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North of the United States was British North America, divided into colonies as had been the United States. There was Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Lower Canada, (Quebec) and Upper Canada (Ontario) - which together had about one-eighteenth the population of the United States.
Following the War of 1812 , tensions remained between the United States and Britain. A naval arms race developed in the Great Lakes region, and incidents occurred on the lakes as the British exercised what they believed was their right to search U.S. ships. In 1817 the U.S. War Department sent two expeditions to the south shore of Lake Superior to remove British flags and to establish U.S. influence - in what was essentially Indian country. But there was to be no war. The War of 1812 was that last of what could be called a war that involved the border between the United States and its northern neighbor.
Hostility toward Britain remained among those in the United States who chose to remember recent conflicts, and Britain's upper classes remained hostile toward the United States. But the British and the United States would be able to resolve their conflicts. Britain accepted the revolution that transformed its colonies into the United States. The U.S. and Britain were two liberal powers, one a constitutional monarchy, the other a republic. There were no dynastic rivalries or kings competing for land. Expansion westward was possible without expanding against each other. Moreover, wealthy men in shipping and commerce in the United States disliked the idea of war because they knew that it would shut down commerce, and they disliked the idea of losing ships to the British.
The United States had high tariffs against British imports, erected in 1816, inspired in part by the desire to deprive Britain of one of its largest export markets as well as to protect American manufacturers and farmers from foreign competition. But enough political leaders in the U.S. saw it in their nation's interest to establish accords with Britain that, in 1818, the U.S. and Britain produced the Rush-Bagot Agreement for disarmament on the Great Lakes. Each power was to have no more than four warships on the Great Lakes, none of which was to exceed 100 tons.
In 1820, Methodist ministers who had migrated to Canada (there were almost 6,000 Methodists in Upper Canada) tried to get help from the U.S. to rid them of competition from Wesleyan ministers from Britain - the British Wesleyans numbering around 750. [note] But the U.S. government was not interested in intervening in this conflict.
Styles were changing. James Madison (president from 1809 to 1817) was the last United States president to wear his hair in a pony tail. His successor, James Monroe (in office until 1825), was the last president to be seen in knee breeches. Population size was also changing. Between 1800 and 1820 the combined populations of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, and Alabama increased almost six times:from around 386,000 to 2,216,000. And the total population for the United States had risen from 5.3 million in 1800 to 9.6 million in 1820, surpassing New Spain - soon to be Mexico - which in 1820 had a population of around 6 million. The U.S. was the most populous power on the continent, which had implications for the future.
Both the United States and British North America had their pioneers pushing westward, clearing land and starting farms. And both suffered from economic recession following the Napoleonic Wars - in part the result of too much optimism and too much unsound money lending.
Before the 1800s, growers in the southern states had tobacco, rice, and indigo as major crops. Long-staple cotton was grown along the seacoast, but cotton inland had not been produced for market because removing the sticky seeds from inside each ball of short-staple cotton was too slow to make growing it profitable. The availability of the cotton gin after 1802 changed that, and by 1820 growing cotton had become the South's greatest industry.
The northern and southern states were developing differently. The South was sending its cotton north to factories and for shipment across the Atlantic - mainly to Britain. And growing more cotton and less food, the South was importing food. Northerners were investing profits from their industry in advances in machinery for all kinds of commercial enterprises, including farmers investing in better tools. Southern plantation owners had less money to invest and were usually in debt to northern bankers. Many who were not plantation owners were interested in buying land and retiring on a small plantation. And everyone was more interested in investing in slaves than they were in labor-saving machinery. Plantation owners found slavery suitable, and in the South were 52 slaves for every 100 whites.[note] Slavery was not suitable for the small family farms or for manufacturing enterprises in the North, and by 1820 half of the northern states had outlawed slavery.
In the U.S. Congress, southerners battled for what they perceived to be their interests against intrusive legislation created by northerners, especially the most wealthy and most industrialized section of the nation, New England. To maximize their political strength, southern states were counting their slaves for representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. The population of southern states, black and white, was 4.5 million and gave the South 80 members in the U.S. House of Representatives. The other states had 105 members in the House of Representatives, and southern politicians worried about being overwhelmed by northern views.
Congress was in the process of making Missouri a state. Southern politicians wanted Missouri to join as a slave state. Northern politicians wanted it to join the Union as a free state. In newspapers, in state legislatures and at mass meetings across the nation much rhetoric was produced. A compromise was reached:Missouri entered the Union in 1821 as a state that allowed slavery and Maine entered as a state that forbade slavery. And a part of the compromise was that within the territory of the Louisiana Purchase no slavery was to be allowed north of 36o 30" - the latitude of Missouri's southern border.
The British inherited slavery in the French speaking areas of North America when it took power there at the close of the Seven Year's War. At the close of the American Revolutionary War, freed slaves loyal to Britain arrived in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and slaves (commonly called "servants for life" arrived with the loyalists. The British government promised all of these people, including the slaves, protection. And for the free it promised land and supplies, but the freed blacks received less of a share and felt cheated. Blacks lived either segregated in towns dominated by whites or they had their own small towns. Wages that the freed blacks earned was less than that paid to whites, and they were relegated to day labor, to sharecropping or indentured servitude. And hostilities between whites and blacks arose, including a ten-day riot at Shelburne and Birchtown in Nova Scotia in July 1784, put down by military force.
In the 1820s, slaves from the United States were escaping into Upper Canada, where white people in the small towns and villages were at first sympathetic. But when the number of escaping blacks grew substantially, whites became alarmed, and they moved to keep the blacks segregated. But despite the difficulties, blacks developed communities at Chatham, Collingwood, Amherstburg, Windsor and elsewhere in Upper Canada, communities where some blacks advanced themselves as craftsmen, tradesmen and educators.
Many of the slaves that had been in British North American were freed before 1833, and the remaining 781,000 slaves were freed in 1833 when Britain's parliament passed the Abolition of Slavery Act. The law went into effect a year later, on August 1, with the British government prepared to compensate financially those who lost slaves. But no claims for compensation were submitted.
Slaves continued escaping to Canada, and extraditions of escaped slaves were requested by the United States government. The British held that such requests had to be accompanied by evidence that the escaped person had committed what British law recognized as a crime - which did not include running away from slavery.
What would have happened with slavery in the colonies that became the United States had there been no American Revolution is open to imagination.
Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, first ran for president in 1824. His rival, John Quincy Adams, carried the New England states and New York, while Jackson carried much of the rest of the nation's twenty-two states and won the popular vote. In electoral votes Adams had 84 and Jackson had 94. Neither number was a majority, and the House of Representatives decided the election, giving it to Adams despite his lower numbers.
Jackson and Adams faced off again in 1828. Jackson was running as a Democratic-Republican, soon to be called merely Democrat. And Adams ran with the National-Republicans, a party associated with Jefferson. In the campaign, Republican newspaper editors raised a morality issue, calling Jackson's wife an adulteress in the belief that her divorce from a previous husband had not been finalized before she and Jackson had married. Also, they accused Jackson of murder for having executed deserters and for having engaged in dueling. Jackson, on the other hand, attacked the "gamester" dealings and elitism of the northeast. He promised to limit presidential power. His running mate, Martin Van Buren of New York, managed Jackson's campaign and promoted Jackson as a frontier representative of common people - as opposed to the fancy, wealthy and pretentious book reading people in New England. Jackson appealed to the common man. "Vote for us," he said, "if you belief that the people should govern."
The most famous of living frontiersmen, Davy Crocket, now 42 and still barely literate, won re-election as a congressman from Jackson's home state: Tennessee. He had been with the Democrats and with Jackson, under whom, from 1811 to 1813, he had fought against the Creek Indians. But he had grown hostile toward Jackson and had switched parties. Crockett had more respect for Indians and their rights than did Jackson.
It was the most democratic of elections. Property and religious qualifications for voting and office holding had been on the decline. In 1824 only 25 percent of adult white males had been eligible to vote, but with a decline in property qualifications that number was higher for the 1828 election. And in 1828, in twenty-two of the twenty-four states, eligible voters, rather than state legislators, were to select their states presidential electors.
Jackson won 178 electoral votes to 83 electoral votes for Adams, Jackson having done well in all states except in populous New England and New Jersey.
Jackson's wife grew ill and died in December. Jackson thought she had been weakened by the attacks during the campaign, and he called those who had attacked her murderers.
When taking office in 1829, Jackson rewarded his southern supporters with appointments. The Jackson administration supported states rights, slavery and the low tariffs favored also by the South. Jackson was a most activist president, accused by his opponents of usurping power that belonged to Congress. Jackson was successful in foreign affairs, ending in 1830 a long dispute between the United States and Britain over reopening British West Indian ports to American commerce. And, under Jackson, more states lowered their property qualifications for voting - the number of white adult males eligible to vote rising to 78 percent by 1840.
Jackson supported the common white male also in his policy of opening more land to him at the expense of Indians. In 1830, Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. And in the congressional elections that year, Jackson and the Democrats managed to defeat Crockett's bid for reelection.
In Georgia the Cherokee Indians were a farming people, sending their children to schools, advancing their literacy and publishing their own newspaper. They had a written a constitution similar to that of the United States. And there were other tribes east of the Mississippi whom whites called civilized:the Creeks, Choctows, Chickasaws and Seminoles. Jackson ridiculed the suggestion that Indians should be allowed sovereignty over land within the states. His southern allies had expected him to rid them of Indians and to make more land available. A Supreme Court decision in 1832 (Worcester v. Georgia) sided with the Cherokees against the state of Georgia, and Jackson heaped scorn upon the decision. The state of Georgia began distributing Cherokee lands, and in the years just ahead the forced migrations of Indians from east of the Mississippi River to Louisiana Purchase territory began.
More on Jackson from Jackson: His Life and Times, by H.W. Brands.
Nat Turner was a slave in Virginia, who, in 1821, at the age of 21, ran away. He was influenced by religion and returned thirty days later after having had a vision. He believed that God had instructed him to return to the service of "his earthly master."
Turner was recognized by his fellow slaves as a man of godly gifts. He had another vision in 1824 and a third vision in 1828, which he was to describe as a loud noise in the heaven, the Spirit appearing before him and of a sign from heaven telling him to commence a great work. He believed that he had been instructed to prepare himself and to slay his enemies with their own weapons, and he spoke of Christ having laid down the yoke He had born for the sins of men."
In February, 1831, Turner interpreted an eclipse of the sun as the sign that he had been promised. He laid plans for his rebellion with six other slaves, and on August 21 they slipped into the woods. That night they entered the home of Turner's master, the Travis family, and killed them.
In the coming days and nights, Turner and his associates went from house to house, killing the white people as they went, chased by a militia, the number of rebelling with Turner growing to forty. The militia scattered and captured the rebels, and, on November 5, while in a county jail, Turner dictated his "confession" to a physician, Thomas R. Gray. Fifty-five white people had been killed, and the state of Virginia executed fifty-five blacks, including Nat Turner, who was hanged and skinned on November 11, 1831.
After Maine became a state in 1820 it began granting lands to settlers, lands in the valley of the Aroostook River, an area claimed by the British. During the winter of 1838-39, British lumberjacks entered the area to cut wood. A land agent arrived from the U.S. to expel them, and in February the British lumberjacks seized him. Maine sent 10,000 troops to the area. A militia in New Brunswick was called up, and the U.S. President, Van Buren, sent one of his generals, Winfield Scott, to the valley in hopes that Scott could settle the dispute peacefully. In March, 1839, a treaty was arranged by Scott between Maine and New Brunswick. Violence was averted, the U.S. troops suffering only one death, Private Hiram T. Smith, of an unknown cause.
The work of a boundary commission consisting of British and U.S. representatives resulted in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. The treaty gave 7,015 square miles to the United States, 5,012 square miles to the British and left them with overland military communications between New Brunswick and Montreal. Britain agreed to pay Maine and Massachusetts $150,000 each, and the U.S. reimbursed Britain for expenses incurred during the crisis.
The British had been ruling the French of Lower Canada since 1763, the British government in London maintaining constitutional rights for the French, including the right of worship as Roman Catholics. In Lower Canada the British maintained a mix of French Civil Law and English Criminal Code.
In both Lower and Upper Canada, the British allowed legislative assemblies, the representatives of these assemblies elected by eligible male voters. But these bodies were overseen by British crown authorities and could be overruled by Britain's governors-general. Ultimate power in Britain's colonies remained with the government in Britain. The legislative assemblies in Lower and Upper Canada were largely places of talk.
British North America suffered a decline in wheat exports in the 1830s, which impoverished many of its small farmers, especially in Lower Canada. And in the mid-thirties an economic recession appeared in both British North America and the United States. In Lower Canada, aggravations fueled French nationalism. A movement led by Louis-Joseph Papineau demanded political and economic reforms that were rejected by the British government, and from March through August, 1837, people gathered to protest Britain's recalcitrance. On September 5, 500 young French speakers in Montreal organized what they called the Fils de la Liberté, (Sons of Liberty), and, in November, brawls erupted between backers of the Fils de la Liberté and those loyal to the British.
On November 23, six companies of British infantry attacked armed French rebels at Saint-Denis (on the St. Lawrence River, 120 kilometers northeast of the town of Quebec.) After seven hours of fighting and losing 6 men killed and 11 wounded, the British retreated. The French rebels lost12 killed and 8 wounded, but they were elated by what they believed had been a victory. Two days later came the Battle of Saint-Charles (20 kilometers east of the town of Quebec). The rebels were routed after two hours of fighting, the British losing 7 dead and 23 wounded, the rebels losing 28 killed and more than 30 wounded. The rout discouraged the rebels. Papineau fled to the United States. On December 12 the British offered a reward for the capture of Papineau. For more than a year he remained in hiding in Albany, New York, and then he moved to Paris.
During the revolt in 1837 by the French, some Anglos in Upper Canada were encouraged and joined the revolt against the British. In the western part of Upper Canada a rebel force of from 500 to 600 was on the move. And at the town of York (later Toronto) a local militia was called out against a rebel force led by William Lyon Mackenzie. The militia won and Mackenzie fled to the United States.
In January, 1838, the United States government affirmed its neutrality concerning the struggle taking place in Canada. In February, sporadic fighting broke out at Amherstburg - a town in Upper Canada bordering the U.S. and about 20 miles south of the town of Detroit, with the rebels assisted by U.S. supporters. Another rebellion was taking shape as a force of 600, mainly French Canadians, assembled at Plattsburg, New York, on Lake Chaplain. They crossed the lake into Vermont and then into Lower Canada. Their leader declared Quebec independent of British rule, but in March they were forced back into the United States where their leaders were arrested by U.S. authorities.
In March, another skirmish occurred between British regulars and Anglo rebels in Upper Canada. The rebel leaders were captured, and in April they were hanged for treason. Another armed rising was attempted in June. Twenty-six rebels crossed into Upper Canada from Grand Island on the south bank of Lake Superior, where they were joined by 22 others, and they defeated a force of 13 British soldiers. Then a second force of loyalist troops arrived and crushed the rebels. The leader of this armed rising was hanged and others were sent to a penal colony across the Pacific Ocean on the island Tasmania (south of Australia).
In early November the British defeated yet another rebellion in Lower Canada, first against 300 armed rebels at Lacolle (five-miles north of the U.S. border and Vermont), and four days later they defeat 600 rebels at Odeltown.
Two days later, from the state of New York, rebels crossed Lake Ontario into Upper Canada - a force of about 200 men, most of them U.S. citizens, led by a Swedish soldier of fortune, Nils von Schoultz. They attacked Fort Wellington, beginning what was called the Battle of the Windmill, and after a four-day siege they surrendered.
The rebellions were over. In Lower Canada, 855 were arrested. On December 8, Nils von Schoultz and 11 other rebels captured at the Battle of Windmill were executed. On December 12, twelve rebels in Lower Canada were executed and fifty-eight were deported to penal colonies across the Pacific. And on December 21, two more rebel leaders, Joseph Cardinal and Joseph Duquet, were executed.
Meanwhile, the British had sent a new governor-general to Lower Canada: Lord Durham. He recommended more self-government for Upper and Lower Canada, and he recommended the unification of the two colonies in order to better assimilate the French. In 1840, the British government passed the Act of Union, uniting Upper and Lower Canada, which became law in 1841. A parliament was created in Canada, with equal representation between Upper and Lower Canada. And in 1846, Britain granted Canada self-government for internal affairs.
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