Confederacy
• The lust for Canada and Florida
• War fever
• War preparations
18. The War of 1812: A Continental War
• Fronts
• Southeast
• At sea
• Great Lakes
19. Fighting the War in the North
• The war in the north
• Invading Canada
• Oliver Hazard Perry and the
Great Lakes
20. The War of 1812: Later Stages
• The Creek War
• Fighting along the Chesapeake Bay
• The burning of Washington, D.C.
21. The War of 1812: Later Stages, continued
• “The Star-Spangled Banner”
• The Battle of Lake Champlain
24. Aftermath of the War
• The Treaty of Ghent (1814)
• Maintained the prewar status quo
• After this war, U.S.–British relations improved.
• The Battle of New Orleans (January 8, 1815)
• The Hartford Convention
• The war’s legacies
The population of the United States continued to expand in the decades after the Revolution. One of the areas experiencing the greatest amount of growth was the trans-Appalachian region.
While most Americans continued to work as farmers, an increasing number began to make a living in emerging markets such as textiles, banking, and construction.
Figure caption: The Capitol Building. This 1806 watercolor was painted by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, its architect, and inscribed to Thomas Jefferson. A tall dome would be added later, after the building was damaged in the War of 1812.
Although John Adams was the first president to live in Washington, District of Columbia (D.C.—a federal district set apart from the states), and the “Executive Mansion” (later known as the White House), Jefferson was the first president to be inaugurated in the new capitol city. At the time, Washington, D.C., was not complete, but Congress and the Supreme Court had followed the president there nonetheless.
Jefferson’s election was the first time the presidency had shifted from one party to another. No one was quite sure what would happen when this occurred. His election had been extremely close and had been thrown into the House of Representatives after no candidate won the electoral vote. The peaceful transition between parties, despite the highly contested election, set a positive precedent for the young nation.
Throughout his time in office, Jefferson deliberately treated people with “republican simplicity.” He sought to highlight the differences between the simpler, more frugal Republicans and the more formal, aristocratic Federalists.
The Republican party appealed to the White, male voters who had recently gained suffrage and the right to hold office, as most states lowered or eliminated their earlier requirements. Many leaders were concerned about the rise of political power and participation among the often uneducated or illiterate men during this period. They worried that the democratization of politics would lead to mob rule by a misinformed, gullible electorate. Republican party leaders like Jefferson sought to draw these men into the Republican party. Federalists such as John Adams, on the other hand, believed that the more educated, wealthy, or “well-born” members of society—the “natural aristocracy”—should govern.
Jefferson, like most humans, was complex in the way that he viewed and interacted with the world. An Enlightenment philosopher who argued for rights using words such as “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, he was also a slave owner who viewed African Americans as unequal to White Americans. His complicated relationship with Sarah “Sally” Hemings (a half-sister on their father’s side of his then-deceased wife Martha) is one indication of Jefferson’s conflicted understanding of what equality and freedom meant and whom he viewed as included or excluded from those rights.
Photo credit: Library of Congress
Figure caption: At Leisure at Monticello. A scene of Jefferson’s Monticello estate, showing his descendants playing in the garden. Designed by Jefferson himself after the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio, Monticello stands as a testament to Jefferson’s classical tastes.
How did Jefferson’s aristocratic lifestyle conflict with his persona as the “people’s president”?
Jefferson’s administration faced its first serious crisis with the controversial effort to repeal the judgeships established by the Judiciary Act of 1801 and the resulting landmark case of Marbury v. Madison (1803). The Federalists had passed the Judiciary Act of 1801 just before Adams left office and the Jeffersonian Republicans rose to power. After his defeat for reelection, Adams and the Federalist-controlled Senate had used the legislation to appoint people to positions on the judiciary across the land. This meant that the judicial branch was the only Federalist-controlled branch of government, while the Republicans controlled the presidency and Congress. All that was needed for the Adams-appointed justices to take their position was their letters of appointment, which Jefferson’s new administration refused to deliver.
William Marbury was one of those who failed to receive the letter. When secretary of state James Madison refused to give it to him, he sued Madison, stating that the Supreme Court, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, had the power to force Madison to give it to him (known as a writ of mandamus). In a surprise move, the Supreme Court, led by Adams-appointed chief justice John Marshall (who was also Jefferson’s cousin), refused to side with Marbury and instead declared section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 unconstitutional, as laws of Congress cannot give the Supreme Court powers. Although it was a loss for Marbury, it was a win for the Supreme Court, as it appropriated a power that it had not been given. This power became known as judicial review: the Supreme Court’s ability to review the constitutional validity of a legislative act.
As would be the custom in the new party system, Jefferson adjusted the policies of the previous administrations to his viewpoint. As a case in point, although he detested the Bank of the United States, he came to understand the important role it played in the financial dealings of the nation. Jefferson’s administration sought to limit federal spending to help pay off as much of the national debt as possible. Western land sales and federal tariffs, along with a generally prosperous economy during Jefferson’s first term, combined with the reduction of federal spending to support the effort to pay off the national debt.
Photo credit: Art Collection 2/Alamy Stock Photo
Figure caption: The Cession of New Orleans. The United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoléon in 1803, effectively doubling the nation’s size. In this contemporary watercolor, the French flag is raised over the city of New Orleans one final time, soon to be replaced with the American flag.
Why was the city of New Orleans an important acquisition for the United States?
Jefferson’s vision for America’s future, as outlined in the 1790s and the early 1800s, included a nation made up primarily of self-sufficient family farms. As such, Jefferson and his party generally looked south and west (mostly between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, in lands that Britain ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Paris of 1783) and were popular among people from those regions. Land sales in the west helped with the effort to pay off the national debt and the opportunity to purchase even more land, this time west of the Mississippi River, helped double the land claims of the United States in 1803.
New Orleans was an ethnically and racially diverse city that had become a hub of trade in the Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf of Mexico. Many Americans living in the west (Tennessee and Kentucky, especially) depended on transporting their goods on the Mississippi River through New Orleans, rather than the more costly, difficult route across the Appalachian Mountains to the eastern United States or eastern U.S. ports for shipment to Europe.
Problems with the control of New Orleans had existed since the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Jefferson sent a delegation to buy it from the current owner, France. Instead of just agreeing to let America buy it, Napoleon offered all of the Louisiana Territory for $15 million (about 3 cents per acre). No one knew just how much land was involved.
Napoléon had planned to use Louisiana as a food and supply source if his French troops had successfully retaken Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Instead, however, the army he sent to recapture the former French colony had been devastated by malaria and yellow fever. Saint-Domingue had been a prominent French colony producing valuable amounts of sugar with enslaved labor. In 1791, Touissaint L’Ouverture and other revolutionaries had declared independence and the creation of the Republic of Haiti. Disease and determined fighters helped keep Haiti free, and it became the first independent nation to be formed by a documented successful slave rebellion. The successful rebellion in Haiti stoked fears among slave owners in the United States, Spanish-then-French Louisiana, and nearby Caribbean islands with large enslaved populations.
When he received the French offer to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States, Jefferson was unsure if he had the constitutional authority to purchase territory. He also faced political challenges as Federalists (many of whom were from New England) argued against the Louisiana purchase. After grappling with both issues, Jefferson asked Congress to ratify the purchase treaty, and it passed on October 17, 1803. The ceremony to formally cede the territory to the United States was held on December 20, 1803; with it, the United States gained claims (contested by the many Native Americans in the region) to about 875,000 square miles of land.
Photo Credit: Historic Collection/Alamy Stock Photo
Map: Explorations of the Louisiana Purchase, 18041807.
How did the United States acquire the Louisiana Purchase?
What was the mission of Lewis and Clark’s expedition?
What were the consequences of Lewis and Clark’s reports about the western territory?
Figure caption: Aaron Burr. Burr graduated from what is now Princeton University at the age of sixteen, where he studied theology. After the United States gained its independence, Burr changed his focus to law, a profession he would return to after his failed conspiracy to take control of the Louisiana Territory ruined his hopes of government service.
The Louisiana Purchase helped further strengthen political support for Jefferson and his Republican party in the southern and western parts of the United States, which worried Federalist leaders, whose power base was in New England.
New England Federalists sought to woo then–Vice President Burr and his state of New York to realign with them by supporting his bid for election as governor of New York. Alexander Hamilton, who knew Burr well, was one of several leading Federalists who voiced concerns about the scheme. When Burr lost the election, he blamed Hamilton and challenged him to a duel. Burr shot Hamilton, who died from his wounds the next day.
In 1804, the Twelfth Amendment (ratified in 1803) required for the first time that presidential and vice presidential ballots be separated in the Electoral College to avoid problems like the series of ties in the 1800 election. The Republicans chose Jefferson as their presidential candidate and George Clinton of New York as his vice presidential running mate. The Federalists chose Charles C. Pinkney of South Carolina and Rufus King of New York as their presidential and vice presidential candidates. Jefferson won reelection.
Burr had fled to his daughter’s home in South Carolina and then to Europe after Hamilton’s death in the duel and New York’s attempt to charge him with murder. He returned to the United States and was accused of plotting with General James Wilkinson (then serving as governor of the Louisiana Territory) to separate part of the southern Mississippi River Valley region from the United States and make it an independent republic. Chief justice John Marshall presided over Burr’s trial for treason. Jefferson wanted revenge against Burr, whereas Marshall insisted on a strict interpretation of treason and the jury acquitted Burr.
Photo Credit: The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo
Figure caption: Slavery’s Endurance in South Carolina. Enslaved men, women, and children on a South Carolina plantation gathered for a photograph in 1862—a reminder of slavery’s persistence in some parts of the United States decades after the bill outlawing the importation of enslaved people.
One of the most important ramifications of Jefferson’s administration was the abolishment of the United States’ participation in the international slave trade; the importation of enslaved Africans was banned as of January 1, 1808.
Photo credit: Timothy H. O’Sullivan/Digital image courtesy of the Getty Museum’s Open Content Program
Figure caption: Preparation for War to Defend Commerce. Shipbuilders, like those pictured here constructing the Philadelphia, played an important role in the war efforts against America’s many rivals.
In the early 1800s, American shipping was caught in the crossfire of the war between Britain and Napoleon’s France. As Napoleon’s troops took over most of continental Europe, the war increasingly impacted American shipping.
Both sides wanted the United States to trade only with them and would seize American shipping to prevent it going from other ports. Because the United States was neutral, this was against international law, but since the United States did not have the power to stop it, it continued unabated.
The British impressment (force into labor) of U.S. sailors, whom they considered to be British citizens, into service on British naval vessels especially angered Americans. Around 6,200 U.S. sailors were forced into service with the British Royal Navy between 1803 and 1811.
Tensions between the United States and Britain over impressment were heightened on June 22, 1807, when the U.S. Chesapeake was attacked by the British warship HMS Leopard. Jefferson, like Adams in the Quasi War, did his best to help keep the United States out of war, but calls for war grew across the nation.
Photo credit: Library of Congress
Figure caption: Ograbme, or, the American Snapping-Turtle. A merchant trying to trade with the British is held back by a so-called Ograbme (embargo spelled backward) in this political cartoon from 1807.
Why was Jefferson’s Embargo Act so unpopular?
In an attempt to “starve” the aggressor nations into respecting U.S. neutrality, Jefferson instituted an embargo on all U.S. shipping. The only country that was truly hurt by this embargo was the United States itself, although nonimportation helped spur the creation of more U.S.-based industries over time.
Photo credit: North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy Stock Photo
Figure caption: Anti-Jefferson Sentiment. This 1807 Federalist cartoon compares Washington (left, flanked by a British lion and American eagle) and Jefferson (right, with a snake and a lizard). Below Jefferson are volumes of French philosophy, while Washington’s volumes simply read: Law, Order, and Religion.
James Madison, Jefferson’s secretary of state and another Virginian Republican, was elected to the presidency in the election of 1808. His administration was characterized by the tensions with Britain and France and by the War of 1812. Dolley Madison, his wife, helped counterbalance the talented but introverted James Madison. Her efforts as hostess helped make her popular in Washington, D.C., and she is still considered one of America’s great first ladies.
Madison was tricked into repealing the Embargo Act against France to force the British to do the same, while France had no intention of upholding the agreement. England agreed as well, but not before the U.S. declaration of war against England was approved by Congress on June 5, 1812. The war was most popular in the southern and western parts of the United States and least popular in New England.
Photo credit: Sarin Images/GRANGER
Figure caption: British Impressment. Three American sailors are forced to abandon their ship and join the British forces in this contemporary print. This humiliating practice was common in the years before the War of 1812 and put merchant sailors at great risk.
How did Congress use impressment as one of its justifications for the war?
The main reason for declaring war with Great Britain was in response to the violation of American shipping rights. The war was most popular in southern and western states, which were also predominately Republican, and least popular in New England, where there were more Federalists. Another cause of the war was the instigation of Native Americans by British citizens to attack the states. The idea of upholding the nation’s honor against British aggression also seems to have been important to many Americans who supported the war. Some Americans were also interested in the conquest of Canada and Florida.
Photo credit: Sarin Images/GRANGER
Figure caption: Tecumseh. A leader of the Shawnee, Tecumseh tried to unite Native American nations in opposition to European culture and in defense of their ancestral lands; he was later killed in 1813 at the Battle of the Thames.
Shawnee leaders and brothers, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa (sometimes called “the Prophet”) worked to create an alliance of Indians against further U.S. encroachment into their territory in the Ohio River Valley. This provoked a U.S. response under the command of William Henry Harrison, who goaded Tecumseh’s forces into attacking him.
The Battle of Tippecanoe ended, along with Tecumseh’s dream of an Indian Confederacy, in a bloody disaster for the Native Americans.
Since the Revolution, some Americans had harbored the hope that British Canada would leave and join the United States. The War of 1812 provided an opportunity to attempt to take Canada from Britain and East Florida from Spain. Neither attempt was successful.
“War Hawks” were mostly southern and western young congressmen who promoted the war as a way to defend the nation’s honor and to deal with tensions with neighboring Native American nations in the South and West.
After war was declared, Congress adjourned without providing financial support for the conflict. The existing army was relatively weak, but the navy was in better condition, having recently fought the pirates. Jefferson’s, and later Madison’s, theory of a weak central government made meeting financial obligations during the war difficult.
Photo credit: Library of Congress
Figure caption: The Battle of Queenston Heights. The artist John David Kelly rendered the devastating American defeat at the Battle of Queenston Heights in this late nineteenth-century painting. The British can be seen in the foreground, fighting alongside Canadian militiamen and their Native American allies against the American forces.
What factors foiled Madison’s plan to invade British Canada?
After raising an army, the only logical place to use it was against the British in Canada. Some “war hawks” believed that many Canadians would join the fighting because they wanted to be part of the United States; instead, most French Canadians fought against the Americans, whom they viewed as invaders. The United States would launch three strikes into the territory, only to have all three fail.
In general, the British won most of the land battles when the United States tried to invade Canada, whereas the U.S. warships under Oliver Hazard Perry were more successful fighting on the Great Lakes and in the area around Lake Erie.
Photo credit: American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA/Bridgeman Images
Figure caption: The Burning of the Capitol. In this illustration by Joseph Boggs Beale, Washington, D.C., residents evacuate the city as the White House and the Capitol blaze with flames in the background.
The southern front of the war focused mostly on the Creek War and then grew to include the British attempt to capture New Orleans. American claims over lands also claimed by the Creek Nation caused conflict and division between the Upper Creeks (sometimes known as the Red Sticks) and the Lower Creeks. The Upper Creeks wanted to stop American encroachment, while the Lower Creeks sought compromise and peace with the Americans. After Upper Creek troops attacked Fort Mims and killed hundreds of Americans (White and African Americans, including men, women, and children), a Tennessee major general, Andrew Jackson, was dispatched to retaliate. By catching the Upper Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson was able to break the power of the Creek Nation in Alabama and Georgia.
The third front of the war included naval battles at sea, a strong British naval presence in American waters along the Atlantic coast, and, eventually, the capture and burning of Washington, D.C. The U.S. Navy, which, along with the army, had been underfunded by Jeffersonian Republicans in the decade leading up to the War of 1812, could not compete effectively with the much larger and better supplied British naval force that was sent to the region. The British presence in the Chesapeake enabled about 4,000 enslaved individuals to flee to safety and freedom on British vessels. Slave owners in the region reacted with fear and horror when they learned in September 1813 that the British had organized an all-Black Colonial Marines unit of about 400 troops.
On August 24, 1814, British troops were able to seize and burn Washington, D.C. The capture of the nation’s capital was mostly a victory of morale and a form of revenge for the earlier American burning of York, the capital of British Canada at the time. Dolley Madison famously saved a portrait of George Washington and a copy of the Declaration of Independence when she and her husband fled the city.
Photo credit: Sarin Images/GRANGER—All rights reserved
Figure caption: A Lesser-Known Stanza. The third stanza of Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner” celebrated the triumph of the “broad stripes and bright stars” over enslaved Africans who had aligned with the British in the course of seeking their freedom.
Embarrassed and shocked by the capture of their capital, many American leaders feared that the war would end with the dissolution of the union. Instead, it seems to have inspired greater efforts by Americans to defend their nation against the British invasion, as evidenced by what happened at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland. Around 1,000 Americans held the fort against a force of about fifty British warships with 4,200 British soldiers (including the Colonial Marines, a unit made up of former enslaved men from Maryland and Virginia).
The siege of this fort moved Francis Scott Key to write the “Star Spangled Banner.” The poem set to an English drinking tune was adopted as the national anthem of the United States in 1931. Most Americans sing only the first stanza of the song and are unaware that it has additional stanzas or that the question at the end of each stanza is answered at the end of the song. Key’s third stanza shows his unwillingness to understand why enslaved Black Americans would side with the British (in the Colonial Marines) in exchange for freedom.
The victory at Fort McHenry combined with news of an American victory at Lake Champlain to encourage U.S. hopes after the burning of Washington, D.C. An invasion attempt from Canada was stopped by a naval battle on Lake Champlain when Commodore Thomas Macdonough’s flotilla engaged and defeated the British ships there, thus providing cover for the army.
Photo credit: Library of Congress
Map: Major Northern Campaigns of the War of 1812
How did the War of 1812 begin?
What was the American strategy in regard to Canada?
Describe the battle that is the subject of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Map: Major Southern Campaigns of the War of 1812
Why did Jackson march into Florida on his way to New Orleans?
Why did he have the advantage in the Battle of New Orleans?
Why was the Battle of New Orleans important to the Treaty of Ghent?
Almost from the moment the war had begun, efforts to end it had been underway. While Napoléon still controlled much of Europe, England was not interested in fighting a war across the Atlantic. When the news about the victory for the United States on Lake Champlain arrived, they decided the war was not worth the cost. U.S. and British diplomats met in Ghent, Belgium, to negotiate a peace treaty in 1814. The treaty was signed Christmas Eve, 1814.
News of the Treaty of Ghent had not yet reached the British or American forces at New Orleans by December 12, when a third British invasion attempt (the first was from Canada south, and the second was along the Chesapeake) was aimed at New Orleans. There, Jackson and a group of about 4,500 Americans of diverse backgrounds were prepared to defend the valuable port and successfully defeated the British on January 8, 1815, despite being outnumbered two to one. Although the Battle of New Orleans occurred after the Treaty of Ghent had officially ended the war, it gave Americans a victory to celebrate and helped spur a wave of patriotism and national pride. It also helped launch Jackson to national fame.
Made up of disgruntled Federalists, the Hartford Convention, which met December 15, 1814, proposed a list of demands that, if not met, might cause New England to secede from the union. These demands arrived in Washington, D.C., the same time as news of the victory at New Orleans. The result was that the Federalists suffered the final death blow to their party due to this embarrassment.
The War of 1812 has been considered the nation’s second war for independence, as the American states were able to stand against the largest army in the world and defeat it. What would also emerge from this time period would be the first industrial revolution, as during the embargo and shipping crisis, Americans looked inward to get their manufactured goods.
Figure caption: Jackson’s Army Defends New Orleans. Unaware that the war was over, in January 1815 Andrew Jackson led his troops and the enslaved people on loan from southern planters to a decisive victory over the British at New Orleans.
What was the diplomatic and symbolic importance of Jackson’s victory?
Photo credit: Library of Congress
