The United States, 1763-2001

Tim Clancey, Simon Mosley, John Spiller, Stephen Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134437399
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

This book takes a new approach to teaching and learning early US history from 1763 to 2001 at A level. It meets the needs of teachers and students studying for today's revised AS and A2 exams.

In a unique style, The United States, 1763-2001 focuses on the key topics within the period. Each topic is then comprehensively explored to provide background, essay writing advice and examples, source work and historical skills exercises.

The key topics featured include:

* the struggle for the Constitution, 1763-1877
* the American Civil War
* Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal
* foreign policy, 1890-1991
* civil rights, 1863 - 1992.

Using essay styles and source exercises from each of the exam boards - AQA, Edexcel and OCR - this book is an essential text for students and teachers.

Chapter 1

An Introduction to the Period

Independence

In the mid-eighteenth century the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies along the Atlantic seaboard of America still regarded themselves as British, but the society in which they lived was far from similar to that in Britain, and in fact major differences had emerged between northern and southern colonies, with such issues as slavery having a profound effect upon the diversity of life in the Americas. The end, in 1763, of the French and Indian War (or Seven Years War, depending on one’s perspective), changed the relationship between the colonies and the mother country, but rather than putting relations on a firmer footing it hastened the process by which the colonies became independent.

The British had no plans to destroy liberty in North America and until the winter of 1775/6 very few colonists favoured independence; yet between 1775 and 1781 the Americans, with the help of the French, defeated the greatest military power in the world at that time and achieved their independence. In the years that followed independence there was initially little support for the expansion of central power and the writing of a new constitution. The ‘Founding Fathers’ however, who met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, changed all of that and by the end of 1789 the Constitution had been ratified, and George Washington had been elected the first President of the US. The new Constitution and accompanying Bill of Rights ensured that the American Revolution would be a strictly political event, with the social order remaining firmly intact. It contained compromises on major issues such as slavery, the representation of the large and small states, the extent of federal power, and trade; but they were not all compromises which could be laid to rest, and in the years to come the struggle for the Constitution would almost destroy the Union it had created.

Expansion, war and Reconstruction

The first half of the nineteenth century was dominated by westwards expansion, with two large tracts of land accruing to the US as a result of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the buying of land from Mexico following the peace treaty of 1848. As territories further west applied to join the Union as states, the question of whether they would be ‘slave’ or ‘free’ states became a thorny issue, particularly as abolitionists, who opposed slavery on moral grounds, grew more vocal. Until the 1850s, when the Whig Party collapsed and the Republican Party came into existence, the party system that had evolved from the end of the eighteenth century managed to prevent slavery from becoming the sectional issue it had always threatened to become. Anti-Catholicism moved from centre stage and gave way to the issue of slavery, which became linked to that of states’ rights versus federal rights, and also to wider questions on the nature of individual freedom, culminating in eleven Southern slave states leaving the Union in the months following Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860.

In the decades before the American Civil War (1861–5) the beginnings of industrial development had been more noticeable in the North and it was this greater capacity for production of the materials of war that allowed the North to make more guns and boats than the South. The larger population of the North also allowed it to recruit more soldiers, and these advantages ultimately proved to be crucial to the outcome of the war.

The war was to prove a watershed in terms of resolving some of the issues over which the Constitution had attempted compromise. Slavery was abolished, and the supremacy of federal rights over states’ rights was secured, along with the future dominance of the North and the Republican Party. Not all Americans however would be reconciled to the verdict the war had brought, and the period of Reconstruction following war witnessed prolonged bitterness on the part of Southern whites, as well as the first impeachment of a President, and culminated in a ‘corrupt bargain’ in 1877 between Democrats and Republicans, largely at the expense of African Americans.

The rise to power – ‘boom and bust’

In the years between 1865 and the close of the century the US became the most powerful industrial nation in the world. The closing of the frontier in 1890 seemed to reinforce the dominance of industrialisation and urbanisation. The pejoratively termed ‘Gilded Age’ had been largely powered by massive immigration, and had brought with it great wealth for the few, social problems on a scale never seen before, and political corruption at the highest level. A kind of backlash came with the Progressives, who prompted greater state intervention to curb the worst excesses of the capitalist system and championed social and political reform.

The 1890s also saw early attempts at empire-building, with intervention in the Civil War in Spanish Cuba by which the US gained certain Caribbean colonies and power in the Pacific. The reluctance of the government to become involved in the First World War was finally overcome and the US emerged from isolation to play a crucial part in the outcome. America reaped the rewards of victory and was also soon to experience the industrial boom of the 1920s – a decade which also brought with it intolerance, repression, Prohibition and female suffrage. The prosperity of the 1920s however was not widely enough dispersed and this was partly what led to the Great Depression that haunted 1930s America. Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ was only partially successful, but demonstrated the extent to which federal government could intervene to improve quality of life and set a precedent for the post-war era. The prosperity of the country was ironically restored by a war that it had, once again, hoped to avoid, with the US eventually being shaken out of its isolationist complacency by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Cold War and beyond

With the advent of the Cold War, foreign policy took an anti-communist direction, against the backdrop of McCarthyism during the 1950s. The decade also brought major civil rights agitation particularly on the part of African Americans. In the 1960s, Kennedy and Johnson expanded government intervention but their domestic legislation was overshadowed by involvement in Vietnam. Watergate in turn overshadowed the cessation of hostilities with Vietnam, as well as the Nixon Presidency, and seriously undermined the faith of the American people in the way the country was governed. The years of Ford and Carter were followed by the emergence of the ‘New Right’, personified by Ronald Reagan. In 1992, in the aftermath of the LA riots that left 55 dead, Bill Clinton was elected President. He was a ‘New Democrat’ who claimed the era of ‘big government had ended’, but will be best remembered for being only the second President in US history to be impeached. Like Andrew Johnson before him, he may have survived the trial but the whole affair left a sour taste in the mouths of voters.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century the US could still be described as an ‘unfinished nation’, to borrow the title of Alan Brinkley’s excellent book. The US had emerged from the Cold War as the world’s only superpower but the richest 1 per cent of its population held 38 per cent of its wealth, and there were also signs that some of the lessons of the past had not been learned: a movement seeking reparations for the families of former black slaves strove to make its case; the number of black males in prison exceeded the number in higher education; and tens of thousands of neo-confederates continued to call for independence from the control of a federal government which had apparently ceased to represent Southern values; while the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and the repercussions of ‘9/11’ appear to have ushered in a new era for the United States and the wider world.

The fundamental aims of this textbook are to deal with the issues covered by the examination boards in a concise but interesting way. In many ways the Presidency, the wider federal government and the Constitution is all that Americans have in common, which is why history has often been written from the top down. We hope that in the following pages we have managed to do more than this, and have succeeded in raising issues that may provide students with the impetus to find out more about the fascinating history of the United States of America.

Chapter 2

The Struggle for the Constitution, 1763–1877

This chapter will cover the build-up to the War of Independence and the subsequent writing of the US Constitution. The problems that the Constitution failed to resolve will be examined, along with the changing nature of American society and politics. An assessment of the impact of the Constitution and its amendments on the political development of the US, the significance of the Civil War for the country, and the changing role of the Presidency will also be undertaken.

Historical background	Sources
Introduction The road to independence The winning of independence and subsequent problems Revising the Articles of Confederation The emergence of party rivalries Politics and constitutional disputes Amendments to the Constitution Judicial power Presidential powers The constitutional impact of the Civil War and its aftermath	1. The struggle to ratify the Constitution 2 The debate over the power of federal government Historical skills 1 Write your own constitution 2 A debate on the Constitution of 1787
Essays The writing of the Constitution The Constitution in practice The significance of the Civil War

Chronology

1754	French and Indian War began
1756	Seven Years War began
1763	Peace of Paris ended ‘Seven Years War’ between Britain and France
1764	Sugar Act
1765	Stamp Tax levied on colonists by British government Stamp Act Congress met at New York with nine colonies represented
1766	Stamp Act repealed by British but Declaratory Act confirmed subordinate status of colonies
1770	Boston Massacre – five colonists killed
1773	Boston Tea Party
1774	First Continental Congress met at Philadelphia with 12 colonies represented
1775	First shots fired at Lexington in War of Independence Second Continental Congress met at Philadelphia
1776	Declaration of Independence
1777	Articles of Confederation agreed by most states
1783	Treaty of Paris – Britain formally recognised US independence
1786	Shays’ Rebellion against taxes in Massachusetts
1787	Philadelphia Convention met and wrote the new Constitution
1789	George Washington chosen to be first President and First Congress elected
1798	Alien and Sedition Acts passed (impinged on free speech)
1798-9	Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions advocated nullification of federal laws by states
1800	Thomas Jefferson elected President
1802	Louisiana Purchase doubled size of US territory
1803	Supreme Court established right of judicial review to overturn an Act of Congress
1812	War of 1812 started against the British
1819	Florida acquired from Spain
1828	Andrew Jackson elected President
1845	Texas admitted to Union
1846	Oregon territory acquired
1846–7	War with Mexico
1848	Mexican land purchased
1860	Abraham Lincoln, first Republican to be elected President
1861	American Civil War began
1862	Homestead Act passed by Congress
1863	Emancipation Proclamation
1865	End of Civil War Lincoln assassinated 13th Amendment (abolished slavery)
1867	Andrew Johnson impeached but not found guilty
1868	Ulysses S. Grant elected President
1870	15th Amendment stated that right to vote could not be denied on grounds of race
1877	Compromise between supporters of Presidential candidates Hayes and Tilden

Part 1: Historical background

Introduction

By the middle of the eighteenth century there existed 13 colonies on the Atlantic seaboard of the North American continent all nominally under British rule. They had been established for a range of reasons in the seventeenth century, except for Georgia which was created in 1733 as a colony for deported debtors. Trade and profit had been the motivation for the setting up of New York, New Jersey and South Carolina, for example, while many of those who set up home in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Pennsylvania did so in order to practise their religious beliefs freely. The colonies each had different customs, currencies and laws, as well as varying climates, which all contributed to economic differences – including the use of African slaves in the southern colonies – and the possibility that one day they might unite to break the shackles of their mother country seemed highly unlikely.

The Treaty of Paris in 1763 has been a convenient event for historians who wish to study the birth of an independent United States of America, given that it formalised the end of the Seven Years War, but there were signs before 1763 that relations between the British and their American cousins were not exactly cordial. In the summer of 1754 a force of the Virginia militia was despatched under the command of a young colonel called George Washington to limit French expansion into the Ohio Valley. Washington’s surrender of Fort Necessity marked the beginning of what colonists called the French and Indian War though it was not until 1756 that the British became formally involved in military action against the French and their Indian allies. Many Americans had hoped the British might get involved sooner, but when they did finally appear, great offence was caused to the very colonists they were supposed to be protecting. The requisition of supplies, impressment of troops and reimposition of Crown authority caused a great deal of friction, and Prime Minister Pitt acted swiftly: reimbursing colonists for supplies; allowing the colonial assemblies to take control of recruitment; and sending greater numbers of soldiers from Britain. There is no doubt that the cessation of the struggle between France and Great Britain for global dominance marked a turning point, and in the aftermath of the war, relations between the 13 colonies and their mother country began to decline markedly. For the British, the defeat of the French was expected to give the Crown greater power in America; whereas for the American colonists, the French defeat seemed to reduce their dependence on Britain for protection.

The road to independence

By the terms of the Treaty of Paris, the French ceded all of Canada and the land east of the Mississippi to the British, who established the Proclamation Line near the crest of the Allegheny Mountains and declared all land to the west to be Indian territory. This was partly in response to the uprising led by Pontiac, chief of the Ottawa, against frontiersmen who had crossed into tribal lands, but served merely to annoy the independent-minded colonists who sought to move west. In addition the exertions of war had more than doubled the national debt of Britain and it was felt that the American colonists should contribute more towards paying off the debt for a war from which they had clearly benefited, as well as to the upkeep of a standing arm...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• General Introduction
• Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Period
• Chapter 2: The Struggle for the Constitution, 1763–1877
• Chapter 3: The Origins of the American Civil War, 1840–1861
• Chapter 4: The American Civil War, 1861–1865
• Chapter 5: Politics, Reform and Westwards Expansion, 1865–1919
• Chapter 6: Boom and Bust: Economy and Society, 1919–1933
• Chapter 7: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1933–1941
• Chapter 8: Foreign Policy, 1890–1941
• Chapter 9: Foreign Policy, 1941–2001: Second World War to Détente
• Chapter 10: Civil Rights, 1863–2001
• Chapter 11: Domestic Policy from Kennedy to Bush, 1961–2001
• Chapter 12: General Conclusion: From AS to A2
• Biographies of Important Personalities
• Glossary of Key Terms
• Select Bibliography