All The Nation's Founders:

Last updated July 18, 2013

Introduction

That this American nation was conceived  of and brought to the world by an exceptional group of men and  women is a given in our political discourse.  Arguments from every point in the political spectrum still rely on speculation about what the "founding fathers" would have thought about some aspect of our present lives.  Whenever we argue from first principles a film of bewigged dignitaries acting in solemn assembly spools reverently behind our eyes.

Such personal films differ, however, in the patriots portrayed, and the chronology of their acts.  Some 300 to 400 were active leaders and important lieutenants in the early events:  disaffection with  Britain, active rebellion, the conduct of revolutionary war, the formation of a more perfect constitutional union and the assertion of the USA as a nation among nations.  We may never see their like again.

But that was just the opening chapter.  For the founding continued, continues and will continue.  We are today in mid-story, filling in an incomplete outline, groping toward its ultimate reach.  Will we follow Rome into imperial decline or lead the world to an era of collegial unity?  How high will our edifice go?  How far will our beacon shine? If past is prologue we will build higher and shine further. Still, Rome fell and we might.

If we prevail, we will do so by finding and following exceptional humans in exacting times.  Lasting greatness only emerges when the times demand it, such as when we must climb from an economic hole or endure the cockpit of war. Examples are our three greatest presidents thus far: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.  While their finest hours varied, what they were all the most tested by was war.  Clearly we need a new metric for greatness if our nation -- even our species -- is to survive. 

It take more than political actors to found and grow a nation. Indeed it takes far more leaders than this essay can cover. It will concentrate, therefore, on the key people and events that have bequeathed us, in Ben Franklin's phrase, "A republic . . . if you can keep it."   We have kept and improved it in the crucible of free debate -- usually heated, occasionally bloody -- that produced 27 (and counting) amendments to the Constitution, and found deeper meaning in original words when tested by changed conditions.  Specifically this essay will dwell on the philosophers, politicians, agitators, warriors, lawyers and judges who led us to independence as a republic,expanded our boundries and who wrote, amended and interpreted our nation's basic law.

The First Founders

A foundation is not the whole building, but without a firm base the structure  may be stunted  or might collapse.  The edifice we later generations have erected as a justly honored foundation is not yet done, nor has its growth been arrested, nor  its striving for perfection ceased.  We have most honored the First Founders not by excessive worship of their words and actions but by understanding and absorbing their intent deeply enough to fix the flaws in the blueprint they bequeathed to us. 

British General Braddock's 1755 defeat by the French and their Indian allies in the wilds of western Pennsylvania was the first foundation stone. Then and there Americans learned that British regulars were not invincible, the British learned that defending distant settlements was not without cost and young Colonel Washington learned first hand that the European order of battle was no winner in the wilderness.  It was also his baptism by fire, a humiliating lesson to guide his later successes as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental army and then first President of the nation under its new Constitution.

Other contemporary writers, notably J. Revell Carr, find the "Seeds of Discontent" (Walker, 2008)  much earlier and cite 1689 as the beginning of the revolt against the exploitative ways of Britain's rulers.  Certainly the events of that era were on the minds of Washington and his contemporaries as uneasy echos of the times now unfolding from 1755 to 1776.  Nor were they unmindful of the histories of the Roman republic or the Greek city-states.  Britain's several steps toward personal liberties and representational democracy, from the Magna Carta on, were another pertinent portion of their heritage.

But Braddock's contemporary rout ushered in two decades of disquiet.  Britain fairly quickly recovered from that opening defeat, and ultimately prevailed over France in the Seven Years War. But it did so only at a cost which it sought to share by edict with the King's colonial subjects .  Many loyal to the Crown on both sides of the Atlantic protested such high handedness without effect.  British troops were dispatched to collect the royal levies and tame any incipient recklessness among George III's subjects.

A heated family feud ensued. There were protests, petitions, edicts, acts of vandalism and finally skirmishes, battles and bloodshed.  But resistance did not immediately translate into rebellion.  Americans first sought equal rights and representation, not emancipation from the King's rule.  When, then, was the cry for rights and representation equal to Englishmen transformed into a call for independence?

Not when the Declaration of Independence was signed.  That eloquent bill of particulars was the culmination  of a change of heart that began precisely on January 10, 1776, with the publication of a political pamphlet by a little known Englishman, recently arrived, named Thomas Paine.  "Common Sense" went -- in today's lexicon -- viral.  In months over 100,000 copies were in print and circulating amid a population of 3 million.

In plain vivid language Paine demolished the pretense to legitimacy of the British Crown and indeed the whole European social order.  He expanded the country's existing ire with a villainous Parliament to include an arrogant aristocracy and its monarch.  He argued against reconciliation and for independence, and won the argument. The second Continental Congress put Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Franklin and others to the task of drafting a declaration of our independence from the age old yoke of inherited sovereignty by divine right.

At that heady moment when the Declaration was adopted the nation was born, but its survival past its natal years was far from insured.  The turning point of the war that followed came when Cornwallis, trapped between Washington's regulars and the French fleet, surrendered at Yorktown.  Britain, also at war with France and Spain, cut its losses in the New World.  It hung on to Canada and its Caribbean Islands, but even during the War of 1812 never again seriously threatened the independence of its former colonies.

But the newly freed colonies were not yet a nation.  On their own and bereft of the unifying prop of a common adversary, they soon showed signs of splintering along the old political fault lines inherent in their isolated origins of nearly two centuries before.  The people's historic allegiance was first to the old colony and then, vaguely, to the new nation. The Articles of Confederation under which the revolutionary government was belatedly formed, conveyed no significant power to the Continental Congress absent unanimous consent of the states.  Regional groupings soon surfaced as well, emphasizing cultural and economic differences among New England, the Mid-Atlantic and the South.  Also the larger, more populous states were eyed warily by the many smaller ones.  The geographic isolation of the time did not help; the settled coast and the growing frontier west of the Alleghenies were increasingly at odds over the costs of the rapidly expanding frontier's conflict with native Americans.

America's foundation was as yet neither complete nor assured. What saved the day requires Churchillian prose to describe.  It was "our finest hour" for "never [until the Battle of Britain, summer,1940] have so many owned so much to so few."  The "Miracle at Philadelphia," as the title of a popular history would have it, produced a Constitution  that was signed by 40 of the 55 nominated state delegates, but it was predominantly the product of effective leadership by three of them, and of an earlier era of enlightened thinking that was part of the educational equipment of thoughtful people on both sides of the Atlantic.

One of the men was George Washington, who presided in silent dignity and thus lent his immense prestige to a change in the basis of government so sweeping in scope that it greatly exceeded what the Continental Congress and the states had bargained for.  One other was James Madison, who was first among the Virginians who presented the Convention with a substitute for the Articles of Confederation, called the Virginia Plan, of which he was a principal author. Madison then orchestrated much of the substantive discussion during the four months of secret deliberations that culminated in our Constitution.  History has rightly accorded him the title, "Father of the Constitution."

The third of the leading triumvirate was Alexander Hamilton.  His voice was influential, but not controlling at Philadelphia.  The New Yorker's stamp was felt more during the tense moths of ratification, when he wrote most of the essays that became the Federalist papers, and, with John Jay, led the fight that brought New York into the union by the slim margin of three votes.  But his greatest achievements came during his time as Secretary of the Treasury in Washington's inaugural administrations.

The era that inspired and instructed Hamilton, Madison and others is known as "The Enlightenment"  and, alternatively as "The Age of Reason."  For our purposes it began with the moral philosophy of John Locke (1632 - 1704) and the  legal theories of Montesquieu (1689 - 1755), and continued with the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment figures of Francis Hutcheson (1694 - 1746), David Hume (1711 -1776) and Adam Smith (1723 - 1790).  Later the political writings and scientific genius of Joseph Priestly influenced the thinking of both Franklin and Jefferson.  These were the thinkers who  influenced America's founders the most that long hot summer of struggle to form a more perfect union.  Present in Philadelphia that summer in spirit only, but vital nonetheless, they, too, helped lay the foundation.

It should be emphasized, though, that it was the practical genious of the Americans during the colonial centuries that first put meat on the dry form of the European philosophies.  Democratic cooperation came naturally to tiny bands of settlers who learned to cooperate or die in the raw wilderness of the American coast.  When every man is valuable the high priniple that the people are soverign is abvious and even unspoken until a distant power attempts to take it away..

Present, but largely silent at the convention, were two men whose presence alone and whose later support for the draft document was critical to its adoption and later acceptance by the people.  They were of course Washington and Franklin.  It is hard to over emphasize the immense prestige of these two Americans, at home and abroad. 

Washington's commanding presence and military success had made him known and respected in Europe as the symbol of a new nation, alien to the old orders, larger in territory than any of them save remote Imperial Russia, with a rapidly growing population.  At home, the prestige and affection accorded him by all the people, and by his peers, placed him an uncontested first in the pantheon of the founders. He became, in the orator's phrase, "First in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countryman."

Franklin, in his eighties when at the convention, was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, for his scientific discoveries (lightning as electricity, the Gulf stream), practical inventions (lightening rod, Franklin stove), civic accomplishments (the colonial post office, the volunteer fire company, the public library), diplomatic achievements (in both Britain and France) and popular writings (Poor Richard's Almanac, his autobiography).  Dr. Franklin (the title was honorific) was considered as the foremost scientist of his day the world over. 

Silent because they were absent on diplomatic missions to England and France were, respectively, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  Though silent, they were not without influence through their writings, both earlier and contemporaneous.


Ratification

The country to which the draft constitution was finally presented was skeptical, even suspicious.  They were, as it turned out, willing to be sold on the benefits of a strong, more perfect union, but it was a hard sell.  Critics fearful of exchanging one tyranny for another resonated with citizens whose allegiance was first granted to their old colonies, now states, and little inclined to find value in a central government with even limited power over their states.  It was too reminiscent of the tyranny of Parliament and King.
 
It took the salesmanship of countless letters, newspaper articles, dueling pamphlets, public forums and not a few tavern brawls to bring the so called anti-Federalists aboard.  Less influential at the time were the finest treatises on the republican form of representative democracy ever written.  We know them as The Federalist Papers, a series of essays that were the collaborative work of Madison, Hamilton and Jay.  

These authors laid out these principles behind  the new constitution: checks and balances, enumerated powers, a tripartite division of power, a representative democracy in republican form, bicameral legislatures.  Madison especially, did even more.  He also listened -- reluctantly at first -- to the objections of the opposition.  Of the several obvious flaws -- from today's perspective -- in the constitutional draft (slavery accommodated, suffrage limited, women's subordination continued) one only gained immediate traction.  Constitutional backers realized, not a moment too soon, that ratification would fail absent their solemn promise of prompt addition of a statement of individual rights. 

Madison, elected from Virginia to that first ever House of Representatives, drafted the first version of the ten amendments to the new constitution that we know as the Bill of Rights, in response to the well nigh universal demand that the rights that the people had fought for be specified in the basic document.  He had ample material from which to work.  Most of the states forwarded with ratification amendments for the first congress to consider, including extensive and wildly varying lists of individual rights.  Many were drawn from their state's governing documents, others were rooted in English common law, notably the Magna Carta, and echoed in the writings of The Enlightenment.
 
The Con-Founders and Ratification

 The revolution was not won, nor the constitution adopted, without dissent.  Ben Franklin's son, William, broke with his father and stayed loyal to England, becoming royalist governor of New Jersey during the conflict and moving permanently to the British Isles after the fighting ended.  He was only one of the more notable of the Loyalists, who may have numbered one third of the population.

More significant for this history were those loyal contributors to the revolution who could not back the Constitution, including Patrick Henry, who dissented with unmatched eloquence from the first, and James Mason, John Randolph and James Monroe, all of Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry, from Connecticut.  Mason, Randolph and Gerry all attended the Constitutional Convention and made substantial contributions to its final form.
 
Perhaps the most consequential of the anti-Federalists was a New Yorker, Melancton Smith, who was firmly against adopting the Constitution without the prior addition of a Bill of Rights, and was the leader of the Big Apple's anti-Federalist majority at its ratifying convention.  Arguing the Federalist cause were Hamilton, an open political rival of Smith's, and Jay, whose modest winning personality, worked in tandem with Hamilton's sometimes abrasive eloquence and brilliant grasp of the constitution's plumbing.

The New York convention opened at a critical juncture.  Eight of the states had already ratified; only nine was needed to for the new government to be instituted, leaving the others on the outside looking in.  Conventions in Virginia and North Carolina were sitting already, while New Hampshire's had reconvened after some months of time out for tempers to cool.  (Rhode Island, which boycotted the Constitutional Convention, hadn't even scheduled elections for delegates, and -- recalcitrant to the end -- was fated not to join the union until 1793 after the new nation was in being with the other 12 states.)

One by one the hold outs ratified.  New Hampshire came first, but the word from Virginia arrived ahead of New Hampshire's news.  Still, Smith's majority held.  Then one day he walked over to Hamilton and sat beside him, then rose to tell his followers that he had changed his mind and to urge them to vote for ratification.  Jay had convinced him that the Federalists could be trusted to add a Bill of Rights by amendment as a first order of business under the new government. Still New York ratified only by that three vote margin. It was a close thing.

The Con-Founders, or anti-federalists, were no less patriotic than Washington, Franklin and Madison.  Nor were they completely wrong.  Mason, for example, was anti slavery and correctly predicted that fudging this issue would  haunt later generations.  All of them deplored the absence of an enumeration of certain rights, a position Madison never entirely appreciated on its merits, but accepted as a political necessity. 

History tells us that Henry, Smith et al were right about rights, if not about their opposition to the constitution itself.  Most of their other objections and gloomy prognostications about a new tyranny in the making evaporated swiftly with the prompt success of the new government.  But for most Americans the Bill of Rights is the crown jewel of the constitution.  We owe the Con-Founders for their dogged insistence on those first ten critical amendments and for their principled acquiescence to the new federal order.  They too are founders, not least because the Bill of Rights inspired an explosion of rights here and round the globe that rumbles on still.

The National Foundation

With the constitution ratified, the work of putting flesh on those fine bones could begin.  Elections of senators and representatives, and of the president and vice president,  had to be conducted.  Departments of the executive branch had to be defined and established.  Likewise the design of the judiciary beyond the office of the Chief Justice was a first order of business.  The offices thus established required flesh and blood to fill them before official bottoms could occupy the new seats of power and responsibility.

Congress once convened needed to organize.  Each house is responsible for its own rules of operation and conduct.  The senate, for one example, declared itself a "continuing body" because only one third of its members change every two years.  Consequently its rules continue unless changed.  The house of representatives decided differently.  Since the whole house is replenished by elections every two years, it votes its rules afresh after every election.  Each house appoints its own officers and establishes its own committee structure.

Nearly every step of the way required new rules, conventions, customs and newly minted traditions.  One example: what to call the president?  A fierce wrangle ensued.  Which side you were on depended on your view of the office.  Was the presidency akin to royalty?  John Adams suggested, "His Mightiness."  Or was the office more like a prime minister?  The felicitous answer, "Mr. President," has sufficed ever since.  (Abroad, protocol, buttressed by the standing of America in the world, accords the president  the twin offices of Chief of State, equal to the kings and emperors of other nations, and Head of Government, equally at home with prime ministers.)

No one genius stands out in the development of the executive branch, but the imposing figure of Washington infused the presidency with standing that has served the office ever since.  He was the first to form a so called team of rivals, with Jefferson as his Secretary of State and Hamilton as the Secretary of the Treasury, offices inherited from the Continental Congresses,  bringing opposite views of how the nation should develop and be governed to the debate. After Washington the prestige of the office was assured, and it was forever prized above all other offices, until in the 20th century at the height of the nation power, the incumbent would become and be called the most powerful man on earth.

The third pillar of the constitution, the Supreme Court, was duly established by Congress with John Jay as its first chief justice.  But it wasn't until the first transfer of power from one political faction to another in 1800 that events were put in chain that solidified the authority of the Supreme Court to interpret in cases before it the meaning of the Constitution's clauses.   That pivotal election dismissed John Adams, the Federalist party successor to Washington, after one term, and put Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Republican party, into office.

But Jefferson would not take office until March 4, a leisurely four months away, plenty of time for Adams and the Federalists to make a lot of perfectly legal mischief, mostly by filling vacancies with Federalist stalwarts, especially those vacancies that required Senate confirmation.  One most important one was Adam's replacement of the Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth -- who resigned -- with John Marshall,  who was confirmed by the lame duck Federalist dominated senate.

Less noted at the time was the appointment of one William Marbury to the office of Justice of the Peace for the District of Columbia.  Incoming Secretary of State James Madison found Marbury's appointment on his desk among others not delivered to the appointees.  On Jefferson's order they were withheld.  Marbury filed suit in the Supreme Court, now headed by Marshall, the very Secretary of State who neglected to deliver his appointment to Marbury.  Out of this minor, if delicious, irony came a major constitutional advance.  The case of Marbury vs Madison yielded the first judicial ruling to overturn a federal law on constitutional grounds. Marshall wrote for the court:

"It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.  Those who apply the law to to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule.  If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each."

He went on over a 34 year tenure as Chief Justice, to solidify the role of the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution.  In the process the Court sharpened the roles of the legislative and executive branches vis a vis the Court and each other, and set the first limits of sovereignty between the states and the federal government not precisely enumerated in  the Constitution's allocations.

The Marshall court did not do this without opposition, echos of which reverberate to this day, especially at the vexing boundaries between the rights of individuals and the powers of government and among levels of government.  Other courts have since ruled in constitutionally significant ways, and we will tell those tales in their place, but none more significantly than the one led by Marshall.

The authority of the court has grown over the years.  Since it does not wield the power of the purse as the Congress does, nor command an army as the President does, its power to interpret the constitution draws from the confidence and respect accorded it by the other branches and ultimately the people to the degree it shows respect for and insists upon equality before the law. 

No court can  take up a subject not raised by a case before it.  The Supreme Court accepts few cases on appeal, usually after two lower courts have issued conflicting judgements.  Further, plaintiffs must have "standing" --  a grievance or wrong to be remedied -- before  they may come to any court.  Also, judges explain themselves in writing.  The logic of their opinions is thus available for critical scrutiny.  Appointed for life and paid amounts that cannot be lowered during their tenure, justices of the Supreme Court are thus somewhat inoculated against venal temptations and insulated from intimidating pressures. 

Insulated thus from politics, the court is nonetheless aware of political currents.  As Mr Dooley, the fictional Irish barkeep voice of  comic writer Peter Finnley Dunn, has said, the Supreme Court "follows the illiction returns."

John and Abigail

John Adams, the who appointed Marshall, has required rehabilitation of late to separate his solid achievements from his emotional personality.  He was blunt, excitable, ambitious to a fault for his place in history and prone to feuds and outbursts.  He was also an effective diplomat, Washington's loyal vice-president and successor (by two electoral votes over Jefferson), who kept the country from alliance with either Britain for France, and thus out of unwinable wars. .

His anchor was Abigail Adams, life long wife and full political  partner, who listened to his outbursts, led him to more calm, reflective waters, critiqued his copious writings, kept his home and haven and added social grace to his political and diplomatic endeavors.  If John was a founder then so was Abigail.  Like only one other First Lady, she was the wife of one president and mother of another. Arguably she was also the first suffragette, famously saying to her husband as the constitution was taking shape, ". . . please don't forget the ladies."  Of course they did for the next 133 years..

Territories Into States

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 created the first organized territory of the United States, from lands south of the Great Lakes, north and west of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River. Most importantly, the Ordinance anticipated the introduction of new states on a fully equal basis with the old.  This principle echos the grievance central to why the thirteen colonies revolted. We were not accorded  rights to representation in the British parliament, which nonetheless taxed us.  It is hard to think of another nation which diluted the political power of its original parts in so generous a fashion.  By 1837, when Michigan was admitted as the 26th state, the number of new states equaled that of the old.

The Ordinance's prohibition of slavery in the territory that became five states (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan) and part of another (Minnesota) in practice set the Ohio River as the boundary between free and slave territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. In this prohibition was thus planted another seed of civil war to join the Constitution clause ending slave importation by 1809.

The principal author of the 1789 law was Nathan Dane (c1752 -- c1815), a Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress, fist elected in 1785.  Dane's sole claim to fame, his work is enough to make this local lawyer and politician one of the Founders, if the least known among them.  The ordinance gleams with none of the eloquence of other documents central to our founding, but it has its moments.  In it we find the first use of a majestic Constitutional phrase: ". . . neither slavery or involuntary servitude . . . " There is also a careful compendium of individual rights such as those found in state constitutions and in the recommendations of the ratifying state conventions of 1788 that were grist for James Madison when milling the Bill of Rights. 

Manifest Destiny I


This term, a slogan for American expansion "from sea to shining sea," did not gain currency until much later, but its opening salvo was the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory by purchase ($15 million) from Napoleon's France in 1802-3. Negotiated by David Livingston and James Monroe, the treaty was the first and most benign of several later expansions by war and negotiation. Each of these was followed by subjugation of dozens of Native American nations by guile and force motivated by unrelenting greed, ambition, glory and other all too human motivations for conquest sanctified by historical practice.

Manifest Destiny remains the sorriest continuing story in our history, an unmatched blot on our adherence to liberty's ideals. The indifferent mistreatment of those unfortunate to be here first still goes on, only slightly mitigated by a few small instances of belated treaty recognition and official respect for a limited measure of sovereignty. Still, this decidedly immoral process has produced a great nation, a bastion of liberty and the most admired and emulated nation ever. This is a record of achievement that does offset to a great degree the ruthless way we accumulated the territory.  But it is hypocritical of us, when arraigned before the bar of history, to celebrate the brighter aspects of this chapter without acknowledging its darker side.

The Louisiana Purchase was the first and largest of our territorial acquisitions, doubling the nation's acreage. It was a result of complex dealing and double dealing among France, Spain and the United States, with the looming presence of Great Britain and its dominating fleet always in mind though seldom in the room. Also in the calculus was Haiti's slave revolt and the subsequent loss of 50,000 French troops to its rebel forces and their persistent ally, cholera.

Haiti depleted the French treasury and its appetite for New World expansion. Napoleon's focus turned to Great Britain and to help pay for war with the world's greatest naval power he handed the greatest bargain in history to the United States. More to the point of this treatise, he also presented the Jefferson administration with a first constitutional crisis.

The crisis existed primarily and most critically in the heads of Jefferson and Madison, his secretary of state. Nowhere in the Constitution was authority for such an expansion to be found. To justify this purchase without a Constitutional amendment required Jeffersonian republicans to embrace a large dose of Hamiltonian's High Federalism. This the normally high minded romantic Sage of Monticello promptly and pragmatically did. The treaty he presented to the Senate was duly ratified, the money was appropriated, and the powers of the office of President of the United States under the Constitution enlarged by precedent for the future.

Also enhanced by the transaction, and by the subsequent practical problems of how to settle and incorporate Louisiana into the Union, were the powers of the National government in relation to the original states. New states, which soon out numbered the old, were creatures of the federal government, while the thirteen original states could lay legitimate claim to have invented the federation.

James Monroe and His Doctrine

The opposite side of the coin of Manifest Destiny was the Monroe doctrine.  Americans and no one else could aspire to empire in the American continents, north and south, Monroe in effect proclaimed in his annual message to Congress of December 2, 1823.  He invited out further colonization by any foreign power, especially France and Spain in the Atlantic and Imperial Russia in the Pacific:

"The American continents . . . are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. . . We should consider ay attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety."

His edict coincided with the serial rebellions of the South American Spanish colonies, largely successful in the preceeding seven years, and the tacit imperial interests of Britain backed by its dominating Navy.  By thus nudging the prevailing historical trend our way, Monroe's extra-constitutional bravado found traction.  In time the tide of colonization halted, receded  and after World War II all but vanished world wide.  Monroe's doctrine briefly flared into life during the cold war with the Soviets and remains latent but alive in the nation's foreign policy.  Its historical importance stems from its bold assertion by the brash young republic that it was nation among nations, here to stay, and a rising power to be reckoned with.

Manifest Destiny II

Andrew Jackson is this writer's least favorite founder.  His imperious bent skirts the line breached by Aaron Burr.  A hero because of his stunning victory over the British in the battle of New Orleans (fought unavoidably after the treaty ending the War of 1812 had been signed), which cemeted our hold on that vital port at the Mssissippi's mouth, Jackson rode his military fame to two presidential terms. His actions over a long career in the public eye were notably both good and and bad and also lasting.

An example:  President Monroe sent General Jackson, commanding a Tennennesse militia, to settle a dispute betweens settlers on the American side of the boarder and Seminoles in Florida, which was weakly held by token Spanish forces.  Instead Jackson routed the Seminoles and executed among others two British traders, nearly igniting another war with England.  He then stormed Pensacola, and garrisoned its fort with American soldiers.  Eyebrows were raised in offficial Washington, for all this exceeded his orders, but the rest of the country cheered.  Spain decided to cut its losses and in 1819 sold us all its lands east of the Mississippi for $5 million.  The deal also fixed the boundary between the USA and Mexico and required Spain to forego its tenuous claims to the Oregon territory.

Another example: President Jackson over the period of 1828 -33 clashed famously with John C. Calhoun, Senator from South Carolina, over Calhoun's theory of nullification.  That theory held that the Constitution was the creature, not of we the people, but of thirteen sovereign states, who were sovereign still.  Further the Federal Government was a mere agent of those states. Consequently, amy state could declare any act of Congress it deemed unconstitutional null and void.  Only a Constitutional amendment could override a state's nullification.

In 1828 the South Carolina legislature approved nullification, an act condemed by such as Madison and Daniel Webster ("Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and insepaarable!").  Jackson weighed in at a dinner on April 13, 1830, with the toast, "Our Federal Union--it must be preserved!"   Calhoun replied, "The Union -- next to our liberty, the most dear!" 

Matters stayed with reteoric until 1932 when a new unacceptable tariff passed by Congress caused South Carolina's legislature to declare it "null, void, and no law, nor binding upon this state."  The ordinance threatened secession from the Union if the tariff was forceably collected.  Jackson ordered just that.  On March 2, 1833 he signed the Force Act, which authorized him to use the armed services to collect duties.

But he also signed into law a gradual scaling down of all tariff schedules, and South Carolina then repealed the nulification ordinance.  To save face it nullified the Force Act, though now a dead letter. Beyond nullification lay seccession.  The next pretext, Jackson predicted, ". . . will be  the . . . slavery question."  And so it was.

Indian Removal

"John Marshall has made his decision.  Now let him enforce it."  Andrew Jackson may not have said those pithy words, but they express his attitude to a Supreme Court decision that the laws of Georgia did not apply to the Cherokee nation because they contradicted a federal treaty.  Jackson was of course far from a dictator, but his reported remark reminds one of Stalin's question, "How many divisions does the Pope command?" Neither cared much for moral authority. 

Indians from territories  north and south were driven west of the Mississippi during Jackson's presidency.  By force and deceit, by officials and swarms of settlers, lands claimed from Europeans were claimed for Manifest Destiny.

Manifest Destiny III

James Knox Polk presided (1845 --49) over wars and treaties that expanded the United States from the Mississippi to the Pacific ocean.  Texas agreed to annexation just four days before he was inaugurated and he signed the formal papers the following December.  Mexico rejected this grab of what it still regarded as a rebellious province and the US won a sweeping victory in the war that followed.  The US imposed the Treaty of Hidalgo, taking most of the present Southwest, including prized Alta California.

When he negotiated a division of the Oregon territory with Great Britain at the 49th parallel -- despite agitation of "54/40 or fight -- the continental United States was all but complete.  The Gadsden Purchase of 1854 finished the job by adding just under 30,000 square miles for $10 million, despite much grandeous talk and the occasional failed action stretching from the war of 1812 -14 to the  World War of 1917 -- 18.  Targets of expansion were Canada, Mexico and Cuba.  Nothing came of all that except rattled nerves in those nations.

Prelude to Civil War

To be continued . . .