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Explore the topics, videos and stories of the 19th century in American history, from the Gilded Age to the Oregon Trail. Learn about the inventions, events and people that shaped the nation during this period.
- Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism is a 19th-century school of American...
- Knights of Labor
The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, was a prominent...
- Bleeding Kansas
Bleeding Kansas describes the period of repeated outbreaks...
- Bank War
The Bank War was the political struggle that ensued over the...
- Daniel Webster
Daniel Webster emerged as one of the greatest orators and...
- Gilded Age
The Gilded Age was an American era in the late 19th century...
- Transcendentalism
Explore the major events, figures, and movements that shaped America in the 19th century. Learn about the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, and more.
The 19th century in the United States refers to the period in the United States from 1801 through 1900 in the Gregorian calendar. For information on this period, see: History of the United States series: History of the United States (1789–1849) History of the United States (1849–1865) History of the United States (1865–1918) Historical eras:
- Overview
- Effects of the War of 1812
- National disunity
- Transportation revolution
The years between the election to the presidency of James Monroe in 1816 and of John Quincy Adams in 1824 have long been known in American history as the Era of Good Feelings. The phrase was conceived by a Boston editor during Monroe’s visit to New England early in his first term. That a representative of the heartland of Federalism could speak in ...
Later scholars have questioned the strategy and tactics of the United States in the War of 1812, the war’s tangible results, and even the wisdom of commencing it in the first place. To contemporary Americans, however, the striking naval victories and Jackson’s victory over the British at New Orleans created a reservoir of “good feeling” on which Monroe was able to draw.
Abetting the mood of nationalism was the foreign policy of the United States after the war. Florida was acquired from Spain (1819) in negotiations, the success of which owed more to Jackson’s indifference to such niceties as the inviolability of foreign borders and to the country’s evident readiness to back him up than it did to diplomatic finesse. The Monroe Doctrine (1823), actually a few phrases inserted in a long presidential message, declared that the United States would not become involved in European affairs and would not accept European interference in the Americas; its immediate effect on other nations was slight, and that on its own citizenry was impossible to gauge, yet its self-assured tone in warning off the Old World from the New reflected well the nationalist mood that swept the country.
For all the signs of national unity and feelings of oneness, equally convincing evidence points in the opposite direction. The very Supreme Court decisions that delighted friends of strong national government infuriated its opponents, while Marshall’s defense of the rights of private property was construed by critics as betraying a predilection for one kind of property over another. The growth of the West, encouraged by the conquest of Indian lands during the War of 1812, was by no means regarded as an unmixed blessing. Eastern conservatives sought to keep land prices high; speculative interests opposed a policy that would be advantageous to poor squatters; politicians feared a change in the sectional balance of power; and businessmen were wary of a new section with interests unlike their own. European visitors testified that, even during the so-called Era of Good Feelings, Americans characteristically expressed scorn for their countrymen in sections other than their own.
Economic hardship, especially the financial panic of 1819, also created disunity. The causes of the panic were complex, but its greatest effect was clearly the tendency of its victims to blame it on one or another hostile or malevolent interest—whether the second Bank of the United States, Eastern capitalists, selfish speculators, or perfidious politicians—each charge expressing the bad feeling that existed side by side with the good.
If harmony seemed to reign on the level of national political parties, disharmony prevailed within the states. In the early 19th-century United States, local and state politics were typically waged less on behalf of great issues than for petty gain. That the goals of politics were often sordid did not mean that political contests were bland. In every section, state factions led by shrewd men waged bitter political warfare to attain or entrench themselves in power.
The most dramatic manifestation of national division was the political struggle over slavery, particularly over its spread into new territories. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 eased the threat of further disunity, at least for the time being. The sectional balance between the states was preserved: in the Louisiana Purchase, with the exception of the Missouri Territory, slavery was to be confined to the area south of the 36°30′ line. Yet this compromise did not end the crisis but only postponed it. The determination by Northern and Southern senators not to be outnumbered by one another suggests that the people continued to believe in the conflicting interests of the various great geographic sections. The weight of evidence indicates that the decade after the Battle of New Orleans was not an era of good feelings so much as one of mixed feelings.
Improvements in transportation, a key to the advance of industrialization everywhere, were especially vital in the United States. A fundamental problem of the developing American economy was the great geographic extent of the country and the appallingly poor state of its roads. The broad challenge to weave the Great Lakes, Mississippi Valley, and Gulf and Atlantic coasts into a single national market was first met by putting steam to work on the rich network of navigable rivers. As early as 1787, John Fitch had demonstrated a workable steamboat to onlookers in Philadelphia; some years later, he repeated the feat in New York City. But it is characteristic of American history that, in the absence of governmental encouragement, private backing was needed to bring an invention into full play. As a result, popular credit for the first steamboat goes to Robert Fulton, who found the financing to make his initial Hudson River run of the Clermont in 1807 more than a onetime feat. From that point forward, on inland waters, steam was king, and its most spectacular manifestation was the Mississippi River paddle wheeler, a unique creation of unsung marine engineers challenged to make a craft that could “work” in shallow swift-running waters. Their solution was to put cargo, engines, and passengers on a flat open deck above the waterline, which was possible in the mild climate of large parts of the drainage basin of the Father of Waters. The Mississippi River steamboat not only became an instantly recognizable American icon but also had an impact on the law. In the case of Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Chief Justice Marshall affirmed the exclusive right of the federal government to regulate traffic on rivers flowing between states.
Canals and railroads were not as distinctively American in origin as the paddle wheeler, but, whereas 18th-century canals in England and continental Europe were simple conveniences for moving bulky loads cheaply at low speed, Americans integrated the country’s water transport system by connecting rivers flowing toward the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes and the Ohio-Mississippi River valleys. The best-known conduit, the Erie Canal, connected the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, linking the West to the port of New York City. Other major canals in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Ohio joined Philadelphia and Baltimore to the West via the Ohio River and its tributaries. Canal building was increasingly popular throughout the 1820s and ’30s, sometimes financed by states or by a combination of state and private effort. But many overbuilt or unwisely begun canal projects collapsed, and states that were “burned” in the process became more wary of such ventures.
Feb 26, 2024 · To help students better understand the cataclysmic changes of this century, this unique resource offers detailed description and expert analysis of the most important 19th-century events in America: the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, the Monroe Doctrine, Jacksonian Democracy, Abolition, the war with Mexico, the Civil War, the Industrial ...
- Eric Novotny
- 2015
Dec 6, 2023 · Romanticism. The U.S. Civil War in Art. Realism. Western art. Aestheticism and the Gilded Age. Photography. Sculpture, architecture, and design. All content | The United States in the 19th century. From Romanticism to the Gilded Age, American art ranged from bucolic landscapes to elegant city parks. View of a Cheyenne Village. Le Retour.
U.S. 19th Century. Americanists who study the nineteenth century ask questions about a wide variety of topics, including U.S. foreign policy, Chinese migration, visual culture, philanthropy, gender and sexuality, African-American working class women, the Civil War and Reconstruction, global imperialism, and Mexican-American history.
