The American Yawp — Chapter Nine: Getting Forward
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

After the War of 1812 ended, many Americans hoped for a fresh start. Between 1816 and 1821, the country added six new states: Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Maine, and Missouri. By the 1820s, twenty-four states made up the Union, with thousands of miles of land along the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast. Much of this growth came from seizing Indigenous lands in the West and South. Some young white Americans believed that progress was certain, and they called these years an "era of good feelings." Others were less confident. In 1821, John Adams warned Thomas Jefferson that a free government is "a complicated piece of machinery." The Second Bank of the United States, chartered in 1816, helped stabilize the economy, but the spread of new states also strengthened plantation slavery. By the late 1820s, it was much harder to imagine slavery ever ending.

In 1815, a Baltimore newspaper described an "almost universal ambition to get forward," and that drive reshaped the American economy. Historians call this change the Market Revolution. New roads, canals, and steamboats let Americans sell goods across long distances. The greatest project was the Erie Canal, completed in 1825. This 363-mile "artificial river" linked the Great Lakes to New York City and the Atlantic Ocean. Steamboat travel grew quickly after Robert Fulton started the first commercial service in 1807; by 1830, more than two hundred steamboats traveled the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Factories also changed how goods were made. In 1813, Francis Cabot Lowell and Paul Moody copied the British powered loom from memory and built new textile mills in New England. As factory work spread, many free Northern farmers became wage workers. Some protested low pay and long hours, calling it a "cruel system." A new middle class grew, but Northern factories needed cotton, so plantation slavery spread westward into new Southern lands.

Andrew Jackson rose to national fame in these years. Born in 1767 to Irish immigrants, he survived a duel in 1806 that left a bullet near his heart. He became a hero after winning the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814 and the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. In 1818 he invaded Spanish Florida, and Spain soon gave Florida to the United States in the Adams-On's Treaty of 1819. In the election of 1824, four candidates ran for president. Jackson won the most popular votes, but no candidate won a majority, so the House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams. When Adams named Henry Clay secretary of state, Jackson's supporters cried "corrupt bargain." Four years later, Jackson defeated Adams in one of the dirtiest campaigns in American history. In these same years, Adams helped create the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European powers to stay out of the Americas.

Religion changed the nation as well. The Second Great Awakening was a wave of Protestant revival. Traveling preachers held outdoor camp meetings that drew people from every social class. Middle-class believers used their time and money to support reform movements. The temperance movement, led by preachers like Lyman Beecher, tried to reduce the drinking of alcohol. Other reformers fought prostitution and built schools. Women played a large part in these campaigns, organizing societies and raising money for moral causes.

Growth also raised a hard question: would slavery spread into the western territories? In 1819, Missouri asked to join the Union as a slave state, threatening the balance between free and slave states. Henry Clay helped arrange the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Missouri entered as a slave state, and Maine entered as a free state. In the rest of the Louisiana Purchase territory, slavery was banned north of the 36°30′ line and permitted south of it. The crisis ended peacefully, but the argument over slavery's future had only begun.