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The U.S.

United States of America, officially the United States of America, abbreviated U.S. or U.S.A., byname America, country in North America, a federal republic of 50 states. Besides the 48 conterminous states that occupy the middle latitudes of the continent, the United States includes the state of Alaska, at the northwestern extreme of North America, and the island state of Hawaii, in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The conterminous states are bounded on the north by Canada, on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, on the south by the Gulf of Mexico and Mexico, and the west by the Pacific Ocean.

The major characteristic of the United States is its great variety, which ranges from the Arctic to the subtropical, from the moist rain forest to the arid desert, from the rugged mountain peak to the flat prairie. Although the total population of the United States is large by world standards, its overall population density is relatively low. The country embraces some of the world’s largest urban concentrations and some of the most extensive areas almost devoid of habitation.

The United States contains a highly diverse population. Unlike a country such as China, the United States has a diversity that to a great degree has come from immense and sustained global immigration. Probably no other country has a wider range of racial, ethnic, and cultural types than doe United States. In addition to the presence of surviving Native Americans (including American Indians, Aleuts, and Eskimos) and the descendants of Africans taken as enslaved persons to the New World, the national character has been enriched, tested, and constantly redefined by the tens of millions of immigrants who, by and large, have come to America hoping for greater social, political, and economic opportunities than they had in their place of origin.

The United States is the world’s greatest economic power, measured in terms of gross domestic product (GDP). The nation’s wealth is partly a reflection of its rich natural resources and its enormous agricultural output, but it owes more to the country’s highly developed industry. Despite its relative economic self-sufficiency in many areas, the United States is the most important single factor in world trade by vibysheer size; its exports and imports represent major proportions of the world total. The United States also impinges on the global economy as a source of and as a destination for investment capital. The country continues to sustain an economic life that is more diversified than any other on Earth, providing the majority of its people with one of the world’s highest standards of living.

At the National Archives in Washington, D.C., is a copy of the original constitution of the United Stat
American History and Politics

The United States is relatively young by world standards, being less than 250 years old; it achieved its current size only in the mid-20th century. America separated successfully from its motherland in 1776 and was the first nation to be established on the premise that sovereignty rests with its citizens and not with the government. In its first century and a half, the country was mainly preoccupied with its territorial expansion and economic growth and with social debates that ultimately led to civil war and a healing period that is still not complete.

TherSeveral articles discusser major U.S. cities, including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, among others. As well as Puerto Rico, which is discussed in the article Puerto Rico, several Pacific islands are discussed in the articles Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa.

The land

Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, Colorado River

The two great sets of elements that mold the physical environment of the United States are, first, the geological, which determines the main patterns of landforms, drainage, and mineral resources and influences soils to a lesser degree, and, second, the atmospheric, which dictates not only climate and weather but also in large part the distribution of soils, plants, and animals. Although these elements are not entirely independent of one another, each produces on a map patterns that are so profoundly different that essentially they remain two separate geographies.

Relieved

The center of the contiguous United States is a great sprawling interior lowland. It reaches from the ancient shield of central Canada on the north to the Gulf of Mexico on the south. The two mountain systems differ drastically. The Appalachian Mountains on the east are low, almost unbroken, and in the main set well back from the Atlantic. From New York to the Mexican border stretches the low Coastal Plain, which faces the ocean along a swampy, convoluted coast. The gently sloping surface of the plain extends out beneath the sea, where it forms the continental shelf, which, although submerged beneath shallow ocean water, is geologically identical to the Coastal Plain. Southward the plain grows wider, swinging westward in Georgia and Alabama to truncate the Appalachians along their southern extremity and separate the interior lowland from the Gulf of Mexico.

West of the Central Lowland is the mighty Cordillera, part of a global mountain system that rings the Pacific basin. The Cordillera encompasses fully one-third of the United States, with an internal variety commensurate with its size. At its eastern margin lie the Rocky Mountains, a high, diverse, and discontinuous chain that stretches all the way fro to the Canadian border. The western edge of the Cordillera is a Pacific coastal chain of rugged mountains and inland valleys, the whole rising spectacularly from the sea without benefit of a coastal plain. Pent between the Rockies and the Pacific chain is a vast intermontane complex of basins, plateaus, and isolated ranges so large and remarkable that they merit recognition as a region separate from but allied to the Cordillera itself.

There are 24 major subregions, or provinces, within these regions: the Interior Lowlands and their upland fringes, the Appalachian Mountain system, the Atlantic Plain, the Western Cordillera, and the Western Intermountane Region.

Interior Lowlands and their uplands

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People were only able to escape Old World influences west of the mountains, in the isolation and freedom of the great Interior Lowlands, because the United States began at the Alleghenies, according to Andrew Jackson, who supposedly said the United States began at the Alleghenies. Though it is debatable if the lowlands serve as the country’s cultural core, they are undeniably its geological core and, in many ways, its geographical core.

For more than 600,000,000 years, this immense region has laid undisturbed by major orogenic (mountain-building) activity on an ancient, much-eroded platform of complex crystalline rocks. These Precambrian rocks are exposed at the surface throughout much of central Canada, forming the formidable, ice-scoured Canadian Shield, the continent’s largest topographic region.

The United States most of the crystalline platform is concealed under a deep blanket of sedimentary rocks. In the far north, however, the naked Canadian Shield extends into the United States far enough to form two small but distinctive landform regions: the rugged Adirondack Mountains of northern New York and the more-subdued Superior Upland of northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. As in the rest of the shield, glaciers have stripped soils away, strewn the surface with boulders and other debris, and obliterated preglacial drainage systems. Most attempts at farming in these areas have been abandoned, but the combination of a comparative wilderness in a northern climate, clear lakes, and white-water streams has fostered the development of both regions as year-round outdoor recreation areas.

The Superior Upland is known for its abundance of minerals, including iron. Iron is mined both north and south of Lake Superior, but the most famous deposits are in Minnesota’s Mesabi Range. Despite being depleted, these mines still produce a significant portion of the United States’ iron and a large share of the world’s supply.

South of the Adirondack Mountains and the Superior Upland lies the boundary between crystalline and sedimentary rocks; abruptly, everything is different. The Central Lowland—the heartland of the United States—is a great Central Plain that stretches for 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometres) from New York to central Texas and north another 1,000 miles to the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. To some people, the landscape may seem dull because heights greater than 2,000 feet (600 metres) are unusual, and truly rough terrain is almost lacking. Landscapes are varied largely as the result of glaciation that directly or indirectly affected most of the region. North of the Missouri-Ohio river line, glaciation left an intricate mosaic of boulders, sand, gravel, silt, and clay with a complex pattern of lakes and drainage channels some abandoned and some still in use. The southern part of Central Lowland is quite different covered mostly with loess (wind-deposited silt), which further subdued the already low relief surface Elsewhere especially near major rivers postglacial streams carved the loess into rounded hills while visitors have aptly compared their billowing shapes to waves on the sea Above all loess soils

The Central Lowland resembles a vast saucer, rising gradually to higher lands on all sides. Southward and eastward, the land rises gradually to three major plateaus, with the Ozark Plateau lying west of the river. Beyond the reach of glaciation to the south, the sedimentary rocks have been raised into two broad upwarps, separated from one another by the great valley of the Mississippi River.

Eastward from the Central Lowland, the Appalachian Plateau forms a transition between the interior plains and the Appalachian Mountains. Usually, however, the Appalachian Plateau is considered as a subregion of the Appalachian Mountains, partly on grounds of location and partly because of geologic structure. Unlike other plateaus, where rocks are warped upward, rocks there form an elongated basin (like in Mesabi Iron country), wherein bituminous coal has been preserved from erosion. This Appalachian coal, similar to Mesabi Iron in U.S. industry, is extraordinary. Extensive, thick, and close to surface-level, it has stoked the furnaces of northeastern steel mills for decades and helps explain the huge concentration of heavy industry along lower Great Lakes area

Prairies of the highlands

A highland region

The western flanks of the Interior Lowlands are the Great Plains, a territory of awesome bulk that spans the full distance between Canada and Mexico in a swath nearly 500 miles wide. The Great Plains were built by successive layers of poorly cemented sand, silt, and gravel—debris laid down by parallel east-flowing streams from the Rocky Mountains. Seen from the east, the surface of the Great Plains rises inexorably from about 2,000 feet (600 metres) near Omaha, Nebraska, to more than 6,000 feet (1,825 metres) at Cheyenne, Wyoming; but the climb is so gradual that popular legend holds it to be flat. True flatness is rare, although parts of the High Plains of western Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and eastern Colorado come close.

The main mineral wealth of the Interior Lowlands derives from fossil fuels. Coal, petroleum, and natural gas occur in nearly every state between the Appalachians and the Rockies, but the Midcontinent Fields of western Texas and the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma, and Kansas surpass all others. Aside from small deposits of lead and zinc, metallic minerals are of little importance.

Appalachian Mountains

Falls caused by screw augers

The Appalachian Mountains dominate the eastern United States and separate the Eastern Seaboard from the interior with a belt of subdued uplands that extends nearly 1,500 miles (2,400 km). These mountains are old, complex features and the eroded stumps of much greater ranges. Present topography is the result of erosion that has carved weak rocks away, leaving a skeleton of resistant rocks behind as highlands. Geologic differences are thus faithfully reflected in topography. In the Appalachians, these differences are sharply demarcated and neatly arranged, so that all of the major subdivisions except New England lie in strips parallel to the Atlantic and to one another.

The core of the Appalachians is a belt of complex metamorphic and igneous rocks that stretches all the way from Alabama to New Hampshire. The western side of this belt forms the long slender rampart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, containing the highest elevations in the Appalachians (Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, 6,684 feet [2,037 metres]) and some of its most handsome mountain scenery. On its eastern, or seaward, side the Blue Ridge descends in an abrupt and sometimes spectacular escarpment to the Piedmont, a well-drained, rolling land—never quite hills, but never quite a plain. Before the settlement of the Midwest the Piedmont was the most productive agricultural region in the United States. Several Pennsylvania counties still consistently report some of the highest farm yields per acre in the entire country.

Topography of ridges and valleys

Away from the axis of primary geologic deformation, sedimentary rocks have escaped metamorphism but are compressed into tight folds. Erosion has carved the upturned edges of these folded rocks into the remarkable Ridge and Valley country of the western Appalachians. Long linear ridges characteristically stand about 1,000 feet (300 metres) from base to crest and run for tens of miles, paralleled by broad open valleys of comparable length. In Pennsylvania, ridges run unbroken for great distances, occasionally turning abruptly in a zigzag pattern; by contrast, the southern ridges are broken by faults and form short, parallel segments that are lined up like magnetized iron filings. By far the largest valley—and one of the most important routes in North America—is the Great Valley, an extraordinary trench of shale and limestone that runs nearly the entire length of the Appalachians. It provides a lowland passage from the middle Hudson valley to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and on southward, where it forms the Shenandoah and Cumberland valleys, and has been one of the main paths through the Appalachian Mountains since pioneer times.

Approximately the same topography as the Ridge and Valley can be found in the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. The intervening section is buried beneath the sediments of the lower Mississippi valley, and is generally thought to be a detached continuation of Appalachian geologic structure.

New Hampshire’s Mount Washington

Although almost completely underlain by crystalline rocks, New England is laid out in north-south bands reminiscent of the southern Appalachians. The rolling, rocky hills of southeastern New England are not dissimilar to the Piedmont, while, farther northwest, the rugged and lofty White Mountains are a New England analogue to the Blue Ridge. (Mount Washington, New Hampshire, at 6,288 feet [1,917 metres], is the highest peak in the northeastern United States.) The westernmost ranges—the Taconics, Berkshires, and Green Mountains—show a strong north-south lineation like the Ridge and Valley. Unlike the rest of the Appalachians, however, glaciation has mostly scoured the crystalline rocks leaving them in rough condition much like those of the Canadian Shield. This is why N.E. New England is better known for its picturesque landscape than for its fertile soil.

The Appalachians are diverse in their geology, containing a great variety of minerals. Only a few occur in quantities large enough for sustained exploitation, notably iron in Pennsylvania’s Blue Ridge and Piedmont region and the famous granites, marbles, and slates of northern New England. In Pennsylvania the Ridge and Valley region contains one of the world’s largest deposits of anthracite coal, once the basis of a thriving mining economy; many of the mines are now shut due to oil and gas replacing coal as the major fuel used to heat homes.

Atlantic Plains

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The eastern and southeastern fringes of the United States are part of the outermost margins of the continental platform, which is repeatedly invaded by the sea and veneered with layer after layer of young, poorly consolidated sediments. A part of this platform now lies slightly above sea level and forms a nearly flat and often swampy coastal plain, which stretches from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to beyond the Mexican border. Most of the platform, however, is still submerged, so that a band of shallow water, the continental shelf, parallels the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

The Atlantic Plain slopes so gently that even slight crustal upwarping can shift the coastline far out to sea at the expense of the continental shelf. The peninsula of Florida is just such an upwarp: nowhere in its 400-mile (640-km) length does the land rise more than 350 feet (100 metres) above sea level; much of the southern and coastal areas rise less than 10 feet (3 metres) and are poorly drained and dangerously exposed to Atlantic storms. Downwarps can result in extensive flooding. North of New York City, for example, the weight of glacial ice depressed most of the Coastal Plain beneath the sea, and the Atlantic now beats directly against New England’s rock-ribbed coasts. Cape Cod, Long Island (New York), and a few offshore islands are all that remain of New England’s drowned Coastal Plain.

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Offshore a line of sandbars and barrier beaches stretches intermittently the length of the Coastal Plain, hampering entry of shipping into the estuaries but providing the eastern United States with a playground that is more than 1,000 miles long.

The Coastal Plain is mostly poor soils, though rare exceptions have formed some of America’s most famous agricultural regions—for example, the citrus country of central Florida’s limestone uplands and the Cotton Belt of the Old South, once centred on the alluvial plain of the Mississippi. Onshore and offshore drilling has revealed colossal reserves of oil and natural gas in eastern Texas and Louisiana.

Cordillera Western

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From west of the Great Plains, the United States is a craggy land with mountains on its skyline—completely unlike the open prairies and rounded hills of the East. As a result of the alignment of the two major chains—the Rocky Mountains on the east, the Pacific ranges on the west—one may assume that they are geologically and topographically homogeneous. In reality, each chain is divided into sections which are very disparate from one another.

The Rockies are typically diverse. The Southern Rockies are composed of a disconnected series of lofty elongated upwarps, their cores made of granitic basement rocks, stripped of sediments, and heavily glaciated at high elevations. In New Mexico and along the western flanks of the Colorado ranges, widespread volcanism and deformation of colourful sedimentary rocks have produced rugged and picturesque country, but the characteristic central Colorado or southern Wyoming range is impressively austere rather than spectacular. The Front Range west of Denver is prototypical, rising abruptly from its base at about 6,000 feet (1,825 metres) to rolling alpine meadows between 11,000 and 12,000 feet (3,350 and 3,650 metres). Peaks appear as low hills perched on this high-level surface, so that Colorado, for example, boasts 53 mountains over 14,000 feet (4,270 metres) but not one over 14,500 feet (4,420 metres).

Teton Range in Grand Teton National Park

The Middle Rockies cover most of west-central Wyoming. Much of the subregion, however, is not mountainous at all but consists of extensive intermontane basins and plains—largely floored with enormous volumes of sedimentary waste eroded from the mountains themselves. Whole ranges have been buried, producing the greatest gap in the Cordilleran system, the Wyoming Basin—resembling in geologic structure and topography an intermontane peninsula of the Great Plains. As a result, the Rockies have never posed an important barrier to east-west transportation in the United States; all major routes, from the Oregon Trail to interstate highways, funnel through the basin, essentially circumventing the main ranges of the Rockies.

The Northern Rockies contain the most varied mountain landscapes of the Cordillera, reflecting a corresponding geologic complexity. The region’s backbone is a series of batholiths—huge masses of molten rock that slowly cooled below the surface and were later uplifted. The batholiths are eroded into rugged granitic ranges, which, in central Idaho, compose the most extensive wilderness country in the conterminous United States. East of the batholiths and opposite the Great Plains, sediments have been folded and thrust-faulted into a series of linear north–south ranges, a southern extension of the spectacular Canadian Rockies. Although elevations run 2,000 to 3,000 feet (600 to 900 metres) lower than the Colorado Rockies (most of the Idaho Rockies lie well below 10,000 feet [3,050 metres]), increased rainfall and northern latitude have encouraged glaciation—there as elsewhere a sculptor of handsome alpine landscape.

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The western branch of the Cordillera directly abuts the Pacific Ocean. This coastal chain, like its Rocky Mountain cousins on the eastern flank of the Cordillera, conceals bewildering complexity behind a facade of apparent simplicity. At first glance, the chain consists merely of two lines of mountains with a discontinuous trough between them—the Pacific Coast Ranges. Immediately behind the coast is a line of hills and low mountains—the Pacific Coast Ranges. Farther inland, averaging 150 miles (240 km) from the coast, the line of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Range includes the highest elevations in the conterminous United States. Between these two unequal mountain lines is a discontinuous trench—the Troughs of the Coastal Margin.

Kings Canyon National Park, South Fork Kings River

The apparent simplicity disappears under the most cursory examination. The Pacific Coast Ranges actually contain five distinct sections, each of different geologic origin and each with its own distinctive topography. The Transverse Ranges of southern California are a crowded assemblage of islandlike faulted ranges, with peak elevations of more than 10,000 feet but sufficiently separated by plains and low passes so that travel through them is easy. From Point Conception to the Oregon border, however, the main California Coast Ranges are entirely different, resembling the Appalachian Ridge and Valley region, with low linear ranges that result from erosion of faulted and folded rocks. Major faults run parallel to the low ridges, and the greatest—the notorious San Andreas Fault—was responsible for the earthquake that all but destroyed San Francisco in 1906. Along the California–Oregon border, however, everything changes again. In this region, the wildly rugged Klamath Mountains represent a western salient of interior structure reminiscent of the Idaho Rockies and the northern Sierra Nevada. In western Oregon and southwestern Washington the Coast Ranges are also different—a gentle, hilly land carved by streams from a broad arch of marine deposits interbedded with tabular lavas. In the northernmost part

East of these Pacific Coast Ranges, the Troughs of the Coastal Margin contain the only extensive lowland plains of the Pacific margin- California’s Central Valley, Oregon’s Willamette River valley, and the half-drowned basin of Puget Sound in Washington. Parts of an inland trench that extends for great distances along the east coast of the Pacific, similar valleys occur in such diverse areas as Chile and the Alaska panhandle. These valleys are blessed with superior soils, easily irrigated, and very accessible from the Pacific. They have enticed settlers for more than a century and have become main centres of population and economic activity for much of the U.S. West Coast.

California’s Mount Whitney

The two highest mountain chains in the contiguous United States are the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada. Aside from elevation, geographic continuity, and spectacular scenery, however, the two ranges differ in almost every important respect. The Sierra Nevada is largely made of granite, part of the same batholithic chain that creates the Idaho Rockies. The range is grossly asymmetrical, the result of massive faulting that has gently tilted the western slopes toward the Central Valley but has uplifted the eastern side to confront the interior with an escarpment nearly two miles high. At high elevation glaciers have scoured the granites to a gleaming white, while on the west the ice has carved spectacular valleys such as Yosemite. Mount Whitney, which at 14,494 feet (4,418 metres) is the highest mountain in the conterminous states, is accompanied by downfaulting that formed nearby Death Valley, at 282 feet (86 metres) below sea level.

The Cascades are formed of volcanic rock, with the older range being a long belt of upwarped lava and the newer range consisting of relatively recent lava outpourings. The two ranges are essentially two ranges, with the lower, older range being a chain of volcanoes situated near sea level while the higher, more imposing chain is punctuated by magnificent glacier-clad peaks. The highest peak in the Cascades is Mount Rainier which rises from near sea level. Most of the other high Cascade volcanoes exhibit sign of seismic activity in some form.

Western Intermountain Region

Montana’s Beartooth Mountains

Two main chains of the Cordillera surround a vast intermontane region containing arid basins, plateaus, and isolated mountain ranges that stretch from Mexico nearly to Canada and extend 600 miles east to west. There are three major subregions within this enormous territory, each with its own unique geology and topography.

The Colorado Plateau is an extraordinary island of geologic stability set in the turbulent sea of Cordilleran tectonic activity. Stability was not absolute, of course, so that parts of the plateau are warped and injected with volcanics, but in general the landscape results from the erosion by streams of nearly flat-lying sedimentary rocks. The result is a mosaic of angular mesas, buttes, and steplike canyons intricately cut from rocks that often are vividly colored. Large areas of the plateau are so improbably picturesque that they have been set aside as national preserves.

West of the plateau and abutting the Sierra Nevada’s eastern escarpment lies the arid Basin and Range province, among the most remarkable topographic provinces of the United States. The Basin and Range extends from southern Oregon and Idaho into northern Mexico. Rocks of great complexity have been broken by faulting, and the resulting blocks have tumbled, eroded, and been partly buried by lava and alluvial debris accumulating in the desert basins. The eroded blocks form mountain ranges that are characteristically dozens of miles long, several thousand feet from base to crest, with peak elevations that rarely rise to more than 10,000 feet, and almost always aligned roughly north–south. The basin floors are typically alluvium and sometimes salt marshes or alkali flats.

The third intermontane region, the Columbia Basin, is literally the last, for in some parts its rocks are still being formed. The entire area is underlain by innumerable tabular lava flows that have flooded the basin between the Cascades and Northern Rockies to undetermined depths. The volume of lava must be measured in thousands of cubic miles, for the flows blanket large parts of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho and in southern Idaho have drowned the flanks of the Northern Rocky Mountains in a basaltic sea.

Most large mountain systems are sources of varied mineral wealth, and the American Cordillera is no exception. Metallic minerals have been taken from most crystalline regions and have furnished the United States with both romance and wealth—the Sierra Nevada gold that provoked the 1849 gold rush, the fabulous silver lodes of western Nevada’s Basin and Range, and gold strikes all along the Rocky Mountain chain. Industrial metals, however, are now far more important; copper and lead are among the base metals, and the more exotic molybdenum, vanadium, and cadmium are mainly useful in alloys.

In the Cordillera, as elsewhere, the greatest wealth stems from fuels. Most major basins contain oil and natural gas, conspicuously the Wyoming Basin, the Central Valley of California, and the Los Angeles Basin. The Colorado Plateau, however, has yielded some of the most interesting discoveries—considerable deposits of uranium and colossal occurrences of oil shale. Oil from the shale is probably not economically removable without widespread strip-mining and correspondingly large-scale damage to the environment. Wide exploitation of low-sulfur bituminous coal has been initiated in the Four Corners area of the Colorado Plateau, but open-pit mining has already devastated parts of this once-pristine country as completely as it has West Virginia.

The drainage system

Yes, the United States has an extraordinary network of rivers and lakes. These waterways provide an immense mileage of cheap inland transportation in both the East and West, as well as being heavily used for irrigation and power generation. Despite efforts to clean them up, most large waterways are laden with vast poisonous volumes of industrial, agricultural, and human wastes.

Systems in the East

The Mississippi is one of the most important rivers in the United States. It has many large tributaries, including the Ohio and the Missouri, which make it a very large network of waterways. However, some of its smaller tributaries are not very navigable, and there are many sandbars along its banks.

The Great Lakes–St. Lawrence system, the other half of the midcontinental inland waterway, is connected to the Mississippi–Ohio via Chicago by canals and the Illinois River. The five Great Lakes (four of which are shared with Canada) constitute by far the largest freshwater lake group in the world and carry a larger tonnage of shipping than any other. The three main barriers to navigation—the St. Marys Rapids, at Sault Sainte Marie; Niagara Falls; and the rapids of the St. Lawrence—are all bypassed by locks, whose 27-foot (8-metre) draft lets ocean vessels penetrate 1,300 miles (2,100 km) into the continent, as far as Duluth, Minnesota, and Chicago.

Thirdly, Eastern rivers drain the coastal strip along the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Almost all of these coastal rivers flow in an almost straight line to the sea, except for the Rio Grande, which rises west of the Rockies and flows 1,900 circuitous miles (3,050 km) to the Gulf. Most coastal streams are navigable for some distance except in glaciated New England and arid southwest Texas.

Systems in the Pacific

Almost all of the rivers in the West are strongly influenced by aridity. In the deserts and steppes of the intermontane basins, most of the scanty runoff disappears into interior basins, only one of which, the Great Salt Lake, holds any substantial volume of water. Aside from a few minor coastal streams, only three large river systems manage to reach the sea—the Columbia, the Colorado, and the San Joaquin–Sacramento system of California’s Central Valley. All three of these river systems are exotic: that is, they flow for considerable distances across dry lands from which they receive little water. The Columbia and the Colorado have carved awesome gorges, the former through the sombre lavas of the Cascades and the Columbia Basin, the latter through the brilliantly coloured rocks of the Colorado Plateau. These gorges lend themselves to easy damming, and proposals for new dam construction have met fierce opposition from those who want to preserve the spectacular natural beauty of the river’s canyon lands.

The climate

The climate affects human habitats directly and indirectly through its effects on vegetation, soils, and wildlife. In the United States, however, nearly four centuries of European settlement, as well as thousands of years of Indian occupancy, have drastically altered the natural environment.

Wherever land is abandoned, “wild” conditions rapidly return, achieving a dynamic equilibrium among soils, vegetation, and the inexorable strictures of climate. Thus, though Americans have created an artificial environment of continental proportions, the United States still can be divided into a mosaic of bioclimatic regions, each of them distinguished by peculiar climatic conditions and each with a potential vegetation and soil that eventually would return in the absence of humans. The main exception to this generalization applies to fauna, so drastically altered that it is almost impossible to know what sort of animal geography would redevelop in the areas of the United States if humans were removed from the scene.

Controls of the climate

Climates of the United States are largely determined by the location of the conterminous United States, which is almost entirely located in the middle latitudes, its position with respect to the continental landmass and the fringing oceans, and its pattern of mountains and lowlands. Air masses change their characteristics from season to season depending on these geographical controls.

Located between the tropic of Cancer and 50° N latitude, the conterminous United States is characterized by Arctic climates confined to mountaintops and genuine tropical environments confined to southern Florida. The middle latitudes, however, are notorious for extreme temperature and precipitation variations, so the climate is in no sense temperate.

The vast size of North America helps to reinforce these extremes. Since land heats up and cools more rapidly than bodies of water, places that are far from the ocean have continental climates; in contrast, marine climates tend to be more temperate. Most U.S. climates are markedly continental, the more so because the Cordillera effectively confines the moderating Pacific influence to a narrow strip along the West Coast. In some parts of the country, temperatures have ranged between a record high of 121 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius) and a record low of -60 degrees Fahrenheit (-51 degrees Celsius). Moreover, the general eastward drift of air over the United States carries continental temperatures all the way to the Atlantic coast. For example, Bismarck, North Dakota has an annual temperature range that is much greater than that of Boston, which is located on the Atlantic but largely exempt from its influence. San Francisco, which is located under strong Pacific influence, only has a small summer-to-winter differential.

In addition to confining Pacific temperatures to the coastal margin, the Pacific Coast Ranges are high enough to make a local rain shadow in their lee, but the main barrier is the great rampart formed by the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges. This mountain crest is one of the sharpest climate divides in the United States, with rainy slopes on the west and barren slopes on the east.

The Intermontane Region, except for isolated ranges that manage to capture leftover moisture at high altitudes, is either arid or semiarid east of the Rockies. East of the Rockies, the westerly drift brings mainly dry air, which results in Great Plains being semiarid. Further east, humidity increases owing to frequent incursion from south of warm, moist, and unstable air from Gulf of Mexico which produces more precipitation in United States than both Pacific and Atlantic oceans combined.

Although the landforms of the Interior Lowlands are typically referred to as dull, the weather conditions are anything but. Air from the Gulf of Mexico can flow northward across the Great Plains, unimpeded by topographical barriers, but continental Canadian air flows south by the same route, and, since these two air masses differ in every important respect, collisions between them often produce spectacular weather displays. Plainsmen and Midwesterners are accustomed to sudden displays of furious weather—tornadoes, blizzards, hailstorms, precipitous drops and rises in temperature, and a host of other spectacular meteorological phenomena, sometimes dangerous but seldom boring.

Seasonal changes

Most of the United States is marked by sharp differences between winter and summer. In winter, when temperature contrasts between land and water are greatest, huge masses of frigid, dry Canadian air periodically spread far south over the midcontinent, bringing cold, sparkling weather to the interior and generating great cyclonic storms. Although such cyclonic activity occurs throughout the year, it is most frequent and intense during the winter. Winter temperatures differ widely, depending largely on latitude. Thus, New Orleans, Louisiana, at 30° N latitude, and International Falls, Minnesota, at 49° N, have respective January temperature averages of 55 °F (13 °C) and 3 °F (−16 °C). In the north, however, precipitation often comes as snow; farther south, cold rain alternates with sleet and occasional snow. Southern Florida is the only dependably warm part of the East; although “polar outbursts” have been known to bring temperatures below 0 °F (−18 °C) as far south as Tallahassee. The main uniformity of Eastern weather in wintertime is the expectation of frequent change.

The Intermontane Region is similar to the Pacific Coast, but with much less rainfall and a considerably wider range of temperatures.

During the summer there is a reversal of the air masses, and east of the Rockies the change resembles the summer monsoon of Southeast Asia. As the midcontinent heats up, the cold Canadian air mass weakens and retreats, pushed north by an aggressive mass of warm, moist air from the Gulf. The great winter temperature differential between North and South disappears as the hot, soggy blanket spreads from the Gulf coast to the Canadian border. Heat and humidity are naturally most oppressive in the South, but there is little comfort in the more northern latitudes. In Houston, Texas, on a typical July day temperatures reach 93 °F (34 °C), with relative humidity averaging near 75 percent but in Minneapolis, Minnesota 1,000 miles (1,600 km) north it only reaches 86 °F (30 °C) and has a relative humidity of only 45 percent.

Since the Gulf air is unstable as well as wet, convectional and frontal summer thunderstorms are endemic east of the Rockies, accounting for a majority of total summer rain. These storms usually drench small areas with brief, sometimes violent downpours, so that crops in one Midwestern county may prosper, those in another shrivel in drought, and those in yet another be flattened by hailstones. In contrast, relief from the humid heat comes in the northern Midwest from occasional outbursts of cool Canadian air; small but more consistent relief is found downwind from the Great Lakes and at high elevations in the Appalachians. East of the Rockies, however, U.S. summers are distinctly uncomfortable, and air conditioning is viewed as a desirable amenity in most areas.

A crowd of depositors gathers in front of the closed American Union Bank, New York City. April 26, 1932.

The Great Depression’s causes

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Again, the Pacific regime is different. The moist Aleutian air retreats northward, to be replaced by mild, stable air from over the subtropical but cool waters of the Pacific, and except in the mountains the Pacific Coast is nearly rainless though often foggy. In the meanwhile, a small but potent mass of dry hot air raises temperatures to blistering levels over much of the intermontane Southwest. In Yuma, Arizona, for example, the normal temperature in July reaches 107 °F (42 °C), while nearby Death Valley, California, holds the national record, 134 °F (57 °C). During its summer peak this scorching air mass spreads from the Pacific margin as far as Texas on the east and Idaho to the north, turning the whole interior basin into a summer desert.

While spring and autumn are generally agreeable in the United States, this is disappointingly brief due to the shift in dominance between marine and continental air masses. Along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, for example, hurricanes occur in autumn—the American equivalent of typhoons of the Asian Pacific. The Mississippi valley holds the dubious distinction of recording more tornadoes than any other area on Earth.

Regions with different bioclimates

The first three zones encompass most of the conterminous United States—regions in which climatic conditions are similar enough to dictate similar conditions of mature (zonal) soil and potential climax vegetation (i.e., the assemblage of plants that would grow and reproduce indefinitely given stable climate and average conditions of soil and drainage). These are the Humid East, the Humid Pacific Coast, and the Dry West. In addition, the boundary zone between the Humid East and the Dry West is so large and important that it constitutes a separate region, the Humid–Arid Transition. Finally, because the Western Cordillera contains an intricate mosaic of climatic types, largely determined by local elevation and exposure, it is useful to distinguish the Western Mountain Climate. The first 10 regionsfifteen if include mountain climatesare much more diverse than bioclimatic zones, which require further breakdown producing a total of 10 main bioclimatic regions. Boundaries between bioclimatic regions should be interpreted as zonal and transitional, and rarely should be considered as sharp lines in landscape.

However, these bioclimatic regions retain a strong and easily recognizable identity in spite of their indistinct boundaries. Having a single bioclimatic region and a single landform region within a particular region strengthens regional identity strongly. As a result, landscapes with a distinctive regional personality emerge, as in the Piedmont South, the Midwest, or the western Great Plains.

East Asia’s humid climate

The largest and most important of the bioclimatic zones in North America, the Humid East was where Europeans first settled, tamed the land, and adapted to American conditions. In early times almost all of this territory was forested, which was a significant factor in American history that profoundly influenced both soils and wildlife. As in most of the world’s humid lands, soluble minerals have been leached from the earth, leaving a great family of soils called pedalfers that are rich in relatively insoluble iron and aluminum compounds.

Since rainfall is ample and summers are warm everywhere, the main differences between forests and soils result from the length and severity of winters.

The Sub-Boreal Forest Region is the northernmost of these bands. It is only a small and discontinuous part of the United States, representing the tattered southern fringe of the vast Canadian taiga—a scrubby forest dominated by evergreen needle-leaf species that can endure the fierce winters and reproduce during the short, erratic summers. Average growing seasons are less than 120 days, though localities in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula have recorded frost-free periods lasting as long as 161 days and as short as 76 days. Soils of this region that survived the scour of glaciation are miserably thin podzols—heavily leached, highly acid, and often interrupted by extensive stretches of bog. Most attempts at farming in the region long since have been abandoned.

Farther south lies the Humid Microthermal Zone of milder winters and longer summers. Large broadleaf trees begin to predominate over the evergreens, producing a mixed forest of greater floristic variety and economic value that is famous for its brilliant autumn colors. As the forest grows richer in species, sterile podzols give way to more productive gray-brown podzolic soils, stained and fertilized with humus. Although winters are warmer than in the Sub-Boreal zone, and although the Great Lakes help temper the bitterest cold, January temperatures ordinarily average below freezing, and a winter without a few days of subzero temperatures is uncommon. Everywhere, the ground is solidly frozen and snow covered for several months of the year.

Still farther south are the Humid Subtropics. The region’s northern boundary is one of the country’s most significant climatic lines: the approximate northern limit of a growing season of 180–200 days, the outer margin of cotton growing, and, hence, of the Old South. Most of the South lies in the Piedmont and Coastal Plain, for higher elevations in the Appalachians cause a peninsula of Northern mixed forest to extend as far south as northern Georgia. The red-brown podzolic soil, once moderately fertile, has been severely damaged by overcropping and burning. Thus much of the region that once sustained a rich, broadleaf-forest flora now supports poor piney woods. Summers are hot, muggy, long, and disagreeable; Dixie’s “frosty mornings” bring a welcome respite in winter.

The southern margins of Florida contain the only real tropics in the contiguous United States; it is an area in which frost is almost unknown. Hot, rainy summers alternate with warm and somewhat drier winters, with a secondary rainfall peak during the autumn hurricane season—altogether a typical monsoonal regime. Soils and vegetation are mostly immature, however, since southern Florida rises so slightly above sea level that substantial areas, such as the Everglades, are swampy and often brackish. Peat and sand frequently masquerade as soil, and much of the vegetation is either salt-loving mangrove or sawgrass prairie.

Pacific Coast Humidity

The western humid region differs from its eastern counterpart in so many ways, including its smaller size and narrower littoral belt. Precipitation is extremely seasonal, falling mostly in the winter half of the year. Summers are droughty throughout the region, but the main regional differences come from the length of drought—from about two months in humid Seattle, Washington, to nearly five months in semiarid San Diego, California.

Western Washington, Oregon, and northern California lie within a zone that climatologists call Marine West Coast. Winters are raw, overcast, and drizzly—not unlike northwestern Europe—with subfreezing temperatures restricted mainly to the mountains, upon which enormous snow accumulations produce local alpine glaciers. Summers, by contrast, are brilliantly cloudless, cool, and frequently foggy along the West Coast and somewhat warmer in the inland valleys. This mild marine climate produces some of the world’s greatest forests of enormous straight-boled evergreen trees that furnish the United States with much of its commercial timber. Mature soils are typical of humid midlatitude forestlands, a moderately leached gray-brown podzol.

With diminishing coastal rain the moist marine climate gradually gives way to California’s tiny but much-publicized Mediterranean regime. Although mountainous topography introduces a bewildering variety of local environments, scanty winter rains are quite inadequate to compensate for the long summer drought, and much of the region has a distinctly arid character. Inland, however, summer temperatures reach blistering levels, so that in July, while Los Angeles expects a normal daily maximum of 83 °F (28 °C), Fresno expects 100 °F (38 °C) and is climatically a desert. As might be expected, Mediterranean California contains a huge variety of vegetal habitats, but the commonest perhaps is the chaparral, a drought-resistant, scrubby woodland of twisted hard-leafed trees, picturesque but of little economic value. Chaparral is a pyrophytic (fire-loving) vegetation—i.e., under natural conditions its growth and form depend on regular burning. These fires constitute a major environmental hazard in the suburban hills above Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay, especially in autumn, when hot dry Santa Ana winds from the interior regularly convert brush fires into infernos. Soils are similarly varied, but most of

West of the Dry

In the United States, the dry areas refer to the West. It occupies a huge region stretching from Canada to Mexico across the western part of the Great Plains. To Americans nurtured in the Humid East, this vast territory has been harder to tame than any other—with no region captivating the national imagination more fiercely and dangerously than this fierce and dangerous land.

Despite the fact that temperatures may differ dramatically from region to region, the most important regional differences are overwhelmingly determined by the degree of aridity, whether an area is extremely dry, so a desert, or semiarid, so a steppe.

Americans of the 19th century were preoccupied by the myth of a Great American Desert, which supposedly occupied more than one-third of the entire country. True desert, however, is confined to the Southwest, with patchy outliers elsewhere, all without exception located in the lowland rain shadows of the Cordillera. Vegetation in these desert areas varies between nothing at all (a rare circumstance confined mainly to salt flats and sand dunes) to a low cover of scattered woody scrub and short-lived annuals that burst into flamboyant bloom after rains. Soils are usually thin, light-coloured, and very rich with mineral salts. In some areas wind erosion has removed fine-grained material, leaving behind desert pavement, a barren veneer of broken rock.

Pedocals in the semiarid region support a thin cover of short bunchgrass, commonly alternating with scrubby brush. In the slightly wetter environments of the West, they are enriched with humus from decomposed grass roots. Pedocals have the potential to be very fertile under proper type of management.

Weather in the West is often extreme, violent, and unreliable. Rainfall, for example, obeys a cruel natural law: as total precipitation decreases, it becomes more undependable. John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath describes the problems of a family enticed to the arid frontier of Oklahoma during a wet period only to be driven out by the savage drought of the 1930s that turned the western Great Plains into the great American Dust Bowl. Temperatures in the West also fluctuate convulsively within short periods, and high winds are infamous throughout the region.

Transition from humid to arid conditions

East of the Rockies, all climatic boundaries are gradational. However, one boundary is especially important and inconspicuously subtle – the boundary zone that separates the Humid East from the Dry West and that alternates unpredictably between arid and humid conditions from year to year. The band stretches approximately from Texas to North Dakota, and includes a unique and valuable combination of soils, flora, and fauna. The native vegetation, insofar as it can be reconstructed, was prairie. Soils include the enormously productive chernozem (black earth) in the north, with reddish prairie soils of nearly equal fertility in the south. Temperatures are severely continental throughout the region, with bitterly cold winters in the north and scorching summers everywhere.

The western edge of the prairie gradually fades into the shortgrass steppe on the High Plains, which represents a function of diminishing rainfall. The eastern edge, however, represents one of the few major discordances between a climatic and biotic boundary in the United States – for the grassland penetrates the eastern forest in a great salient across humid Illinois and Indiana. Many scholars believe this part of the prairie was artificially induced by repeated burning and consequent destruction of the forest margins by Indians.

Mountains in the West

Throughout the Cordillera and Intermontane regions, irregular topography shatters the grand bioclimatic pattern into an intricate mosaic of tiny regions that differ drastically according to elevation and exposure. No small- or medium-scale map can accurately record such complexity, and mountainous parts of the West are said, noncommittally, to have a “mountain climate.” Lowlands are usually dry but increasing elevation brings lower temperature, decreased evaporation, and—if a slope faces prevailing winds—greater precipitation. Soils vary wildly from place to place but vegetation is fairly predictable. From the desert or steppe of intermontane valleys, a climber typically ascends into parklike savanna, then through an orderly sequence of increasingly humid and boreal forests until, if the range is high enough, one reaches the timberline and Arctic tundra.

Lewis, Peirce F.

Life of plants

Forest, grassland, desert, and alpine tundra are the dominant vegetation types.

A coniferous forest of white and red pine, hemlock, spruce, jack pine, and balsam fir extends interruptedly in a narrow strip near the Canadian border from Maine to Minnesota and southward along the Appalachian Mountains. There may be found smaller stands of tamarack, spruce, paper birch, willow, alder, and aspen or poplar. Southward, a transition zone of mixed conifers and deciduous trees gives way to a hardwood forest of broad-leaved trees. This forest may contain varying mixtures of maple, oak, ash, locust, linden, sweet gum, walnut, hickory, sycamore and beech. Pines are prominent on the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain and adjacent uplands but may occur in nearly pure stands called pine barrens. Hickory and various oaks combine to form a significant part of this forest with magnolia, white cedar and ash often seen. In the frequent swamps bald cypress tupelo and white cedar predominate.

The grasslands occur principally in the Great Plains area and extend westward into the intermontane basins and benchlands of the Rocky Mountains. Numerous grasses such as buffalo, grama, side oat, bunch, needle, and wheat grass, together with many kinds of herbs, make up the plant cover. Coniferous forests cover the lesser mountains and high plateaus of the Rockies, Cascades, and Sierra Nevada. Ponderosa (yellow) pine, Douglas fir, western red cedar, western larch, white pine, lodgepole pine, several spruces, western hemlock, grand fir, red fir, and the lofty redwood are the principal trees of these forests. The densest growth occurs west of the Cascade and Coast ranges in Washington, Oregon, and northern California; here the trees are often 100 feet (30 metres) or more in height. There the forest floor is so dark that only ferns
mosses and a few shade-loving shrubs and herbs may be found.

The alpine tundra, located in the conterminous United States only in the mountains above the limit of trees, consists principally of small plants that bloom brilliantly for a short season. Sagebrush is the most common plant of the arid basins and semideserts west of the Rocky Mountains, but juniper, nut pine, and mountain mahogany are often found on the slopes and low ridges. The desert, extending from southeastern California to Texas, is noted for the many species of cactus, some of which grow to the height of trees, and for the Joshua tree and other yuccas, creosote bush, mesquite, and acacias.

It has a wide variety of native forest trees, some of which, like the sequoia, are among the most massive known in the world. Nearly 200 of these species and varieties are of economic value, either because of their timber and other useful products or because of their importance in forestry. More than 1,000 species and varieties have been described.

Kudzu vines, introduced to the southeastern United States, have disrupted agriculture

Check out the disruption caused by the kudzu vine, which was introduced to the Southeast

Besides the native flowering plants, estimated at between 20,000 and 25,000 species, hundreds of species introduced from other regions, primarily Europe, Asia, and tropical America, have become naturalized as well. Several of these are common annual weeds of fields, pastures, and roadsides that make up more than half the plant population in some districts.

Oehser, Paul H.

Rollins, Reed C.

Life of animals

With most of North America, the United States lies within the Nearctic faunistic realm, which contains an assemblage of species similar to Eurasia and North Africa but sharply different from the tropical and subtropical zones to the south. Main regional differences correspond roughly with primary climatic and vegetal patterns. Thus, for example, the animal communities of the Dry West differ sharply from those of the Humid East and from those of the Pacific Coast. Because animals tend to range over wider areas than plants, faunal regions are generally coarser than vegetal regions and harder to delineate sharply.

The animal geography of the United States, however, is far from a natural pattern, for European settlement produced a series of environmental changes that grossly altered the distribution of animal communities. First, many species were hunted to extinction or near extinction, most conspicuously, perhaps, the American bison, which ranged by the millions nearly from coast to coast but now rarely lives outside of zoos and wildlife preserves. Second, habitats were upset or destroyed throughout most of the country—forests cut, grasslands plowed and overgrazed, and migration paths interrupted by fences, railroads, and highways. Third, certain introduced species found hospitable niches and, like the English sparrow, spread over huge areas, often preempting the habitats of native animals. Fourth, though their effects are not fully understood, chemical biocides such as DDT were used for so long and in such volume that they are believed at least partly responsible for catastrophic mortality rates among large mammals and birds, especially predators high on the food chain. Fifth, there has been a gradual northward migration of certain tropical and subtropical insects, birds, and mammals, perhaps encouraged by gradual climatic warming. In consequence, many native animals have been reduced to tiny fractions

Lewis, Peirce F.

In addition to being able to compare further with the distribution of insects and other invertebrates, the arrangement of fauna distribution according to climatic and vegetal regions has the advantage of being able to compare the distribution of fauna according to climatic and vegetal regions. It is likely that some of these animals will follow the same geographic patterns as vertebrates, while others may follow different dispersal modes or differ in age.

The transcontinental zone of coniferous forest at the north, the taiga, and the tundra zone into which it merges at the northern limit of tree growth are strikingly paralleled by similar vertical zones in the Rockies, and on Mount Washington in the east, where the area above the timberline and below the snow line is often inhabited with tundra animals like the ptarmigan and white Parnassius butterflies, while the spruce and other conifers below the timberline form a belt sharply set off from other vegetation at still lower elevation.

A whole series of important types of animals spread beyond the limits of such regions or zones, sometimes over most of the continent. Aquatic animals, in particular, may live equally in forest and plains, in the Gulf states, and at the Canadian border. Such widespread animals include the white-tailed (Virginia) deer and black bear, the puma (though only in the remotest parts of its former range) and bobcat, the river otter (though now rare in inland areas south of the Great Lakes) and mink, and the beaver and muskrat. The distinctive coyote ranges over all of western North America and eastward as far as Maine. The snapping turtle ranges from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains.

The North American animal in this taiga assemblage is the Canadian porcupine.

The hardwood forest area of the eastern and the southeastern pinelands compose the most important of the faunal regions within the United States. A great variety of fishes, amphibians, and reptiles of this region have related forms in East Asia, and this pattern of representation is likewise found in the flora. This area is rich in catfishes, minnows, and suckers. The curious ganoid fishes, the bowfin and the gar, are ancient types. The spoonbill cat, a remarkable type of sturgeon in the lower Mississippi, is represented elsewhere in the world only in the Yangtze in China. The Appalachian region is headquarters for the salamanders of the world, with no less than seven of the eight families of this large group of amphibians represented; no other continent has more than three of the eight families together. The eel-like sirens and amphiumas (congo snakes) are confined to the southeastern states. There is a great variety of frogs, and these include tree frogs whose main development is South American and Australian. The emydid freshwater turtles of the southeast parallel those of East Asia to a remarkable degree, though the genus Clemmys is the only one represented

In its mammals and birds the southeastern fauna is less sharply distinguished from the life to the north and west and is less directly related to that of East Asia. The forest is the home of the white-tailed deer, the black bear, the gray fox, the raccoon, and the common opossum. There is a remarkable variety of woodpeckers. The birdlife in general tends to differ from that of Eurasia in the presence of birds like the tanagers, American orioles, and hummingbirds that belong to South American families. Small mammals abound with types of the worldwide rodent family Cricetidae, and with distinctive moles and shrews.

Bison (Bison bison)

Badgers of America

The most distinctive of the grassland animals proper is the American bison, whose nearly extinct European relative, the wisent, is a forest dweller. The most distinctive of the American hoofed animals is the pronghorn, or prongbuck, which represents a family intermediate between the deer and the true antelopes in that it sheds its horns like a deer but retains the bony horn cores. The pronghorn is perhaps primarily a desert mammal, but it formerly ranged widely into the shortgrass plains. Everywhere in open country in the West there are conspicuous and distinctive rodents. The burrowing pocket gopher is peculiarly American, rarely seen making its presence known by pushed-out mounds of earth. The ground squirrels of the genus Citellus are related to those of Central Asia, and resemble them in habit; in North America the gregarious prairie dog is a closely related form.

Rats of the kangaroo

Rat kangaroo

A paradise for reptiles, the Southwestern deserts are home to a variety of lizards, including the deadly Gila monster, and a number of rattlesnakes that are rare in the rest of the United States. There are numerous desert reptile species that range from the Pacific Coast to the Great Basin. There are several notable mammals, including the graceful bipedal kangaroo rat (almost exclusively nocturnal), the ring-tailed cat, a relative of the raccoon, and the piglike peccary.

The Rocky Mountains and other western ranges afford distinctive habitats for rock- and cliff-dwelling hoofed animals and rodents. The small pikas, related to the rabbit, inhabit talus areas at high elevations as they do in the mountain ranges of East Asia. Marmots live in the Rockies as in the Alps. Every western range formerly had its own race of mountain sheep. At the north, the Rocky Mountain goat lives at high altitudes—it is more properly a goat antelope, related to the takin of the mountains of western China. The dipper, remarkable for its habit of feeding in swift-flowing streams, though otherwise a bird without special aquatic adaptations, is a Rocky Mountain form with relatives in Asia and Europe.

The extremely distinctive primitive tailed frog Ascaphus, which inhabits icy mountain brooks, represents a family by itself, perhaps more nearly related to the frogs of New Zealand than to more familiar types. The Cascades and Sierras form centres for salamanders of the families Ambystomoidae and Plethodontidae second only to the Appalachians, and there are also distinctive newts. The burrowing lizards, of the well-defined family Anniellidae, are found only in a limited area in coastal California. The only family of birds distinctive of North America, that of the wren-tits, Chamaeidae, is found in the chaparral of California. The mountain beaver, or sewellel (which is not at all beaverlike), is likewise a type peculiar to North America, confined to the Cascades and Sierras. The moles in the Pacific area are distinct from those in other parts of North America.

It is striking how different the mammals are on the two coasts, but true seals (harp seals and harbour seals) are found on both. Only three sea lions exist in the Pacific—the California sea lion, Steller’s sea lion, and fur seals—all with longer necks and projecting ears. A close relative of the more widespread and distinctively marine West Indian species, the Florida manatee inhabits the larger rivers of Florida.

Schmidt, Karl Patterson

Patterns of settlement

United States population density

Although the land that now constitutes the United States was occupied and much affected by diverse Indian cultures over many millennia, these pre-European settlement patterns have had virtually no impact upon the contemporary nation—except locally, as in parts of New Mexico. A benign habitat permitted a huge contiguous tract of settled land to materialize across nearly all of the eastern half of the United States, within substantial patches of the West. The vastness of the land, its scarcity of labour, and its abundance of migratory opportunities facilitated exceptional human mobility and a quick succession of ephemeral forms of land use and settlement. Human endeavours have greatly transformed the landscape, but such efforts have been largely destructive. Most of the pre-European landscape in the United States was so swiftly and radically altered that it is difficult to conjecture intelligently about its earlier appearance.

The overall impression of the landscape in America is one of disorder and incoherence. The individual landscape unit is seldom in visual harmony with its neighbour, so that, however sound in design or construction the single structure may be, the general effect is untidy. These attributes have been intensified by the individualism of the American people, vigorous speculation in land and other commodities, a strongly utilitarian attitude toward the land and the treasures above and below it, and government policy and law.

As of the mid-20th century, the convergence of rural and urban modes of life was another special characteristic of American settlement. Rural folk-and farmsteads in general-have become increasingly urbanized, and agricultural operations have become increasingly automated, while the metropolis is becoming more gelatinous, unfocused, and pseudo-bucolic along its borders.

Patterns of rural settlement in the United States bear a strong family resemblance to that of other neo-European lands, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, or tsarist Siberia—places that have undergone rapid occupation and exploitation by immigrants intent upon short-term development and enrichment.

Land allocation models in the early 20th century

A major official policy of the British (except between 1763 and 1776) and the U.S. government from the start was to encourage agricultural and other settlement in order to move westward as quickly as possible. By granting large, often vaguely specified tracts of land to individuals or companies, the British crown enabled the grantees to attract settlers by offering land for sale or lease at attractive prices, or even by giving it away.

Of the numerous attempts at group colonization, the most notable effort was the theocratic and collectivist New England town that flourished, especially in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, during the first century of settlement. The town, the basic unit of government and comparable in area to townships in other states, allotted both rural and village parcels to single families by group decision. Contrary to earlier scholarly belief, in all but a few cases settlement was spatially dispersed throughout the socially cohesive towns-at least until about 1800. However, with the exception of a few Mormon settlements in Utah and adjacent states-the only later-day settlement experiment to achieve enduring success-most attempts were short-lived and fragile.

Domain creation at the national level

As a result of independence, the original 13 states surrendered nearly all of their claims to the western lands beyond their boundaries to the new national government after complex negotiations. Certain tracts, however, were reserved for particular groups’ disposal. As a result, Connecticut natives were given preferential treatment in the Western Reserve of northeastern Ohio, while veterans of the American Revolution were granted bonus payments from Ohio and Indiana.

A federally administered national domain was created, to which the great bulk of the territory acquired in 1803 in the Louisiana Purchase and later beyond the Mississippi and in 1819 in Florida was consigned. The only major exceptions were the public lands of Texas, which remained within that state’s jurisdiction; such earlier French and Spanish land grants as were confirmed, often after tortuous litigation; and some Indian lands. In sharp contrast to the slipshod methods of colonial land survey and disposal, the federal land managers expeditiously surveyed, numbered, and mapped their territory in advance of settlement, beginning with Ohio in the 1780s, then sold or deeded it to settlers under inviting terms at a number of regional land offices.

The design universally followed in the new survey system was a simple, efficient rectangular scheme. Townships were laid out as blocks, each six by six miles in size, oriented with the compass directions. Thirty-six sections, each one square mile, or 640 acres (260 hectares), in size, were designated within each township; and public roads were established along section lines and, where needed, along half-section lines. At irregular intervals, offsets in survey lines and roads were introduced to allow for the Earth’s curvature. Individual property lines were coincident with, or parallel to, survey lines.

If you fly over Iowa or Kansas, you will see this all-encompassing checkerboard pattern. Streams and other natural features are scarce, and there are few diagonal highways or railroads to interrupt the overwhelming squareness of the landscape. Much of Texas and those parts of Maine, western New York, and Pennsylvania that were settled after the 1780s also have systematic rectangular layouts, though they are less rigorous in form.

Land distribution in rural areas

Since its formation, Congress has enacted a series of complex schemes for distributing the national domain. These plans have differed with time as the nature of farming technology and of the remaining lands have changed, but their general effect has been to perpetuate the Jeffersonian ideal of a republic in which yeoman farmers own and till self-sufficient properties.

The program was successful in providing private owners with relatively choice land, aside from parcels reserved for schools and various township and municipal uses. More than one third of the national territory, however, is still owned by federal and state governments, with much of this land in forest and wildlife preserves. A large proportion of this land is in the West and is unsuitable for intensive agriculture or grazing because of the roughness, dryness, or salinity of the terrain; much of it is leased out for light grazing or for timber cutting.

Farm life patterns

During the classic period of American rural life, around 1900, many Americans lived or worked on small family farms which varied in form and content with local tradition and economy. This was in contrast to rural life in other parts of the world, where the farm family lived an isolated farmstead some distance from town and often from farm neighbours; their property averaged less than one-quarter square mile. The farmstead varied in form and content with local tradition and economy, for example, tobacco barns in the South, great dairy barns in Wisconsin, general-purpose forebay barns in southeastern Pennsylvania, or woodlots in less accessible or less fertile areas.

Many services normally located in urban places might be found in rustic settings, among people who have been historically rural and antiurban in bias.

In addition, social activity was widely dispersed among numerous rural churches, schools, or grange halls; and a county fair, political rally, or religious encampment could often serve as a climax of the year. In addition to the countless family graveyards and community cemeteries scattered across the countryside, there is also a strong tendency toward spatial isolation.

Patterns of small towns in different regions

There has been much regional variation among smaller villages and hamlets, but such phenomena have received relatively little attention from students of American culture or geography. The distinctive New England village, of course, is generally recognized and cherished: it consists of a loose clustering of white frame buildings, including a church (usually Congregationalist or Unitarian), town hall, shops, and stately homes. Later derivative village forms were carried westward to sections of the northern Midwest.

Less widely known but equally distinctive is the town morphology characteristic of the Midland, or Pennsylvanian, culture area and most fully developed in southeastern and central Pennsylvania and Piedmont Maryland. It differs totally from the New England model in density, building materials, and general appearance. Closely packed, often contiguous buildings—mostly brick, but sometimes stone, frame, or stucco—abut directly on a sidewalk, which is often paved with brick and usually thickly planted with maple, sycamore, or other shade trees. Such towns are typically linear in plan, have dwellings intermingled with other types of buildings, have only one or two principal streets, and may radiate outward from a central square lined with commercial and governmental structures.

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In the U.S., small towns with simple layouts, usually based on grid plans, are the most typical. The central business district, consisting of tightly packed two- or three-story brick buildings, is primarily devoted to commercial and administrative activities. Residences are usually positioned in a peripheral location, as are most rail facilities, factories, and warehouses, which are generally set well back within spacious lots.

In the South, even modest urbanization of small towns arrived late. In the early Chesapeake Bay country or North Carolina, most urban functions were spatially dispersed, or they were performed entirely by the larger plantations dominating much of the region’s economic life. In the 19th and 20th centuries, cities and towns often followed the Midwestern layout when they began to emerge.

Many of the villages in the Mormon and Hispanic-American districts are of interest for their distinctive layouts and culture. The Mormon village was laid out according to a religiously prescribed grid plan composed of square blocks, each with perhaps only four large house lots, and the block surrounded by wide streets. These villages in New Mexico that are based on Mexican culture often feature a central plaza with a predominant Roman Catholic church, surrounded by low stone or adobe buildings.

Transition from rural to urban

The agrarian ideal is weakening

The United States has had little success in achieving or maintaining the ideal of the family farm. Focusing on larger farms with questionable legality, smaller properties have been merged into much larger entities. By the late 1980s, for example, when the average farm size had surpassed 460 acres, farms containing 2,000 or more acres accounted for almost half of all farmland and 20 percent of the cropland harvested. At the other extreme were those 60 percent of all farms that contained fewer than 180 acres and reported less than 15 percent of cropland harvested. This trend toward fewer but larger farms has continued.

The huge, heavily capitalized ‘neoplantation,’ essentially a factory in the field, is especially conspicuous in parts of California, Arizona, and the Mississippi delta, but examples can be found in any state. There are also many smaller but intensive operations that call for large investments and advanced managerial skills. This trend toward large-scale, capital-intensive farm enterprise has been paralleled by a sharp drop in rural farm population—a slump from the all-time high of some 32000,000 in the early 20th century to about 50000,000 in the late 1980s; but even in 1940, when farm folk still numbered more than 30000,000, nearly 40 percent of farm operators were tenants, and another 10 percent were only partial owners.

Although Americans have gravitated, sometimes reluctantly, to the big city, in the daydreams and assumptions that guide many sociopolitical decisions, the memory of a rapidly vanishing agrarian America is well noted. This is revealed not only in the works of contemporary novelists, poets, and painters but also throughout the popular arts: in movies, television, soap operas, folklore, country music, political oratory, and in much leisure activity.

Motor vehicle impact

Since about 1920 more genuine change has occurred in American rural life than during the preceding three centuries of European settlement in North America. Although the basic explanation is the profound social and technological transformations engulfing most of the world, the most immediate agent of change has been the internal-combustion engine. The automobile, truck, bus, and paved highway have more than supplanted a moribund passenger and freight railroad system. While many local rail depots have been boarded up and scores of secondary lines have been abandoned, hundreds of thousands of miles of old dirt roads have been paved, and a vast system of interstate highways has been constructed to connect major cities in a single nonstop network. This net result has been a shrinking of travel time and an increase in miles traveled for the individual driver, rural or urban.

Since the late 1960s, small towns near highways and urban centres have generally prospered while less-fortunate towns near highways have declined in population. However, the rural population is growing faster than the metropolitan population, an event known as the metro–nonmetro turnaround. Recent evidence suggests that the growth of small towns may be approaching a equilibrium point between urban and rural sectors.

Highways have become the central route, and many of the functions once confined to a town or city now extend for many miles along major highways.

Rural dominance reversed

Most of the rural population and area have been impacted by the metropolitanization of life in the United States, which has not only affected cities, suburbs, and exurbs. As a consequence, local crafts and regional distinctiveness have declined, evidently in farm implements, fencing, silos, and housing, and in commodities such as clothing or bread. The countryside has become economically dependent on the city in many ways.

The city dweller is the dominant consumer for products other than those of field, quarry, or lumber mill; and city location tends to determine patterns of rural economy rather than the reverse. City folk stream out to second homes in the countryside and to campgrounds, ski runs, beaches, boating areas, or hunting and fishing tracts during weekends and vacations. Recreation is the principal source of income and employment for many large rural areas; and northern New England and upstate New York have become playgrounds and Sylvan refuges for many urban residents.

The larger cities reach far into the countryside for their vital supplies of water and energy. In order to meet the ever-growing volume of garbage generated by cities, cities have sought out rural disposal sites far afield. There is an increasing reliance on distant coalfields to provide fuel for electrical power plants.

This enables many farm residents to operate their farms while working part- or full-time at a city job, and thus helps to prevent the drastic decline in rural population that has occurred in remoter parts of the country.

Settlements in urban areas

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Urban society in the United States has taken on many of the characteristics of advanced nations, such as increased population density and concentration within designated urban places. Overall, about four-fifths of the population lives in clustered settlements which make up 2 percent of the country. Another 15 percent live in dispersed residences – though these may be economically or socially oriented as urban areas.

Siting and growth patterns that are classic

Although more than 95 percent of the population was rural during the colonial period and for the first years of independence, cities were crucial elements in the settlement system from the earliest days. Boston; New Amsterdam (New York City); Jamestown, Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; and Philadelphia were founded at the same time as the colonies they served.

The colonial cities acted as funnels for the collection and shipment of farm and forest products and other raw materials from the interior to trading partners in Europe, the Caribbean, or Africa and for the return flow of manufactured goods and other locally scarce items, as well as immigrants. Such cities were essentially marts and warehouses, with only minimal attention given to social, military, educational, or religious functions. With the populating of the interior and the spread of a system of canals and improved roads, such new cities as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Cincinnati, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; and St. Louis, Missouri mushroomed at junctures between various routes or at which modes of transport were changed. Older ocean ports such as New Castle, Delaware; Newport, Rhode Island; Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; and Portland, Maine tended to stagnate.

During the first half of the 19th century, new cities and the further growth of older ones in large part were dependent on their location within the new steam railroad system and on their ability to dominate a large tributary territory. Such waterside rail hubs as Buffalo; Toledo, Ohio; Chicago; and San Francisco gained population and wealth rapidly, while such offspring of the rail era as Atlanta, Georgia; Indianapolis, Indiana; Minneapolis; Fort Worth, Texas; and Tacoma, Washington, also grew dramatically. Much of the rapid industrialization of the 19th and early 20th centuries occurred in places already favoured by water or rail transport systems, but in some instances—such as in the cities of northeastern Pennsylvania’s anthracite region, some New England mill towns, and the textile centres of the Carolina and Virginia Piedmont—manufacturing brought about rapid urbanization and the consequent attraction of transport facilities.

A strong early start, whatever the initial economic base may have been, was often the key factor in competition among cities. With sufficient early momentum, urban capital and population tended to expand almost automatically. The point is illustrated perfectly by the larger cities of the northeastern seaboard, from Portland, Maine, through Baltimore, Maryland. These nearby physical wealth is poor to mediocre, but a prosperous mercantile beginning and good land and sea connections with distant places were sufficient to bring about the growth of one of the world’s largest concentrations of industry, commerce, and people.

Factors affecting municipal development

The pre-1900 development of the American city was almost completely a chronicle of the economics of the production, collection, and distribution of physical commodities and basic services dictated by geography, but there have been striking deviations from this pattern. Cities have become more oriented toward the more advanced modes for the production and consumption of services, specifically the knowledge, managerial, and recreational industries. The largest cities have become more dependent upon corporate headquarters, communications, and the manipulation of information for their sustenance. D.C., is the most obvious example of a metropolis in which government and ancillary activities have been the spur for vigorous growth; but almost all state capitals have displayed a similar demographic and economic vitality. Further, urban centres that contain a major college or university often have enjoyed remarkable expansion.

With the coming of relative affluence and abundant leisure to the population and a decrease in labour input in industrial processes, a new breed of cities has sprouted across the land: those that cater to pleasure-seekers, vacationers, and the retired—for instance, the young, flourishing cities in Florida or Nevada, as well as many areas in California, Arizona, and Colorado.

The automobile as a means of personal transportation was developed about the time of World War I, and the American city was catapulted into a radically new period, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in the further evolution of physical form and function. The size, density, and internal structure of the city were previously constrained by the limitations of the pedestrian and early mass-transit systems. Only the well-to-do could afford horse and carriage or a secluded villa in the countryside. Cities grew by accretion along their edges, without any significant spatial hiatuses except where commuter railroads linked outlying towns to the largest of metropolises. Workers living beyond the immediate vicinity of their work had to locate within reach of the few horse-drawn omnibuses or later electric streetcar systems.

The universality of the automobile, even among the less affluent, and the parallel proliferation of service facilities and highways greatly loosened and fragmented the American city, which spread over surrounding rural lands. Older, formerly autonomous towns grew swiftly. Many towns became satellites of the larger city or were absorbed. Many suburbs and subdivisions arose with single-family homes on lots larger than had been possible for the ordinary householder in the city. These communities were almost totally dependent on the highway for the flow of commuters, goods, and services, and many were located in splendid isolation, separated by tracts of farmland, brush, or forest from other such developments. At the major interchanges of the limited-access highways, a new type of agglomerated settlement sprang up. In a further elaboration of this trend, many larger cities have been girdled by a set of mushrooming complexes consisting mostly of private enterprise. These creations usually have anchors such as shopping malls and office parks and offer virtually all of the social and economic facilities needed for modern life-style.

Metropolitan area’s new look

The outcome has been a widespread, haphazard, partially suburbanized belt of land surrounding each city, large or small, and quite often blending imperceptibly into the suburban-exurban halo encircling a neighbouring metropolitan center. There is a great similarity in the makeup and general appearance of all such tracts: the planless intermixture of scraps of the rural landscape with the fragments of the scattered metropolis; the randomly distributed subdivisions or single homes; the vast shopping centres, the large commercial cemeteries, drive-in theatres, junkyards, and golf courses and other recreational enterprises; and the regional or metropolitan airport, often with its own cluster of factories, warehouses, or travel-oriented businesses. The traditional city—unitary, concentric in form, with a single well-defined middle—has been replaced by a relatively amorphous, polycentric metropolitan sprawl.

The inner city of a large U.S. metropolitan area displays some traits that are common to the larger centres of all advanced nations. A central business district, almost always the oldest section of the city, is surrounded by a succession of roughly circular zones, each distinctive in economic and social-ethnic character. The symmetry of this scheme is distorted by the irregularities of surface and drainage or the effects of radial highways and railroads. Land is most costly, and hence land use is most intensive, towards the center. Major business, financial and governmental offices, department stores, and specialty shops dominate the downtown, which is usually fringed by a band of factories and warehouses. The outer parts of the city, like the suburbs, are mainly residential.

Biases in research on the downtown areas reflect the fact that people do not reside there. Because of this, the population density decreases per unit area and more open land and single-family residences are found as one moves closer to the city center. This is contrary to the general trend of increasing income and social status with distance from the core. The migrant groups that have had a greater impact on neighborhoods in the inner cities generally tend to cluster in areas that are rougher and have less chance for success.

Characteristics of cities on an individual and collective level

A Bostonian city

American cities, more so than the small-town or agrarian landscape, tend to be the product of a particular period rather than location. The relatively venerable centres of the Eastern Seaboard—Boston; Philadelphia; Baltimore; Albany, New York; Chester, Pennsylvania; Alexandria, Virginia; or Georgetown (a district of Washington, D.C.), for example—are virtual replicas of the fashionable European models of their early period rather than the fruition of a regional culture, unlike New Orleans and Santa Fe, New Mexico, which reflect other times and regions. When strong-minded city founders instituted a highly individual plan and their successors managed to preserve it—as in such places as Savannah, Georgia; Washington, D.C.; and Salt Lake City, Utah—or when there is a happy combination of a spectacular site and appreciative residents—as in San Francisco or Seattle—a genuine individuality does seem to emerge. Such an identity also may develop where immigration has been highly selective, as in such places as Miami, Florida; Phoenix, Arizona; and Los Angeles.

As a group, U.S. cities differ from cities in other countries in both type and degree. The national political structure, the social inclinations of the people, and the strong outward surge of urban development have led to the political fragmentation of metropolises that socially and economically are relatively cohesive units. The fact that a single metropolitan area may sprawl across numerous incorporated towns and cities, several townships, and two or more counties and states has a major impact upon both its appearance and the way it functions. Not the least of these effects is a dearth of overall physical and social planning (or its ineffectuality when attempted), and the rather chaotic, inharmonious appearance of both inner-city and peripheral zones painfully reflects the absence of any effective collective action concerning such matters.

“The American city is a place of sharp transitions,” [though] “increasing thought has been given to preserving monuments and buildings.” [Preservation and restoration do occur, but often only when it makes sense in terms of tourist revenue.]”Physical and social blight has reached epidemic proportions in the slum areas of the inner city; but, despite the wholesale razing of such areas and the subsequent urban-renewal projects (sometimes as apartment or commercial developments for the affluent), the belief has become widespread that the ills of the U.S. city are incurable.”

Archway to the Gateway

In the central sections of U.S. cities, there is little sense of history or continuity; instead, one finds evidence of the dominance of the engineering mentality and of the credo that the business of the city is business. Commercial and administrative activities are paramount, and usually there is little room for church buildings or for parks or other nonprofit enterprises. Some cities have felt the need for other bold secular monuments; hence the Gateway Arch looming over St. Louis, Seattle’s Space Needle, and Houston’s Astrodome. Future archaeologists may well conclude from their excavations that American society was ruled by an oligarchy of highway engineers, architects, and bulldozer operators. The great expressways converging upon, or looping, the downtown area and the huge amount of space devoted to parking lots and garages are even more impressive than the massive surgery executed upon U.S. cities a century ago to hack out room for railroad terminals and marshaling yards.

Many urban sites have undergone radical physical transformation of shoreline, drainage systems, and land surface that would be difficult to match elsewhere in the world. This has resulted in a distinctive physical lineament for Manhattan and inner Boston, which bears scant resemblance to the landscape seen by their initial settlers. The surface of downtown Chicago has been raised several feet above its former swamp level, the city’s lakefront extensively reshaped, and the flow of the Chicago River reversed. Los Angeles, notorious for its disregard of the environment, has its concrete arroyo bottoms, terraced hillsides and landslides, as well as its own artificial microclimate.

Supercities

Since the outward sprawl of American urban settlement has been unprecedented, new settlement forms have been created, as the quantitative change has been so great that it has induced qualitative change. In early 19th-century Europe, conurbations—a territorial coalescence of two or more large cities with overlapping peripheral zones—may have first appeared. Great Britain, the Low Countries, Germany, and Japan are some of the major examples.

In terms of size and complexity, the aptly named megalopolis, that supercity stretching along the Atlantic from Portland, Maine, past Richmond, Virginia, is unparalleled. Other large conurbations include, in the Great Lakes region, one centred on Chicago and containing large slices of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana; another based in Detroit, embracing large parts of Michigan and Ohio and reaching into Canada; and a third stretching from Buffalo through Cleveland and back to Pittsburgh. All three are reaching toward one another and may form another megalopolis that, in turn, may soon be grafted onto the seaboard megalopolis by a corridor through central New York state.

Barbara, California

Another example of a growing megalopolis is the huge southern California conurbation reaching from Santa Barbara, through a dominating Los Angeles, to the Mexican border. The solid strip of urban territory that lines the eastern shore of Puget Sound is a smaller counterpart. Quite exceptional in form is the slender linear multicity occupying Florida’s Atlantic coastline, from Jacksonville to Miami, and the loose swarm of medium-sized cities clustering along the Southern Piedmont, from south-central Virginia to Birmingham, Alabama; also of note are the Texas cities of Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio, which have formed a rapidly growing—though discontinuous—urbanized triangle.

One of the few predictions that seem safe in such dynamic and innovative a land as the United States is that, unless severe and painful controls are placed on land use, the shape of the urban environment will increasingly be megalopolitan: a small set of great constellations of polycentric urban zones, each interconnected physically and socially.

U.S. traditional regions

Despite the regional differences among America’s traditional culture areas, which tend to be slight and shallow when compared with those in most older, more stable countries, the muted and often subtle nature of interregional differences can be ascribed to the relative newness of American settlement as well as the country’s superb communications system and centralization of economy and government.

Despite the nationwide standardization in many areas of American thought and behaviour, the lingering effects of the older culture areas do remain potent. In particular, the differences helped to precipitate the gravest political crisis and bloodiest military conflict in the nation’s history. More than a century after the Civil War, the South remains a powerful entity in political, economic, and social terms, and its peculiar status is recognized in religious, educational, athletic, and literary circles.

Nevada, Las Vegas

Even more intriguing is the appearance of a series of essentially 20th-century regions. Southern California is the largest and perhaps the most distinctive region, and its special culture has attracted large numbers of immigrants to the state. Similar trends are visible in southern Florida; in Texas, whose mystique has captured the national imagination; and to a certain degree in the more ebullient regions of New Mexico and Arizona as well. At the metropolitan level, it is difficult to believe that such distinctive cities as San Francisco, Las Vegas, Dallas, Tucson, and Seattle have become like all other American cities. A detailed examination would show significant if sometimes subtle interregional differences in terms of language, religion, diet, folklore, folk architecture and handicrafts, political behaviour, social etiquette, and a number of other cultural categories.

Hierarchy of cultural areas

A multitiered hierarchy of culture areas might be postulated for the United States; but the most interesting levels are, first, the nation as a whole and, second, the five to 10 large subnational regions, each embracing several states or major portions thereof. There is a remarkably close coincidence between the political United States and the cultural United States. Crossing into Mexico, the traveler passes across a cultural chasm. If the contrasts are less dramatic between the two sides of the U.S.-Canadian boundary, they are nonetheless real, especially to the Canadian. Erosion of the cultural barrier has been largely limited to the area that stretches from northern New York state to Aroostook county, Maine.

While the international boundaries act as a cultural container, the interstate boundaries are curiously irrelevant. Even when the state had a strong autonomous early existence—as happened with Massachusetts, Virginia, or Pennsylvania—subsequent economic and political forces have tended to wash away such initial identities. Actually, it could be argued that the political divisions of the 48 contiguous states are anachronistic in the context of contemporary socioeconomic and cultural forces. Partially convincing cases might be built for equating Utah and Texas with their respective culture areas because of exceptional historical and physical circumstances, or perhaps Oklahoma, given its very late European occupation and its dubious distinction as the territory to which exiled Indian tribes of the East were relegated.

Much remains to be learned about how economic and cultural areas are related in the United States. If the South or New England were once correlated with a specific economic system, this is no longer easy to do. Cultural systems can take longer to respond to agents of change than do economic or urban systems, which means that the Manufacturing Belt, a core region for many social and economic activities, now spans parts of four traditional culture areas—New England, the Midland, the Midwest, and the northern fringes of the South. The great urban sprawl from southern Maine to central Virginia indifferently ignores the visible cultural slopes that still exist in its more rural tracts.

Hearths of culture

The culture areas of the United States are generally European in origin, the result of importing European colonists and adapting social groups to new habitats. The aboriginal cultures have had relatively little influence on the nation’s modern culture. In the Southwest and the indistinct Oklahoma subregions, the Indian element merits consideration only as one of several ingredients making up the regional mosaic. The East Coast has a more British cultural heritage, with some exceptions, while the cultural gradient between them is much steeper.

This region of the country

New England, United States

New England played a dominant role in the 19th century in terms of demographic and economic expansion, but also in social and cultural life. It exhibited its primacy in education, politics, theology, literature, science, architecture, and the more advanced forms of social technology.

The New England identity, as expressed in its dialect, town morphology, folk architecture, and folklore, expanded and changed over the course of its first two centuries because of the influx of British immigrants. However, much of the character of the people was preserved due to their regional identity.

Due to its location, wealth, and seniority, the Boston metropolitan area has become New England’s cultural and economic center. However, two other old centers in Rhode Island, the lower Connecticut Valley and the Narragansett Bay region, share some of this sovereignty.

The early westward demographic and ideological expansion of New England was so influential that it is justifiable to call New York, northern New Jersey, northern Pennsylvania, and much of the Upper Midwest “New England Extended.” Further, the energetic endeavours of [New England] whalers, merchants, and missionaries had a considerable impact on the cultures of Hawaii, various other Pacific isles, and several points in the Caribbean. New Englanders also were active in the Americanization of early Oregon and Washington, with results that are still visible. Later, the overland diffusion of [New England] natives and practices meant a recognizable New England character not only for the Upper Midwest, from Ohio to the Dakotas, but also in the Pacific Northwest in general, though to a lesser degree.

U.S. South

The Upper South of the United States

Deep South of the United States

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By far the largest of the three original Anglo-American culture areas, the South is also the most idiosyncratic with respect to national norms—or slowest to accept them. The South was once so distinct from the non-South in almost every observable or quantifiable feature and so fiercely proud of its peculiarities that for some years the question of whether it could maintain political and social unity with the non-South was in serious doubt. These differences are still observable in almost every realm of human activity, including rural economy, dialect, diet, costume, folklore, politics, architecture, social customs, and recreation. Only during the 20th century can an argument be made that it has achieved a decisive convergence with the rest of the nation, at least in terms of economic behaviour and material culture.

A persistent deviation from the national mainstream probably began in the first years of settlement. The first settlers of the South were almost purely British, not outwardly different from those who flocked to New England or the Midwest, but almost certainly distinct in terms of motives and social values and more conservative in retaining the rural and family structure of premodern Europe. The vast importation of enslaved Africans was also a major factor, as was a degree of contact with the Indians that was less pronounced farther north. In addition, the unusual pattern of economy (much different from that of northwestern Europe), settlement, and social organization, which were in part an adaptation to a starkly unfamiliar physical habitat, accentuated the South’s deviation from other culture areas.

In both origin and spatial structure, the South has been characterized by diffuseness. Early components of Southern population and culture also arrived from other sources. A narrow coastal strip from North Carolina to the Georgia–Florida border and including the Sea Islands is decidedly Southern in character, yet it stands apart self-consciously from other parts of the South. Though colonized directly from Great Britain, it had also significant connections with the West Indies, in which relation the African cultural contribution was strongest and purest. Charleston and Savannah, which nurtured their own distinctive civilizations, dominated this subregion. Similarly, French Louisiana received elements of culture and population—to be stirred into the special Creole mixture—not only, putatively, from the Chesapeake Bay hearth area but also indirectly from France, French Nova Scotia, the French West Indies, and Africa. In south-central Texas, the Germanic and Hispanic influx was so heavy that a special subregion can be designated.

The Southern culture area may be an example of convergent evolution, in which elements arrive from multiple directions but are subject to a common process that shapes one larger regional consciousness.

Because of its slowness in joining the national technological mainstream, the South can be subdivided into a greater number of subregions than any other older traditional region can. Those described above are of lesser order than the two principal Souths, variously referred to as Upper and Lower (or Deep) South, Upland and Lowland South, or Yeoman and Plantation South.

The Upland South, comprising the southern Appalachians, the upper Appalachian Piedmont, the Cumberland and other low interior plateaus, and the Ozarks and Ouachitas was colonized culturally and demographically from the Chesapeake Bay hearth area and the Midland; it is predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) in character. The latter area which contains a large black population includes the greater part of the South Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains and the lower Appalachian Piedmont. Its early major influences came from the Chesapeake Bay area, with only minor elements from the coastal Carolina–Georgia belt, Louisiana, and elsewhere. The division between the two subregions remains distinct from Virginia to Texas but each region can be further subdivided. Within the Upland South, the Ozark region might legitimately be detached from the Appalachian; and within the latter, Kentucky Bluegrass with its emphasis on tobacco and Thoroughbreds deserves special recognition.

The Mason-Dixon Line

The difficulties in delimiting subregions become greater as one approaches the margins of the South. The outer limits themselves are a topic of special interest. There seems to be more than an accidental relation between these limits and various climatic factors. The fuzzy northern boundary, definitely not associated with the conventional Mason and Dixon Line or the Ohio River, seems most closely associated with length of frost-free season or with temperature during the winter. As the Southern cultural complex was carried to the West, it not only retained its strength but became more intense, in contrast to the influence of New England and the Midland. Ultimately however, the South fades away as one approaches the 100th meridian, with its critical decline in annual precipitation.

Amarillo, Texas, Cadillac Ranch

The Texas subregion is so large, distinctive, vigorous, and self-assertive that it presents some vexing classificatory questions. Is Texas simply a subregion of the Greater South, or has it acquired so strong and divergent an identity that it can be regarded as a major region in its own right? It is likely that a major region has been born in a frontier zone where several distinct cultural communities confront one another and in which the mixture has bred the vigorous, extroverted, aggressive Texas personality so widely celebrated in song and story. Similarly, peninsular Florida may be considered either within or juxtaposed to the South but not necessarily part of it. In the case of Florida, an almost empty territory began to receive significant settlement only after about 1890, and if like Texas most of it came from the older South, there were also vigorous infusions from elsewhere.

Midlands

Middle Atlantic region of the United States

The Midland comprises portions of Middle Atlantic and Upper Southern states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Serious European settlement of the Midland began a generation or more after that of the other major cultural centres and after several earlier, relatively ineffectual trials by the Dutch, Swedes, Finns, and British. The Midland’s culture area first assumed its distinctive character: a prosperous, sober, industrious agricultural society that quickly became a mixed economy as mercantile and later industrial functions came to the fore. By the mid-18th century much of the region had acquired a markedly urban character, resembling in many ways the more advanced portions of the North Sea countries. In this respect, at least, the Midland was well ahead of neighbouring areas to the north and south.

The area varied also in its polyglot ethnicity. From almost the beginning, the various ethnic and religious groups of the British Isles were joined by immigrants from the European mainland. This diversity has grown and is likely to continue. The mosaic of colonial ethnic groups has persisted in much of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, as has the remarkable variety of nationalities and churches in coalfields, company towns, cities, and rural areas. Much of the same ethnic heterogeneity can be seen in New England, the Midwest, and a few other areas, but the Midland stands out as perhaps the most polyglot region of the nation. The Germanic element has always been notably strong, if irregularly distributed, in the Midland, accounting for more than 70 percent of the population of many towns. Had the Anglo-American culture not triumphed, the area might well have been designated Pennsylvania German.

The Midland culture area reaches into Virginia and West Virginia, and traces can be seen far down the Appalachian zone and into the South as a result of physiography and migration.

The northern half of the greater Midland region (the New York subregion) cannot be assigned unequivocally to either New England or this Midland. Essentially, it is a hybrid formed mainly from two regional strains of almost equal strength: New England and the post-1660 British element moving up the Hudson valley and beyond. There has also been a persistent, if slight, residue of early Dutch culture and some subtle filtering northward of Pennsylvanian influences. Apparently within the New York subregion occurred the first major fusion of American regional cultures- especially within the early 19th-century “Burned-Over District,” around the Finger Lakes and Genesee areas of central and western New York. This locality, the seedbed for a number of important social innovations, was a major staging area for westward migration and possibly a major source for the people and notions that were to build the Midwestern culture area.

As both name and location suggest, the Midland is intermediate in character in many respects, lying between New England and the South. Its residents are much less concerned with or conscious of a strong regional identity than is true for the other regions, and, in addition, the Midland lacks their strong political and literary traditions though it is unmistakable in its distinctive townscapes and farmsteads.

Areas of culture that are newer

Midwestern United States

Midwest of the United States

There is no such self-effacement in the Midwest, that large triangular region justly regarded as the most nearly representative of the national average. Everyone within or outside of the Midwest knows about its existence, but no one is certain where it begins or ends. The older apex of the eastward-pointing triangle appears to rest around Pittsburgh, while the two western corners melt away somewhere in the Great Plains, possibly in southern Manitoba in the north and southern Kansas in the south. The eastern terminus and the southern and western borders are broad, indistinct transitional zones.

The serious study of the historical geography of the Midwest began only in the 20th century, but it seems likely that this culture region was the combination of all three colonial regions and that this combination first took place in the upper Ohio valley. The early routes of travel—the Ohio and its tributaries, the Great Lakes, and the low, level corridor along the Mohawk and the coastal plains of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie—converge upon Ohio. As settlers worked their way frontierward, there seems to have been a fanlike widening of the new hybrid area into the West.

Two major subregions are readily discerned, the Upper and Lower Midwest. They are separated by a line that persists as far west as Colorado in terms of speech patterns and indicates differences in regional provenance in ethnic and religious terms. Much of the Upper Midwest retains a faint New England character, although Midland influences are probably as important. A rich mixture of German, Scandinavian, Slavic, and other non-WASP elements has greatly diversified a stock in which the British element usually remains dominant and the range of church denominations is great. The Lower Midwest, except for the relative scarcity of Blacks, tends to resemble the South in its predominantly Protestant and British makeup. There are some areas with sizable Roman Catholic and non-WASP populations, but on the whole the subregion tends to be more WASP in inclination than most other parts of the nation.

“The West” has a problem

Analyze how Native Americans, Spanish explorers, and Mormons shaped the U.S. Mountain Region

Learn how Native Americans, Spanish explorers, and Mormons influenced the U.S. Mountain Region.

There is a dilemma in classifying the remaining half of the conterminous United States. The concept of the American West, strong in the popular imagination, is reinforced constantly by romanticized cinematic and television images of the cowboy. It is facile to accept the widespread Western livestock complex as epitomizing the full gamut of Western life, because although the cattle industry may have once accounted for more than one-half of the active Western domain as measured in acres, it employed only a relatively small fraction of the total population. As a single culture, it cannot represent the total regional culture.

It is not clear whether there is a genuine, single, grand Western culture region. Unlike the East, where virtually all the land is developed and culture areas and subregions abut and overlap in splendid confusion, the eight major and many lesser nodes of population in the western United States resemble oases, separated from one another by wide expanses of nearly unpopulated mountain or arid desert. The only obvious properties these isolated clusters have in common are a mixture of several strains of culture- primarily from the East but with additions from Europe, Mexico, and East Asia- and a general modernity, having been settled in a serious way no earlier than the 1840s. Some areas may be viewed as inchoate or partially formed cultural entities; others have acquired definite personalities but are difficult to classify as first-order or lesser order culture areas.

There are several major tracts in the western United States that reveal a genuine cultural identity: the Upper Rio Grande region, the Mormon region, southern California, and, by some accounts, northern California. It is also possible to add the anomalous Texan and Oklahoman subregions, which are a mixture of West and South.

Southwest United States

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The term Upper Rio Grande region was coined to denote the oldest and strongest of the three sectors of Hispanic-American activity in the Southwest, the others being southern California and portions of Texas. Although covering the valley of the upper Rio Grande, the region also embraces segments of Arizona and Colorado as well as other parts of New Mexico. European communities and culture have been present there, with only one interruption, since the late 16th century. The initial sources were Spain and Mexico, but after 1848 at least three distinct strains of Anglo-American culture were increasingly well represented—the Southern, Mormon, and a general undifferentiated Northeastern culture—plus a distinct Texan subcategory. For once this has occurred without obliterating the Indians, whose culture endures in various stages of dilution, from the strongly Americanized or Hispanicized to the almost undisturbed.

A general mosaic consists of Indian, Anglo, and Hispanic elements, and each of these groups has a unique character as well. Indians include the Navajos, Pueblos, and several smaller groups, all of which are very distinct from one another. Hispanics are also diverse—mostly Mexican mestizos, but also nearly pure pre-Spanish aborigines.

The northern mountain region of the United States

Mountain region of the southern United States

The Mormon region is expansive in the religious and demographic realms, though it has ceased to expand territorially as it did in the decades after the first settlement in the Salt Lake valley in 1847. Despite its Great Basin location and an exemplary adaptation to environmental constraints, this cultural complex appears somewhat non-Western in spirit: the Mormons may be in the West, but they are not entirely of it. Their historical derivation from the Midwest and from ultimate sources in New York and New England is still apparent, along with the generous admixture of European converts to their religion.

A human will and an intensely cherished abstract design have triumphed over an unfriendly habitat in New England as well. Within a region more homogeneous internally than any other U.S. culture area, the Mormon way of life is reflected in the settlement landscape and economic activities.

The Golden State

Follow a Vietnamese family in California and meet diverse immigrants in the Pacific Region

Follow an immigrant Vietnamese family in California and meet diverse immigrants in the Pacific Region

From the beginning of the great 1849 gold rush, the area drew a diverse population from Europe and Asia as well as the older portions of the United States. Whether the greater part of northern California has produced a culture amounting to more than the sum of the contributions brought by immigrants is questionable. San Francisco, the regional metropolis, may have crossed the qualitative threshold. A markedly cosmopolitan outlook that includes an awareness of the Orient stronger than that of any other U.S. city, a fierce self-esteem, and a distinctive townscape may be symptomatic of a genuinely new local culture.

Southern California is the most spectacular region of the Western US in terms of economic and population growth, as well as its luxuriance, regional particularism, and general avant-garde character. Until the coming of a direct transcontinental rail connection in 1885, the region was remote, rural, and largely inconsequential. Since then, however, the invasion by persons from virtually every corner of North America and by the world has been massive; however, since the 1960s in-migration has slackened perceptibly. Many residents have begun to question the doctrine of unlimited growth. In any event, a loosely articulated series of urban and suburban developments continue to encroach upon what little is left of arable or habitable land in the Coast Ranges and valleys from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border.

Although every major ethnic and racial group and every other U.S. culture area is abundantly represented in southern California, there is reason to suspect that a process of selection for certain types of people, attitudes, and personality traits may have been at work at both source and destination. The region is distinct from, or perhaps in the vanguard of, the remainder of the nation. One might view southern California as the super-American region or the outpost of a postindustrial future, but its cultural distinctiveness is very evident in landscape and social behaviour. Southern California in no way approaches being a “traditional region” or even the smudged facsimile of such, but rather the largest, boldest experiment in creating a “voluntary region,” one built through the self-selection of immigrants and their subsequent interaction.

The northern Pacific coast of the United States

The remaining identifiable Western regions—the Willamette valley of Oregon, the Puget Sound region, the Inland Empire of eastern Washington and adjacent tracts of Idaho and Oregon, central Arizona, and the Colorado Piedmont—can be treated jointly as potential or emergent culture areas, still too close to the national mean to display any cultural distinctiveness. In all of these regions is evident the arrival of a cross section of the national population and the growth of regional life around one or more major metropolises. A New England element is noteworthy in the Willamette valley and Puget Sound regions, while a Hispanic-American component appears in the Colorado Piedmont and central Arizona. Only time and further study will reveal whether any of these regions have the capacity to become an independent cultural area.

Zelinsky, Wilbur

The American people

New York City’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

A country for less than two and a half centuries, the United States is a relatively new member of the global community; its rapid growth since the 18th century is unparalleled. The early promise of the New World as a refuge and land of opportunity was realized dramatically in the 20th century with the emergence of the United States as a world power. With a total population exceeded only by those of China and India, the United States is also characterized by an extraordinary diversity in ethnic and racial ancestry. A steady stream of immigration, notably from the 1830s onward, formed a pool of foreign-born persons unmatched by any other nation; 60 million people immigrated to U.S. shores in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many were driven, seeking escape from political or economic hardship, while others were drawn, by a demand for workers, abundant natural resources, and expansive cheap land. Most arrived hoping to remake themselves in the New World

Additionally, Americans have migrated internally with great enthusiasm, exhibiting a restlessness that thrived on the frontier and in the open. Initially, migration patterns ran east to west and from rural areas to cities, then, in the 20th century, from the South to the Northeast and Midwest. While urban areas have been growing in the south, southwest, and west since the 1950s, movement has mainly been from outlying suburbs to the growing urban agglomerations of the south, southwest, and west.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the majority of Americans had achieved a high level of material comfort, prosperity, and security. Nonetheless, Americans struggled with the unexpected problems of relative affluence, as well as the persistence of residual poverty, crime, drug abuse, affordable energy sources, urban sprawl, voter apathy, pollution, high divorce rates, AIDS, and excessive litigation. Among the public policy issues widely debated were abortion, gun control, welfare reforms, and capital punishment.

Many Americans perceive social tension as a product of society’s failure to extend the traditional dream of equality of opportunity to all people. Idealistically, social, political, economic, and religious freedom would assure the like treatment of everyone, so that all could achieve goals in accord with their individual talents, if only they worked hard enough. This strongly held belief has united Americans throughout the centuries. The fact that some groups have not achieved full equality troubles citizens and policy-makers alike.

Distribution by ethnicity

As a result of decades of immigration and acculturation, many U.S. citizens claim mixed identities, describing themselves generically only as “Americans.” The 2000 U.S. census introduced a new category for those who identified themselves as a member of more than one race, and of 281.4 million counted, 2.4 percent chose to be classified as multiracial. Those figures had grown to 2.9 percent of 308.7 million in the 2010 census ten years later.

European Americans of European descent

Although the term ethnic is frequently confined to the descendants of immigrants, its broader meaning applies to all groups unified by cultural heritage and experience in the New World. In the 19th century, Yankees formed one such group, marked by common religion and by habits shaped by the original Puritan settlers. These people inhabited small towns until the industrialization of the South in the 20th century, and they preserved affiliations with the Democratic Party until the 1960s.

This is also true of the Scots, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, and Dutch, whose colonial nuclei received some reinforcement after 1800 but who gradually adapted to the ways of the larger surrounding groups.

In the descendants of the Scandinavian newcomers of the 19th century, distinct languages and religions preserved some coherence. Those residing in large settlements, such as Minnesota, passed on a sense of identity well beyond the second generation, and their emotional attachment to their homelands lingered.

Prior to 1840, both Roman Catholics and Jews were tiny groups, but religion played a powerful role in fostering cohesion. Both groups now exhibit striking heterogeneity, exhibiting a wide variety of economic and social conditions, as well as conforming to the styles of life of other Americans. The pull of external concerns—unification of Ireland in one case, Israel’s security in the other—has kept group loyalty alive.

Indeed, by the 1970s, ethnic had come to be used to describe the Americans of Polish, Italian, Lithuanian, Czech, and Ukrainian extraction, along with those of other eastern and southern European ancestry. The only European ethnic group to arrive in large numbers at the end of the 20th century were Russians.

In general, a pattern of immigration, self-support, and then assimilation was typical. Recently established ethnic groups often preserve greater visibility and greater cohesion. Their group identity is based not only upon a shared cultural heritage but also on the common interests, needs, and problems they face in the present-day United States. They tend to believe in equality of opportunity and self-improvement and attribute poverty to the failing of the individual and not to inequities in society. As the composition of the U.S. population changed, it was projected that sometime in the 21st century, Americans of European descent would be outnumbered by those from non-European ethnic groups.

Afro-Americans

From colonial times, African Americans arrived in large numbers as enslaved persons and lived primarily on plantations in the South. In 1790, enslaved and free Blacks together comprised about one-fifth of the U.S. population.

The American civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s awakened the country’s conscience to the plight of African Americans, who had long been denied first-class citizenship. The movement used nonviolence and passive resistance to change discriminatory laws and practices, primarily in the South. As a result, increases in median income and college enrollment among the Black population were dramatic in the late 20th century. Widening access to professional and business opportunities included noteworthy political victories. By the early 1980s Black mayors in Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., had gained election with white support. In 1984 and 1988 Jesse Jackson ran for U.S. president; he was the first African American to contend seriously for a major party nomination. In 2008 Barack Obama became the first African American elected to the country’s highest office. Despite an expanding Black middle-class and equal opportunity laws in education, housing, and employment, African Americans continue to face staunch social and political challenges, especially those living in the inner cities, where some of America’s most difficult problems (such as crime and drug trafficking) are acute.

The Hispanic community

Latinos make up between one-sixth and one-fifth of the US population. They constitute the country’s largest ethnic minority. More than half of the increase in the US total population from 2000 to 2010 was due to growth in the Hispanic population alone. The growth rate of the Hispanic population during this period was 43 percent—four times the growth rate of the general population. Hispanics live in all regions of the US, but more than three-fourths live in the West or the South. They make up the largest share of the overall population in the West, where nearly three-tenths of the region’s residents are Hispanic. Almost half of the country’s total Hispanic population resides in the states of California and Texas, where they make up more than one-third of the population in each state.

Despite their generally speaking Spanish as a second language, Hispanics are hardly a monolithic group. The majority of them (more than three-fifths) are of Mexican origin—some descended from settlers in portions of the United States that were once part of Mexico (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California), others legal and illegal migrants from across the Mexico-U.S. border. The greater opportunities and higher living standards in the United States have long attracted immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Puerto Ricans are the second largest group of Hispanics in the United States. Their experience in the United States is markedly different from that of Mexican Americans. Most importantly, Puerto Ricans are American citizens by virtue of the island commonwealth’s association with the United States. As a result, migration between Puerto Rico and the United States has been fairly fluid, mirroring the continuous process by which Americans have always moved to where chances seem best. While most of that migration traditionally has been toward the mainland, by the end of the 20th century in- and out-migration between the island and the United States equalized. Puerto Ricans now make up nearly one-tenth of the U.S. Latino population.

While representatives of every social group are among them, the initial wave of Cubans was distinctive because of the large number of professional and middle-class people who migrated. Their social and political attitudes differ significantly from those of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, though this distinction was lessened by an influx of 120,000 Cuban refugees in the 1980s.

Most Mexicans live in western states, most Puerto Ricans live in northeastern states, and most Cubans live in southern states (primarily Florida).

After 1960 easy air travel and political and economic instability stimulated a significant migration from the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. The arrivals from Latin America in earlier years were often political refugees, more recently they usually have been economic refugees. In 2010, Latinos constituted about one-fourth of the Hispanic diaspora. This group comprises largely Central Americans, Colombians, and Dominicans, the last of whom have acted as a bridge between the Black and Latino communities. Of Central American groups, three had population increases of more than 100 percent between 2000 and 2010. Hondurans (191 percent), Guatemalans (180 percent), and Salvadorans (152 percent).

Americans of Asian descent

Asians Americans as a group have confounded earlier expectations that they would form an indigestible mass in American society. The Chinese, earliest to arrive (in large numbers from the mid-19th century, principally as labourers, notably on the transcontinental railroad), and the Japanese were long victims of racial discrimination. In 1924 the law barred further entries; those already in the United States had been ineligible for citizenship since the previous year. In 1942 thousands of Japanese, many born in the United States and therefore American citizens, were interned in relocation camps because their loyalty was suspect after the United States engaged Japan in World War II. Subsequently, anti-Asian prejudice largely dissolved, and Chinese and Japanese, along with others such as the Vietnamese and Taiwanese, have adjusted and advanced. Among generally more recent arrivals, many Koreans, Filipinos, and Asian Indians have quickly enjoyed economic success. Though enumerated separately by the U.S. census, Pacific Islanders such as native Hawaiians constitute a small minority but contribute to making Hawaii and California the states with the largest percentages of Asian Americans.

People from the Middle East

Among the 20th century trends in Arab immigration were the arrival of Lebanese Christians in the first half of the century and Palestinian Muslims in the second half. Initially Arabs inhabited the East Coast, but by the end of the century there was a large settlement of Arabs in the greater Detroit area. Armenians, also from southwest Asia, arrived in large numbers in the early 20th century, eventually congregating largely in California, where, later in the century, Iranians were also concentrated. Some recent arrivals from the Middle East maintain cultural traditions such as traditional dress.

People of Native American descent

Native Americans are an ethnic group only in a very general sense. In the East, centuries of coexistence with whites has led to some degree of intermarriage and assimilation and to various patterns of stable adjustment. In the West, the hasty expansion of agricultural settlement crowded the Native Americans into reservations, where federal policy has vacillated between efforts at assimilation and the desire to preserve tribal cultural identity, with unhappy consequences. The Native American population has risen from its low point of 235,000 in 1900 to 2.5 million at the turn of the 21st century.

The reservations are often enclaves of deep poverty and social distress, although the many casinos operated on their land have created great wealth in some instances. Many Native Americans migrated to large cities, but, by the end of the 20th century, a modest repopulation occurred in rural counties of the Great Plains.

Groups of religious believers

The U.S. government has never supported an established church, and the diversity of the population has discouraged any tendency toward uniformity in worship. As a result, thousands of religious denominations thrive within the country. Only about one-sixth of religious adherents are not Christian, and although Roman Catholicism is the largest single denomination (about one-fifth of the U.S. population), the many churches of Protestantism constitute the majority. Some are the products of native development—among them the Disciples of Christ (founded in the early 19th century), Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons; 1830), Seventh-day Adventists (officially established 1863), Jehovah’s Witnesses (1872), Christian Scientists (1879), and the various Pentecostal churches (late 19th century).

Ordaining

Anointment

There are large numbers of denominations, most with European roots. Among others are Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, various Eastern churches (including Orthodox), Congregationalists, Reformed, Mennonites and Amish, various Brethren, Unitarians, and Friends (Quakers). Significant numbers of recent immigrants have increased the Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu presence to about 4 million, 2.5 million, and 1 million believers, respectively.

The immigration process

Liberty Statue

The Immigration Act of 1924 established an annual quota (fixed in 1929 at 150,000) and established the national-origins system in order to characterize immigration policy for the next 40 years. Under it, quotas were established for each country based on the number of persons of that national origin who were living in the United States in 1920. The quotas reduced drastically the flow of immigrants from southeastern Europe in favor of the countries of northwestern Europe. The quota system was abolished in 1965, in favor of a predominantly first-come, first-served policy.

Since the new policy was instituted, the dominant group of immigrants has been non-Europeans. This includes new arrivals from various parts of Latin America, as well as other regions in the world. More recently, the admission of refugees and illegal aliens has been liberalized, with a majority coming from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

Naisbitt, John

Flaum, Thea K.

Handlin, Oscar

The economy

Everett, Washington, Boeing factory

As a world leader in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), the United States has historically ranked among the world’s highest-ranking countries in terms of GDP per capita. Despite having less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States produces about one-fifth of the world’s output economically.

The United States is a significant player in global trade for a variety of reasons, chief among them its massive economy. Its exports account for more than one tenth of the world total and its investment capital helps spur growth overseas in other countries as well.

Weaknesses and strengths

The global financial crisis of 2007-08 left its mark

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The U.S. economy has faced a number of setbacks in the first decade of the 21st century, but has been able to persevere. These include the collapse of stock markets following an unsustainable run-up in technology shares, losses from corporate scandals, the September 11 attacks in 2001, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast near New Orleans in 2005, and the punishing economic downturn that became widely known as the Great Recession.

The U.S. government plays only a small direct role in running the country’s economic enterprises. Businesses are free to hire or fire employees and open or close operations. Unlike the situation in many other countries, new products and innovative practices can be introduced with minimal bureaucratic delays. The government does, however, regulate various aspects of all U.S. industries. Federal agencies oversee worker safety and work conditions, air and water pollution, food and prescription drug safety, transportation safety, and automotive fuel economy—to name just a few examples. Moreover, the Social Security Administration operates the country’s pension system, which is funded through payroll taxes. The government also operates public health programs such as Medicaid (for the poor) and Medicare (for the elderly).

Even in an economy dominated by privately owned firms, there are still some government-owned companies. These include the U.S. Postal Service, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Amtrak (formerly the National Railroad Passenger Corporation), and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

As a consumer of goods, the federal government exerts considerable influence on certain sectors of the economy-most notably the defense and aerospace industries. Antitrust laws are also enforced by the agency to prevent companies from colluding on prices or monopolizing market share.

Despite its ability to weather economic shocks, in the earliest years of the 21st century the U.S. economy developed many weaknesses that pointed to future risks. The country faces a chronic trade deficit; imports greatly outweigh the value of U.S. goods and services exported to other countries. Household incomes have effectively stagnated since the 1970s, while indebtedness reached record levels. Rising energy prices made it more costly to run businesses and transport goods and people. The country’s aging population placed new burdens on public health spending and pension programs (including Social Security). At the same time, the burgeoning federal budget deficit limited the amount of funding available for social programs.

The tax system

Nearly all of the federal government’s revenues come from taxes, with total income from federal taxes representing about one-fifth of GDP. The most important source of tax revenue is the personal income tax (accounting for roughly half of federal revenue). Gross receipts from corporate income taxes yield a far smaller fraction (about one-eighth) of total federal receipts. Excise duties yield yet another small portion (less than one-tenth) of total federal revenue; however, individual states levy their own excise and sales taxes. Federal excises rest heavily on alcohol, gasoline, and tobacco. Other sources of revenue include Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes (which account for almost two-fifths of federal revenue) and estate and gift taxes (yielding only about 1 percent of the total).

The labor force

Following the higher unemployment rates that resulted from the Great Recession, the U.S. labour market has returned to its traditional level of roughly 5 percent per year. More than three quarters of the country’s workforce works in the service sector, while less than one fifth of the workforce works in the manufacturing and industrial sectors.

Demonstration by the AFL-CIO “Make Wall Street Pay”

After peaking in the 1950s, when 36 percent of American workers were enrolled in unions, union membership at the beginning of the 21st century had fallen to less than 15 percent of U.S. workers, nearly half of them government employees. The transformation in the late 20th century to a service-based economy changed the nature of unions, which are now focused on service industries. Although the freedom to strike is qualified with provisions requiring cooling-off periods and in some cases compulsory arbitration, major unions are able and sometimes willing to embark on long strikes.

Fishing, forestry, and agriculture

Iowa corn harvesting

Although agricultural productivity has increased considerably in recent decades, the combined outputs of agriculture, forestry, and fishing only contribute a small percentage of GDP. The advent of mechanization and organizational changes in commercial farming as well as improved yields through the increased use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides have all contributed to this increase. The most important crops are corn (maize), soybeans, wheat, cotton, grapevines, and potatoes.

More than four-fifths of the trees harvested in the United States are softwoods, such as Douglas fir and southern pine. Oak is the most important hardwood.

Fish for human consumption accounts for more than half of the tonnage landed, while shellfish account for less than one-fifth of the catch but account for nearly half of the value.

The United States is a leading producer of coal, petroleum, and some metals, yet mining and quarrying account for less than one-fiftieth of the GDP.

Power and resources

A major producer of energy in the world, the United States has long been the world’s biggest consumer of energy until China passed it in the early 21st century. In particular, it relies on other countries for petroleum products. Its efficient use of natural resources and its ability to turn those resources into useful products have made the country a world leader.

Metallurgy

The United States is one of the world’s leading producers of refined petroleum, has important reserves of natural gas, and is among the world’s coal exporters.

The United States has important reserves of many minerals, including iron ore, copper, magnesium, lead, zinc, lead mining is concentrated in Missouri, and other metals mined in the United States are gold, silver, molybdenum, manganese, tungsten, bauxite, uranium, vanadium, and nickel. Important nonmetallic minerals produced are phosphates, potash, sulfur, stone, and clays.

Resources of biological origin

More than two-fifths of the total land area of the United States is devoted to farming (including pasture and range). Tobacco is produced in the Southeast and in Kentucky, cotton in the South and Southwest; California is known for vineyards, citrus groves, and truck gardens; the Midwest is known for corn and wheat farming, while dairy herds are centered in the Northern states. It is common to see large livestock herds in the Southwest and Rocky Mountains.

Almost half of the country’s hardwood forests are found in Appalachia. Most of the U.S. forestland is located in the West (including Alaska), but significant forests are also found elsewhere. Approximately two-thirds of commercial forestland is privately owned. About one-fifth is owned or controlled by the federal government, the remainder by state and local governments.

The power of

Although hydroelectric resources are heavily concentrated in the Pacific and Mountain regions, less than one-tenth of the country’s electricity comes from hydroelectricity. Approximately one-fourth of the country’s power is generated by coal-burning plants, one-fifth by nuclear generators, and one-tenth to one-fifth by renewable sources of energy.

The manufacturing industry

Services (including health care, entertainment, and finance) have grown faster than any other sector of the economy since the mid-20th century. While manufacturing jobs have declined since the 1960s, productivity has allowed manufacturing output, including construction, to remain relatively constant at about one-sixth of GDP as a result.

Industries that have high economic productivity tend to be diverse. Transportation equipment manufacturing is a leading sector, as is the computer and telecommunications industry. Other sectors with high productivity include the drug manufacturing and biotechnology industry, health services, food products, chemicals, electrical and nonelectrical machinery, energy, and insurance.

The financial sector

Building of the Federal Reserve Board, Marriner S. Eccles

Under the Federal Reserve System, which regulates bank credit and influences the money supply, regional Federal Reserve banks exercise central banking functions. The Board of Governors, appointed by the president, supervises these banks. Based in Washington, D.C., the board does not necessarily act in accord with the administration’s views on economic policy. The U.S. Treasury also influences the working of the monetary system through its management of the national debt (which can affect interest rates) and by changing its own deposits with the Federal Reserve banks (which can affect the volume of credit). While only about two-fifths of all commercial banks belong to the Federal Reserve System, these banks hold almost three-fourths of all commercial bank deposits. Banks incorporated under national charter must be members of the system, while banks incorporated under state charters may become members. Member banks must maintain minimum legal reserves and must deposit a percentage of their savings and checking accounts with a Federal Reserve bank. There are also thousands of nonbank credit agencies such as personal credit institutions and savings and loan associations (S&Ls).

Although banks supply less than half of the funds used for corporate finance, bank loans represent the country’s largest source of capital for business borrowing. A liberalizing trend in state banking laws in the 1970s and ’80s encouraged both intra- and interstate expansion of bank facilities and bank holding companies. Succeeding mergers among the country’s largest banks led to the formation of large regional and national banking and financial services corporations. In serving both individual and commercial customers, these institutions accept deposits, provide checking accounts, underwrite securities, originate loans, offer mortgages, manage investments, and sponsor credit cards.

Stock exchange in New York

Stock Exchange of New York

Financial services are also provided by insurance companies and security brokerages. The federal government sponsors credit agencies in the areas of housing (home mortgages), farming (agricultural loans), and higher education (student loans). New York City has three organized stock exchanges—the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), NYSE Amex Equities, and NASDAQ—which account for the bulk of all stock sales in the United States. The country’s leading markets for commodities, futures, and options are the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), and the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) specializes in futures contracts for greenhouse gas emissions (carbon credits). Smaller exchanges operate in a number of American cities.

Trade with foreign countries

International trade is an important part of the national economy. The combined value of imports and exports is equivalent to about one-third of the gross national product. Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and South Korea are major trading partners. Leading exports include electrical and office machinery, chemical products, motor vehicles, airplanes and aviation parts, and scientific equipment. Major imports include manufactured goods, petroleum and fuel products, and machinery and transportation equipment.

EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit)

U.S. transportation

The U.S. economy and social environment are strikingly similar in that both are characterized by a high level of mobility. This mobility is seen as a big factor in the dynamism of the American economy. However, mobility has its downsides, such as the deterioration of older urban areas and increased traffic congestion.

Railroads and roads

System of Interstates

Most trips in metropolitan areas are made by automobile, but public transit and rail commuter lines play an important role in the most populous cities. At the end of the 20th century, these added up to more than 100 million privately owned vehicles.

Transport by water and air

Barge on the Mississippi River

navigable waterways cover extensive interior regions, including the country’s largest port systems located along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, as well as in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway system in the north, and the Gulf Coast waterways along the Gulf of Mexico. These ports handle a majority of domestic waterborne traffic; petroleum products, coal, and grain are some of the most common commodities transported.

Distances from the United States by air

Air traffic has increased dramatically in the United States since the mid-20th century. Passenger traffic on certified air carriers increased 373 percent from 1970 to 1999, while freight cargo has grown by 700 percent. There are now more than 14,000 public and private airports in the United States, with the busiest being in Atlanta and Chicago for passenger traffic and Los Angeles and Memphis for freight.

Owen, Wilfred

The government and society

Framework for the Constitution

Washington, D.C.’s Mall.

The Constitution of the United States, written to redress the deficiencies of the country’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, defines a federal system of government in which certain powers are delegated to the national government and others are reserved to the states. The national government consists of executive, legislative, and judicial branches that are designed to ensure, through separation of powers and through checks and balances, that no one branch of government is able to subordinate the other two branches. All three branches have overlapping yet quite distinct authority.

Although the Constitution contains several specific provisions (such as age and residency requirements for holders of federal offices and powers granted to Congress), it is vague in many areas and could not have comprehensively addressed the complex myriad of issues (e.g., historical, technological, etc.) that have arisen in the centuries since its ratification, it is still a living document with subsequent interpretations changing its meaning over time. Furthermore, framers provided for amendments through procedures outlined in Article V. To amend the Constitution, a proposal must be passed by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress or by a national convention called for at the request of the legislatures of two-thirds of the states; after which it must be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures or by conventions in as many states.

In the more than two centuries since the Constitution’s ratification, there have been 27 successful amendments. All but one—the Twenty-first Amendment (1933), which repealed Prohibition—have been ratified by state legislatures. The first 10 amendments, proposed by Congress in September 1789 and adopted in 1791, are known collectively as the Bill of Rights, which places limits on the federal government’s power to curtail individual freedoms. The First Amendment, for example, provides that Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Though the First Amendment’s language appears absolute, it has been interpreted to mean that the federal government (and later the state governments) cannot place undue restrictions on individual liberties but can regulate speech, religion, and other rights.

The guarantees of the Bill of Rights are steeped in controversy and debate continues over the limits that the federal government may appropriately place on individuals. One source of conflict has been the ambiguity in the wording of many of the Constitution’s provisions—such as the Second Amendment’s right “to keep and bear arms” and the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.” Also problematic is the Tenth Amendment’s apparent contradiction of the body of the Constitution; Article I, Section 8, enumerates the powers of Congress but also allows that it may make all laws “which shall be necessary and proper,” while the Tenth Amendment stipulates that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The distinction between what powers should be left to the states or to the people and what is a necessary and proper law for Congress to pass has not always been clear.

Between the ratification of the Bill of Rights and the American Civil War, only two amendments were passed, and both were technical in nature. The Eleventh Amendment (1795) forbade suits against the states in federal courts, and the Twelfth Amendment (1804) corrected a constitutional error that came to light in the presidential election of 1800. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Thirteenth abolished slavery, while the Fifteenth (1870) forbade denial of the right to vote to formerly enslaved men. The Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship rights to formerly enslaved people and guaranteed to every citizen due process and equal protection of the laws, was regarded for a while by the courts as limiting itself to the protection of formerly enslaved people, but it has since been used to extend protections to all citizens. Initially, the Bill of Rights applied solely to the federal government and not to the states. However, many (though not all) of the provisions of the Bill of Rights were extended by the Supreme Court through the Fourteenth Amendment to protect individuals from encroachments by the states. Notable amendments since the Civil War include:
The Sixteenth (19

Government’s executive branch

Government of the United States

The executive branch is headed by the president, who must be a natural-born citizen of the United States and a resident of the country for at least 14 years. A president is elected indirectly by the people through the Electoral College system to a four-year term and is limited to two elected terms of office by the Twenty-second Amendment. The president’s official residence and office is the White House, located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W. in Washington, D.C. The formal constitutional responsibilities vested in the presidency of the United States include serving as commander in chief of the armed forces; negotiating treaties; appointing federal judges, ambassadors, and cabinet officials; and acting as head of state. In practice, presidential powers have expanded to include drafting legislation, formulating foreign policy, conducting personal diplomacy, and leading the president’s political party.

National Security Council; George W. Bush

The members of the president’s cabinet—the attorney general and the secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Education, Energy, and Veterans Affairs—are appointed by the president with the approval of the Senate; although they are described in the Twenty-fifth Amendment as “the principal officers of the executive departments,” significant power has flowed to non-cabinet-level presidential aides such as those serving in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Council of Economic Advisers, the National Security Council (NSC), and the office of the White House Chief of Staff. Cabinet-level rank may be conferred to heads of such institutions at the discretion of the president. Members of the cabinet and presidential aides serve at the pleasure of the president and may be dismissed by him at any time.

The executive branch also includes independent regulatory agencies such as the Federal Reserve System and the Securities and Exchange Commission. These agencies protect the public interest by enforcing rules and resolving disputes over federal regulations. Governed by commissions appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate (commissioners may not be removed by the president), these agencies are part of the executive branch. Also part of the executive branch are government corporations (e.g., the Tennessee Valley Authority, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation [Amtrak], and the U.S. Postal Service), which supply services to consumers that could be provided by private corporations, and independent executive agencies (e.g., the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), which comprise a remainder of the federal government.

Legislative branch

Learn how the United States elects its House of Representatives, Senate, president, and vice president, unlike the United Kingdom

Here’s how the United States elects its House of Representatives, Senate, president, and vice president, unlike the United Kingdom.

Two houses make up the U.S. Congress, the federal government’s legislative branch. In addition to levying taxes, borrowing money, regulating interstate commerce, impeaching and convicting the president, declaring war, disciplining its own members, and determining its rules of procedure, Congress has the authority to impose taxes, borrow money, regulate interstate commerce, impeach and convict the president, declare war, and regulate interstate commerce.

A bill may be introduced in and amended by either house, and a bill—with its amendments—must pass both houses in identical form and be signed by the president before it becomes law. The president may veto a bill, but a veto can be overridden by a two-thirds vote of both houses. The House of Representatives may impeach a president or another public official by a majority vote; trials of impeached officials are conducted by the Senate, and a two-thirds majority is necessary to convict and remove the individual from office. Congress is assisted in its duties by the General Accounting Office (GAO), which examines all federal receipts and expenditures by auditing federal programs and assessing the fiscal impact of proposed legislation, and by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which assesses budget data, analyzes the fiscal impact of alternative policies, and makes economic forecasts.

The House of Representatives is chosen by the direct vote of the electorate in single-member districts in each state. The number of representatives allotted to each state is based on its population as determined by a decennial census; states sometimes gain or lose seats, depending on population shifts. Representatives must be at least 25 years old, residents of the states from which they are elected, and previously citizens of the United States for at least seven years. It has become a practical imperative—though not a constitutional requirement—that a member be an inhabitant of the district that elects him. Members serve two-year terms, and there is no limit on the number of terms they may serve. The speaker of the House, who is chosen by the majority party, presides over debate, appoints members of select and conference committees, and performs other important duties; he is second in the line of presidential succession (following the vice president). The parliamentary leaders of the two main parties are the majority floor leader and the minority floor leader. The floor leaders are assisted by party whips, who are responsible for maintaining contact between the leadership and the members of the House. Bills introduced by members in the House of Representatives are received by standing committees, which can amend

Chamber of the U.S. Senate

Each state elects two senators at large. Senators must be at least 30 years old, residents of the state from which they are elected, and previously citizens of the United States for at least nine years. They serve six-year terms, which are arranged so that one-third of the Senate is elected every two years. Senators also are not subject to term limits. The vice president serves as president of the Senate, casting a vote only in the case of a tie, and in his absence the Senate is chaired by a president pro tempore, who is elected by the Senate and is third in the line of succession to the presidency.

Judiciary

Washington, D.C., Supreme Court Building.

Supreme Court of the United States

The judicial branch is headed by the Supreme Court of the United States, which interprets the Constitution and federal legislation. The Supreme Court consists of nine justices (including a chief justice) appointed to life terms by the president with the consent of the Senate. It has appellate jurisdiction over the lower federal courts and original jurisdiction in cases involving foreign ambassadors, ministers, and consuls. It also has appellate jurisdiction over state courts if a federal question is involved.

Most cases reach the Supreme Court through its appellate jurisdiction. The Judiciary Act of 1925 provided the justices with the sole discretion to determine their caseload. To issue a writ of certiorari, which grants a court hearing to a case, at least four justices must agree (the “Rule of Four”). Three types of cases commonly reach the Supreme Court: cases involving litigants of different states, cases involving the interpretation of federal law, and cases involving the interpretation of the Constitution. With six judges available for deliberation, a majority vote is decisive; however, if there is a tie vote, the lower-court decision stands. The official decision of the court is often supplemented by concurring opinions from justices who support the majority decision and dissenting opinions from justices who oppose it.

Board of Education v. Brown

Critics of the Supreme Court often charge that it interprets the Constitution in an arbitrary and capricious manner. This was especially apparent in the 1930s, when the court overturned much of FDR’s New Deal legislation. In the area of civil rights, criticism has come from various groups at different times. The 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was harshly attacked by Southern political leaders, who were later joined by Northern conservatives. A number of decisions involving pretrial rights have been contested on the grounds that they make it difficult to convict criminals. On divisive issues such as abortion, affirmative action, school prayer, and flag burning, there has been strong opposition with opponents seeking amendments to overturn court decisions.

At the lowest level of the federal court system are district courts (see United States District Court). Each state has at least one federal district court and at least one federal judge. Federal judges are appointed to life terms by the president with the consent of the Senate. Appeals from district-court decisions are carried to the U.S. courts of appeals (see United States Court of Appeals). Losing parties at this level may appeal for a hearing from the Supreme Court. Special courts handle property and contract damage suits against the United States (United States Court of Federal Claims), review customs rulings (United States Court of International Trade), hear complaints by individual taxpayers (United States Tax Court) or veterans (United States Court of Appeals for Veteran Claims), and apply the Uniform Code of Military Justice (United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces).

Government at the state and local levels

The U.S. Constitution establishes a federal system, the state governments enjoy extensive authority which has waxed and waned over time according to decisions by conservative-leaning federal courts that have increased the power of the states relative to the federal government in some areas and reduced their power in others.

State governments follow a similar structure to the federal government. Each state has a governor, legislature, and judiciary. It also has its own constitution.

All state legislatures are bicameral except Nebraska’s unicameral legislature. Most state judicial systems are based upon elected justices of the peace, above whom are major trial courts and appellate courts. Each state has its own supreme court. In addition, there are probate courts concerned with wills, estates, and guardianships. Most state judges are elected, although some states use an appointment process similar to the federal courts and some use a nonpartisan selection process known as the Missouri Plan.

Governors are generally elected to terms of two, four, or sometimes six years and in some states their terms are limited. The powers of governors often vary, with some constitutions ceding substantial authority to the chief executive such as appointment and budgetary powers and the authority to veto legislation. In a few states, however, governors have highly circumscribed authority with the constitution denying them the power to veto legislative bills.

Lt. governors are generally elected independently of the governor and may not be members of the governor’s party in most states. They serve as the presiding officer for the state Senate. A secretary of state, state treasurer, state auditor, attorney general, and superintendent of public instruction are other elected officials.

Among the many functions of state governments are conservation, highway and motor vehicle supervision, public safety and correction, professional licensing, agriculture regulation, intrastate business regulation, and public health and welfare regulation. Governors are in charge of the administrative departments overseeing these activities.

Each state may establish local governments to assist it in carrying out its constitutional powers. Local governments exercise only those powers that are granted to them by the states, and a state may redefine the role and authority of local government as it deems appropriate. There are some 85,000 local government units in the United States, ranging from small townships to large counties.

South Carolina, Rock Hill

Municipal, or city, governments are responsible for delivering most local services. The three basic types of municipal government are mayor-council, commission, and council-manager.

As society has become increasingly urban, politics and government have become more complex. Many problems of the cities, including transportation, housing, education, health, and welfare, can no longer be handled entirely on the local level. Cities often turn to the federal government for assistance, though proponents of local control have urged that the federal government provide block-grant aid to state and local governments without federal restrictions.

Process of political decision-making

The framers of the U.S. Constitution, focusing primarily on the state and national governments, only briefly addressed the political and electoral process. Indeed, three of the Constitution’s four references to the election of public officials left the details to be determined by Congress or the states. The fourth reference, in Article II, Section 1, prescribed the role of the Electoral College in choosing the president, but this section was soon amended (in 1804 by the Twelfth Amendment) to remedy the technical defects that had arisen in 1800, when all Democratic-Republican Party electors cast their votes for Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr.

The framers stipulated that, in establishing the Electoral College, “Congress may determine the Time of chusing [sic] the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.” In 1845 Congress established that presidential electors would be appointed on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November; the electors cast their ballots on the Monday following the second Wednesday in December. Article I, establishing Congress, merely provides that representatives are to be “chosen every second Year by the People of the several States” and that voting qualifications are to be the same for Congress as for the “most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.” Initially, senators were chosen by their respective state legislatures (Section 3), though this was changed to popular election by the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. Section 4 leaves to the states the prescription of the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives” but gives Congress the power “at any time by Law [to] make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

Abolition of slavery

Suffrage for women

All citizens 18 years of age or older are eligible to vote in the United States. The history of voting rights in the United States has been one of gradual extension of the franchise, with religious, property ownership, race, and gender no longer being legal barriers to voting. In 1870, through the Fifteenth Amendment, formerly enslaved people were granted the right to vote, though African Americans were subsequently still denied the franchise (particularly in the South) through devices such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses. Only in the 1960s, through the Twenty-fourth Amendment (barring poll taxes) and the Voting Rights Act, were the full voting rights of African Americans guaranteed. Though universal manhood suffrage had theoretically been achieved following the American Civil War, women’s suffrage was not fully guaranteed until 1920 with the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment (several states, particularly in the West, had begun granting women the right to vote and to run for political office beginning in the late 19th century).

Elections and voting

Place of voting

Voters go to the polls in the United States not only to elect members of Congress and presidential electors but also to cast ballots for state and local officials, including governors, mayors, and judges. Additionally, on ballot initiatives and referendums that may range from local bond issues to state constitutional amendments (see referendum and initiative), voters may choose between a variety of candidates. The 435 members of the House of Representatives are elected by the direct vote of the electorate in single-member districts in each state. State legislatures (sometimes with input from the courts) draw congressional district boundaries, often for partisan advantage (see gerrymandering); incumbents have always enjoyed an electoral advantage over challengers, but as computer technology has made redistricting more sophisticated and easier to manipulate, elections to the House of Representatives have become even less competitive, with more than 90 percent of incumbents who choose to run for reelection regularly winning—often by significant margins. By contrast, Senate elections are generally more competitive.

Certificate showing the votes of Alabama’s electors

Voters indirectly elect the president and vice president through the Electoral College. Instead of choosing a candidate, voters actually choose electors committed to support a particular candidate. Each state is allotted one electoral vote for each of its senators and representatives in Congress; the Twenty-third Amendment (1961) granted electoral votes to the District of Columbia, which does not have congressional representation. A candidate must win at least 270 out of 538 electoral votes to be elected president. If no candidate wins a majority, the House of Representatives selects the president, with each state delegation receiving one vote; the Senate elects the vice president if no vice presidential candidate secures an Electoral College majority. Presidential elections are costly and generate much media and public attention—sometimes years before the actual date of the general election. Indeed, some presidential aspirants have declared their candidacies years in advance of the first primaries and caucuses, and some White House hopefuls drop out of the grueling process long before the first votes are cast.

In contrast to most other Western countries, voter turnout is quite low in the United States. In late 20th and early 21st century, about 50 percent of Americans cast ballots in presidential elections; turnout was even lower for congressional and state and local elections, with participation dropping under 40 percent for most congressional midterm elections (held midway through a president’s four-year term). Indeed, in some local elections (such as school board elections or bond issues) and primaries or caucuses, turnout has sometimes fallen below 10 percent. High abstention rates led to efforts to encourage voter participation by making voting easier. For example, in 1993 Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act (the so-called “motor-voter law”), which required states to allow citizens to register to vote when they received their driver’s licenses, and in 1998 voters in Oregon approved a referendum that established a mail-in voting system. In addition, some states now allow residents to register to vote on election day, polls are opened on multiple days and in multiple locations in some states, and Internet voting has even been introduced on a limited basis for some elections.

Campaigns and money

In an attempt to reduce the influence of money in the political process, reforms were instituted in the 1970s that limited the amount of contributions that individuals could make to federal candidates. These reforms, however, allowed labour unions, corporations, political advocacy groups, and political parties to raise and spend unlimited amounts of soft money (so-called ” unsolicited donations “). Because there are no limits on soft money contributions, individuals or groups can contribute to political parties any sum at their disposal or spend limitless amounts on advocating policy positions (often with the benefit or detriment of particular candidates). In the 2000 election cycle it is estimated that more than $1 billion was spent by the Democratic and Republican parties and candidates for office. Roughly two-fifths of this total came from soft money contributions.

In 2002, concerns about campaign finance led to the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly called the “McCain-Feingold law,” which banned national political parties from raising soft money and increased the amount individuals could contribute to candidates (indexing the amount for inflation). The law also prevented interest groups from broadcasting advertisements that specifically referred to a candidate within 30 days of a primary election and 60 days of a general election.

In 2010 the contribution limits imposed by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act were partly invalidated by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that contributions made for independent electioneering communications were a form of constitutionally protected free speech. This decision was hailed by some as a resounding victory for freedom of speech, whereas others criticized it as an overreaching attempt to rewrite campaign finance law. The judgment led to the growth of so-called Super PACs, organizations allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money to support or defeat a candidate or an issue, so long as those expenditures were made independently from the official campaign.

Campaign button for Perot and Ross

A candidate’s spending on his or her own candidacy is not subject to federal limits. For example, Ross Perot spent over $60 million of his fortune in 1992 in his unsuccessful attempt to become president of the United States, and Michael Bloomberg won the mayorship of New York City in 2001 after spending nearly $70 million.

Parties

Richard M. Nixon

The United States has two major national political parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Although the parties contest presidential elections every four years and have national party organizations, between elections they are often little more than loose alliances of state and local party organizations. Other parties have occasionally challenged the Democrats and Republicans, but since the Republican Party’s rise to major party status in the 1850s, minor parties have had only limited electoral success. In most cases, limited to influencing the platforms of the major parties or siphoning off enough votes from a major party to deprive that party of victory in a presidential election

There are several reasons for the failure of minor parties and the resilience of America’s two-party system. In order to win a national election, parties must appeal to a broad base of voters and a wide spectrum of interests. The two major parties have tended to adopt centrist political programs, and sometimes there are only minor differences between them on major issues, especially those related to foreign affairs. Each party has both conservative and liberal wings, and on some issues (e.g., affirmative action) conservative Democrats have more in common with conservative Republicans than with liberal Democrats. The cost of campaigns and the “winner-take-all” plurality system penalize minor parties. Since the 1970s, presidential campaigns (primaries and caucuses, national conventions, and general elections) have been publicly funded through a tax checkoff system. Whereas the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates receive full federal financing (nearly $75 million in 2004), a minor party is eligible for a portion of the federal funds only if its candidate surpassed 5 percent in the prior presidential election.

Sacramento, California, Tea Party rally

Both the Democratic and Republican parties have undergone significant ideological transformations throughout their histories. The modern Democratic Party traditionally supports organized labour, minorities, and progressive reforms. Nationally, it generally espouses a liberal political philosophy, supporting greater governmental intervention in the economy and less governmental regulation of the private lives of citizens. It also generally supports higher taxes (particularly on the wealthy) to finance social welfare benefits that provide assistance to the elderly, the poor, the unemployed, and children.

1960 presidential election in the United States

At the state level, political parties reflect the diversity of the population. Democrats in the Southern states are generally more conservative than Democrats in New England or the Pacific Coast states; likewise, Republicans in New England or the mid-Atlantic states also generally adopt more liberal positions than Republicans in the South or the mountain states of the West. Large urban centres are more likely to support the Democratic Party, whereas rural areas, small cities, and suburban areas tend more often to vote Republican. Some states have traditionally given majorities to one particular party. For example, because of the legacy of the Civil War and its aftermath, until recently the Democratic Party dominated Southern states of former Confederacy thanks to their large African American population (11 out of 19 at present). However, after 1960s Republican-leaning Southern and Western states started gaining in population and clout relative to Democratic-leaning Northern and Eastern ones; for instance, New England has always been a stronghold for Democrats.

According to the received wisdom, red states were Republican, conservative, andGod-fearing; blue states were Democratic, liberal, secular, and politically correct.

Al Gore and Bill Clinton

Many individuals work their way up through the party organization, belonging to a neighbourhood party club, helping to raise funds, getting out the vote, watching the polls, and gradually rising to become a candidate for local, state and higher office. Because American elections are now more heavily candidate-centred rather than party-centred and are less susceptible to control by party bosses, wealthy candidates have often been able to circumvent the traditional party organization.

After the September 11 attacks of 2001, the Department of Homeland Security was created to protect the United States against terrorist attacks. The department’s establishment consolidated much of the country’s security infrastructure and integrated the functions of more than 20 agencies. The department’s substantive responsibilities are divided into four directorates: border and transportation security, emergency preparedness, information analysis and infrastructure protection, and science and technology. The Secret Service, which protects the president, vice president, and other designated individuals, is also under the department’s jurisdiction.

Department of Defense

The country’s military forces consist of the U.S. Army, Navy (including the Marine Corps), and Air Force, under the umbrella of the Department of Defense which is headquartered in the Pentagon building in Arlington county, Virginia. Male citizens between 18-25 years old are currently required to register for a select service if there is a need for a draft during a crisis. The National Guard is made up of reserve groups that may be called-up at any time by the governor of the state.

The military has a considerable economic and political impact on government expenditures, as well as other countries through multilateral and bilateral treaties and organizations.

Central Intelligence Agency seal

The National Security Act of 1947 established a coordinated command for security and intelligence-gathering activities. The act established the National Security Council (NSC) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the latter under the authority of the NSC and responsible for foreign intelligence. The National Security Agency, an agency of the Department of Defense, is responsible for cryptographic and communications intelligence. The Department of Homeland Security analyzes information gathered by FBI and CIA to assess threat levels against United States.

Enforcement of domestic laws

While federal law enforcement officers began to increase in the late 20th century, law enforcement has traditionally been concentrated in local police departments. In cities, police and detectives perform the bulk of the work, while in rural areas, sheriffs and constables do the rest. Additionally, many state governments have law enforcement agencies, and they all have highway patrol systems for enforcing traffic laws.

The investigation of crimes that come under federal jurisdiction (e.g., those committed in more than one state) is the responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which also provides assistance with fingerprint identification and technical laboratory services to state and local law-enforcement agencies. In addition, certain federal agencies—such as the Drug Enforcement Administration of the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms of the Department of the Treasury—are empowered to enforce specific federal laws.

Welfare and health

Medicare under Lyndon B. Johnson

Despite the country’s enormous wealth, poverty remains a reality for many people in the United States, though programs such as Social Security and Medicare have significantly reduced the poverty rate among senior citizens. While one-tenth of the general population—and about one-sixth of children under 18 years of age—lived in poverty in the early 21st century, about half the poor live in homes in which the head of household is a full- or part-time wage earner. Of those living in poverty, many are too old to work or are disabled, and a large percentage are mothers of young children. The states provide assistance to the poor in varying amounts, and the United States Department of Agriculture subsidizes the distribution of low-cost food and food stamps to the poor through state and local governments. Unemployment assistance, provided for by the 1935 Social Security Act, is funded through worker and employer contributions.

Getting a head start

Get a head start

In the 1960s, increasing public concern with poverty and welfare led to new federal legislation, especially the Great Society programs of the presidential administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. Work, training, and rehabilitation programs were established in 1964 for welfare recipients. Between 1964 and 1969, the Office of Economic Opportunity began a number of programs, including the Head Start program for preschool children, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, and the Teacher Corps. Responding to allegations of abuse in the country’s welfare system and charges that it encouraged dependency, the federal government introduced reforms in 1996, including limiting long-term benefits, requiring recipients to find work, and devolving much of the decision making to the states.

Persons who have been employed are eligible for retirement pensions under the Social Security program, and their surviving spouses and dependent children may be generally eligible for survivor benefits. Many employers provide additional retirement benefits, usually funded by worker and employer contributions. In addition, millions of Americans maintain individual retirement accounts, such as the popular 401(k) plan, which is organized by employers and allows workers (sometimes with matching funds from their employer) to contribute part of their earnings on a tax-deferred basis to individual investment accounts.

With total health care spending significantly exceeding $1 trillion annually, the provision of medical and health care is one of the largest industries in the United States. There are, nevertheless, many inadequacies in medical services, particularly in rural and poor areas. Unfortunately, some two-thirds of the population is not covered by any form of health insurance. Approximately one-sixth of the population receives medical care paid for or subsidized by the federal government, with that for the poor provided by Medicaid.

PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act)

The passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) had a markedly different impact on the situation than did previous legislation, such as Medicare. PPACA included provisions that made it easier and less costly for most individuals to obtain health insurance, cracked down on abusive insurance practices, and attempted to rein in rising costs of health care.

Grants are also made to researchers in clinics and medical schools by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, through its National Institutes of Health.

The housing market

Virginia, Alexandria

About three-fifths of the housing units in the United States are detached single-family homes, and two-thirds are occupied by the owners. Most houses are constructed of wood, with shingles or brick veneer covering most of them. The housing stock is relatively modern; nearly one-third of all units were constructed since 1980, while about one-fifth were built before 1940. Nearly two-thirds of homes have five or more rooms, making them relatively large.

Housing has long been considered a private rather than a public concern. The growth of urban slums, however, led many municipal governments to enact stricter building codes and sanitary regulations. Many efforts were made to reduce slums in large cities by developing low-cost housing, but these attempts were frequently resisted by local residents who feared a subsequent decline in property values. For many years the restrictive covenant, which barred certain groups from purchasing homes in community, served to keep these groups out of many communities. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled such covenants unenforceable and in 1962 President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order prohibiting discrimination in housing built with federal aid. This prohibition has led to great racial disparities in home ownership-about three-fourths of whites but only about half of Hispanics and African Americans own their housing units.

During the 1950s and ’60s, large high-rise public housing units were built for low-income families in many large U.S. cities. However, they often became centres of crime and unemployment, and minority groups and the poor continued to live in segregated urban ghettos. Many housing projects were demolished during the 1990s and early 21st century and replaced with joint public-private housing developments with varying income levels.

The education system

California State University, San Jose

The interplay of local, state, and national programs and policies is particularly evident in education. Historically, education has been considered the province of the state and local governments. Of the approximately 4,000 colleges and universities (including branch campuses), the academies of the armed services are among the few federal institutions. Additionally, since 1862—when public lands were granted to the states to sell to fund the establishment of colleges of agricultural and mechanical arts, called land-grant colleges—the federal government has been involved in education at all levels. Additionally, the federal government supports school lunch programs, administers American Indian education, makes research grants to universities, underwrites loans to college students, and finances education for veterans. It has been widely debated whether the government should also give assistance to private and parochial (religious) schools or tax deductions to parents choosing to send their children to such schools. Although Supreme Court ruling bars direct assistance to parochial schools from Congress’s concern over an establishment of religion, it has allowed provision of textbooks and supplementary educational centres on grounds that their primary purpose is educative rather than religious.

Public secondary and elementary education is free, provided primarily by local government, and compulsory. Education is generally from age 7 through 16, though the age requirements vary somewhat among the states. The literacy rate exceeds 95 percent. In order to address the educational needs of a complex society, governments at all levels have pursued diverse strategies, including preschool programs, classes in the community, summer and night schools, additional facilities for exceptional children, and programs aimed at culturally deprived and disaffected students.

Harris, James T.

This is similar to the contributions of African American dance pioneers Katherine Dunham, who began in the 1930s, and Alvin Ailey, who founded his own company in 1958, to Savion Glover, whose “hitting” style of tap dancing was popular on Broadway in the mid-1990s with Bring in’Da Noise, Bring in’Da Funk.

Despite the introduction of these reforms, the years from 1619 to 1624 proved fatal to the future of the Virginia Company. Epidemics, constant warfare with the Indians, and internal disputes took a heavy toll on the colony. In 1624, however, the crown finally revoked the charter of the company and placed the colony under royal control. The introduction of royal government into Virginia, while it had important long-range consequences, did not produce an immediate change in the character of the colony. The economic and political life of the colony continued as it had in the past. The House of Burgesses, though its future under a royal commission in 1624 was uncertain, continued to meet on an informal basis; by 1629 it had been officially reestablished. The crown also grudgingly acquiesced to the decision of Virginian settlers to continue to direct most of their energies to growth and exportation of tobacco. By 1630, at least, Virginia colony was showing signs that it was capable of surviving without royal subsidy.

Washington, D.C.

Maryland historical interpreters

Discover the many historical figures from Maryland, such as George Calvert, Benjamin Banneker, and Thurgood Marshall

Explore the history of Maryland’s many historical figures, including George Calvert, Benjamin Banneker, and Thurgood Marshall.

Maryland, Virginia’s neighbor to the north, was the first English colony to be controlled by a single proprietor rather than by a joint-stock company. Lord Baltimore (George Calvert) had been an investor in a number of colonizing schemes before being given a grant of land from the crown in 1632. Baltimore’s son Cecilius Calvert took over the project at his father’s death and promoted a settlement at St. Mary’s on the Potomac. Supplied in part by Virginia, the Maryland colonists managed to sustain their settlement in modest fashion from the beginning. As in Virginia, however, the early 17th-century settlement in Maryland was often unstable and unrefined; composed overwhelmingly of young single males—many of them indentured servants—it lacked the stabilizing force of a strong family structure to temper the rigours of life in the wilderness.

Colony of Maryland

The colony was intended to serve at least two purposes. Baltimore, a Roman Catholic, was eager to find a colony where Catholics could live in peace, but he also wanted to see his colony yield him a large profit. There were more Protestants in the colony than Catholics, although some prominent Catholics owned a large share of the land. Baltimore was, however, generally a good and fair administrator despite his favoritisms in land policy.

The Calvert family, however, was forced to surrender control of the colony to the royal government following the accession of William III and Mary II to the English throne. After the crown decreed that Anglicanism would be the established religion in the colony, the colony reverted back to a proprietary government in 1715, after the Calvert family had resigned from Catholicism and embraced Anglicanism.

Colonies in New England

Although lacking a charter, the founders of Plymouth in Massachusetts were, like their counterparts in Virginia, dependent upon private investments from profit-minded backers to finance their colony. The nucleus of that settlement was drawn from an enclave of English Separatists who believed that the true church was a voluntary company of the faithful under the “guidance” of a pastor and tended to be exceedingly individualistic in matters of church doctrine. Unlike the settlers of Massachusetts Bay, these Pilgrims chose to “separate” themselves from the Church of England rather than reforming it from within.

Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth, Mass., Dec. 22, 1620

Plymouth, Mass., Dec. 22, 1620, Pilgrim Landing

The First Thanksgiving by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris

Despite decreasing support from English investors, the health and the economic position of the colonists improved. The Pilgrims soon secured peace treaties with most of the Indians around them, enabling them to devote their time to building a strong, stable economic base rather than diverting their efforts toward costly and time-consuming problems of defending the colony from attack. Although none of their principal economic pursuits—farming, fishing, or trading—promised them lavish wealth, the Pilgrims in America were, after only five years, self-sufficient.

Signing of the Mayflower Compact by the Pilgrims

New England in the 17th century

Although the Pilgrims were always a minority in Plymouth, they nevertheless controlled the entire governmental structure of their colony during the first four decades of settlement.

Colony of Massachusetts Bay

Like the Pilgrims, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in seeking to free themselves from religious restraints, sailed to America principally. Unlike the Pilgrims, the Puritans did not desire to “separate” themselves from the Church of England but hoped by their example to reform it. Nevertheless, one of the recurring problems facing leaders of Massachusetts Bay Colony was to be deviation from orthodox Puritan doctrine by some, in their desire to free themselves from alleged corruption of Church of England. When these tendencies or any hinting at deviation developed, those holding them were either quickly corrected or expelled from colony. Leaders of Massachusetts Bay enterprise never intended their colony to be outpost of toleration in New World; rather they intended it as model purity and orthodoxy with all backsliders subject to immediate correction.

Winthrop, John

The civil government of the colony was guided by a similar authoritarian spirit. Men such as John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, believed that it was the duty of the governors of society not to act as the direct representatives of their constituents but rather to decide, independently, what measures were in the best interests of the total society. The original charter of 1629 gave all power in the colony to a General Court composed of only a small number of shareholders in the company. On arriving in Massachusetts, many disfranchised settlers immediately protested against this provision and caused the franchise to be widened to include all church members. These “freemen” were given the right to vote in the General Court once each year for a governor and a Council of Assistants. Although technically given power to make all decisions affecting the colony, members of ruling elite initially refused to allow freemen in General Court to take part in lawmaking on grounds that their numbers would render court inefficient.

The General Court adopted a new plan of representation whereby the freemen of each town would be permitted to select two or three delegates and assistants, elected separately but sitting together in the General Court, who would be responsible for all legislation. There was always tension existing between the smaller, more prestigious group of assistants and the larger group of deputies. In 1644, as a result of this continuing tension, the two groups were officially lodged in separate houses of the General Court, with each house reserving a veto power over the other.

Despite the authoritarian tendencies of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a spirit of community developed there as perhaps in no other colony. This spirit that caused the residents of Massachusetts to report on their neighbours for deviation from the true principles of Puritan morality also prompted them to be extraordinarily solicitous about their neighbours’ needs. Although life in Massachusetts was made difficult for those who dissented from the prevailing orthodoxy, it was marked by a feeling of attachment and community for those who lived within the enforced consensus of the society.

Many New Englanders, however, refused to live within the orthodoxy imposed by the ruling elite of Massachusetts and both Connecticut and Rhode Island were founded as a by-product of their discontent. The Rev. Thomas Hooker, who had arrived in Massachusetts Bay in 1633, soon found himself in opposition to the colony’s restrictive policy regarding the admission of church members and to the oligarchic power of the leaders of the colony. Motivated both by a distaste for the religious and political structure of Massachusetts and by a desire to open up new land, Hooker and his followers began moving into the Connecticut valley in 1635. By 1636 they had succeeded in founding three towns—Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersford. In 1638 New Haven was founded and in 1662 Connecticut and Rhode Island merged under one charter.

Williams, Roger

Roger Williams, the man closely associated with the founding of Rhode Island, was banished from Massachusetts because of his unwillingness to conform to the orthodoxy established in that colony. Williams’s views conflicted with those of the ruling hierarchy in several important ways. His own strict criteria for determining who was regenerate, and therefore eligible for church membership, finally led him to deny any practical way to admit anyone into the church. Once he recognized that no church could ensure the purity of its congregation, he ceased using purity as a criterion and instead opened church membership to nearly everyone in the community. Additionally, Williams showed distinctly Separatist leanings preaching that the Puritan church could not possibly achieve purity as long as it remained within the Church of England. Finally, and perhaps most serious, he openly disputed the right of the Massachusetts leaders to occupy land without first purchasing it from the Native Americans.

The unpopularity of Williams’s views forced him to flee Massachusetts Bay for Providence in 1636. In 1639, Coddington, another dissenter in Massachusetts, settled his congregation in Newport. Four years later, Gorton, yet another minister banished from Massachusetts Bay because of his differences with the ruling oligarchy, settled in Shawomet (later renamed Warwick). In 1644 these three communities joined with a fourth in Portsmouth under one charter to become one colony called Providence Plantation in Narragansett Bay.

Massachusetts Bay also ruled the early settlers of Maine and New Hampshire. New Hampshire was permanently separated from Massachusetts in 1692, but it was not until 1741 that it was given its own royal governor. Maine remained under Massachusetts’ jurisdiction until 1820.

Middle colonies

New Netherland was founded in 1624 by the Dutch West India Company, but it was only one element of a wider program of Dutch expansion in the first half of the 17th century. In 1664, New York was captured by the English and renamed after James, duke of York. The duke of York and his resident board of governors were given extraordinary discretion in ruling the colony, although the grant to him mentioned that he had to summon a representative assembly. However, the duke never summoned it until 1683. The duke’s main interest in New York was economic, not political. However, most of his efforts to derive economic gain from New York proved futile because Indians, foreign interlopers (the Dutch actually recaptured New York in 1673 and held it for more than a year), and the success of the colonists in evading taxes made his job a frustrating one.

In February 1685 the duke of York found himself not only proprietor of New York but also king of England, a fact that changed the status of New York from that of a proprietary to a royal colony. The process of royal consolidation was accelerated when in 1688 the colony, along with the New England and New Jersey colonies, was made part of the ill-fated Dominion of New England. In 1691 Jacob Leisler, a German merchant living on Long Island, led a successful revolt against the rule of the deputy governor, Francis Nicholson. The revolt, which was a product of dissatisfaction with a small aristocratic ruling elite and dislike for the consolidated scheme of government in the Dominion of New England, served to hasten the demise of the dominion.

Penn, William

Pennsylvania, because of the liberal policies of its founder, William Penn, became one of the most diverse, dynamic, and prosperous colonies in North America. Penn himself was a liberal English Whig who sought to implement Quaker ideals such as liberty of conscience and pacifism in his “holy experiment” in the New World.

William Penn and his daughter were granted land

Penn received his grant of land along the Delaware River in 1681 from Charles II as a reward for his father’s service to the crown. The first “frame of government” proposed by Penn in 1682 provided for a council and an assembly, each to be elected by the freeholders of the colony. The council was to have the sole power of initiating legislation; the lower house could only approve or veto bills submitted by the council. After numerous objections about the “oligarchic” nature of this form of government, Penn issued a second frame of government in 1682 and then a third in 1696, but even these did not wholly satisfy the residents of the colony. Finally, in 1701, a Charter of Privileges, giving the lower house all legislative power and transforming the council into an appointive body with advisory functions only, was approved by the citizens.

“An accurate description of the newly founded province of Pennsylvania”

“An accurate description of Pennsylvania, a newly founded province”

Pennsylvania prospered from the outset. Although there was some jealousy between the original settlers (who had received the best land and important commercial privileges) and the later arrivals, economic opportunity in Pennsylvania was on the whole greater than in any other colony. Beginning with the immigration of Germans into the Delaware valley in 1683, and continuing with an immense influx of Irish and Scotch-Irish in the 1720s and ’30s, the population of Pennsylvania increased and diversified. The fertile soil of the countryside, in conjunction with a generous government land policy, kept immigration at high levels throughout the 18th century. Ultimately, however, the continuing influx of European settlers hungry for land spelled doom for the pacific Indian policy initially envisioned by Penn.

Carteret, Philip

New Jersey remained in the shadow of both New York and Pennsylvania throughout most of the colonial period. In 1664, part of the territory ceded to the duke of York by the English crown lay in what would later become the colony of New Jersey. The duke of York in turn granted that portion of his lands to John Berkeley and George Carteret, two close friends and allies of the king. In 1665 Berkeley and Carteret established a proprietary government under their own direction. Constant clashes, however, developed between the New Jersey and the New York proprietors over the precise nature of the New Jersey grant. The legal status of New Jersey became even more tangled when Berkeley sold his half interest in the colony to two Quakers, who in turn placed the management of the colony in the hands of three trustees, one of whom was Penn. The area was then divided into East Jersey, controlled by Carteret, and West Jersey, controlled by Penn and the other Quaker trustees. In 1682, Quakers bought East Jersey. A multiplicity of owners and an uncertainty of administration caused both colonists and colonizers to feel dissatisfied with the proprietary arrangement, and in 1702, crown united the two Jerseys into a single royal province.

To protect their water route to Pennsylvania, the Quakers acquired East Jersey as well as the land that became Delaware when they acquired East Jersey. It remained under the governor of Pennsylvania until 1704, when it was given its own assembly, but remained under the Pennsylvania governor until the American Revolution.

Georgia and the Carolinas

The English crown had issued grants to the Carolina territory as early as 1629, but it was not until 1663 that a group of eight proprietors—most of them men of extraordinary wealth and power even by English standards—actually began colonizing the area. The proprietors hoped to grow silk in the warm climate of the Carolinas, but all efforts to produce that valuable commodity failed. Moreover, it proved difficult to attract settlers to the Carolinas; it was not until 1718, after a series of violent Indian wars had subsided, that the population began to increase substantially. Settlement followed two paths in both North Carolina and South Carolina; however, there was more diversity in North Carolina where many residents were part of the spillover from Virginians southward.

The original framework of government for the Carolinas, the Fundamental Constitutions, drafted in 1669 by Anthony Ashley Cooper (Lord Shaftesbury) with the help of the philosopher John Locke, was largely ineffective because of its restrictive and feudal nature. The Fundamental Constitutions was abandoned in 1693 and replaced by a frame of government diminishing the powers of the proprietors and increasing the prerogatives of the provincial assembly. In 1729, primarily because of the proprietors’ inability to meet the pressing problems of defense, Carolina were converted into two separate royal colonies of North and South Carolina.

The proprietors of Georgia, led by James Oglethorpe, were wealthy philanthropic English gentlemen who transported imprisoned debtors to Georgia in order to rehabilitate them and make money for the proprietors in the process. Those who actually settled in Georgia—and by no means all of them were impoverished debtors—encountered a highly restrictive economic and social system. Oglethorpe and his partners limited the size of individual landholdings to 500 acres (about 200 hectares), prohibited slavery, forbade the drinking of rum, and instituted a system of inheritance that further restricted the accumulation of large estates. The regulations, though noble in intention, created considerable tension between some of the more enterprising settlers and the proprietors. Moreover, the economy did not live up to the expectations of the colony’s promoters.

The settlers were also dissatisfied with the political structure of the colony; the proprietors, concerned primarily with keeping close control over their utopian experiment, failed to provide for local institutions of self-government. The crown seized control over the colony in 1752 as protests against the proprietors’ policies mounted; subsequently, many of the restrictions imposed on the settlers were lifted, including those that discouraged slavery.

Organization of the Imperial Court

Since the politics of England in the 17th and 18th centuries were never wholly stable, it is not surprising that British colonial policy during those years never developed along clear and consistent lines. However, by 1660, England had taken the first steps in reorganizing her empire in a more profitable manner. This included the Navigation Act of 1660, a modification and amplification of temporary series of acts passed in 1651.

The 1660 act proved inadequate to safeguard the entire British commercial empire, and in subsequent years other navigation acts were passed, strengthening the system. On the whole, this attempt at imperial consolidation—what some historians have called the process of Anglicization—was successful in bringing the economic activities of the colonies under closer crown control. While a significant amount of colonial trade continued to evade British regulation, it is nevertheless clear that the British were at least partially successful in imposing greater commercial and political order on the American colonies during the period from the late-17th to the mid-18th century.

In addition to the agencies of royal control in England, there were a number of royal officials in America responsible not only for aiding in the regulation of Britain’s commercial empire but also for overseeing the internal affairs of the colonies. The weaknesses of royal authority in the politics of provincial America were striking, however. In some areas, particularly in the corporate colonies of New England during the 17th century and in the proprietary colonies throughout their entire existence, direct royal authority in the person of a governor responsible to the crown was nonexistent. This absence of a royal governor had a particularly deleterious effect on the enforcement of trade regulations. In fact, the lack of royal control over the political and commercial activities of New England prompted the Board of Trade to overturn the Massachusetts Bay charter in 1684 and to consolidate Massachusetts, along with the other New England colonies and New York, into the Dominion of New England. After colonists overthrew scheme installation a royal governor was put in place to protect Crown interests.

In those colonies with royal governors—the number of which grew from one in 1650 to eight in 1760—the crown possessed a mechanism by which to ensure that royal policy was enforced. The Privy Council issued each royal governor in America a set of instructions carefully defining the limits of provincial authority. The governor had enormous powers over other aspects of the political structure of the colony, including the appointment of officials of local agencies of government.

Power growth in the provinces

Growth in politics

The distance separating England and America, the powerful pressures exerted on royal officials by Americans, and the inevitable inefficiency of any large bureaucracy all served to weaken royal power and to strengthen the hold of provincial leaders on the affairs of their respective colonies during the 18th century. During this period, the colonial legislatures gained control over their own parliamentary prerogatives, achieved primary responsibility for legislation affecting taxation and defense, and ultimately took control over the salaries paid to royal officials. Provincial leaders also made significant inroads into the governor’s patronage powers. Although theoretically the governor continued to control the appointments of local officials, in reality he most often automatically followed the recommendations of the provincial leaders in the localities in question. Similarly, the governor’s councils, theoretically agents of royal authority, came to be dominated by prominent provincial leaders who tended to reflect the interests of the leadership of the lower house of assembly rather than those of the royal government in London.

Thus, by the mid-18th century most political power in America was concentrated in the hands of provincial rather than royal officials. This concentration of authority undoubtedly represented the interests of their constituents more faithfully than any royal official could, but it is clear that the politics of provincial America were hardly democratic by modern standards. In fact, both social prestige and political power tended to be determined by economic standing, and the economic resources of colonial America, though not as unevenly distributed as in Europe, were nevertheless controlled by relatively few men.

In the Chesapeake Bay societies of Virginia and Maryland, a planter class dominated nearly every aspect of those colonies’ economic life. These same planters, joined by a few prominent merchants and lawyers, dominated the two most important agencies of local government—the county courts and the provincial assemblies. This extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of a wealthy few occurred in spite of the fact that a large percentage of the free adult male population (some have estimated as high as 80 to 90 percent) was able to participate in the political process. The ordinary citizens of the Chesapeake society, and those of most colonies, nonetheless continued to defer to those whom they considered to be their “betters.” Although the societal ethic that enabled power to be concentrated in the hands of a few was hardly a democratic one, there is little evidence, at least for Virginia and Maryland, that the people of those societies were dissatisfied with their rulers. In general, they believed that their local officials ruled responsively.

In the Carolinas a small group of rice and indigo planters monopolized much of the wealth. As in Virginia and Maryland, the planter class came to constitute a social elite. As a rule, the planter class of the Carolinas did not have the same long tradition of responsible government as did the ruling oligarchies of Virginia and Maryland, and this tended to be a source of their political instability.

The western regions of both the Chesapeake and Carolina societies displayed distinctive characteristics. Ruling traditions were fewer, accumulations of land and wealth less striking, and the social hierarchy less rigid in the west. In fact, in some western areas antagonism toward the restrictiveness of the east and toward eastern control of the political structure led to actual conflict. In both North and South Carolina armed risings of varying intensity erupted against the unresponsive nature of these eastern elites. As time progressed, however, and as more men accumulated wealth and social prestige, these societies came more closely to resemble those in the east.

Compared to the South, New England society was more diverse, and its political system was less oligarchic. In New England, the town government mechanism served to broaden civic participation beyond county courts.

While nearly all adult males were able to attend town meetings, which chose their provincial assemblies, a relatively small group of men dominated the provincial governments in New England. As in the South, men of high occupational status and social prestige were closely concentrated in leadership positions in their respective colonies; in New England, merchants, lawyers, and to a lesser extent clergymen dominated the political and social elite.

The social and political structure of the middle colonies was more diverse than that of any other region in America. New York, with its extensive system of manors and manor lords, often displayed genuinely feudal characteristics. The tenants on large manors often found it impossible to escape the influence of their manor lords. The administration of justice, the election of representatives, and the collection of taxes often took place on the manor itself. As a consequence, the large landowning families exercised an inordinate amount of economic and political power. The Great Rebellion of 1766, a short-lived outburst directed against the manor lords, was a symptom of the widespread discontent among the lower and middle classes. By contrast, Pennsylvania’s governmental system was more open and responsive than that of any other colony in America. A unicameral legislature, free from the restraints imposed by a powerful governor’s council, allowed Pennsylvania to be relatively independent of the influence of both the crown and the proprietor. This fact, in combination with the tolerant and relatively egalitarian bent of the early Quaker settlers and the subsequent immigration of large numbers of Europeans, made the social and political structure of Pennsylvania more democratic but more faction-ridden than that of any other

Growth of the population

The 1760s in Boston

The Philadelphians

The increasing political autonomy of the American colonies was a natural reflection of their increased stature in the overall scheme of the British Empire. In 1650 the population of the colonies had been about 52,000; in 1700 it was perhaps 250,000, and by 1760 it was approaching 1,700,000. These figures reflect that throughout the eighteenth century, America continued to grow and prosper as an important part of the British Empire. As Virginia increased from about 54,000 in 1700 to approximately 340,000 in 1760, so too did Pennsylvania with its first settlers in 1681 attracting at least 250,000 people by 1760. Cities like Boston and New York City also began to grow during this time; by 1765 Boston had reached 15,000 people, while New York City had reached 16,000 –17,000 by this point in history. And Philadelphia – America’s largest city – had a population of over 20,000 by 1765.

Those populations grew substantially because of the slave trade: in Virginia, enslaved persons jumped from about 2,000 in 1670 to perhaps 23,000 in 1715 and reached 150,000 on the eve of the American Revolution; in South Carolina, there were probably no more than 2,500 Blacks in 1700 but by 1765 there were 80,000–90,000.

The westward migration to America’s frontier—in the early 17th century all of America was a frontier, and by the 18th century the frontier ranged anywhere from 10 to 200 miles (15 to 320 km) from the coastline—was one of the distinctive elements in American history. English Puritans, beginning in 1629 and continuing through 1640, were the first to immigrate in large numbers to America. Throughout the 17th century most of the immigrants were English; but, beginning in the second decade of the 18th century, a wave of Germans, principally from the Rhineland Palatinate, arrived in America: by 1770 between 225,000 and 250,000 Germans had immigrated to America, more than 70 percent of them settling in the middle colonies, where generous land policies and religious toleration made life more comfortable for them. The Scotch-Irish and Irish immigration, which began on a large scale after 1713 and continued past the American Revolution, was more evenly distributed. By 1750 both Scotch-Irish and Irish could be found in nearly every colony. In almost all the regions in which Europeans sought greater economic opportunity, however, that same quest for independence and self-sufficiency led to tragic conflict

Growth in the economy

Tobacco transportation

Provincial America came to be less dependent upon subsistence agriculture and more on the cultivation and manufacturing of products for export. New England turned its land over to the raising of meat products for export. The middle colonies were the principal producers of grains. By 1700 Philadelphia exported more than 350,000 bushels of wheat and more than 18,000 tons of flour annually. The Southern colonies were, of course, even more closely tied to the cash crop system. South Carolina, aided by British incentives, turned to the production of rice and indigo. North Carolina, although less oriented toward the market economy than South Carolina, was nevertheless one of the principal suppliers of naval stores. Virginia and Maryland steadily increased their economic dependence on tobacco and on London merchants who purchased that tobacco, and for the most part they ignored those who recommended that they diversify their economies by turning part of their land over to wheat production. Their near-total dependence upon the world tobacco price would ultimately prove disastrous, but for most of the 18th century Virginia and Maryland soil remained productive enough to make a single-crop system reasonably profitable.

Galloway, Joseph

As America evolved from subsistence to commercial agriculture, an influential commercial class increased its power in nearly every colony. Boston was the centre of the merchant elite of New England, who not only dominated economic life but also wielded social and political power as well. Merchants such as James De Lancey and Philip Livingston in New York and Joseph Galloway, Robert Morris, and Thomas Wharton in Philadelphia exerted an influence far beyond the confines of their occupations. In Charleston the Pinckney, Rutledge, and Lowndes families controlled much of the trade that passed through that port. Even in Virginia, where a strong merchant class was nonexistent, those people with the most economic and political power were those commercial farmers who best combined the occupations of merchant and farmer. And it is clear that the commercial importance of the colonies was increasing.

Beeman, Richard R.

Independence, land, and labor

Although Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 “frontier thesis” – that American democracy was the result of an abundance of free land – has long been seriously challenged and modified, it is clear that the plentifulness of virgin acres and the lack of workers to till them did cause a loosening of the constraints of authority in the colonial and early national periods. Once it became clear that the easiest path to success for Britain’s New World “plantations” lay in raising export crops, there was a constant demand for agricultural labour which in turn spurred practices that – with the notable exception of slavery – compromised a strictly hierarchical social order.

In all the colonies, whether governed directly by the king, by proprietors, or by chartered corporations, it was essential to attract settlers, and what governors had most plentifully to offer was land. Sometimes large grants were made to entire religious communities numbering in the hundreds or more. Sometimes tracts were allotted to wealthy men on the “head rights” (literally “per capita”) system of so many acres for each family member they brought over. Few Englishmen or Europeans had the means to buy farms outright, so the simple sale of homesteads by large-scale grantees was less common than renting. But there was another well-traveled road to individual proprietorship that also provided a workforce: the system of contract labor known as indentured service. Under it, an impecunious new arrival would sign on with a landowner for a period of service—commonly seven years—binding him to work in return for subsistence and sometimes for the repayment of his passage money to the ship captain who had taken him across the Atlantic (such immigrants were called “redemptioners”). At the end of this term, the indentured servant would in many cases be rewarded by the colony itself with

The harshness of New England’s climate and topography meant that for most of its people, the road to economic independence lay in trade, seafaring, fishing, or craftsmanship. But the craving for an individually owned subsistence farm grew stronger as the first generations of religious settlers who had “planted” by congregation died off. In the process, communal holding of land by townships—with small allotted family garden plots and common grazing and orchard lands, much in the style of medieval communities—yielded gradually to the more conventional privately owned fenced farm. The invitation that available land offered—individual control of one’s life—was irresistible. Property in land also conferred civic privileges, so an unusually large number of male colonists were qualified for suffrage by the Revolution’s eve, even though not all of them exercised the vote freely or without traditional deference to the elite.

Because slavery was the foundation of large-scale tobacco cultivation, it took the strongest hold in the Southern colonies. In addition, thousands of white freeholders of small acreages lived in those colonies; furthermore, a small scale of slavery (primarily domestic service and unskilled labour) developed in the North. There had not yet been a sharp divide between a free and a slaveholding America.

One truly destabilizing system of acquiring land was simply “squatting.” On the western fringes of settlement, it was not possible for colonial administrators to use police powers to expel those who helped themselves to acres technically owned by proprietors in the seaboard counties. Far from seeing themselves as outlaws, the squatters believed that they were doing civilization’s work in putting new land into production, and they saw themselves as the moral superiors of eastern “owners” for whom land was a mere speculative commodity that they did not cultivate themselves. Squatting became a regular feature of westward expansion throughout early U.S. history.

Weisberger, Bernard A.

Development of culture and religion

Culture of colonial times

Benjamin Rush

Franklin, Benjamin

America’s intellectual attainments during the 17th and 18th centuries, while not inferior to those of the countries of Europe, were nevertheless of a decidedly different character. It was the techniques of applied science that most excited the minds of Americans, who, faced with the problem of subduing an often wild and unruly land, saw in science the best way to explain, and ultimately to harness, those forces around them. Ultimately this scientific mode of thought might be applied to the problems of civil society as well but for the most part the emphasis in colonial America remained on science and technology, not politics or metaphysics. Typical of America’s peculiar scientific genius was John Bartram of Pennsylvania, who collected and classified important botanical data from the New World. The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1744, is justly remembered as the focus of intellectual life in America. Men such as David Rittenhouse, an astronomer who built the first planetarium in America; Cadwallader Colden, the lieutenant governor of New York, whose accomplishments as a botanist and as an anthropologist probably outmatched his achievements as a politician; and Benjamin Rush, a pioneer in numerous areas of social reform as well as one of colonial

Almanac of Poor Richard

The most important American contribution to literature was neither in fiction nor in metaphysics but rather in such histories as Robert Beverley’s History and Present State of Virginia (1705) or William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line (1728–29, but not published until 1841). The most important cultural medium in America was not the book but the newspaper. Next to newspapers, almanacs were the most popular literary form in America, Franklin’s Poor Richard’s being only the most famous among scores of similar projects. Not until 1741 and the first installment of Franklin’s General Magazine did literary magazines begin to make their first appearance in America. Most of the 18th-century magazines, however, failed to attract subscribers, and nearly all of them collapsed after only a few years of operation.

Mrs. Richard Yates is Gilbert Stuart’s wife

The visual and performing arts, though flourishing somewhat more than literature, were still slow to achieve real distinction in America. The United States produced one excellent historical painter, Benjamin West, and two excellent portrait painters, John Copley and Gilbert Stuart, but it is not unimportant that they spent much of their lives in London, where they were paid more and received more attention.

The Southern colonies, particularly Charleston, seemed to be more concerned with providing good theatre for their residents than did other regions, but the theatres of no colony approached the excellence of that of Europe. In New England, Puritan influence was an obstacle to the performance of plays, and even in cosmopolitan Philadelphia, the Quakers discouraged the development of drama for years.

College of William and Mary

King’s College, Nassau Hall

If Americans in the colonial period did not excel in achieving a high level of traditional cultural attainment, they did manage at least to disseminate what culture they had in a manner slightly more equitable than that of most countries of the world. Newspapers and almanacs, though hardly on the same intellectual level as the Encyclopédie produced by the European philosophes, probably had a wider audience than any European cultural medium. The New England colonies, although they did not always manage to keep pace with population growth, pioneered in the field of public education. Outside New England, education remained the preserve of those who could afford to send their children to private schools, although the existence of privately supported but tuition-free charity schools and of relatively inexpensive “academies” made it possible for the children of the American middle class to receive at least some education. The principal institutions of higher learning—Harvard (1636), William and Mary (1693), Yale (1701), Princeton (1747), Pennsylvania (a college since 1755), King’s College (1754, now Columbia University), Rhode Island College (1764, now Brown University), Queen’s College (1766, now Rutgers University), and

Beeman, Richard R.

The Great Awakening from a city on a hill

Religion remains an important part of shaping the American mind, despite sometimes being overstated. While the strong religious impulses present in the original settlements—particularly those in New England—were secularized and democratized over the first century and a half of colonial life, they retained much of their original influence.

In 1620, when the Pilgrim Fathers signed the Mayflower Compact, resolving themselves to form a “civil body politic,” they explicitly emphasized religious fellowship as the basis for a political community. On the passenger list, however, there were nonmembers of the Leiden Separatist congregation, the “strangers” among the saints, who sought an expansion of their rights in Plymouth colony until 1691, when it was absorbed into Massachusetts.

The Puritans were determined that their community be, as John Winthrop called it in his founding sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” a “city on a hill,” to which all humankind should look for an example of heaven on earth. This theme, in various guises, resounds in every corner of American history. The traditional image of Massachusetts Puritanism is one of repressive authority, but what is overlooked is the consensus among Winthrop and his followers that they should be bound together by love and shared faith, an expectation that left them “free” to do voluntarily what they all agreed was right. It was a kind of elective theocracy for the insiders.

The theocratic model, however, did not apply to nonmembers of the church, who originally lacked voting rights and were difficult to maintain as members. Problems soon arose in maintaining membership only among those who had undergone a personal experience of “conversion” reassuring them of their salvation. As the first generation died off, however, many of those children could not themselves personally testify to such conversion and so bring their own offspring into the church. They were finally allowed to do so by the Half-Way Covenant of 1662 but did not enjoy all the rights of full membership. Such apparent theological hair-splitting illustrated the power of the colony’s expanding and dispersing population. As congregations hived off to different towns and immigration continued to bring in worshippers of other faiths, Puritan doctrine had to bend somewhat before the wind.

Nonetheless, in the early years of Massachusetts’s history, Puritan disagreements over the proper interpretation of doctrine led to schisms, exiles, and the foundation of new colonies. Only in America could dissenters move into neighbouring “wilderness” and start anew, as they did in Rhode Island and Connecticut. So the American experience encouraged religious diversity from the start. Even the grim practice of punishing dissidents such as the Quakers (and “witches”) fell into disuse by the end of the 17th century.

Maryland’s founders, the well-born Catholic Calvert family, extended liberty to their fellow parishioners and other non-Anglicans in the Toleration Act of 1649. Despite the fact that Anglicanism was later established in Maryland, it remained the first locus of American Catholicism, and the first “American” bishop named after the Revolution, John Carroll, was of English stock. Not until the 19th century would significant immigration from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland provide U.S. Catholicism its own “melting pot.” Pennsylvania was not merely a refuge for the oppressed community who shared William Penn’s Quaker faith but by design a model “commonwealth” of brotherly love in general. And Georgia was founded by idealistic and religious gentlemen to provide a second chance in the New World for debtors in a setting where both rum and slavery were banned, though neither prohibition lasted long.

In the 18th century, thousands of German immigrants brought German pietism to western Pennsylvania, especially among Mennonites, Moravians, Schwenkfelders, and others.

Anabaptists, also freshly arrived from the German states, broadened the foundations of the Baptist church in the new land. French Huguenots fleeing fresh persecutions after 1687 (they had already begun arriving in North America in the 1650s) added a Gallic brand of Calvinism to the patchwork quilt of American faith. Jews arrived in what was then Dutch New Amsterdam in 1654 and were granted asylum by the Dutch West India Company, to the dismay of Gov. Peter Stuyvesant, who gloomily foresaw that it would be a precedent for liberality toward Quakers, Lutherans, and “Papists.” By 1763, synagogues had been established in New York City (1623), Philadelphia (1682), Newport (Rhode Island) (1729), Savannah (Georgia) (1733), and other seaport cities where small Jewish mercantile communities existed.

As material prosperity increased and the hardships of the founding era faded in memory, the religious life in the American colonies already had a distinctive stamp by the 1740s. But then something changed.

Weisberger, Bernard A.

Edwards, Jonathan

A series of religious revivals known collectively as the Great Awakening swept over the colonies in the 1730s and ’40s. Its impact was first felt in the middle colonies, where Theodore J. Frelinghuysen, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, began preaching in the 1720s. In New England in the early 1730s, men such as Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most learned theologian of the 18th century, were responsible for a reawakening of religious fervour. By the late 1740s the movement had extended into the Southern colonies, where itinerant preachers such as Samuel Davies and George Whitefield exerted considerable influence, particularly in the backcountry.

The Great Awakening represented a reaction against the increasing secularization of society and against the corporate and materialistic nature of the chief churches of American society. By making conversion the initial step on the road to salvation and by opening up the conversion experience to all who recognized their own sinfulness, ministers of the Great Awakening, some intentionally and others unwittingly, democratized Calvinist theology. The technique of many of the preachers of the Great Awakening was to inspire in their listeners a fear of the consequences of their sinful lives and a respect for the omnipotence of God. This sense of the ferocity of God was often tempered by the implied promise that a rejection of worldliness and a return to faith would result in a return to grace and an avoidance of the horrible punishments of an angry God. There was a certain contradictory quality about these two strains of Great Awakening theology, however. Predestination, one of the principal tenets of Calvinist theology preached by most ministers of the Great Awakening, was ultimately incompatible with the promise that man could, by a voluntary act of faith, achieve salvation by his own efforts. Moreover, call for a return to complete faith and emphasis on omnipotence God was the very antithesis Enlightenment thought, which called for a greater

America, England, and the wider world during colonial times

Whereas previous contests between Great Britain and France in North America had been mostly provincial affairs, with American colonists doing most of the fighting for the British, the Great War for the Empire saw sizable commitments of British troops to America. The strategy of the British under William Pitt was to allow their ally, Prussia, to carry the brunt of the fighting in Europe, freeing Britain to concentrate its troops in America.

War of the French and Indians

Ticonderoga Fort

Louisbourg blockade engraving in English

Despite their numerical disadvantage, the French were well equipped and successful in holding their own against the British colonial population in America. They had a larger military organization in America than did the British; their troops were better trained; and they were more successful than the British in forming military alliances with the Indians. The early engagements of the war went to the French; however, as defeats took place, the British were able to increase their supplies of both men and matériel in America. By 1758, with its strength finally up to a satisfactory level, Britain began implementing its larger strategy which involved sending a combined land and sea force to gain control of the St Lawrence and a large land force aimed at Fort Ticonderoga to eliminate French control of Lake Champlain.

Montcalm’s death

Explore the battle along the St. Lawrence between Louis-Joseph de Montcalm-Grozon’s and James Wolfe’s forces

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It was probably the turning point of the war that James Wolfe captured Quebec from the French army led by the marquis de Montcalm in 1759, following several months of sporadic fighting. In the fall of 1760, the British had taken Montreal, and they controlled all of North America. Although it took the British another two years to defeat its rivals in other parts of the world, the battle for control of North America had been won.

In the Treaty of Paris of 1763, Great Britain took possession of all of Canada, East and West Florida, all territory east of the Mississippi in North America, and St. Vincent, Tobago, and Dominica in the Caribbean. At that time, the British victory seemed one of the greatest in its history. The British Empire in North America had been not only secured but also greatly expanded. But because Britain won the war, it dissolved the empire’s most potent material adhesives-conflicts arose as the needs and interests of the British Empire began to differ from those of the American colonies. And eventually, the colonies would rebel before submitting to the British plan of empire.

Beeman, Richard R.

Native Americans’ response

Native Americans interacted with Europeans in different ways, with some groups being more successful than others. However, this wasn’t always according to any kind of plan.

Cacahontas

The English colonies in North America differed significantly from Spanish and French colonizers in the Southwest and Canada, with English settlers coming to encourage the immigration of an agricultural population that would require the exclusive use of large land areas to cultivate—which would have to be secured from native possessors.

English colonial officials began by making land purchases from the Indians, but such transactions worked to their disadvantage, as Indians didn’t understand the concept of individual “ownership” over natural resources. After a sale was concluded with representatives of Indian peoples, the Indians were surprised to learn that they had relinquished their hunting and fishing rights, and settlers assumed an unqualified sovereignty that Native American culture did not recognize.

In time, conflict was inevitable. The early days of settlement saw cooperation between Indian-European settlers, as with the assistance rendered by Squanto to the Plymouth colonists or the semidiplomatic marriage of Virginia’s John Rolfe to Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan. The Native Americans taught the newcomers techniques of survival in their new environment, but they were less adept in countering two European advantages—the possession of a common written language and a modern system of exchange—so most purchases of Indian lands by colonial officials often turned into thinly disguised landgrabs. William Penn and Roger Williams made particular efforts to deal fairly with the Native Americans, but they were rare exceptions.

Confederacy of Iroquois

The impact of Indian involvement in the affairs of the colonists was especially evident in the Franco-British struggle over Canada. For furs the French had depended on the Huron people settled around the Great Lakes, but the Iroquois Confederacy, based in western New York and southern Ontario, succeeded in crushing the Hurons and drove Huron allies such as the Susquehannocks and the Delawares southward into Pennsylvania. This action put the British in debt to the Iroquois because it diverted some of the fur trade from French Montreal and Quebec city to British Albany and New York City. European-Indian alliances also affected the way in which Choctaws, influenced by the French in Louisiana, battled with Spanish-supported Apalachees from Florida and with the Cherokees, who were armed by the British in Georgia.

Jacket in red

The French and Indian War not only strengthened the military experience and self-awareness of the colonists but also produced several Indian leaders, such as Red Jacket and Joseph Brant, who were competent in two or three languages and could negotiate deals between their own peoples and the European contestants. This was the beginning of disaster for the Indians. When the steady military success of the British culminated in the expulsion of France from Canada, the Indians no longer could play the diplomatic card of agreeing to support whichever king—the one in London or the one in Paris—would restrain westward settlement. Realizing this led some Indians to consider mounting a united resistance to further encroachments. But, like later efforts at cooperative Indian challenges to European and later U.S. power, it was simply not enough.

Weisberger, Bernard A.

Early federalism and the American Revolution

Revolutionary prelude

Discover how the new United States and the British fought over naval impressment

Learn about the new United States’ struggle with the British over naval impressment and their history of conflict.

Britain’s victory over France in the Great War for the Empire had been won at a great cost. British government expenditures, which had amounted to nearly £6.5 million annually before the war, rose to about £14.5 million annually during the war. As a result, the burden of taxation in England was probably the highest in Britain’s history, much of it borne by the politically influential landed classes. Furthermore, with the acquisition of the vast domain of Canada and the prospect of holding British territories both against various nations of Indians and against Spanish colonies to the south and west, colonial defense costs could be expected to continue indefinitely. Parliament, moreover, had voted to give Massachusetts a generous sum in compensation for its expenses during the war. It therefore seemed reasonable to British opinion that some of future burden should be shifted to colonists themselves- who until then had been lightly taxed and indeed lightly governed.

General Motors

The prolonged wars had also revealed the need to tighten administration of the loosely run and widely scattered elements of the British Empire. If the course of the war had confirmed necessity, the end of the war presented opportunity. The acquisition of Canada required officials in London to take responsibility for unsettled western territories, now freed from threat of French occupation. The British soon moved to take charge of whole field of Indian relations by royal Proclamation of 1763. By proclamation, line was drawn down Appalachians marking limit settlement from British colonies beyond which Indian trade was to be conducted strictly through British-appointed commissioners. The proclamation sprang in part from respect for Indian rights (though it did not come in time to prevent uprising led by Pontiac). From London’s viewpoint, leaving lightly garrisoned West to fur-gathering Indians also made economic and imperial sense. The proclamation, however, caused consternation among British colonists for two reasons. It meant that limits were being set to prospects of settlement and speculation in western lands, and it took control west out of colonial hands. Most ambitious men in colonies thus saw proclamation as loss power to control their own fortunes. Indeed, underestimation of how deeply halt westward expansion would be resented by colonists was one factor

Controversy over taxes

George Grenville, who was named prime minister in 1763, met the costs of defense by raising revenue in the colonies. The first measure was the Plantation Act of 1764, which reduced to a mere threepence the duty on imported foreign molasses but linked with this a high duty on refined sugar and a prohibition on foreign rum (the needs of the British treasury were carefully balanced with those of West Indies planters and New England distillers). The last measure of this kind (1733) had not been enforced, but this time the government set up a system of customs houses, staffed by British officers, and even established a vice-admiralty court. The court sat at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and heard very few cases, but in principle it appeared to threaten the cherished British privilege of trials by local juries. Boston further objected to the tax’s revenue-raising aspect on constitutional grounds, but, despite some expressions of anxiety, the colonies in general acquiesced.

Act relating to stamps

Act on Stamps

A Currency Act (1764) was passed by Parliament to withdraw paper currencies, many of which remained in circulation from the war period, and affect colonial economic prospects. During the difficult postwar period, this did not restrict economic growth so much as remove unsound currency, but it significantly reduced the circulating medium and further indicated British control in such matters.

In response to the Stamp Act, Grenville’s next move was a stamp duty, to be raised on a wide variety of transactions, including legal writs, newspaper advertisements, and ships’ bills of lading. The colonies were duly consulted and offered no alternative suggestions. The feeling in London was that, after making formal objections, the colonies would accept the new taxes as they had the earlier ones. However, the Stamp Act (1765) hit harder and deeper than any previous parliamentary measure. As some agents had already pointed out, because of postwar economic difficulties the colonies were short of ready funds, which is why the Stamp Act hit them so hard.

The 2nd marquess of Rockingham, Charles Watson Wentworth

A change in ministry facilitated a change in British policy on taxation. Parliamentary opinion was angered by what it perceived as colonial lawlessness, but British merchants were worried about the embargo on British imports. The marquis of Rockingham, succeeding Grenville, was persuaded to repeal the Stamp Act-for domestic reasons rather than out of any sympathy with colonial protests—and in 1766 the repeal was passed. On the same day, however, Parliament also passed the Declaratory Act, which declared that Parliament had the power to bind or legislate the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” Parliament would not have voted the repeal without this assertion of its authority.

Acts of Townshend

The colonists, jubilant at the repeal of the Stamp Act, drank innumerable toasts, sounded peals of cannon, and were prepared to ignore the Declaratory Act as window dressing. John Adams, however, warned in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law that Parliament, armed with this view of its powers, would try to tax the colonies again; and this happened in 1767 when Charles Townshend became chancellor of the Exchequer in a ministry formed by Pitt.

Portrait of John Dickinson by Charles Willson Peale

Despite this, the colonists were outraged. In Pennsylvania, the lawyer and legislator John Dickinson wrote a series of essays that, appearing in 1767 and 1768 as Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, were widely reprinted and exerted great influence in forming a united colonial opposition. Dickinson agreed that Parliament had supreme power where the whole empire was concerned, but he denied that it had power over internal colonial affairs; he quietly implied that the basis of colonial loyalty lay in its usefulness among equals rather than in obedience owed to a superior.

It proved easier to unite on opinion than on action. Gradually, after much maneuvering and negotiation, a wide-ranging nonimportation policy against British goods was brought into operation. Agreement had not been easy to reach, and the tensions sometimes broke out in acrimonious charges of noncooperation. In addition, enforcement of the policy had to be done by newly created local committees, which put a new disciplinary power into the hands of local men who had not had much previous experience in public affairs. There were many signs of discontent with the ordering of domestic affairs in some of the colonies—a development that had obvious implications for the future of colonial politics if more action was needed later.

Differences between the British and American constitutions

Otis James

Very few colonists wanted or even envisaged independence at this stage. Dickinson had hinted at such a possibility with expressions of pain that were obviously sincere. The colonial struggle for power, although charged with intense feeling, was not an attempt to change government structure but an argument over legal interpretation. The core of the colonial case was that, as British subjects, they were entitled to the same privileges as their fellow subjects in Britain. They could not constitutionally be taxed without their own consent; and, because they were unrepresented in the Parliament that voted the taxes, they had not given this consent. James Otis, in two long pamphlets, ceded all sovereign power to Parliament with this proviso. Others, however, began to question whether Parliament did have lawful power to legislate over the colonies. These doubts were expressed by the late 1760s, when James Wilson, a Scottish immigrant lawyer living in Philadelphia, wrote an essay on the subject. Because of the withdrawal of the Townshend round of duties in 1770, Wilson kept this essay private until new troubles arose in 1774, when he published it as Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament. In this he fully articulated a view that had been

To this Otis snorted that, if the majority of the British people did not have the vote, they ought to have it. The idea of colonial members of Parliament was never a likely solution because of problems with time and distance and because they might not be effective.

The two sides to the controversy could be traced in the language used. The principle of parliamentary sovereignty was expressed in the language of paternalistic authority; the British referred to themselves as parents and to the colonists as children. Colonial Tories, who accepted Parliament’s case in the interests of social stability, also used this terminology. From this point of view, colonial insubordination was “unnatural,” just as the revolt of children against parents was unnatural. The colonists replied to all this in the language of rights. They held that Parliament could do nothing in the colonies that it could not do in Britain because the Americans were protected by all the common-law rights of British subjects.

Rights implied equality, which led to colonists perceiving legal inequality when writs of assistance were authorized in Boston in 1761 while closely related “general warrants” were outlawed in two celebrated cases in Britain. Townshend specifically legalized writs of assistance in the colonies in 1767. Dickinson devoted one of his Letters from a Farmer to this issue.

The Third George

North, Lord

On the early morning of March 5, 1770, when Lord North became prime minister early in 1770, British government began to acquire some stability. By 1770, in the face of the American policy of nonimportation, the Townshend tariffs were withdrawn—all except the tax on tea, which was kept for symbolic reasons. Relative calm returned, though it was ruffled on the New England coastline by frequent incidents of defiance of customs officers, who could get no support from local juries. These outbreaks did not win much sympathy from other colonies, but they were serious enough to call for an increase in the number of British regular forces stationed in Boston. One of the most violent clashes occurred in Boston just before the repeal of the Townshend duties. Threatened by mob harassment, a small British detachment opened fire and killed five people, an incident soon known as the Boston Massacre. The soldiers were charged with murder and were given a civilian trial, in which John Adams conducted a successful defense.

Before a compromise was reached, Parliament had threatened to suspend the assembly. The episode was ominous because it indicated that Parliament intended to take the Declaratory Act at its word.

British intervention in colonial economic affairs occurred again when in 1773 Lord North’s administration tried to rescue the East India Company from difficulties that had nothing to do with America. The Tea Act gave the company, which produced tea in India, a monopoly of distribution in the colonies. The company planned to sell its tea through its own agents, eliminating the system of sale by auction to independent merchants. By thus cutting the costs of middlemen, it hoped to undersell the widely purchased inferior smuggled tea. This plan naturally affected colonial merchants, and many colonists denounced the act as a plot to induce Americans to buy—and therefore pay the tax on—legally imported tea. Boston’s reply was the most dramatic—and provocative.

Tea Party in Boston

On December 16, 1773, a party of Bostonians, thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the ships at anchor and dumped some £10,000 worth of tea into the harbour, an event popularly known as the Boston Tea Party.

Congress of the Continentals

The Continental Congress and George Washington

There was widespread agreement that this intervention in colonial government could threaten other provinces and could be countered only by collective action. After much intercolonial correspondence, a Continental Congress came into existence, meeting in Philadelphia in September 1774. Every colonial assembly except that of Georgia appointed and sent a delegation. The Virginia delegation’s instructions were drafted by Thomas Jefferson and were later published as A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774). Jefferson insisted on the autonomy of colonial legislative power and set forth a highly individualistic view of the basis of American rights. This belief that the American colonies and other members of the British Empire were distinct states united under the king and thus subject only to the king and not to Parliament was shared by several other delegates, notably James Wilson and John Adams, and strongly influenced the Congress.

The Congress’ first important decision was one on procedure: whether to vote by colony, each having one vote, or by wealth calculated on a ratio with population. The decision to vote by colony was made based on practical grounds—neither wealth nor population could be satisfactorily ascertained—but it had important consequences. Individual colonies, no matter what their size, retained a degree of autonomy that translated immediately into the language and prerogatives of sovereignty. Under Massachusetts’ influence, the Congress next adopted the Suffolk Resolves, recently voted in Suffolk county, Massachusetts, which for the first time put natural rights into the official colonial argument (hitherto all remonstrances had been based on common law and constitutional rights). Apart from this, however, the prevailing mood was cautious.

The aim of the Congress was to put pressure on the British government so that it would redress all colonial grievances and restore the harmony that had once prevailed. The objectives of the association were to pressure the British government through economic means, beginning with nonimportation, moving to nonconsumption, and concluding with nonexportation in September. A few New England and Virginia delegates were looking toward independence, but the majority went home hoping that these steps, together with new appeals to the king and to the British people, would avert the need for any further such meetings. If these measures failed, however, a second Congress would convene in spring.

Behind the unity achieved by the Congress lay deep divisions in colonial society. In the mid-1760s upriver New York was disrupted by land riots, which also broke out in parts of New Jersey; much worse disorder ravaged the backcountry of both North and South Carolina, where frontier people were left unprotected by legislatures that taxed them but in which they felt themselves unrepresented. A pitched battle at Alamance Creek in North Carolina in 1771 ended that rising and was followed by executions for treason. Although without such serious disorder, the cities also revealed acute social tensions and resentments of inequalities of economic opportunity and visible status. New York provincial politics were riven by intense rivalry between two great family-based factions, the DeLanceys, who benefited from royal government connections, and their rivals, the Livingstons. Another phenomenon was the rapid rise of dissenting religious sects, notably the Baptists; although they carried no political program, their style of preaching suggested a strong undercurrent of social as well as religious dissent.

Lexington, Massachusetts, Minuteman statue

When British Gen. Thomas Gage sent a force from Boston to destroy American rebel military stores at Concord, Massachusetts, fighting broke out between militia and British troops at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Reports of these clashes reached the Second Continental Congress in May. Although most colonial leaders still hoped for reconciliation with Britain, the news stirred the delegates to more radical action. Steps were taken to put the continent on a war footing- including formation of an army and adoption of a Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms- in August 1775. The king declared a state of rebellion; by the end of the year, all colonial trade had been banned. Even yet, Gen. George Washington, commander of the Continental Army referred to British troops as “ministerial” forces, indicating that there was still a civil war going on.

Using common sense

Sense of common sense

Then in January 1776 the publication of Thomas Paine’s irreverent pamphlet Common Sense abruptly shattered this hopeful complacency and put independence on the agenda. Paine’s eloquent, direct language spoke people’s unspoken thoughts; no pamphlet had ever made such an impact on colonial opinion. While the Congress negotiated urgently, but secretly, for a French alliance, power struggles erupted in provinces where conservatives still hoped for relief. The only form relief could take, however, was British concessions; as public opinion hardened in Britain, where a general election in November 1774 had returned a strong majority for Lord North, the hope for reconciliation faded. In the face of British intransigence, men committed to their definition of colonial rights were left with no alternative, and the substantial portion of colonists—about one-third according to John Adams, although contemporary historians believe the number to have been much smaller—who preferred loyalty to the crown, with all its disadvantages, were localized and outflanked.

The most dramatic internal revolution occurred in Pennsylvania, where a powerful radical party, based mostly in Philadelphia but with allies in the country, seized power during the dispute over independence. Congress recommended that colonies form their own governments in 1776 and assigned a committee to draft a declaration of independence as a result of the strong opposition to independence.

Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull

This document, written by Thomas Jefferson but revised in committee, consisted of two parts. The preamble set the claims of the United States on a basis of natural rights and a dedication to the principle of equality; the second was a long list of grievances against the crown- Parliamentary now, since the argument was that Parliament had no lawful power in the colonies. On July 2, Congress itself voted for independence; on July 4, it adopted the Declaration of Independence.

Pole, J.R.

Revolutionary War in the United States

Political cartoon from the American Revolution

Explore the highlights of the Revolutionary War, which led to the independence of 13 American colonies from Great Britain

Discover the highlights of the Revolutionary War, which won 13 American colonies their independence from Great Britain.

Learn about the Hessians, German mercenaries who assisted the British during the American Revolutionary War

Learn more about the Hessians, the German mercenary soldiers who assisted the British during the American Revolutionary War.

The American Revolutionary War thus began as a civil conflict within the British Empire over colonial affairs, but with America being joined by France in 1778 and Spain in 1779 it became an international war. (The Netherlands, which was engaged in its own war with Britain, provided financial support to the Americans as well as official recognition of their independence.) On land the Americans assembled both state militias and the Continental Army, with approximately 20,000 men, mostly farmers, fighting at any given time. By contrast, the British army was composed of reliable and well-trained professionals, numbering about 42,000 regulars, supplemented by about 30,000 German (Hessian) mercenaries.

Howe, William

When Washington besieged the British forces in Boston, he organized the Continental Army

See all videos related to this article to learn how Washington organized the Continental Army while besieging the British forces in Boston

After the fighting at Lexington and Concord that began the war, Rebel forces began a siege of Boston that ended when American General Henry Knox arrived with artillery captured from Fort Ticonderoga. This forced General William Howe, Gage’s replacement, to evacuate Boston on March 17, 1776. An American force under General Richard Montgomery invaded Canada in the fall of 1775, captured Montreal, and launched an unsuccessful attack on Quebec, in which Montgomery was killed. The Americans maintained a siege on the city until the arrival of British reinforcements in the spring and then retreated to Fort Ticonderoga.

Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze

The British government sent Howe’s brother, Richard, Adm. Lord Howe, with a large fleet to join his brother in New York and authorize them to treat with the Americans and assure them pardon should they submit. When the Americans refused this offer of peace, General Howe landed on Long Island and on August 27 defeated the army led by Washington, who retreated into Manhattan. Howe drew him north and defeated his army at Chatterton Hill near White Plains on October 28. He then stormed the garrison Washington had left behind on Manhattan, seizing prisoners and supplies. Lord Charles Cornwallis, having taken Washington’s other garrison at Fort Lee, drove the American army across New Jersey to the western bank of the Delaware River and then quartered his troops for the winter at outposts in New Jersey. On Christmas night Washington stealthily crossed the Delaware and attacked Cornwallis’s garrison at Trenton, taking nearly 1,000 prisoners. Though Cornwallis soon recaptured Trenton, Washington escaped and went on to defeat British reinforcements at Princeton.

In 1777, a British army led by Gen. John Burgoyne moved south from Canada with Albany, New York, as its goal. However, Burgoyne was twice defeated by an American force led by Generals Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold, and on October 17, 1777, at Saratoga, he was forced to surrender his army. Earlier that fall Howe had sailed from New York to Chesapeake Bay and once ashore he had defeated Washington’s forces at Brandywine Creek on September 11 and occupied the American capital of Philadelphia on September 25.

Discover how George Washington and other commanders reconstituted the Continental Army during the American Revolution while wintering at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania

During the American Revolution, George Washington and other commanders reconstituted the Continental Army at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

Washington quartered his 11,000 troops for the winter at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben was able to give the American troops valuable training in maneuvers and in the more efficient use of their weapons. Von Steuben’s aid contributed greatly to Washington’s success at Monmouth (now Freehold), New Jersey, on June 28, 1778.

Lord Cornwallis’ surrender to John Trumbull

While the French had been secretly furnishing financial and material aid to the Americans since 1776, in 1778 they began preparations for a war with Britain. Their primary contribution was in the south, where they participated in such undertakings as the siege of British-held Savannah and the decisive siege of Yorktown. Cornwallis destroyed an army under Gates at Camden, South Carolina, on August 16, 1780, but suffered heavy setbacks at Kings Mountain, South Carolina, on October 7 and at Cowpens, South Carolina, on January 17, 1781. After Cornwallis won a costly victory at Guilford Courthouse, North Carolina, on March 15, 1781, he entered Virginia to join other British forces there. Washington’s army and a force under the French Count de Rochambeau placed Yorktown under siege. After more than seven months of fighting and numerous casualties on both sides, Cornwallis surrendered his army on October 19th, 1781.

Following the Revolutionary War, land action in America largely ceased though war continued on the high seas. A Continental Navy was created in 1775, but the American sea effort lapsed largely into privateering after 1780. After 1780 Spain and the Netherlands were able to control much of the water around the British Isles, thus keeping the bulk of British naval forces tied down in Europe.

Paris Treaty

Paris Peace

The military verdict in North America was reflected in the preliminary Anglo-American peace treaty of 1782, which was included in the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Franklin, John Adams, John Jay, and Henry Laurens served as the American commissioners. By its terms Britain recognized the independence of the United States with generous boundaries, including the Mississippi River on the west. Britain retained Canada but ceded East and West Florida to Spain. Provisions were inserted calling for the payment of American private debts to British citizens, for American access to Newfoundland fisheries, and for a recommendation by the Continental Congress to the states in favor of fair treatment of loyalists.

Loyalist atrocities

Many of the loyalists remained in the new country; however, perhaps as many as 80,000 Tories migrated to Canada, England, and the British West Indies. Many of these had served as British soldiers and many had been banished by the American states during the war and immediately afterward. They were commonly deprived of civil rights, often fined, and frequently relieved of their property. The British government compensated more than 4,000 of the exiles for property losses, paying out almost £3.3 million. It also gave them land grants, pensions, and appointments to enable them to reestablish themselves. The less ardent and more cautious Tories, staying in the United States, accepted the separation from Britain as final and after a generation could not be distinguished from the patriots.

The American republic’s foundations

Although the French began supplying arms, clothing, and loans surreptitiously soon after the Americans declared independence, it was not until 1778 that a formal alliance was forged.

Most of these problems lasted beyond the achievement of independence and continued to vex American politics for many years, even for generations. Meanwhile, however, the colonies had valuable, though less visible, sources of strength. Practically all farmers had their own arms and could form into militia companies overnight. More fundamentally, Americans had for many years been receiving basically the same information, mainly from the English press, reprinted in identical form in colonial newspapers. The effect of this was to form a singularly wide body of agreed opinion about major public issues. Another force of incalculable importance was the fact that for several generations Americans had to a large extent been governing themselves through elected assemblies, which in turn had developed sophisticated experience in committee politics.

This factor of institutional memory was of great importance in the forming of a mentality of self-government. Men became attached to their habitual ways, especially when these were habitual ways of running their own affairs, and these habits formed the basis of an ideology just as pervasive and important to the people concerned as republican theories published in Britain and the European continent. Moreover, colonial self-government seemed, from a colonial point of view, to be continuous and consistent with the principles of English government—principles for which Parliament had fought the Civil Wars in the mid-17th century and which colonists believed to have been reestablished by the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. It was also important that experience of self-government had taught colonial leaders how to get things done. When the Continental Congress met in 1774, members did not have to debate procedure (except on voting); they already knew it. Finally, Congress’s authority was rooted in traditions of legitimacy. The old election laws were used. Voters could transfer their allegiance with minimal difficulty from the dying colonial assemblies to the new assemblies and conventions of the states.

The Second Continental Congress faced a number of problems

As the Second Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia in May 1775, revolution was not a certainty. However, they had to prepare for it nonetheless, and thus faced two parallel problems. The first was how to organize for war; the second, which proved less urgent but could not be set aside forever, was how to define the legal relationship between the Congress and the states.

Washington, George

In June 1775, the Congress provided for the enlistment of an army and turned to the vexatious problems of finance. An aversion to taxation being one of the unities of American sentiment, it began by trying to raise a domestic loan. It did not have much success, however, for the excellent reason that the outcome of the operation appeared highly doubtful. At the same time, authority was taken for issuing a paper currency. This proved to be the most important method of domestic war finance, and as the war years passed, Congress resorted to issuing more and more Continental currency, which depreciated rapidly and had to compete with currencies issued by state governments. The Continental Army was a further source of a form of currency because its commission agents issued certificates in exchange for goods; these certificates bore an official promise of redemption and could be used in personal transactions. Loans raised overseas were another important source of revenue.

George Washington; Robert Morris; Haym Salomon

In 1780 Congress decided to call in all former issues of currency and replace them with a new issue on a 40-to-1 ratio. The Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris, who was appointed superintendent of finance in 1781 and came to be known as the “Financier,” guided the United States through its complex fiscal difficulties. Morris’s personal finances were inextricably tangled up with those of the country, and he became the object of much hostile comment, but he also used his own resources to secure urgently needed loans from abroad. In 1781 Morris secured a charter for the first Bank of North America, an institution that owed much to the example of the Bank of England. Although the bank was attacked by radical egalitarianians as an unrepublican manifestation of privilege, it gave the United States a firmer financial foundation.

Articles of Confederation drafted by John Dickinson

This problem of financing and organizing the war sometimes overlapped with Congress’s other major problem, that of defining its relations with the states. The Congress, being only an association of states, had no power to tax individuals. The Articles of Confederation, a plan of government organization adopted and put into practice by Congress in 1777 but not officially ratified by all the states until 1781, gave Congress the right to make requisitions on the states proportionate to their ability to pay. The states in turn had to raise these sums by their own domestic powers to tax, a method that state legislators looking for reelection were reluctant to employ. The result was that many states were constantly in heavy arrears, and, particularly after the urgency of the war years had subsided, the Congress’s ability to meet expenses and repay its war debts was crippled.

The Congress lacked power to enforce its requisitions and fell badly behind in repaying its wartime creditors. When individual states (Maryland as early as 1782, Pennsylvania in 1785) passed legislation providing for repayment of the debt owed to their own citizens by the Continental Congress, one of the reasons for the Congress’s existence began to crumble. Two attempts were made to get the states to agree to grant the Congress the power it needed to raise revenue by levying an impost on imports. But each failed for lack of unanimous consent. Essentially, an impost would have been collected at ports, which belonged to individual states—there was no “national” territory—and therefore cut across the concept of state sovereignty. Agreement was nearly obtained on each occasion, but failed due to lack of unanimity. If it had been obtained, then the Constitutional Convention might never have been called.

The Articles of Confederation reflected strong preconceptions of state sovereignty. Article II expressly reserved sovereignty to the states individually, and another article even envisaged the possibility that one state might go to war without the others. Fundamental revisions could be made only with unanimous consent, because the Articles represented a treaty between sovereigns, not the creation of a new nation-state. Other major revisions required the consent of nine states. Yet state sovereignty principles rested on artificial foundations. The states could never have achieved independence on their own and in fact the Congress had taken the first step both in recommending that the states form their own governments and in declaring their collective independence. Most important of its domestic responsibilities by 1787, the Congress had enacted several ordinances establishing procedures for incorporating new territories.

By 1786, well-informed men were discussing a probable breakup of the confederation into three or more new groups, which could have led to wars between the American republics.

Politics at the state level

The problems of forming a new government affected the states individually and in confederation. Most of them established their own constitutions—either in conventions or in the existing assemblies. The most democratic of these constitutions was the product of a virtual revolution in Pennsylvania, where a highly organized radical party seized the opportunity of the revolutionary crisis to gain power. Suffrage was put on a taxpayer basis, with nearly all adult males paying some tax; representation was reformed to bring in the populations of western counties; and a single-chamber legislature was established. An oath of loyalty to the constitution for some time excluded political opponents and particularly Quakers (who could not take oaths) from participation. The constitutions of the other states reflected the firm political ascendancy of the traditional ruling elite. Power ascended from a broad base in the elective franchise and representation through a narrowing hierarchy of offices restricted by property qualifications. State governors had in some cases to be men of great wealth. Senators were either wealthy or elected by the wealthy sector of the electorate.

This was the acceptance of the principle of giving representation in legislative bodies in proportion to population. It was made possible and attractive when the larger aggregations of population broadly coincided with the highest concentrations of property: great merchants and landowners from populous areas could continue to exert political ascendancy so long as they retained some sort of hold on the political process. The principle reemerged to dominate the distribution of voters in the House of Representatives and in the Electoral College under the new federal Constitution.

Constitutions that were relatively conservative failed to stem an increasingly democratic political tide. The old elites had to wrestle with new political forces (and in the process they learned how to organize in the new regime). Power was weakened in the executive branch. Several elections were held annually, and terms were limited. Legislators quickly elected new representatives from recent settlements, many with little previous political experience.

The new state governments, moreover, had to tackle major issues that affected all classes. The needs of public finance led to emissions of paper money. In several states these were resumed after the war, and as they tended (though not invariably) to depreciate they led directly to fierce controversies. The treatment of loyalists was also a theme of intense political dispute after the war. Despite the protests of men such as Alexander Hamilton, who urged restoration of property and rights, in many states loyalists were driven out and their estates seized and redistributed in forms of auction, providing opportunities for speculation rather than personal occupation. Many states were depressed economically. In Massachusetts which remained under orthodox control, stiff taxation under conditions of postwar depression trapped many farmers into debt. Unable to meet their obligations, they rose late in 1786 under a Revolutionary War officer Captain Daniel Shays in a movement to prevent the court sessions. Shays’s Rebellion was crushed early in 1787 by an army raised in the state. The action caused only a few casualties but the episode sent a shiver of fear throughout the country’s propertied classes. It also seemed to justify the classical thesis that republics were unstable providing a potent stimulus to state legislatures to send delegates

Convention of the Constitution

Constitution of the United States

The Philadelphia Convention, which met in May 1787, was officially called for by the old Congress solely to remedy defects in the Articles of Confederation. The Virginia Plan presented by the Virginia delegates went beyond revision and boldly proposed to introduce a new, national government in place of the existing confederation. The convention thus immediately faced the question of whether the United States was to be a country in the modern sense or would continue as a weak federation of autonomous and equal states represented in a single chamber, which was the principle embodied in the New Jersey Plan presented by several small states. This decision was effectively made when a compromise plan for a bicameral legislature—one house with representation based on population and one with equal representation for all states—was approved in mid-July. Though neither plan prevailed, the new national government in its final form was endowed with broad powers that made it indisputably national and superior.

Constitution of the United States

The Constitution, as it emerged after a summer of debate, embodied a much stronger principle of separation of powers than was generally to be found in the state constitutions. The chief executive was to be a single figure (a composite executive was discussed and rejected) and was to be elected by the Electoral College meeting in the states. This followed much debate over the Virginia Plan’s preference for legislative election. The principal control on the chief executive, or president, against violation of the Constitution was the rather remote threat of impeachment (to which James Madison attached great importance). The Virginia Plan’s proposal that representation be proportional to population in both houses was severely modified by the retention of equal representation for each state in the Senate. But the question of whether to count enslaved people in the population was abrasive. After some contention, antislavery forces gave way to a compromise by which three-fifths of enslaved people would be counted as population for purposes of representation (and direct taxation). Slave states would thus be perpetually overrepresented in national politics; provision was also added for a law permitting the recapture of escaped enslaved people (“fugitive slaves”), though in deference to republican scruples the word slaves was not used

Contemporary theory expected the legislature to be the most powerful branch of government. Thus, to balance the system, the executive was given a veto, and a judicial system with powers of review was established. It was also implicit in the structure that the new federal judiciary would have power to veto any state laws that conflicted either with the Constitution or with federal statutes, even if those laws were passed by the Congress. States were forbidden to pass laws impairing obligations of contract—a measure aimed at encouraging capital—and the Congress could pass no ex post facto law. But Congress was endowed with only limited powers, and could not confer aristocratic titles of honour. The prospect of eventual enlargement of federal power appeared in the clause giving it power to pass legislation “necessary and proper” for implementing the general purposes of the Constitution.

Constitutional attacks on Pennsylvania

The Constitution shifted the political center of gravity to the federal government, of which the most fundamental indication was the universal understanding that this government would act directly on citizens, as individuals, throughout all the states. The language of the Constitution told of the new style: it began, “We the people of the United States,” rather than “We the people of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, etc.”

The draft Constitution aroused widespread opposition. Anti-Federalists—so called because their opponents deftly seized the appellation of “Federalists,” though they were really nationalists—were strong in states such as Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts, where the economy was relatively successful and many people saw little need for such extreme remedies. Many good republicans detected oligarchy in the structure of the Senate, with its six-year terms. The absence of a bill of rights aroused deep fears of central power. The Federalists had the advantages of communications, the press, organization, and, generally, the better of the argument.

Federalist Papers

A Federalist’s View

Hamilton, Alexander

The debate gave rise to a very intensive literature, much of it at a very high level. The most sustained pro-Federalist argument, written mainly by Hamilton and Madison (assisted by Jay) under the pseudonym Publius, appeared in newspapers as The Federalist. This essays attacked the feebleness of the confederation and claimed that the new Constitution would have advantages for all sectors of society while threatening none. In the course of the debate, they passed from a strongly nationalist standpoint to one that showed more respect for the idea of a mixed form of government that would safeguard the states. Madison contributed assurances that a multiplicity of interests would counteract each other, preventing the consolidation of power continually charged by their enemies.

The Bill of Rights, steered through the first Congress by Madison’s diplomacy and mollified much of the latent opposition, adopted into the Constitution the basic English common-law rights that Americans had fought for. But they did more. Unlike Britain, the United States secured a guarantee of freedom for the press and the right to (peaceable) assembly, as well as church and state being formally separated in a clause that seemed to set equal value on nonestablishment of religion and its free exercise.

As a result of state conventions held between the winter of 1787 and summer of 1788, nine states ratified the Constitution. The vote in Virginia and New York, respectively the tenth and eleventh states to ratify, was so close that the whole scheme would have come to naught without them.

Social revolution

Enslaved persons are auctioned off

The American Revolution was a great social upheaval that was widely diffused, often gradual, and different in different regions. The principles of liberty and equality stood in stark conflict with the institution of slavery, which had built much of the country’s wealth. One gradual effect of this conflict was the decline of slavery in all the Northern states; another was a spate of manumissions by liberal enslavers in Virginia. But with most enslavers, especially in South Carolina and Georgia, ideals counted for nothing. Throughout the slave states, the institution of slavery came to be reinforced by a white supremacist doctrine of racial inferiority. The manumissions did result in the development of new communities of free Blacks, but they were short-lived due to restrictions placed on them by state legislatures and eventually became a permanent underclass, denied education and opportunity.

The American Revolution also dramatized the economic importance of women. Women had always contributed indispensably to the operation of farms and often businesses, while they seldom acquired independent status; but, when war removed men from the locality, women often had to take full charge, which they proved they could do. Republican ideas spread among women, influencing discussion of women’s rights, education, and role in society. Some states modified their inheritance and property laws to permit women to inherit a share of estates and to exercise limited control of property after marriage. On the whole, however, the Revolution itself had only very gradual and diffused effects on women’s ultimate status. Such changes as took place amounted to a fuller recognition of the importance of women not only as mothers of republican citizens but also into independent citizens with equal political and civil status with men.

Wallace, Willard M.

Americans had fought for independence to protect common-law rights; they had no program for legal reform at that time. Gradually, however, some customary practices came to seem out of keeping with republican principles. The outstanding example was the law of inheritance. The new states took steps, where necessary, to remove the old rule of primogeniture in favour of equal partition of intestate estates; this conformed to both the egalitarian and the individualist principles preferred by American society. Humanization of the penal codes, however, occurred only gradually, in the 19th century, inspired as much by European example as by American sentiment.

Revival of religion

Several key developments took place in the early years of independence. One was the creation of American denominations independent of their British and European origins and leadership. By 1789, American Anglicans (renaming themselves Episcopalians), Methodists (formerly Wesleyans), Roman Catholics, and members of various Baptist, Lutheran, and Dutch Reformed congregations had established organizations and chosen leaders who were born in or full-time residents of what had become the United States of America. Another pivotal postindependence development was a rekindling of religious enthusiasm, especially on the frontier, that opened the gates of religious activism to the laity. Still another was the disestablishment of tax-supported churches in those states most deeply feeling the impact of democratic diversity. And finally, this period saw the birth of a liberal and socially aware version of Christianity uniting Enlightenment values with American activism.

Meeting of Methodist campers

Between 1798 and 1800 there was a sudden burst of revitalization in frontier Protestant congregations, beginning with a great revival in Logan county, Kentucky, under the leadership of men such as James McGready and the brothers John and William McGee. This was followed by a gigantic camp meeting at Cane Ridge, where thousands were “converted.” The essence of the frontier revival was that this conversion from mere formal Christianity to a full conviction in God’s mercy for the sinner was a deeply emotional experience accessible even to those with much faith and little learning. So exhorters who were barely literate themselves could preach brimstone and fire and showers of grace, bringing repentant listeners to a state of excitement in which they would weep and groan, writhe and faint, and undergo physical transports in full public view.

Heart religion supplanted head religion among largely Scotch-Irish Presbyterian ministers in the West, leading to dangerous territory because the official church leadership preferred more decorum and biblical scholarship from its pastors. moreover, the idea of winning salvation by noisy penitence undercut Calvinist predestination. In fact, the fracture along fault lines of class and geography led to several schisms. Methodism had fewer problems of this kind. It never embraced predestination, and, more to the point, its structure was democratic, with rudimentarily educated lay preachers able to rise from leading individual congregations to presiding over districts and regional “conferences,” eventually embracing the entire church membership. Methodism fitted very neatly into frontier conditions through its use of traveling ministers or circuit riders who rode from isolated settlement to settlement, saving souls and mightily liberalizing the word of God.

Beecher, Lyman

The Second Great Awakening, which emphasized gatherings that were less uninhibited than camp meetings but warmer than conventional Congregational and Presbyterian services, led to the ordination of college-educated ministers such as Lyman Beecher. This voluntarism more than offset the gradual state-by-state cancellation of taxpayer support for individual denominations.

The era of the early republic also saw the growth, especially among the urban educated elite of Boston, of a gentler form of Christianity embodied in Unitarianism. Many Christians of the “middling” sort viewed Unitarianism as excessively concerned with ideas and social reform and far too indulgent or indifferent to the existence of sin and Satan. By 1815, then, social structure of American Protestantism had taken shape.

Weisberger, Bernard A.

From 1789 to 1816, the United States

Parties and the Federalist administration

1783-1812: United States

Arches of triumph at Washington’s inauguration

The first elections under the new Constitution were held in 1789. George Washington was unanimously voted the country’s first president. His secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, formed a clear-cut program that soon gave substance to old fears of the Anti-Federalists. Hamilton, who had believed since early 1780s that a national debt would be a national blessing, both for economic reasons and because it would act as a “cement” to the union, used his new power base to realize ambitions of nationalists. He recommended that federal government pay off old Continental Congress’s debts at par rather than at depreciated value and that it assume state debts, drawing interests of creditors toward central government rather than state governments. This plan met strong opposition from many who had sold their securities at great discount during postwar depression and from Southern states, which had repudiated their debts and did not want to be taxed to pay other states’ debts. A compromise in Congress was reached—thanks to efforts of Secretary of State Jefferson—whereby Southern states approved Hamilton’s plan in return for Northern agreement to fix location of new national capital on banks of Potomac, closer to south. When Hamilton next introduced his plan to

Thomas Paine caricature

A party opposed to Hamilton’s fiscal policies began to form in Congress. With Madison at its centre and with support from Jefferson, it soon extended its appeal beyond Congress to popular constituencies. Meanwhile, the French Revolution and France’s subsequent declaration of war against Great Britain, Spain, and Holland divided American loyalties. Democratic-Republican societies sprang up to express support for France, while Federalists, known as “Jay Trimmers,” backed Britain for economic reasons. Washington pronounced American neutrality in Europe, but to prevent a war with Britain he sent Chief Justice John Jay to London to negotiate a treaty. In the Jay Treaty (1794), the United States gained only minor concessions and—humiliatingly—accepted British naval supremacy as the price of protection for American shipping.

John Adams: Gilbert Stuart’s portrait

John Adams’ portrait by Gilbert Stuart

Washington, whose tolerance had been severely strained by the Whiskey Rebellion and by criticism of the Jay Treaty, chose not to run for a third term as President. In his Farewell Address, in a passage drafted by Hamilton, he denounced the new party politics as divisive and dangerous. Parties did not yet aspire to national objectives, however, and, when the Federalist John Adams was elected president, the Democrat-Republican Jefferson became vice president. Wars in Europe and on the high seas, together with rampant opposition at home, gave the new administration little peace. Virtual naval war with France had followed from American acceptance of British naval protection. In 1798 a French attempt to solicit bribes from American commissioners negotiating a settlement of differences (the so-called XYZ Affair) aroused a wave of anti-French feeling. Later that year the Federalist majority in Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which imposed serious civil restrictions on aliens suspected of pro-French activities and penalized U.S. citizens who criticized the government, making nonsense of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free press. The acts were most often invoked to prosecute Republican editors, some of whom served jail terms. These measures in turn called forth the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions,

Taxation, which had been levied to pay anticipated war costs, caused more discontent, however, including a new minor rising in Pennsylvania led by Jacob Fries. Fries’s Rebellion was put down without difficulty, but widespread disagreement over issues ranging from civil liberties to taxation polarized American politics. A basic sense of political identity now divided Federalists from Republicans, and in the election of 1800 Jefferson drew on deep sources of Anti-Federalist opposition to challenge and defeat his old friend and colleague Adams. The result was the first contest over the presidency between political parties and the first actual change of government as a result of a general election in modern history.

In power, the Jeffersonian Republicans

Jefferson, Thomas

Jefferson began his presidency with a plea for reconciliation: “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” He had no plans for a permanent two-party system. As well as committing to limited government and a strict construction of the Constitution, he also made a strong commitment to the fight against war, diplomacy, and political contingency. All of these commitments were soon to be tested.

Purchase of Louisiana

The Sacagawea, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark of N.C. Wyeth

Sacagawea, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark by N.C. Wyeth

On the American continent, Jefferson pursued a policy of expansion. He seized the opportunity when Napoleon I decided to relinquish French ambitions in North America by offering the Louisiana territory for sale (Spain had recently ceded the territory to France). This extraordinary acquisition, the Louisiana Purchase, bought at a price of a few cents per acre, more than doubled the area of the United States. Jefferson had no constitutional sanction for such an exercise of executive power; he made up the rules as he went along, taking a broad construction view of the Constitution on this issue. Some separatist movements periodically arose, including a plan for a Northern Confederacy formulated by New England Federalists. Aaron Burr, who had been elected Jefferson’s vice president in 1800 but was replaced in 1804, led several western conspiracies. Arrested and tried for treason, he was acquitted in 1807.

Marshall, John

In his role as chief executive, Jefferson clashed with the judiciary, many of whom had been appointed by Adams late. Among his primary opponents was the late appointee Chief Justice John Marshall. The Supreme Court first exercised judicial review of congressional legislation in the case of Marbury v. Madison (1803).

The United States remained neutral, but both Britain and France imposed various orders and decrees severely restricting American trade with Europe and confiscated American ships for violating the new rules. Unable to agree to treaty terms with Britain, Jefferson tried to coerce both Britain and France into ceasing to violate “neutral rights” with a total embargo on American exports, enacted by Congress in 1807. The results were catastrophic for American commerce and produced bitter alienation in New England, where the embargo (written backward as “O grab me”) was held to be a Southern plot to destroy New England’s wealth. In 1809, shortly after Madison was elected president, the embargo act was repealed.

The War of 1812 and Madison’s presidency

Portrait of James Madison by Asher B. Durand

James Madison’s portrait by Asher B. Durand

French attacks on U.S. ships on a broadside

Madison’s presidency was dominated by foreign affairs, with both Britain and France committing depredations on American shipping. But Britain was more resented, partly because with the greatest navy it was more effective and partly because Americans were extremely sensitive to British insults to national honour. Certain expansionist elements looking to both Florida and Canada began to press for war, taking advantage of the issue of naval protection. Madison’s own aim was to preserve the principle of freedom of the seas and to assert the ability of the United States to protect its own interests and its citizens, while striving to confront the European adversaries impartially. However, he was drawn into war against Britain, which was declared in June 1812 on a vote of 79–49 in the House and 19–13 in the Senate. There was almost no support for war in the strong Federalist New England states.

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Political cartoon depicting the War of 1812

Political cartoon from the War of 1812

Ghent Treaty

The War of 1812 began and ended in irony. The British had already rescinded the offending orders in council, but the news had not reached the United States at the time of the declaration. The Americans were poorly positioned from every point of view. However, under the circumstances, it was remarkable that the United States succeeded in staggering through two years of war, eventually winning important naval successes at sea, on the Great Lakes, and on Lake Champlain. On land a British raiding party burned public buildings in Washington, D.C., and drove President Madison to flee from the capital. Jackson’s political reputation rose directly from this battle.

In historical retrospect, the most important aspect of the peace settlement was an agreement to set up a boundary commission for the Canadian border, which could thenceforth be left unguarded. This marked the advent of an era of mutual trust. The conclusion of the War of 1812, which has sometimes been called the Second War of American Independence, freed Americans to look to the West.

Pole, J.R.

Indian-American relations

Whereas they had earlier dealt with representatives of Europe-based empires seeking only access to selected resources from a distant continent, now they faced a resident, united people yearly swelling in numbers, determined to make every acre of the West their own and culturally convinced of their absolute title under the laws of God and history. There was no room for compromise. Even before 1776, each step toward American independence reduced the Indians’ control over their own future. The Proclamation Line of 1763 was almost immediately violated by men like Daniel Boone on the Kentucky frontier. In the western parts of Pennsylvania and New York, however, despite extensive Indian land concessions in the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, they still had enough power to bar an advance toward the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes.

Tippecanoe Battle

For armed resistance to have had any hope of success, unity would have been required between all the Indians from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. This unity simply could not be achieved. The Shawnee leaders known as Tenskatawa, or the Prophet, and his brother Tecumseh attempted this kind of rallying movement, much as Pontiac had done some 40 years earlier, with equal lack of success. Some help was forthcoming in the form of arms from British traders remaining in the Northwest Territory in violation of the peace treaty, but the Indians failed to secure victory in a clash with American militia and regulars at the Battle of Tippecanoe Creek (near present-day West Lafayette, Indiana) in 1811.

Political cartoon depicting the War of 1812

As soon as the War of 1812 broke out, Indians hoped the crown would protect them if the British won. Although Tecumseh was commissioned as a general in the royal forces, he was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813, and the dismembered body parts were distributed as gruesome souvenirs among his conquerors.

During the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, U.S. Gen. Andrew Jackson defeated the British-supported Creeks in the Southwest. The war itself ended in a draw, preserving American territory. Since then, there has been no major Indian resistance east of the Mississippi, with minor exceptions. The first quarter century of American nationhood was lustrous, but all roads left open to Native Americans ended in defeat.

From 1816 to 1850, the United States

Mixed Feelings Era

1812–22: United States

Monroe, James

John Quincy Adams

The years between the election 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. This phrase was conceived by a Boston editor during Monroe’s visit to New England early in his first term. That a representative from the heartland of Federalism could speak in such positive terms of the visit by a Southern president whose decisive election had marked not only a sweeping Republican victory but also the demise of the national Federalist Party was dramatic testimony that former foes were inclined to put aside the sectional and political differences of the past.

War of 1812 effects

Later scholars have questioned the strategy and tactics of the United States in the War of 1812, its tangible results, and even the wisdom of starting it at all. At the time, however, a reservoir of “good feeling” was created by Jackson’s victory over the British at New Orleans and the striking naval victories.

Monroe Doctrine note by Jefferson

After the war, the United States pursued a nationalist foreign policy. Florida was acquired from Spain 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, but its self-assured tone in warning off the Old World from the New reflected well the nationalist mood sweeping the country.

Internally, the decisions of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Marhsall in such cases as McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) promoted nationalism by strengthening Congress and national power at the expense of the states. The congressional decision to charter the second Bank of the United States (1816) was explained in part by the country’s financial weaknesses, exposed by the War of 1812, and in part by the intrigues of financial interests. The readiness of Southern Jeffersonians—former strict constructionists—to support such a measure indicates, too, an amazing degree of nationalist feeling. Perhaps the clearest sign of a new sense of national unity was the victorious Republican Party, standing in solitary splendour on the national political horizon, its long-time foes the Federalists vanished without a trace (on the national level) and Monroe, the Republican standardbearer, reelected so overwhelmingly in 1820 that it was long believed that one electoral vote denied him had been held back only to preserve Washington’s record of unanimous selection.

Disunity in the nation

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.

In addition to economic hardship, disunity resulted from the financial panic of 1819. The cause of the panic was complex, but its greatest effect was clearly its tendency for 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 reflecting the bad feelings that existed alongside the good.

On the national level, harmony seemed to prevail, but within the states, disharmony ruled. Politics in the early 19th century was typically fought for petty gain rather than for great issues. Politicians’ goals were often sordid, but that does not mean that they were bland. State factions led by shrewd men waged bitter political war in every section in order to establish or consolidate 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. However, 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.

Economic conditions

The American economy expanded and matured at a remarkable rate in the decades after the War of 1812. This rapid growth of the West created a great new centre for the production of grains and pork, permitting the country’s older sections to specialize in other crops. New processes of manufacture, particularly in textiles, not only accelerated an “industrial revolution” in the Northeast but also, by drastically enlarging the Northern market for raw materials, helped account for a boom in Southern cotton production. If by midcentury Southerners of European descent had come to regard slavery—on which the cotton economy relied—as a “positive good” rather than the “necessary evil” that they had earlier held the system to be, it was largely because of the increasingly central role played by cotton in earning profits for the region. Industrial workers organized the country’s first trade unions and even workingmen’s political parties early in this period. The corporate form thrived in an era of booming capital requirements, and older and simpler forms of attracting investment capital were rendered obsolete. Commerce became increasingly specialized, with the division of labour in disposal of goods matching increasingly sophisticated division of labour that had come to characterize production.

Pessen, Edward

The management of the growing economy during the early years of the United States was inseparable from political conflict. At the start, the issue was between agrarians, who favored a decentralized system of easy credit, and an investing community looking for stability and profit in financial markets. This latter group, championed by Hamilton and the Federalists, won the first round with the establishment of the Bank of the United States (1791), jointly owned by the government and private stockholders. However, its charter expired in 1811 and the financial chaos that hindered procurement and mobilization during the ensuing War of 1812 demonstrated the importance of such centralization. Thus, even Jeffersonian Republicans were converted to acceptance of a second Bank of the United States, chartered in 1816.

Biddle, Nicholas

The political fire faced by the second Bank of the United States was not merely between farming and mercantile interests, but also between local bankers who wanted access to the profits of an expanding credit system and those who, like President Nicholas Biddle, wanted more regularity and predictability in banking through top-down control. The Constitution gave the United States exclusive power to coin money but allowed for the chartering of banks by individual states, and these banks were permitted to issue notes that also served as currency. The state banks, whose charters were often political plums, lacked coordinated inspection and safeguards against risky loans usually collateralized by land, whose value fluctuated wildly, as did the value of the banknotes. Overspeculation, bankruptcies, contraction, and panics were the inevitable result.

1837 Panic

Biddle’s hope was that the large deposits of government funds in the Bank of the United States would allow it to become the major lender to local banks, and from that position of strength it could squeeze the unsound ones into either responsibility or extinction. But this notion ran afoul of the growing democratic spirit that insisted that the right to extend credit and choose its recipients was too precious to be confined to a wealthy elite. This difference of views produced the classic battle between Biddle and Jackson, culminating in Biddle’s attempt to win recharter for the Bank of the United States, Jackson’s veto and transfer of the government funds to pet banks, and the Panic of 1837. Not until the 1840s did the federal government place its funds in an independent treasury, and not until after 1877 did there exist legislation creating a national banking system in America. The country was strong enough to survive, but the politicization of fiscal policy making continued to be a major theme of American economic history.

Revolution in transportation

Steamboat owned by John Fitch

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. It was 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.

Canal of Erie

Canals and railroads were not as distinctly 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 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.

New York’s early railroads

Clay, Henry

Canal development was overtaken by the growth of the railroads, which were far more efficient in covering the great distances underserved by the road system and indispensable in the trans-Mississippi West. Work on the Baltimore and Ohio line, the first railroad in the United States, was begun in 1828, and a great burst of construction boosted the country’s rail network from zero to 30,000 miles (50,000 km) by 1860. The financing alone, no less than the operation of the burgeoning system, had a huge political and economic impact. Adams was a decided champion of “national internal improvements”—the federally assisted development of turnpikes, lighthouses, and dredging and channel-clearing operations (that is, whatever it took to assist commerce). That term, however, was more closely associated with Henry Clay, like Adams a strong nationalist. But Clay’s passionate opposition to spending money on infrastructure projects created one battlefield in the long contest between the Democratic and Whig parties that did not end until the triumph of Whig economic ideas in the Republican party during the Civil War.

Industrialization begins

Economic, social, and cultural history cannot easily be separated. The creation of the “factory system” in the United States was the outcome of interaction between several characteristically American forces: faith in the future, a generally welcoming attitude toward immigrants, an abundance of resources linked to a shortage of labour, and a hospitable view of innovation. The pioneering textile industry, for example, sprung from an alliance of invention, investment, and philanthropy. Moses Brown (later benefactor of the College of Rhode Island, renamed Brown University in honor of his nephew Nicholas) was looking to invest some of his family’s mercantile fortune in the textile business. New England wool and southern cotton were readily available, as was water power from Rhode Island’s swiftly flowing rivers. All that was lacking to convert a handcraft industry into one that was machine-based was machinery itself; however, the new devices for spinning and weaving that were coming into use in England were jealously guarded there. But Samuel Slater, a young English mechanic who immigrated to the United States in 1790 carrying the designs for the necessary machinery in his prodigious memory, became aware of Brown’s ambitions and of the problems he was having with his machinery

Patented automatic gristmill

Sketch of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin

Local American inventive talent embodied in sometimes self-taught engineers was available too. One conspicuous example was Delaware’s Oliver Evans, who built a totally automatic flour mill in the 1780s and later founded a factory that produced steam engines; another was the ultimate Connecticut Yankee, Eli Whitney, who not only fathered the cotton gin but built a factory for mass producing muskets by fitting together interchangeable parts on an assembly line. Whitney got help from a supportive U.S. Army, which sustained him with advances on large procurement contracts. Such governmental support of industrial development was rare, but, when it occurred, it was a crucial if often understated element in the industrializing of America.

Whereas Slater and Brown used local families, living at home, to provide “hands” for their factories, Lowell brought in young women from the countryside and put them up in boardinghouses adjacent to the mills. The “girls”—most of them in or just out of their teens—were happy to be paid a few dollars for 60-hour workweeks that were less taxing than those they put in as farmers’ daughters. Their moral behaviour was supervised by matrons, and they themselves organized religious, dramatic, musical, and study groups. The idea was to create an American labour force that would not resemble the wretched proletarians of England and elsewhere in Europe.

Lowell, Massachusetts, Boott Cotton Mills

Lowell was marveled at by foreign and domestic visitors alike but lost its idyllic character as competitive pressures within the industry resulted in larger workloads, longer hours, and lower wages. Young Yankee women were replaced by French-Canadian and Irish immigrants when they formed embryonic unions and struck in the 1840s and 1850s. Nevertheless, early New England industrialism was characterized by an awareness that Americans were different.

Weisberger, Bernard A.

Developments in society

Many well-bred Europeans were evidently taken aback by the self-assurance of lightly educated American common folk. Ordinary Americans seemed unwilling to defer to anyone on the basis of rank or status.

The birth of American culture

Melville, Herman

“In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” asked an English satirist early in the 1800s. Had he looked beyond the limits of “high culture,” he would have found plenty of answers. As a matter of fact, the period between 1815 and 1860 produced an outpouring of traditional literary works now known to students of English-language prose and poetry everywhere—the verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, as well as the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson—all expressing distinctively American themes and depicting distinctly American characters such as Natty Bumppo, Hester Prynne, and Captain Ahab who now belong to the world.

Diary of William Clark’s expedition

Expedition of Lewis and Clark

But setting these aside, Nathaniel Bowditch’s The New American Practical Navigator (1802), Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), and the reports from the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the various far Western explorations made by the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers, as well as those of U.S. Navy Antarctic explorer Charles Wilkes, were some of the American books on desks throughout the world by 1860. By then, the international scientific community knew that there was an American intellectual presence.

Tent of P.T. Barnum

Foster, Stephen

Theodore Whitman

Whitman, Walt

In 1828, Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language included hundreds of words of local origin to be incorporated in the former “King’s English.” Webster’s blue-backed “Speller,” published in 1783, Jedidiah Morse’s geography textbooks of 1807 and 1828, William Holmes McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers of 1837, popular literature like the humorous works of Seba Smith, Joseph G. Baldwin, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Artemus Ward that featured frontier tall tales and rural dialect, and the growing cities there were new varieties of mass entertainment including the blatantly racist minstrel shows for which ballads like those of Stephen Foster were composed. The “museums” and circuses of P.T. Barnum also entertained the middle-class audience and the spread of literacy sustained a new kind of popular journalism pioneered by James Gordon Bennett who mixed its up-to-the-moment political and international news with sports, crime, gossip, and trivia in his New York Herald. Popular magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and Godey

Weisberger, Bernard A.

People

In America, population growth was at a rapid pace for the antebellum decades. However, after 1820 the rate of growth varied throughout the country. Areas that lost settlers to the Western Reserve experienced slower population growth, while the Southern Atlantic states had a more rapid rate of growth.

The population increase of the 1830s and ’40s was composed of immigrants. Whereas about 250,000 Europeans had arrived in the first three decades of the 19th century, there were 10 times as many between 1830 and 1850. The newcomers were overwhelmingly Irish and German. Traveling in family groups rather than as individuals, they were attracted by the dazzling opportunities of American life: abundant work, land, food, and freedom on one hand and the absence of compulsory military service on the other.

Pessen, Edward

Emigrants from Ireland

Despite the mere statistics of immigration, its vital role in pre-Civil War America is evident. The intermingling of technology, politics, and accident produced yet another great migration. By the 1840s, oceanic passages had become more frequent and regular making it easier for hungry Europeans to answer the call of America to take up the farmlands and build the cities. Meanwhile, the steady growth of democracy in Europe created the Revolutions of 1848, which created a wave of political refugees. Many Germans who traveled over in the wake of the revolutions were refugees who brought liberal ideals, professional educations, and other intellectual capital to the American West. Therefore, German contributions to American musical, educational, and business life cannot be measured statistically. Neither can one quantify the impact of Irish politicians, policemen, and priests on American urban life or Irish migration in general on Roman Catholicism in the United States.

Immigrants from Sweden

Besides the Irish and Germans, thousands of Norwegians and Swedes immigrated, driven by agricultural depression in the 1850s, to take up new land on the yet-unspoiled Great Plains. The Chinese migrants to California in the 1850s, who exchanged hard times for new opportunities in the gold fields, were much smaller, but they had a profound impact on American culture as well.

Wright, Frances

Chromolithograph print of American Progress, ca. 1873

Chromolithograph print of American Progress, c. 1873

Mention must also be made of utopian immigrant colonies planted by thinkers who wanted to create a new society in a New World. Examples include Nashoba, Tennessee, and New Harmony, Indiana, by two British newcomers, Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, respectively. There also were German planned settlements at Amana, Iowa, and in New Ulm and New Braunfels, Texas. If the growth of materialistic and expansionist bumptiousness represented by the Manifest Destiny movement was fueled in part by the immigration-fed expansion of the American populace, these experiments in communal living added fuel to the less materialistic forces driving American thought. They fit the pattern of searching for heaven on earth that marked the age of reform.

Weisberger, Bernard A.

Most African Americans in the North possessed little theoretical freedom and little else. Confined to menial occupations for the most part, they fought a losing battle against Irish competition in northeastern cities. The struggle between the two groups erupted spasmodically into ugly street riots. The hostility shown to free African Americans by the general community was less violent but equally unremitting. Discrimination in politics, employment, education, housing, religion, and even cemeteries resulted in a cruelly oppressive system. Unlike enslaved persons, free African Americans in the North could criticize and petition against their subjugation, but this proved fruitless in preventing the continued deterioration of their situation.

Although improved machinery had resulted in expanded farm production and had given further impetus to the commercialization of agriculture, the way of life of independent agriculturists had changed little by midcentury. The public journals put out by some farmers insisted that their efforts were unappreciated by the larger community. Evidence suggests that many farmers led lives marked by unremitting toil, cash shortage, and little leisure. Farm workers received minuscule wages. In all sections of the country, much of the best land was concentrated in the hands of a small number of wealthy farmers, but this proportion was far greater in the United States than in Europe.

The cities

The 1850s in New York City

Cities, both old and new, thrived during the era. Their growth in population outstripped the spectacular growth rate of the country as a whole, and their importance and influence far transcending the relatively small proportions of citizens living in them. Whether on the “urban frontier” or in older seaboard regions, antebellum cities were centers of wealth and political influence for their outlying hinterlands. New York City faced problems of a different order of magnitude from those confronting such cities as Poughkeepsie and Newark, but the pattern of change during the era was amazingly similar for eastern cities or western, old cities or new, great cities or small. The lifeblood of them all was commerce. Old ideals of economy in town government were grudgingly abandoned by the merchant, professional, and landowning elites who typically ruled. Taxes were increased in order to deal with pressing new problems and to enable the urban community of midcentury to realize new opportunities. Harbours were improved, police forces professionalized, services expanded, waste more reliably removed, streets improved, and welfare activities broadened all as a result of statesmanship and self-interest on the part of property owners who were convinced that amelior

Pessen, Edward

Women and education

Brown, Olympia

College of Mount Holyoke

Cities were also centres of educational and intellectual progress. The emergence of a relatively well-financed public educational system, free of the stigma of “pauper” or “charity” schools, and the emergence of a lively “penny press,” made possible by a technological revolution, were among the most important developments. The role of women in America’s expanding society was intriguingly shaped by conflicting forces. On one hand, there were factors that abetted emancipation. For example, the growing cities offered new job opportunities as clerks and shop assistants for girls and young women with elementary educations furnished by the public schools. And the need for trained teachers for those schools offered another avenue to female independence. At higher levels, new rungs on the ladder of upward mobility were provided by the creation of women’s colleges, such as Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, Massachusetts (1837), and by the admission of women to a very few coeducational colleges, such as Oberlin (1833) and Antioch (1852), both in Ohio. A rare woman or two even broke into professional ranks, including Elizabeth Blackwell, considered the first woman physician of modern times, and the Rev. Olympia Brown, one of the first American

On the other hand, traditionally educated women from genteel families who remained bound by silken cords of expectation. The “duties of womanhood” expounded by popular media included, to the exclusion of all else, the conservation of a husband’s resources, the religious and moral education of children and servants, and the cultivation of higher sensibilities through proper selection of decorative objects and reading matter. The “true woman” made the home an island of tranquility and uplift to which busy male could retreat after a day’s struggle in the hard world of the marketplace. In so doing, she was venerated but kept in a clearly noncompetitive role.

Weisberger, Bernard A.

Affluence

Tocqueville, Alexis

The brilliant French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, in common with most contemporary observers, believed that American society was remarkably egalitarian. Most rich American men were thought to have been born poor; “self-made” was the term Henry Clay popularized for them. The society was allegedly a very fluid one, marked by the rapid rise and fall of fortunes, with room at the top accessible to all but the most humble; opportunity for success seemed freely available to all, and although material possessions were not distributed perfectly equally, they were, in theory, dispersed so fairly that only a few poor and a few rich men existed at either end of the social spectrum.

Since rich taxpayers kept secret from assessors the bulk of their wealth, these were great fortunes indeed. Typically, the wealthiest 1 percent of urban citizens owned approximately one-half the wealth of the great cities of the Northeast, while the great bulk of their populations possessed little or nothing.

Democracies under Jackson

Political democratization

Nevertheless, American politics became increasingly democratic during the 1820s and 1830s. Local and state offices that had earlier been appointive became elective. Suffrage was expanded as property and other restrictions on voting were reduced or abandoned in most states. The freehold requirement that had denied voting to all but holders of real estate was almost everywhere discarded before 1820, while the taxpaying qualification was also removed, if more slowly and gradually. In many states a printed ballot replaced the earlier system of voice voting, while the secret ballot also grew in favour. Whereas in 1800 only two states provided for the popular choice of presidential electors, by 1832 only South Carolina still left the decision to the legislature. Conventions of elected delegates increasingly replaced legislative or congressional caucuses as the agencies for making party nominations. By the latter change, a system for nominating candidates by self-appointed cliques meeting in secret was replaced by a system of open selection of candidates by democratically elected bodies.

Jackson, Andrew

Many of the democratic changes in the United States were not engineered by Andrew Jackson and his followers, as was once believed. Most of them antedated the emergence of Jackson’s Democratic Party, and in New York, Mississippi, and other states some of the reforms were accomplished over the objections of the Jacksonians. There were men in all sections who feared the spread of political democracy, but by the 1830s few were willing to voice such misgivings publicly. Jacksonians effectively sought to fix the impression that they alone were champions of democracy, engaged in mortal struggle against aristocratic opponents. The accuracy of such propaganda varied according to local circumstances.

Whereas by the 1830s the common man—of European descent—had come into possession of the vote in most states, the nomination process continued to be outside his control. More importantly, legislative programs adopted by competing factions and parties in the states owed little to ordinary voters. State parties extolled the common people in grandiloquent terms but typically focused on prosaic legislation awarding bank charters or monopoly rights to favored insiders. That American parties would be pragmatic vote-getting coalitions, rather than organizations devoted to high political principles, was due largely to another series of reforms enacted during the era. Electoral changes that rewarded winners or plurality gatherers in small districts contrasted with a previous system that divided a state’s offices among the several leading vote getters, weakening single issue or ideological parties while strengthening those that tried to be many things to many people.

It was the Jacksonians

To many citizens, Jackson embodied the vast power of nature and Providence, on the one hand, and the majesty of the people, on the other. His very weaknesses- such as a nearly uncontrollable temper- were political strengths. Opponents who branded him an enemy of property and order only gave credence to the claim of Jackson’s supporters that he stood for the poor against the rich, the plain people against the interests.

Jackson, like most of his leading antagonists, was in fact a wealthy man with conservative social beliefs. In his many volumes of correspondence he rarely referred to labour. As a lawyer and man of affairs in Tennessee prior to his accession to the presidency, he aligned himself not with have-nots but with the influential, not with the debtor but with the creditor. His reputation was created largely by astute men who propagated the belief that his party was the people’s party and that the policies of his administrations were in the popular interest. Savage attacks on those policies by some wealthy critics only fortified the belief that the Jacksonian movement was radical as well as democratic.

Andrew Jackson’s “Old Hickory”

Crawford, William H.

At its birth in the mid-1820s, the Democratic Party was a loose coalition of diverse men and interests united primarily by a practical vision. They held to the twin beliefs that Old Hickory, as Jackson was known, was a magnificent candidate and that his election to the presidency would benefit those who helped bring it about. His excellence as candidate derived in part from the fact that he appeared to have no political principles of any sort. In this period there were no distinct parties on the national level. Jackson, Clay, John C. Calhoun, John Quincy Adams, and William H. Crawford—the leading presidential aspirants—all portrayed themselves as “Republicans.” The National Republicans were the followers of Adams and Clay; the Whigs emerged in 1834, were above all else the party dedicated to the defeat of Jackson.

Parties with the most votes

Ross Douthat observed that the parties of the era were created to persuade men of the primacy of principles, but this was only natural given that the leaders of these new parties desired to win over the electorate. As time went on, however, the parties came to be identified with specific political policies.

By the 1840s, Whig and Democratic congressmen voted as rival blocs. The Whigs supported and Democrats opposed a weak executive, a new Bank of the United States, a high tariff, distribution of land revenues to the states, relief legislation to mitigate the effects of the depression, and federal reapportionment of House seats. The Whigs voted against and Democrats approved an independent treasury, an aggressive foreign policy, and expansionism. These were important issues, capable of dividing the electorate just as they divided the major parties in Congress. Certainly it was significant that Jacksonians were more ready than their opponents to take punitive measures against African Americans or abolitionists or to banish and use other forceful measures against the southern Indian tribes, brushing aside treaties protecting Native American rights. But these differences do not substantiate the belief that the Democrats and Whigs were divided ideologically, with only the former somehow representing the interests of the propertyless.

Cartoon about the nullification controversy

Tariff lines earlier had been more easily broken, as during the crisis that erupted over South Carolina’s bitter objections to the high Tariff of 1828. Jackson’s firm opposition to Calhoun’s policy of nullification (i.e., the right of a state to nullify a federal law, in this case the tariff) had commanded wide support within and outside the Democratic Party. Clay’s solution to the crisis, a compromise tariff, represented not an ideological split with Jackson but Clay’s ability to conciliate and to draw political advantage from astute tactical maneuvering.

Recent evidence reveals that Jackson’s reelection margin was hardly unprecedented and that Democratic success may have been due to other considerations, such as the well thought of second Bank by many Westerners, many farmers, and even Democratic politicians who admitted to opposing it primarily not to incur the wrath of Jackson.

Jackson’s reasons for detesting the second Bank and its president (Biddle) were complex. Anticapitalist ideology would not explain a Jacksonian policy that replaced a quasi-national bank as repository of government funds with dozens of state and private banks, equally controlled by capitalists and even more dedicated than was Biddle to profit making. The saving virtue of these “pet banks” appeared to be the Democratic political affiliations of their directors. Perhaps the pragmatism as well as the large degree of similarity between the Democrats and Whigs is best indicated by their frank adoption of the “spoils system.” The Whigs, while out of office, denounced the vile Democratic policy for turning lucrative customhouse and other posts over to supporters, but once in office they resorted to similar practices. It is interesting that the Jacksonian appointees were hardly more plebeian than were their so-called aristocratic predecessors.

Parties of minor importance

The politics of principle was represented during the era not by the major parties but by the minor ones. The Anti-Masons aimed to stamp out an alleged aristocratic conspiracy. The Workingmen’s Party called for “social justice.” The Locofocos (so named after the matches they used to light up their first meeting in a hall darkened by their opponents) denounced monopolists in the Democratic Party and out. The variously named nativist parties accused the Roman Catholic Church of all manner of evil. The Liberty Party opposed the spread of slavery. These parties were ephemeral because they failed to attract masses of voters in addition to their original constituencies. The Democratic and Whig parties thrived not in spite of their opportunism but because of it, reflecting well the practical spirit that animated most American voters.

Reform era

Broadside of the United States

1822–54: United States

Historians have labeled the period 1830–50 an “age of reform.” Reform movements sprang up across the United States during this time, due in part to the rage for reform that swept across the Anglo-American community. There is not yet agreement as to why a rage for reform erupted in the antebellum decades, but some of the explanations cited includes an outburst of Protestant Evangelicalism, a reform spirit that swept across the Anglo-American community, a delayed reaction to the teachings of the Enlightenment, and the worldwide revolution in communications that was a feature of 19th-century capitalism.

What is not in question is the amazing variety of reform movements that flourished simultaneously in the North—women’s rights, pacifism, temperance, prison reform, abolition of imprisonment for debt, an end to capital punishment, improving the conditions of the working classes, universal education, community organization, improved the condition of the insane and congenitally enfeebled. These causes inspired zealots during the era.

Pessen, Edward

A strange combination of economic hunger and spiritual striving characterized American life. Both were built on the belief that the future could be controlled and improved. Even though frontier life was cruel and harsh, there was a strong belief that the human condition would eventually improve: human nature itself would not remain stuck in a perpetual state of shortcoming as old-time Calvinism had predicted.

The “period of ‘freedom’s ferment'” from 1830 to 1860 combined the humanitarian impulses of the late 18th century with the revivalistic pulse of the early 19th century. The two streams flowed together. For example, the earnest Christians who founded the American Christian Missionary Society believed it to be their duty to bring the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ to the “heathens” of Asia. But in carrying out this somewhat arrogant assault on the religions of the poor in China and India, they founded schools and hospitals that greatly improved the earthly lot of their Chinese and “Hindoo” converts in a manner of which Jefferson might have approved.

Charles G. Finney, Reverend

Mann, Horace

Millennialism and secular perfectionism, the belief that the world might soon end, found their counterparts in crusades and crusaders. Universal education was seen as the key to it all, which accounted for many college foundings and for the push toward universal free public schooling led by Horace Mann.

One way to forge such victories was to improve the condition of those whom fate had smitten and society had neglected or abused. There was, for example, the movement to provide special education for the deaf, led by Samuel Gridley Howe, as well as the founding of an institute to teach the blind by Boston merchant Thomas Handasyd Perkins, who found philanthropy a good way for a Christian businessman to show his appreciation for what he saw as God’s blessings on his enterprises. There also was the work of Dorothea Lynde Dix to humanize the appalling treatment of the insane, which followed up on the precedent set by Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, a devout believer in God and science.

Fourier, Charles

Industrialization led to a widening imbalance between classes, prompting economic reformers to action. Some accepted the permanence of capitalism but tried to enhance the bargaining power of employees through labor unions while others rejected the private enterprise model and looked to a reorganization of society on cooperative rather than competitive lines. One labour reformer, George Henry Evans, proposed that wages be raised by reducing the supply of labourers through awarding some of them free farms, “homesteads” carved from the public domain.

Whatever a reform movement’s nature, whether as pragmatic as agricultural improvement or as utopian as universal peace, the techniques that spread the message over America’s broad expanses were similar. Voluntary associations were formed to spread the word and win supporters, a practice that Tocqueville, in 1841, found to be a key to American democracy. Even when church-affiliated, these groups were usually directed by professional men rather than ministers, and lawyers were conspicuously numerous. Next came publicity through organizational newspapers, which were easy to found on small amounts of capital and sweat. So when, as one observer noted, almost every American had a plan for the universal improvement of society in his pocket, every other American was likely to be aware of it.

Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments for women’s suffrage

Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments on women’s suffrage

Some crusades continued past the Civil War era, such as temperance. This crusade invoked lasting values—moralism, efficiency, and health. Drinking was viewed as a sin that, if overindulged, led to alcoholism, incurred social costs, hurt productivity, and harmed one’s body. The women’s rights crusade persisted because it touched upon a perennial and universal question of the just allotment of gender roles.

Weisberger, Bernard A.

The United States’ abolitionism

Finally, there was abolitionism which passionately advocated and resisted with equal intensity. It appeared as late as the 1850s to be a failure in politics, but by 1865 it had succeeded in embedding its goal in the Constitution by amendment, though at the cost of a civil war. At its core lay the issue of “race,” over which Americans have shown their best and worst faces for more than three centuries. When it became entangled in this period with the dynamics of American sectional conflict, its full explosive potential was released.

Garrison, William Lloyd

Child, Lydia M.

The diverse phenomenon of abolition itself included both William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Weld, who took a more conciliatory stance. There was also the work of free Blacks such as David Walker and Robert Forten, as well as formerly enslaved persons like Frederick Douglass, who had humanitarian motives.

Few neurotics and few members of the northern socioeconomic elite became abolitionists. For all the movement’s zeal and propagandistic successes, it was bitterly resented by many Northerners, and the masses of free whites were indifferent to its message. In the 1830s urban mobs, typically led by “gentlemen of property and standing,” stormed abolitionist meetings, wreaking violence on the property and persons of African Americans and their white sympathizers, evidently indifferent to the niceties distinguishing one abolitionist theorist from another. The fact that abolition leaders were remarkably similar in their New England backgrounds, their Calvinist self-righteousness, their high social status, and the relative excellence of their educations is hardly evidence that their cause was either snobbish or elitist. Ordinary citizens were more inclined to loathe African Americans and to preoccupy themselves with personal advance within the system.

Movements supporting reform

The utopian community of Oneida

The existence of many reform movements did not mean that a vast number of Americans supported them. Many reforms had small followings, and most of the major movements did poorly at the polls. The evidence indicates that few persons actually participated in these activities. Utopian communities such as Brook Farm and those in New Harmony, Indiana, and Oneida, New York, did not succeed in winning over many followers or inspiring many other groups to imitate their example. The importance of these and the other movements derived neither from their size nor from their achievements. Reform reflected the sensitivity of a small number of persons to imperfections in American life.

Reforms inspired by religion

Despite the wide impact of the American version of secular perfectionism, it was the reform inspired by religious zeal that was most apparent in the antebellum United States. Not that religious enthusiasm was invariably identified with social uplift; many reformers were more concerned with saving souls than with curing social ills. The merchant princes who played active roles in—and donated large sums of money to—the Sunday school unions, home missionary societies, and Bible and tract societies did so in part out of altruism and in part because the latter organizations stressed spiritual rather than social improvement while teaching the doctrine of the “contented poor.” In effect, conservatives who were strongly religious found no difficulty in using religious institutions to fortify their social predilections. Radicals, on the other hand, interpreted Christianity as a call to social action, convinced that true Christian rectitude could be achieved only in struggles that infuriated the smug and the greedy. Ralph Waldo Emerson was an example of the American reformer’s insistence on the primacy of the individual. The great goal according to him was the regeneration of the human spirit, rather than a mere improvement in material conditions. Emerson and reformers like him, however, acted on the premise

Midcentury expansionism and political crisis

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Throughout the 19th century, people kept spilling over into the Mississippi valley and beyond, pushing the frontier farther westward. The Louisiana Purchase territory offered ample room to pioneers and those who came after. American wanderlust, however, was not confined to that area. Throughout the era Americans in varying numbers moved into regions south, west, and north of the Louisiana Territory, which caused dispute between these governments and the United States.

Expansion westward

Tyler, John

Polk, James K.

The growing nationalism of the American people was effectively engaged by the Democratic presidents Jackson and James K. Polk (served 1845–49) and by the expansionist Whig president John Tyler (served 1841–45) to promote their goal of enlarging the “empire for liberty.” Each of these presidents performed shrewdly. Jackson waited until his last day in office to establish formal relations with the Republic of Texas, one year after his friend Sam Houston had succeeded in dissolving the ties between Mexico and the newly independent state of Texas. On the Senate’s overwhelming repudiation of his proposed treaty of annexation, Tyler resorted to the use of a joint resolution so that each house could vote by a narrow margin for incorporation of Texas into the Union. Polk succeeded in getting the British to negotiate a treaty (1846) whereby the Oregon country south of 54th parallel would revert to the United States. These were precisely the terms of his earlier proposal, which had been rejected by the British. Ready to resort to almost any means to secure the Mexican territories of New Mexico and upper California, Polk used a border incident as a pretext for commencing a war with Mexico. The Mexican-American War was not widely acclaimed, and

Although there is no evidence that these actions had anything like a public mandate, clearly they did not evoke widespread opposition.Nonetheless, the expansionists’ assertion that Polk’s election in 1844 could be construed as a popular clamour for the annexation of Texas was hardly a solid claim; Clay was narrowly defeated and would have won but for the defection from Whig ranks of small numbers of Liberty Party and nativist voters. The nationalistic idea, conceived in the 1840s by a Democratic editor, that it was the “manifest destiny” of the United States to expand westward to the Pacific undoubtedly prepared public opinion for the militant policies undertaken by Polk shortly thereafter. It has been said that this notion represented the mood of the American people; it is safer to say it reflected the feelings of many of the people.

Pessen, Edward

As a result, the American Indians were further displaced by the westward expansion. The sociocultural environment of “young America” offered new rationales for the dispossession of Native Americans; the broadening of federal power provided administrative machinery to carry out the dispossession; and the booming economy spurred the demand to bring more “virgin land” still in Indian hands into the orbit of “civilization.”

After 1815, control of Indian affairs was shifted from the State Department to the War Department and then to the Department of the Interior. The Indians were no longer treated as separate nations but were considered wards of the United States, to be relocated at the convenience of the government when necessary. The acquisition of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 and Florida in 1819 removed the last possibilities of outside help for Indians from France or Spain; moreover, they opened new areas for “resettlement” of unassimilable population elements.

The Sauk and Fox Indians by Karl Bodmer

Black Hawk Chief

The decimated and dependent Indian peoples of Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin were, one after another, forced onto reservations within those states in areas that Americans of European descent did not yet see as valuable. There was almost no resistance, except for the Sauk and Fox uprising led by Black Hawk (the Black Hawk War) in 1832 and put down by local militia whose ranks included a young Abraham Lincoln. In the Southeast, individual members of these groups had become landholders and even enslavers. After the policy’s enactment into law in 1830, the Southeast Indian peoples were driven westward along the Trail of Tears.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

This is comprehensible in the light of cultural forces. The revival-inspired missionary movement, while Native American-friendly in theory, assumed that the cultural integrity of Indian land would and should disappear when the Indians were “brought to Christ.” A romantic sentimentalization of the “noble red man,” evidenced in the literary works of James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, called attention to positive aspects of Indian life but saw Native Americans as essentially a vanishing breed. Far more common in American thought was the concept of the “treacherous redskin,” which lifted Jackson and William Henry Harrison to the presidency in 1828 and 1840, respectively, partly on the strength of their military victories over Indians. Popular celebration of allegedly Anglo-Saxon characteristics of energy and independence helped to brand other “races”–Indians as well as Africans, Asians, and Hispanics–as inferiors who would have to yield to progress.

Weisberger, Bernard A.

Expansionist attitudes

Henry Clay and the Compromise of 1850

Public attitudes towards expansion into Mexican territories were very much affected by the issue of slavery. Those opposed to the spread of slavery or simply not in favor of the institution joined abolitionists in discerning a proslavery policy in the Mexican-American War. The great political issue of the postwar years concerned slavery in the territories. Calhoun and spokesmen for the slave-owning South argued that slavery could not be constitutionally prohibited in the Mexican cession. “Free Soilers” supported the Wilmot Proviso idea—that slavery should not be permitted in the new territory. Others supported the proposal that popular sovereignty (called “squatter sovereignty” by its detractors) should prevail—that is, that settlers in the territories should decide the issue. Still others called for the extension westward of the 36°30′ line of demarcation for slavery that had resolved the Missouri controversy in 1820.

Pessen, Edward

During the Civil War

The prelude to war, 1850–1860

Prior to the Civil War, the United States experienced a whole generation of nearly uninterrupted political crisis. Underlying the problem was the fact that America in the early 1800s had been a country, not a nation. The major functions of government—those relating to education, transportation, health, and public order—were performed on the state or local level, and little more than a loose allegiance to the government in Washington, D.C., a few national institutions such as churches and political parties, and a shared memory of the Founding Fathers of the republic tied the country together. Within this loosely structured society every section, every state, every locality, every group could pretty much go its own way.

Gradually, however, changes in technology and the economy were bringing all the elements of the country into steady and close contact. Improvements in transportation—first canals, then toll roads, and especially railroads—broke down isolation and encouraged the boy from the country to wander to the city, the farmer from New Hampshire to migrate to Iowa. Improvements in the printing press, which permitted the publication of penny newspapers, and the development of the telegraph system broke through the barriers of intellectual provincialism and made everybody almost instantaneously aware of what was going on throughout the country. As the railroad network proliferated, it necessitated central direction and control; and national railroad corporations—the first true “big businesses” in America—emerged to provide order and stability.

For many Americans the wrench from a largely rural, slow-moving, fragmented society in the early 1800s to a bustling, integrated, national social order in the mid-century was an abrupt and painful one, and often they resisted it. Sometimes resentment against change manifested itself in harsh attacks upon those who appeared to be the agents of change—especially immigrants, who seemed to personify the forces that were altering the older America. Vigorous nativist movements appeared in most cities during the 1840s; but not until the 1850s, when the huge numbers of Irish and German immigrants of the previous decade became eligible to vote, did the antiforeign fever reach its peak. Directed both against immigrants and against the Roman Catholic church, to which so many of them belonged, the so-called Know-Nothings emerged as a powerful political force in 1854 and increased resistance to change.

Slavery and sectionalism

A more enduring manifestation of hostility toward the nationalizing tendencies in American life was the reassertion of strong feelings of sectional loyalty. New Englanders felt threatened by the West, which drained off the ablest and most vigorous members of the labour force and also, once the railroad network was complete, produced wool and grain that undersold the products of the poor New England hill country. The West, too, developed a strong feeling of its uniqueness, its feeling of being looked down upon as raw and uncultured, and its awareness that it was being exploited by the businessmen of the East.

Whitehall Street, Atlanta, 1864

The most conspicuous and distinctive section, however, was the South—an area set apart by climate, by a plantation system designed for the production of such staple crops as cotton, tobacco, and sugar, and, especially, by the persistence of slavery, which had been abolished or prohibited in all other parts of the United States. It should not be thought that all or even most white Southerners were directly involved in the section’s “peculiar institution.” Indeed, in 1850 there were only 347,525 slaveholders in a total white population of about 6,000,000 in the slave states. Half of these held four enslaved persons or fewer and could not be considered planters. There were fewer than 1,800 persons who held more than 100 enslaved people in the entire South.

Turner, Nat

Nevertheless, over time, slavery did give a distinctive tone to the whole pattern of Southern life. If the large planters were few, they were also wealthy, prestigious, and powerful; often they were the political as well as the economic leaders of their section; and their values pervaded every stratum of Southern society. Far from opposing slavery, small farmers thought only of the possibility that they too might, with hard work and good fortune, some day join the ranks of the planter class—to which they were closely connected by ties of blood, marriage, and friendship. Behind this virtually unanimous support of slavery lay the universal belief—shared by many whites in the North and West as well—that Blacks were an innately inferior people who had risen only to a state of barbarism in their native Africa and who could live in a civilized society only if disciplined through slavery.

Political crises for a decade

Since distances were great, communication was difficult, and the powerless national government had almost nothing to do, sectional differences existed in the early days of the republic that could have been reconciled or ignored. The revolution in transportation and communication, however, eliminated much of the isolation, and the victory of the United States in its brief war with Mexico left the national government with problems that required action.

The sovereignty of the people

There are three compromises in the United States: the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act

Compromise of 1850, Missouri Compromise, and Kansas-Nebraska Act

The Compromise of 1850 was an uneasy patchwork of concessions to all sides that began to fall apart as soon as it was enacted. In the long run, popular sovereignty proved most unsatisfactory of all, making each territory a battleground where the supporters of the South contended with the defenders of the North and West.

Douglas, Stephen A.

In 1854, Stephen A. Douglas introduced his Kansas bill in Congress, establishing a territorial government for the vast region that lay between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had forever excluded slavery from this area, so Douglas knew that the Southern senators would block the organization of Kansas as a free territory.

Franklin Pierce

Douglas thought that the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which had been applied to the territories gained from Mexico, would avoid a political contest over the Kansas territory: it would permit Southern enslavers to move into the area, but, since the region was unsuited for plantation slavery, it would inevitably result in the formation of additional free states. His bill therefore allowed the inhabitants of the territory self-government in all matters of domestic importance, including the slavery issue. This provision in effect allowed the territorial legislatures to mandate slavery in their areas and was directly contrary to the Missouri Compromise. With the backing of Pres.Franklin Pierce (served 1853–57), Douglas bullied, wheedled, and bluffed congressmen into passing his bill.

Slavery polarization

Although disliking slavery, Northerners had made few efforts to change the South’s “peculiar institution” so long as the republic was loosely articulated, but with the sections, perforce, being drawn closely together, Northerners could no longer profess indifference to the South and its institutions. Sectional differences, centring on the issue of slavery, began to appear in every American institution. During the 1840s the major national religious denominations, such as the Methodists and the Presbyterians, split over the slavery question. The Whig Party, which had once allied the conservative businessmen of the North and West with the planters of the South, divided and virtually disappeared after the election of 1852. When Douglas’s bill opened up to slavery Kansas and Nebraska—land that had long been reserved for the westward expansion of the free states—Northerners began to organize into an antislavery political party, called in some states the Anti-Nebraska Democratic Party, in others the People’s Party, but in most places, the Republican Party.

Charles Sumner was attacked

Events of 1855 and 1856 further exacerbated relations between the sections and strengthened this new party. Kansas, once organized by Congress, became the field of battle between the free and slave states in a contest in which concern over slavery was mixed with land speculation and office seeking. A virtual civil war broke out, with rival free- and slave-state legislatures both claiming legitimacy (see also Bleeding Kansas). Disputes between individual settlers sometimes erupted into violence. A proslavery mob sacked the town of Lawrence on May 21, 1856. On May 24–25 John Brown led a small party in a raid upon some proslavery settlements on Pottawatomie Creek, murdered five men in cold blood and left their gashed and mutilated bodies as a warning to the enslavers. Not even the U.S Capitol was safe from the violence. On May 22 Preston Brooks, a South Carolina congressman brutally attacked Sen Charles Sumner of Massachusetts at his desk in the Senate chamber because he had presumably insulted Brooks’s “honour” in a speech he had given in support of Kansas abolitionists. The 1856 presidential election made it clear that voting was becoming polarized along sectional lines. Though James Buchanan, the Democratic nominee,

The Dred Scott case

The following year, the Supreme Court of the United States tried to solve the sectional conflicts that had baffled both the Congress and the president. Hearing the case of Dred Scott, an enslaved Missourian who claimed freedom on the ground that his master had taken him to live in free territory, the majority of the court, headed by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, found that African Americans were not citizens of the United States and that Scott hence had no right to bring suit before the court. Two Northern antislavery judges on the court bitterly attacked Taney’s logic and his conclusions. Acclaimed in the South, the Dred Scott decision was condemned and repudiated throughout the North.

Seward, William H.

Many Americans, North and South, had come to the conclusion that slavery and freedom could not much longer coexist in the United States by this point. For Southerners the answer was withdrawal from a Union that no longer protected their rights and interests; they had talked of it as early as the Nashville Convention of 1850, when the compromise measures were under consideration, and now more and more Southerners favoured secession. For Northerners the remedy was to change the social institutions of the South; few advocated immediate or complete emancipation of enslaved people, but many felt that the South’s “peculiar institution” must be contained. In 1858 William H. Seward, the leading Republican of New York, spoke of an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery; and in Illinois a rising Republican politician, Abraham Lincoln, who unsuccessfully contested Douglas for a seat in the Senate, announced that “this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”

The Harper’s Ferry area

That it was not possible to end the agitation over slavery became further apparent in 1859 when on the night of October 16, John Brown, who had escaped punishment for the Pottawatomie massacre, staged a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia), designed to free enslaved people and overthrow the Southern government. Even though Brown was promptly captured and enslaved people in Virginia gave no heed to his appeals, Southerners feared that this was the beginning of organized Northern efforts to undermine their social system. The fact that Brown was a fanatic and an inept strategist whose actions were considered questionable even by abolitionists did not lessen Northern admiration for him.

Campaign for the 1860 presidential election

The presidential election of 1860 occurred, therefore, in an atmosphere of great tension. Southerners, determined that their rights should be guaranteed by law, insisted upon a Democratic candidate who would protect slavery in the territories; and they rejected Stephen A. Douglas, whose popular-sovereignty doctrine left the question in doubt, in favor of John C. Breckinridge. Douglas ran on a separate Democratic ticket from the elder conservatives who deplored all agitation but advanced no solutions. The Republicans confident of success passed over Seward’s claims and nominated Lincoln instead. Voting in the subsequent election was along markedly sectional patterns with Republican strength confined almost completely to the North and West. Though Lincoln received only a plurality of the popular vote he was an easy winner in the Electoral College.

Civil War politics and secession, 1860–65

War is on its way

In the South, Lincoln’s election was taken as the signal for secession, and on December 20, South Carolina became the first state to withdraw from the Union. Promptly the other states of the lower South followed. Meanwhile, strenuous efforts in Washington to work out another compromise failed.

Inauguration of Jefferson Davis

Neither extreme Southerners, now intent upon secession, nor Republicans, intent upon reaping the rewards of their hard-won election victory, were really interested in compromise. On February 4, 1861—a month before Lincoln could be inaugurated in Washington—six Southern states (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana) sent representatives to Montgomery, Alabama, to set up a new independent government. Delegates from Texas soon joined them. With Jefferson Davis of Mississippi at its head, the Confederate States of America came into being and issued its own money. It raised its own taxes and flew its own flag. Not until May 1861 did the new government transfer its capital to Richmond.

1861, Fort Sumter

Faced with a fait accompli, Lincoln was prepared to conciliate the South in every way but one: he would not recognize that the Union could be divided. The test of his determination came early in his administration, when he learned that the Federal troops under Maj. Robert Anderson in Fort Sumter, South Carolina—then one of the few military installations in the South still in Federal hands—had to be promptly supplied or withdrawn. After agonized consultation with his cabinet, Lincoln determined that supplies must be sent even if doing so provoked the Confederates into firing the first shot.

War’s political course

The Union and Confederacy fought for four years in the most titanic war in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

Learn more about Copperhead’s opposition to Abraham Lincoln during the U.S. presidential election of 1864.

Both presidents at first relied upon volunteers to man the armies, and both administrations were poorly prepared to arm and equip the hordes of young men who flocked to the colours in the initial stages of the war. As the fighting progressed, both governments reluctantly resorted to conscription—the Confederates first, in early 1862, and the Federal government more slowly, with an ineffective measure of late 1862 followed by a more stringent law in 1863. Both governments pursued an essentially laissez-faire policy in economic matters, with little effort to control prices, wages, or profits. Only the railroads were subject to close government regulation in both regions; and the Confederacy, in constructing some of its own powder mills, made a few experiments in “state socialism.”

Even toward slavery, despite pressure from abolitionists, the administration of Lincoln was not initially disposed to disturb the “peculiar institution.”

Towards emancipation

Gradually, however, under the pressure of war, both governments moved to end slavery; Lincoln came to see that emancipation of African Americans would favourably influence European opinion toward the Northern cause, might deprive the Confederates of their productive labour force on the farms, and would add much-needed recruits to the Federal armies. In September 1862 he issued his preliminary proclamation of emancipation, promising to free all enslaved persons in rebel territory by January 1, 1863, unless those states returned to the Union; and when the Confederates remained obdurate, he followed it with his promised final proclamation. A natural accompaniment of emancipation was the use of African American troops; by the end of the war, the number of Blacks who served in the Federal armies totaled 178,895. Uncertain of the constitutionality of his Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln urged Congress to abolish slavery by constitutional amendment; but this was not done until January 31, 1865, with the Thirteenth Amendment. The actual ratification did not take place until after the war.

Meanwhile the Confederacy, though much more slowly, was also inexorably drifting in the direction of emancipation. The South’s desperate need for troops caused many military men, including Robert E. Lee, to demand the recruitment of Blacks; finally, in March 1865 the Confederate congress authorized the raising of African American regiments. Though a few Blacks were recruited for the Confederate armies, none actually served in battle because surrender was at hand. In yet another way Davis’s government showed its awareness of slavery’s inevitable end when, in a belated diplomatic mission to seek assistance from Europe, the Confederacy in March 1865 promised to emancipate enslaved people in return for diplomatic recognition. Nothing came of the proposal, but it is further evidence that by the end of the war both North and South realized that slavery was doomed.

Dissatisfaction among sections

As war leaders, both Lincoln and Davis came under severe attack in their own sections. Both had to face problems of disloyalty from different groups of people. In Lincoln’s case, the Irish immigrants to the eastern cities and the Southern-born settlers of the northwestern states were especially hostile to African Americans and, therefore, to emancipation, while many other Northerners became tired and disaffected as the war dragged on interminably. Residents of the Southern hill country, where slavery never had much of a foothold, were similarly hostile toward Davis. Furthermore, in order to wage war, both presidents had to strengthen the powers of central government which led to more integration and friction between different parts of the country. Both administrations were vigorously attacked by state governors who resented the encroachment upon their authority and who strongly favoured local autonomy.

The extent of Northern dissatisfaction was indicated in the congressional elections of 1862, when Lincoln and his party sustained a severe rebuff at the polls, and the Republican majority in the House of Representatives was drastically reduced. Similarly in the Confederacy, the congressional elections of 1863 went so strongly against the administration that Davis was able to command a majority for his measures only through the continued support of representatives and senators from the states of the upper South, which were under control of the Federal army and consequently unable to hold new elections.

Lincoln and McClellan meet in the general’s tent during the Battle of Antietam

As late as August 1864, Lincoln despaired of his reelection to the presidency and fully expected that the Democratic candidate, General George B. McClellan, would defeat him. Davis, at about the same time, was openly attacked by Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy. But Federal military victories, especially William Tecumseh Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, greatly strengthened Lincoln; and, as the war came to a triumphant close for the North, he attained new heights of popularity. Davis’s administration, on the other hand, lost support with each successive defeat; and in January 1865, Confederate congress insisted that Davis make Robert E. Lee the supreme commander of all Southern forces-some (it is clear) would have preferred to make the general dictator.

Donald David Herbert

Civil War combat

Following the Confederate capture of Fort Sumter, both sides quickly began raising and organizing armies. On July 21, 1861, some 30,000 Union troops marching toward the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, were stopped at Bull Run (Manassas) and then driven back to Washington D.C., by Confederates under Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard. The shock of defeat galvanized the Union which called for 500,000 more recruits. Gen. George B. McClellan was given the job of training the Union’s Army of the Potomac

The Battle of Shiloh – Battle of Antietam: Confederate dead – Battle of Corinth: Confederate dead

The first major campaign of the war was in February 1862 when the Union general Ulysses S. Grant captured the Confederate strongholds of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in western Tennessee; this action was followed by the Union general John Pope’s capture of New Madrid, Missouri, a bloody but inconclusive battle at Shiloh (Pittsburg Landing), Tennessee, on April 6–7, and the occupation of Corinth and Memphis, Tennessee, in June. Also in April, the Union naval commodore David G. Farragut gained control of New Orleans. In the East, McClellan launched a long-awaited offensive with 100,000 men in another attempt to capture Richmond. Opposed by Lee and his able lieutenants Jackson and J.E. Johnston, McClellan moved cautiously and was turned back at the Second Battle of Bull Run (August 29–30). Lee drove another Union army out of Virginia and invaded Maryland. McClellan was able to check Lee’s forces at Antietam (or Sharpsburg, September 17).

Battlefield of Gettysburg – Battle of Chancellorsville

Tennessee’s Lookout Mountain

Burnside was in turn replaced as commander of the Army of the Potomac by Gen. Joseph Hooker, who attempted to outflank Lee’s position at Chancellorsville, Virginia, but was completely outmaneuvered (May 1-5) and forced to retreat. Lee then undertook a second invasion of the North. He entered Pennsylvania, and a chance encounter of small units developed into a climactic battle at Gettysburg (July 1-3), where the new Union commander, Gen. George G. Meade, commanded defensive positions. Lee’s forces were repulsed at the Battle of Gettysburg and fell back into Virginia. At nearly the same time, a turning point was reached in the West. After two months of masterly maneuvering, Grant captured Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 4, 1863. Soon the Mississippi River was entirely under Union control, effectively cutting the Confederacy in two. In October, after a Union army under Gen. W.S. Rosecrans had been defeated at Chickamauga Creek, Georgia (September 19-20), Grant was called to take command in that theatre. Ably assisted by William Sherman and Gen. George Thomas, Grant drove Confederate general Braxton Bragg

Atlanta railroad wrecked by Union soldiers during the American Civil War

Gaines’ Mill: Battles of Cold Harbor

In March 1864, Lincoln gave Grant supreme command of the Union armies. Grant took personal command of the Army of the Potomac in the east and soon formulated a strategy of attrition based upon Union’s overwhelming superiority in numbers and supplies. He began to move in May, suffering extremely heavy casualties in the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, all in Virginia. By mid-June, he had Lee pinned down in fortifications before Petersburg, Virginia. For nearly 10 months the siege of Petersburg continued, while Grant slowly closed around Lee’s positions. Meanwhile, Sherman faced the only other Confederate force of consequence in Georgia. Sherman captured Atlanta early in September and in November he set out on his 300-mile march through Georgia leaving a swath of devastation behind him. He reached Savannah on December 10 and soon captured that city.

Surrender of Appomattox Court House

The army of Lee was thinned by casualties and desertions by March 1865. On April 1, Grant began the final advance at Five Forks, captured Richmond on April 3, and accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9. Sherman had moved north into North Carolina by April 26, and he had received the surrender of J.E. Johnston on April 26. The war was over.

Merrimack-Monitor Battle

Naval operations during the Civil War were generally secondary to the war on land, though there were some celebrated exploits. Farragut was justly hailed for his actions at New Orleans and at Mobile Bay (August 5, 1864), and the battle of the ironclads Monitor and Merrimack (March 9, 1862) is often held to have opened the modern era of naval warfare. For the most part, however, the naval war was one of blockade as the Union attempted to stop the Confederacy’s commerce with Europe.

Affaires étrangères

Charles Francis Adams

Many Confederates, including Davis, hoped Great Britain and possibly France would recognize their independence and intervene directly in the war on their behalf. In spite of Lincoln, Seward, and Charles Francis Adams’ skillful diplomacy, as well as the failure of the Confederate military at a crucial time of the war, they were cruelly disappointed.

The Union’s first trouble with Britain came when Capt. Charles Wilkes halted the British steamer Trent on November 8, 1861 and forcibly removed two Confederate envoys, James M. Mason and John Slidell, bound for Europe. Only the eventual release of the two men prevented a diplomatic rupture with Lord Palmerston’s government in London. Another crisis erupted between the Union and England when the Alabama, built in the British Isles, was permitted upon completion to sail and join the Confederate navy, despite Adams’s protestations. And when word reached the Lincoln government that two powerful rams were being constructed in Britain for the Confederacy, Adams reputedly sent his famous “this is war” note to Palmerston, and the rams were seized by the British government at the last moment.

The diplomatic crisis of the Civil War came after Lee’s striking victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run in late August 1862 and subsequent invasion of Maryland. The British government was set to offer mediation of the war and, if this was refused by the Lincoln administration (as it would have been), forceful intervention on behalf of the Confederacy. Only a victory by Lee on Northern soil was needed, but he was stopped by McClellan in September at Antietam, the Union’s most needed success. The Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg the following summer ensured that Britain and France stayed neutral, particularly when Russia seemed inclined to favour the Northern cause. Even the growing British shortage of cotton from the Southern states did not force Palmerston’s government into Davis’s camp, particularly when British consuls in the Confederacy were more closely restricted toward the close of the war. In the final act, even the Confederate offer to abolish slavery in early 1865 failed to win British recognition.

The aftermath

The war was horribly costly for both sides. The Federal forces sustained more than a half million casualties (including nearly 360,000 deaths); the Confederate armies suffered about 483,000 casualties (approximately 258,000 deaths). Both governments, after strenuous attempts to finance loans, were obliged to resort to the printing press to make fiat money. While separate Confederate figures are lacking, the war finally cost the United States more than $15 billion. The South, especially, where most of the war was fought and which lost its labour system, was physically and economically devastated.

Hassler, Warren W.