The modern world’s first and most influential democracy.
When Christopher Columbus landed on San Salvador in October 1492, he had no idea that he had discovered the continents of North America and South America, along with the many islands of the Caribbean. While later explorers would understand better than Columbus that he had discovered the New World, none could have imagined that a great democracy called the United States of America would develop in the wilderness that stretched from Cape Henry on the Atlantic coast to the sloping hills along the Pacific Ocean far to the west. This new nation would be founded on the twin principles that all people are created equal and that the people must be allowed to rule themselves without the interference of kings and the nobility. The country would eventually comprise fifty states from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi, through the Great Plains and the Rockies to the Pacific, and finally as far west as Alaska and Hawaii. Today, the influence and power of America’s culture and politics, along with its economic and military might, stretch far beyond its borders to most of the rest of the world.
The United States of America began as thirteen colonies founded by England along the Atlantic shore in a 125-year period between 1607 and 1732. Virginia, the first colony, became the model for the southern colonies of Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia through the es tablishment of a plantation system of agriculture. Through the use of indentured servants and African slaves, southern plantations produced cash crops, such as tobacco, rice, and indigo. Virginia also became the model of self-government for all the colonies by establishing the first elected assembly, called the House of Burgesses, at Jamestown in 1619. One year later, the foundations of the colony of Massachusetts were laid when a group of English separatists known as the Pilgrims settled Plymouth on Cape Cod. The Pilgrims and later the Puritans, who founded Boston in 1630, brought a new sense of self-discipline and divine destiny to the American colonial experience.
Massachusetts, with its strong town government, community-based land system, and reliance on the Atlantic merchant trade, became the model for the New England colonies of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. The remaining middle colonies of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, and New Jersey developed a combined economy of small farms and trading towns. The middle colonies were also home to a more diverse mix of peoples than either the South or New England. The settlers in this region came from nations such as Germany, France, and Ireland, as well as England.
As long as England paid scant attention to the day-to-day management of the colonies, there was little friction between America and the mother country. Britain slowly began to strengthen its hold on the colonies through the appointment of royal governors to most of the colonies by the early eighteenth century. The colonists also felt the increasing control of the British Parliament through the Navigation Acts, which governed the entire empire. These laws required goods within the empire to be carried on English ships with at least three-fourths of the crew being English. But even with these restraints, little hardship was felt in the colonies since the Americans were considered Englishmen. Colonial trade and shipbuilding boomed, with at least one-third of all the goods in the empire carried on American ships by the mid-eighteenth century.
However, a serious clash developed between England and the thirteen colonies following the close of the French and Indian War in 1763. The British levied new taxes on the colonies, claiming that the revenue would pay for the many soldiers posted along the Appalachian Mountains on the western frontier to protect the colonists from the Indians. The Americans were also ordered to stay out of the western lands since this would now be a preserve for the British and Native American fur trade. The levying of internal taxes, such as the Stamp Act, without the consent of the colonial legislatures and the closing of the western frontier to settlement were two of the many causes of the American Revolution. Political leaders from the colonies gathered in the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774 to discuss the best response to the growing threats from England, while actual fighting broke out between Massachusetts militia and British redcoats at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. It took Congress another year to finally declare America’s independence from Great Britain. Thomas Jefferson’s stirring words in the Declaration of Independence became the founding document of the new republic that called itself the United States of America.
While most of the fighting ended after the British surrender at Yorktown in October 1781, the American Revolution was officially concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The British recognized their former colonies as a new and independent nation, but kept forts in the Ohio Country on the grounds that colonial loyal-ists had not been fully compensated for damages suffered during the revolution. The British also closed much of the empire, including the West Indies, to American trade. By the mid-1780s, the young American nation faced a series of seemingly insurmountable problems. The westward advance into Ohio was threatened by an alliance between the British and the Native Americans. The French and the Spanish also claimed much of the western territories, including New Orleans and the Mississippi River. Cheap English goods now poured into coastal cities, while American trade on the high seas was fast disappearing. The revolutionary war debt had bankrupted the nation. The lack of a banking system and a national currency, along with the inability of Congress to levy taxes, made the future of the young nation appear hopeless. The growing troubles of the 1780s led leaders from the Revolution, such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, to organize the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. The convention proposed a new constitution that would create a federation of states with a much stronger national government. After much debate among the people at the state level, the Constitution was approved in 1788 and implemented under the presidency of George Washington in 1789.
A debate quickly developed in Washington’s administration and the rest of the country over the role of the national government in the life of the nation. Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, argued for a strong national government that was intimately tied to the economic life of the nation. He proposed the establishment of the Bank of the United States along with tariffs and bounties that would promote American trade and manufacturing. He also recommended an alliance with Great Britain for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the British navy would be able to protect the shipping of its American ally on the high seas. In contrast, Thomas Jefferson, the first secretary of state, feared that government support of business would create an elite that would soon turn their backs on the will of the people. He preferred limited government actions that would help America’s many small farmers and working people. Jefferson also condemned any renewed ties with royal and aristocratic Britain and argued instead for full American support of the French Revolution, even when it turned bloody. The split in Washington’s administration gave rise to the first political party system in American history, with Hamilton’s Federalists arrayed against Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans on nearly every important issue that arose in the early republic.
The election of 1800 proved to be a turning point in the history of the young American nation. Jefferson was elected to the first of two terms and now wielded the power of the national government for the good of the people as he and his Democratic-Republican Party saw fit. His greatest accomplishment came with the purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803. The United States now controlled the Mississippi River, the crucial port of New Orleans, and the northern Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains. His greatest failure came in the policy of neutrality he set for American shipping on the high seas during the Napoleonic Wars. Hoping to trade peacefully with both France and England, merchants on American ships found themselves the target of both nations. The Embargo of 1808 banned all exports from the United States by ship and sent the country into a depression from which many eastern seaports never fully recovered. The tension between the United States and Great Britain increased as the Royal Navy commandeered American vessels on the Atlantic and impressed American sailors into the Royal Navy. Native American unrest along the entire frontier under the leadership of the Shawnee chief Tecumseh further infuriated Americans, who blamed the British for supplying the western tribes with arms and ammunition. President James Madison, Jefferson’s successor, led the nation into the War of 1812 against Great Britain. While many Federalists in New England opposed the war and even threatened to secede from the Union, the United States won significant battles along the western frontier, most notably on Lake Erie and at New Orleans. Signed on December 24, 1814, the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war, returned the nation to the status quo antebellum.
Although the war had gained no new territory for the United States, it had increased the pride and patriotism of its people. The young country now seemed truly independent from Great Britain and finally free of the Native American threat that had blocked the advance to the Mississippi River. The Federalist Party disappeared, and the nation entered a brief period of one-party rule under President James Monroe and the Democratic-Republicans, known as the Era of Good Feelings. The country also felt confident enough to warn any European nations that might try to establish new colonial empires in the Americas that they would face the opposition of the United States. In this era of nationalism, peace, and optimism, settlers raced westward into the new states of the Midwest and the Deep South. A second political party quickly developed as the question of the role of the national government in the economic life of the young nation emerged once again. The Whig Party formed around key figures, such as the Speaker of the House of Representatives Henry Clay of Kentucky. Clay and the Whigs proposed the American System, which would use the power of the national government to build up industry and trade by constructing roads and canals and levying high tariffs on imports. Jefferson’s party regrouped under the leadership of General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee and named itself the Democratic Party. Jackson advocated the rights of the common man and soon won the support of small farmers, tradesmen, and immigrants throughout the nation.
In some ways, the split between the Whigs and the Democrats paralleled the sectionalism that had marked the development of the nation since the end of the War of 1812. The northern and southern states were both developing rapidly, but with great differences between their economies. The northern economy was diversified, with small farms, new industries, free labor, growing cities, and heavy immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany. The transportation network in the North relied on roads, steamboats, canals, and later railroads to move goods and people east and west. The southern economy was equally dynamic but less diversified. The plantation system of agriculture had survived from colonial days. Tobacco and rice were still important crops, but now the major moneymaker in the South was cotton. Small and large planters alike headed westward to open new farms growing cotton, which had become vital to the development of the textile industry in New England and Great Britain. The cotton culture led to greater reliance on slavery than ever before and created less interest in the development of banking, transportation, and manufacturing in the South.
Despite his ties to the South, Andrew Jackson proved himself to be a determined nationalist when he was elected president in 1828. He silenced the first cries for nullification, a state’s right to overrule federal law, from South Carolina over the issue of the tariff. But the conflicting economic paths of the North and the South challenged every later president from Martin Van Buren to James Buchanan. At first, the national government attempted to compromise to hold the Union together. The vast western territory also opened a way for southern slaveholders and northern small farmers to both acquire new lands. Texas was settled by slaveholding cotton planters, while the Oregon Territory became a haven for farmers from the Midwest. However, by the time the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was signed in 1848, ending the Mexican War, the question of whether the remaining Great Plains and the newly acquired southwestern territories would become slave or free states led to a heated national debate. The arguments became more strident as reformers called abolitionists demanded that the United States live up to the revolutionary ideals of the Declaration of Independence and bring an immediate end to slavery.
The debate over the extension of slavery into the Great Plains, the last fertile empty land in the continental United States, gave birth to another political party. The Democrats continued to win support from northerners and southerners alike and argued for the principle of popular sovereignty in the territories. The Whigs were replaced by the Republican Party, which called for the Great Plains to be settled by free white labor. When Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, won the presidential election in 1860, the South seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. The American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865, ended in the total defeat of the southern states. Slavery was outlawed as a labor and social system, the equality of all men was reaffirmed in new amendments to the Constitution, and the northern industrial economy became the standard for the entire nation to follow. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States had transformed itself from a predominantly agrarian nation to a major industrial and urban power on a par with Great Britain, France, and Germany.
The nation now faced the question of the role that it was to play on the world stage. Some believed that the United States should remain neutral in international conflicts and attempt to bring peace and prosperity through the development of world trade. Others argued that the United States should use its growing power to lead the world toward democracy. The debate over the role of the government, and most especially the presidency, was renewed as the Progressive movement called for political reforms at the local, state, and national level. Progressive presidents, such as the Republican Theodore Roosevelt and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, advocated government regulation of the economy and led the nation toward a more active foreign policy. In 1917, Wilson took the United States into World War I, believing that it was time for America’s democratic principles to reshape Europe and the world. Wilson argued that the war was a fight to make the world safe for democracy and that the United States could win the battle by serving as the arsenal of democracy. The participation of 1 million American soldiers, along with the massive outpouring of arms and equipment from American factories, turned the tide in favor of Great Britain and France.
After World War I ended in 1918, the United States signed the Treaty of Versailles the following year but refused to participate in the League of Nations. The country turned away from active involvement on the world stage, preferring instead to develop its new consumer-driven economy. When the Great Depression occurred in 1929, the economies of the United States, Europe, and Asia collapsed, leading to the rise of dictatorships around the world. Under the leadership of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, the United States turned to the programs of the New Deal to pull the nation back from the brink of economic ruin. After World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, Roosevelt prepared the nation to enter the fight on the side of the Allies. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States officially entered the war against the Axis Powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy. When the war ended in 1945, the victorious United States hoped to lead the world toward the nation’s long-held ideals of democracy and free enterprise. New institutions such as the World Bank, the United Nations, and the International Monetary Fund, along with a program to reduce tariffs known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, were meant to lay the foundations for world peace and prosperity.
The Cold War that developed subsequently between the United States and the Soviet Union shattered the hopes of the United States to see American ideals triumph around the world. Marxism appeared to be the leading ideology on the global stage as nations including China and Cuba joined the Soviet Union and its conquered Eastern Europe territories in a communist bloc. The United States never fought an open war against the Soviet Union or China but, instead, followed a policy called “containment” from the late 1940s until the early 1970s. Under this policy, the United States tried to stop the spread of communism to new countries. The policy led to America’s intervention in both Korea and Vietnam. By the early 1970s, the United States had begun a national debate on the best method to ultimately defeat communism. The country followed a policy of détente, or peaceful coexistence, during much of the 1970s, but returned to a massive military buildup in the 1980s. By the early 1990s, communism had collapsed in much of the world, including the Soviet Union.
As the nation entered the twenty-first century, the United States could rejoice that democracy and free enterprise had at last triumphed in much of the Western world. But at the same time, the nation faced unexpected challenges from radical international movements that questioned the most cherished values of the American civilization.
Mary Stockwell
See also: American Revolution; Cold War; World War I; World War II.
Bailyn, Bernard, et al. The Great Republic: A History of the American People. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.