As the story goes, the War of 1812 began as
mostly a reaction to Great Britain’s restrictions to American trade and the
young nation’s ambition to expand westward.
In the way of this last aim was British colonial lands. In the last posting, it was described as a
short war, if any war can be short. It
lasted from June 1812 to February 1815.
And its conclusion led to a relatively unified time in the US, the Era
of Good Feelings. But one cannot say it
was completely unified. One region, New
England, was not too happy with the war.
So
upset were New Englanders that representatives of the five states (Maine was
not yet a state) met in secret at was called the Harford Convention. On the agenda was the following:
· concerns over the three-fifth compromise – the provision
in the Constitution that allowed the southern states to count slaves as
three-fifth a person for determining the South’s representation in Congress,
· the requirement to have a two-thirds vote of agreement to
admit new states, declarations of war, and establishing trade restrictions
(seen as weakening the central government),
· the Louisiana Purchase, and
· the Embargo of 1807
While generally the Federalist Party favored a
strong central government, in terms of these issues, the Federalist attendants at
the conference felt Washington was exerting too much power. Ironically, that power was inordinately in the
hands of the South, a region that supported strong state government. But then fate played a nasty turn on these delegates.
Down
in New Orleans, Andrew Jackson captured the imagination of his countrymen/women
with a decisive victory over the British and the fact the peace treaty ending
the war had already been signed did not diminish the battle’s romantic hold. This reaction was so strong that it led to
discrediting what the Federalist dissent and helped mightily to end that
political party – or so the story goes although that simple assertion is
questioned as being an exaggeration.
For the purposes here, though, the end of the
Federalist Party is the relevant fact.
And one can dig a bit closer to what was going on with these malcontents
in New England. They were so upset over
their concerns that talk of succession was common among them. When word of such talk got out, one can say
that with the peace treaty all that successional sentiment was judged unpatriotic
and even seen as traitorous. After all, in
terms of the war, it gave Americans its national anthem and that cannot, by
association, hold the war too negatively.
If nothing else, the war gave Americans
the sense that they could successfully fend off any attack from Europe. That fact put the fact that Americans did not
accomplish any of the aims they sought in fighting the war, as not even being relevant. In addition, it gave them two heroes, Jackson
and William Henry Harrison, the former would establish the Democratic Party (more
or less an outgrowth of the Democratic-Republican Party), and the latter helped
establish the Whig Party.
The Whig Party would become the second
major party. Its viability extended from
the 1830s to the 1850s. And its initial impetus
was an opposition to Andrew Jackson. It
drew its members from the National Republican Party, the Anti-Masonic Party,
and Democrats that did not follow the general’s politics (some being former
Federalists who fell into the Democratic Party as being the only viable party
during the years following the War of 1812).
What finally set them off was during
Jackson’s Administration and its policies – anti-national bank and low protective
tariffs (tariffs protecting domestic manufacturers that were just getting
started and the importation of cheaper goods). The election that convinced them the Whigs had
to nationally unite occurred in 1836 when four of their candidates earned
electoral votes but could not deprive Jackson’s vice-president, Martin Van
Buren, his victory.
Since Van Buren was Jackson’s picked successor,
his term was seen as Jackson’s third term.
In 1840, the Whigs united under the candidacy of William Henry Harrison
and defeated Van Buren’s attempt at a second term. But fate would then play its part in steering
the new party in a bazaar fashion.
First, due to the longest inaugural
address in history given in inclement weather, the aged Harrison became ill and
died one month into his term. His vice
president, John Tyler took office and shortly found himself at odds with the
other prominent Whigs in Congress. That
would be Henry Clay among other Whig leaders and their point of contention was
over the reestablishment of a national bank.
Jackson had terminated the first national
bank, 1791-1811, that Alexander Hamilton initiated during the Washington
Administration. The contingency of Whigs
led by Clay wanted to reestablish such a bank and were able to pass through
Congress various attempts to do so.
Tyler opposed such efforts.
This proposed bank provision reflected
not a dual sense of federalism, but a cooperative sense. The Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental
Relations, a present-day federal government entity funded by federal dollars,
makes a distinction in one of its publications.[1] That is the difference between a dual vision
of federalism and a cooperative vision one can detect in American history.
The dual vision holds to a federal model
in which each level of government – the central government and the state
government – mostly operate in different areas of governance, each respecting
the other in its realm. Of course, local
areas of concern would be the province of the state and national areas of
concern would be the province of the central government. Cooperative vision sees both levels overlapping
and cooperating among the various realms from local to national.
Using this distinction, Tyler had a dual
vision and Clay, in terms of banking, had a cooperative vision. Everyone agrees that up until the New Deal in
the 1930s, a dual vision prevailed, and since then, the cooperative vision has
over-taken the American approach to federalism.
This account’s concern over this history
can look at this structural debate as telling.
Both antagonists, along with Harrison, were originally Virginians (although
Clay represented Kentucky) and both were previously either Democrats or Democratic-Republicans. The split between Tyler and Clay started with
the Nullification Crisis, 1832-1833, that spurred from an antagonism toward a
national bank proposal and South Carolina’s reaction to it.
There, in opposition to a national bank,
their legislature passed an Ordinance of Nullification, 1832, stating that a state
had the right to nullify federal law within its borders. Tyler sided with the nullifiers, Clay did
not. President Jackson, by the way,
opposed this notion and threatened hangings for those who attempted to
implement the policy. Again, this debate
reflected, to a highly antagonistic level, the difference between the dual
view, the pro-nullification position, and the cooperative view, the
anti-nullification position.
President Tyler took on a strict
interpreter’s posture of the Constitution – what is called a strict
constructionist – and he felt the bank, especially as it was to be structured,
offended the federal character of the Constitution. He especially objected to the law’s provision
for the bank to have branches in several states.
As President, therefore, Tyler’s vetoes
of Clay’s bank bills and Clay’s obvious support of them were in line with their
respective positions and either began or heightened the tensions that would eventually
lead to the Civil War. Most of the
rhetoric that heated up the divisions within the US was mostly targeted over
this contention of states’ rights to govern their affairs. It wasn’t until the Civil War began that the
verbal barbs identified slavery as the main point of contention.
But this account’s review of this
national divide is still at the initiating stages. And the next posting will further describe
the role the Whig Party played. This
posting ends with Tyler and Clay at odds and Clay setting himself to displace
Tyler as the Whig candidate in 1844.
This will prove to be unhelpful in establishing the young party on solid
ground.
[1] The
Federal Role in the Federal System: The
Dynamics of Growth (Washington, DC: Advisory Commission on
Intergovernmental Relations, 1981).
No comments:
Post a Comment