The United States in 1836
The United States of America in 1837 could almost be said not to be a nation, at least in the sense that Europeans understood such entities. Instead of thinking of the centralized state it might one day become, it may be useful to visualize the United States as a collection of regions, loosely confederated, sharing commonalities of language, religion, customs, governance and recent history. Let us consider these regions separately before attempting to comprehend the larger issues.
New England, in the far north of the Atlantic coast, is the heartland of old English Puritan settlement. Dour and hardworking, the people of this region have turned from the stony and unproductive soil to new pursuits: rum, seafaring, ice and industry, to mention a few. As of 1836 the rum, sugar and slave trades are dying away, replaced by whaling, shipping and a broad range of manufactures, chief among which is the mass-production of cotton cloth. Profits are thriftily reinvested in roads, schools and banks. Politically the region tends to support the Whigs and leans toward internal improvement and away from western expansion.
The Mid-Atlantic region is centered upon the states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. New York City and Philadelphia are among the larger English-speaking cities on the planet, not as grand as London but comparable to mid-rank cities like Bristol and Birmingham. Industry is not the force it will later come to be; small-holding farms are the preferred livelihood for the majority of the population. Despite the discovery of vast coal fields and iron ore deposits, American industry remains centered on the small craftman’s workshop. Unable to compete in price or quality with wares from Britain, the region has strong support for the Protective Tariff. The port cities serve as gateways for travel west, either by water up the Hudson River and Erie Canal or overland along the Susquehana River to the headwaters of the Ohio River. The people are more likely to be descended from Dutch, Scot or Irish stock and tend to be less pious and harder-drinking than their New England neighbors.
The Upper South centers on Virginia, though it extends as far as Georgia. By culture and inclination the planter aristocracy patterns itself after the titled nobility of England. The religion of choice is high-church Anglican, directly related to the Church of England. Here plantation agriculture is the norm and slavery is well established. Old crops of indigo, rice and tobacco have given way to cotton, which has exhausted the soil and brought a number of fine old families to near-ruin. Some of these have returned to planting other crops; some profit from the banning of the slave trade by selling field hands to the new plantations in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Manufacturing nothing and dependent upon staple crops, the South bitterly resents the Tariff, desires low taxes and expenditures by government, depends on cheap and easy credit, and refuses to support any federally-funded internal improvements outside the Southern region. In general the South has been opposed to western expansion, but the market for slaves in the Gulf States is causing many planters to rethink their position on the issue.
In all three Atlantic regions the population density is greatest at the seashore and thins rapidly with each mile traveled inland. New York City, Philadelphia, Boston and to a lesser degree Baltimore offer many of the amenities of European cities, but outside their limits lie only scattered villages and isolated farms. By the time a traveler reaches the Appalachian mountains he might journey for days without encountering a single farmstead. Population increases again in Ohio, especially along the waterways of the Great Lakes and the Ohio River, and decreases with each westward mile until the frontier of the Missouri River is reached. Without the city of St Louis – scarcely five thousand strong – Missouri would not qualify for statehood. And beyond Missouri lies a country almost unknown to Europeans.
The Gulf South is new, raw and rapidly becoming impatiently rich; the sole exception is Louisiana, which is old, corrupt, rich and indolent in the crescent around New Orleans. Elsewhere in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and the northern half of Louisiana a man may hack a field from a forest, raise up a crop of cotton and in five years be a lord in a manor house overseeing hundreds of acres and nearly as many slaves. Many of these nouveau-riche planters are in debt to their eyes, but they build extravagant homes and live like kings. In a decade or so, when the cotton has leached the soil of nutrients, they will move west in search of new land and a new fortune. These are the men who agitate for the westward expansion of slavery.
The states that are emerging from the old Northwest Territory – Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and to a degree Kentucky and Tennessee – are peopled by a mix of small farmers, craftsmen and townsfolk. Whether the economy is based on wheat and cattle or hogs and corn, the people are quietly and modestly prosperous. The great exceptions are the cities of Chicago and St Louis, both hubs of water-borne transportation and passageways for immigrants streaming farther west. These are rough, raw places – frontier boom towns where incomparable fortunes are daily made and lost.
Immigrants flowing up the Hudson River and Erie Canal can embark on ships at a number of Great Lakes ports. From there they can venture into the unclaimed vastness of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Peopled largely by hardy Scandinavians and Germans, this region is growing rapidly and will soon be split into new states. Politically and socially the inhabitants have most in common with the residents of northern Ohio and Illinois.
West of Missouri stretches the Great American Desert; a vast plain of sod so deeply rooted in grass that no plow can break it. Uncrossed by any major river this enormous tract rolls west to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Expectations are that this region – perhaps as large as the entire settled United States – will remain undeveloped as a reservation for the indigenous Indian tribes. Passage across it to the fertile coast of Oregon is dangerous and uncertain.
Politically the nation is divided along economic but not regional lines: both Whigs and Democrats (or National Republicans and Democrat Republicans) are to be found in every state and region of the country.
The Whigs were born as an opposition party to counter the Democratic party machine and the administration of Andrew Jackson. As such they are less a coherent political party than a loose coalition of interests that can be mobilized around a few core issues. They approve of modest, restrained growth and oppose rapid westward expansion, fearing the centrifugal forces thus unleashed would rip the country apart. A national bank to control and regulate credit is highly esteemed by Whigs, as are a high price for the sale of public land in the west and the use of federal funds derived from land sales and the high tariff for road construction, harbor improvements and other public works. Henry Clay’s American System (see also) is the heart, soul and Holy Text of the American Whigs.
For more than a decade the Democratic party has been on the rise and it shows little evidence of impending decline. Given voice and heart by Andrew Jackson, the Democrats are the small-government party of the frontier: no national bank, easy credit, cheap or free public land, little or no tariff, rapid westward expansion and little if any expenditure by the government. Many of the measures enacted by the Jackson administration have rebounded to contrary effect from that which was intended. The destruction of the Bank of the United States was one such, as it brought on the grave economic depression that led voters to turn away from Jackson’s hand-picked successor, Martin Van Buren.
Still, the incoming Clay administration will have a difficult time accomplishing its goals, for the House of Representatives retains a Democratic majority, and in the Senate the Whig coalition is thin and delicate. In the years to come, no-one can doubt that the fabled powers of the Great Compromiser, Henry Clay, will be sorely tested.
Cited from the databases of the Knights Temporal, reference: Successful American Revolution Timeline, Second Generation After Founding, General Information.
