America at 250

Having won their little war, the founders convened a constitutional convention in Philadelphia to take on a new challenge: turning Enlightenment principles into an enduring political structure. Using a blueprint from James Madison (pictured), they eventually settled on a republican system with three branches of government each checking and balancing the power of the others. The constitution’s framers also wrote in protections for slavery. Some northern delegates who opposed the institution on principle nonetheless yielded to their southern, slaveholding colleagues for the sake of unity. In doing so they ensured that slavery would endure for generations. An ideal that the constitution’s northern and southern framers could agree on was a national executive strong enough to be effective but not so strong that it would descend into tyranny. This was the original No Kings movement (though the French Revolution would soon go a little harder on that point).

The first ballot for president was, like modern elections, conducted via the odd institution of the electoral college, rather than by a direct popular vote. In virtually all other ways it was unrecognisable to anyone following American politics today: there was no public campaign, not even a Swift Boat advertisement painting Washington’s crossing of the Delaware in a nefarious light. There was no sweating the count on election night either. Having led the Continental Army to victory, Washington was a shoo-in for the presidency (even as he claimed not to want the job). He was selected on all 69 electoral-college ballots that were cast; John Adams, marked on 34 ballots (each elector could list two names), became vice-president. Only one presidential election has been decided unanimously since: Washington’s own re-election.

The Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, transformed the constitution from a merely republican charter into a liberal one, enshrining freedoms of speech, religion and due process, to name but a few. The authors’ vague language ensured that Americans, among them Supreme Court justices, would still be arguing about it 250 years later. Even the use of punctuation is the subject of intense legal debate. In the 21st century the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, reached in part on its placement of commas, ensures that individual Americans, and not just militias, have a constitutional right to own guns. The founders could scarcely have imagined AR-15s.

By 1790 the founders were still arguing over how much power the central government should have. The Broadway musical “Hamilton” told the story through epic rap battles between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. (The actual debates were not conducted in verse.) Hamilton was a New Yorker, the first treasury secretary—and our kind of guy. He wanted a strong federal government that paid its debts (that’s also very much our thing). Jefferson was a Virginian farmer, a slaveholder and the first secretary of state. He argued for states’ rights, fearing that centralisation would bring tyranny. Hamilton won, and thankfully that was the last time there was any disagreement about federal power in American history.

An early reactionary moment in America arrived in 1798. Those excitable French were in the midst of revolution. Tensions between France and America were high. President John Adams’s Federalist Party viewed its critics at home—namely pro-French Jeffersonians—as potential traitors. With Adams’s support Congress (pictured in its natural state) passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, four laws giving the president power to deport “dangerous” foreigners and making it a crime to publish “false, scandalous and malicious writing” about the government. They were used to silence opposition journalists and pamphleteers. One tell that they were undemocratic and illiberal was that Congress set two of the laws to expire on Adams’s last day as president in March 1801. The controversy helped Jefferson win the race to succeed Adams as president, and hastened the decline of the Federalist Party.

Donald Trump could learn a thing or two from Jefferson. While today’s president muses about acquiring Greenland, Jefferson doubled the size of America in a single transaction. In 1803, after negotiations with Napoleon Bonaparte, he purchased the vast Louisiana Territory from France for $15m ($314m in today’s dollars). The tract of land stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and encompassed 828,000 square miles, or more than 20% of modern America.

The Louisiana Purchase secured land for the yeoman farmers whom Jefferson considered the backbone of the country. But he also worried that the deal might be unconstitutional. He himself had long argued that the federal government had no power not explicitly granted by the constitution, and the charter said nothing about buying half a continent. The deal was made using executive power—on Hamiltonian terms.

Talk about Trumpian. Having declared war on Britain in 1812, America invaded Canada, expecting to be greeted as liberators from British oppression. (They were not.) The war itself had been triggered by Britain’s repeated interference in American affairs: on the western front, aiding Native Americans’ resistance to US territorial expansion; on the eastern front, interdicting American ships and pressing sailors into the Royal Navy to fight in the Napoleonic wars.

Britain notoriously set fire to the White House, but America in many respects “won” the War of 1812, as the British thereafter left the North American mainland largely to American ambitions. Native Americans were doomed to military subjugation. The war also made a national hero and future presidential contender of Andrew Jackson, who won the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.

At the time of America’s founding, an estimated 500,000 of the roughly 2.5m people living in the 13 colonies were enslaved—about one in five Americans. By 1800 that number had risen to nearly 900,000. In the South, just before the civil war, enslaved people made up more than one-third of the population. Slavery, as much as freedom, would shape America’s first century.

How did the country’s founders, so enamoured of the idea of “liberty”, justify it? Often, by applying self-serving, twisted logic to liberal principles. Some invoked the idea that property rights were essential to freedom—that is, the freedom of slaveowners to keep slaves as property. Others argued that slavery was a temporary evil worth tolerating for the sake of keeping a young country together. Still others claimed that slavery was an economic engine that the country could not do without. Many simply believed all men were not created equal, despite their soaring revolutionary rhetoric to the contrary.

Jefferson’s record on slavery was particularly troubling. Though he professed opposition in principle, he fathered several children with one of his own slaves, Sally Hemings. He also favoured extending slavery into new western states, arguing—under his peculiar theory of “diffusion”—that dispersing slaves would reduce their concentration and make emancipation less frightening to slaveholders.

Jefferson summed up these anxieties in a letter to his frequent late-in-life pen pal, John Adams, asking rhetorically: “Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?” Adams replied that slavery had been a “black cloud” hanging over the country for half a century. In 1820 the Missouri Compromise drew a line across the map, with slavery permitted below and banned above. The compromise postponed the reckoning. Slavery would endure for nearly another half-century.

Think you know your American history? Prove it in our quiz. Each month brings five new questions on the era covered in that chapter.

Native Americans already got a raw deal from the new Americans long before Jackson became president. European settlers brought with them smallpox and measles, then war and displacement. But things got a lot worse in the 1830s. Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, which Congress narrowly passed in 1830, banished 60,000 Native Americans from their ancestral lands east of the Mississippi River. A Supreme Court ruling in 1832 should have protected tribes from being kicked off their land but Jackson ignored it, a defiant precedent that would inspire future presidents. Thousands died on the forced march west, known as the “Trail of Tears”. Native Americans were given territory where they ended up, but that would later be taken from them too, as white Americans kept moving west. The term “manifest destiny”, coined in the 1840s, gave this expansion a sense of evangelical purpose: it was not only inevitable, it was divine providence.

More than 4m people came to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s—equivalent to roughly a quarter of the population in 1840. This wave of immigrants was dominated by Irish and German Catholics, a contrast to the country’s mostly Protestant, English-speaking inhabitants. Americans reacted to the influx with their traditional calm and restraint. Populist rabble-rousers spread rumours and conspiracy theories about the new arrivals. Nativist riots broke out in northern cities. Not for the last time, Americans were forced to consider whether their national identity was civic or ethnic.

In the 1840s American women were denied more than just the right to vote. Once they were married (as was expected of them) women had no rights to money, property or much else. Their personhood simply dissolved into their husband’s, under laws of “coverture”. This began to change with a gathering at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. Attendees signed Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments”, which called for women to be given the right to vote as well as equality in other respects, declaring, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” (Emphasis added; we wanted to make sure you noticed.)

“What a slur it is upon this self-styled model republic for its most eminent citizens to be contending as to whether slavery shall be extended or not, when other civilised nations are abolishing it unequivocally and promptly!” We wrote those words in 1849, amid a burst of American territorial expansion. The Mexican-American War (1846–48) ended with Mexico’s defeat and the United States acquiring vast western lands. That raised the question of whether slavery would be allowed in these new territories.

The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state and allowed residents of Utah and New Mexico to decide the slavery question. It also significantly toughened the Fugitive Slave Act, stripping black people of habeas corpus rights and requiring northern authorities—and citizens—to assist in the capture of (allegedly) escaped slaves. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 then allowed the newly created Kansas and Nebraska territories to decide on slavery by popular vote, ending a decades-long ban north of the 36°30′ line. Together these events transformed slavery from a regional dispute into a national crisis.

The Supreme Court may be unpopular these days. But its lowest point as an institution came in 1857 with a decision authored by Roger Taney, the chief justice, in Dred Scott v Sandford. Scott (pictured) had sued to obtain his freedom after the death of his owner. By a 7-2 vote the court ruled that black people—whether free or slave—are not and cannot be American citizens, that in fact they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect”. That meant, Taney wrote, that Scott lacked even the standing to sue. Not content with stopping there, the court also ruled that Congress had no right to ban slavery in the territories, because slaves were property and the property rights of slaveowners could not be infringed upon.

It was and remains the worst ruling in the history of the court. Northern rage at the decision fuelled the rise of a new political party, the Republicans, and of one of its members in particular, a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. You may have heard of him.

Is liberty universal or conditional? Can a majority vote away a person’s freedom—or are some rights inherent? These were the questions at the heart of the seven public debates held across Illinois between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in 1858. Lincoln, a Republican, was challenging Douglas, a powerful Democrat, for his Senate seat. The central issue was slavery, and whether it should be allowed to expand into new territories. Douglas argued for letting settlers decide. Lincoln insisted that slavery was morally wrong and incompatible with the Declaration of Independence. In the end, Douglas kept the seat, but Lincoln gained national attention. He emerged as the leading moral and intellectual opponent of slavery’s expansion—and would be elected president two years later.

After the election of Lincoln in November 1860, southern states began to secede from the union, believing that the new president-elect was determined to abolish slavery (though he had promised not to). In April 1861 soldiers of the newly formed Confederate army attacked and seized the federal stronghold of Fort Sumter in South Carolina, starting a four-year civil war.

It remains the bloodiest conflict in American history, killing up to 700,000 people, almost one-and-a-half times as many Americans as would be killed in the second world war. At the Battle of Shiloh, Ulysses Grant, a Union general and future president, remarked that you could walk in any direction to the battlefield’s edge without ever touching grass for all the bodies. The war was particularly devastating for the (white) South, where as many as one in four military-age white men died. The Confederacy lost both the war and the right to own slaves. A new, less imperfect union was born.

Early in the war, Lincoln seized on victory at Antietam to make a risky gamble. He gave the Confederacy an ultimatum: surrender by year’s end or he would abolish slavery. The South continued to fight. So on January 1st Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves within the Confederacy. Though remembered as a great moment of liberation, the declaration was more pragmatic than is sometimes remembered—slavery remained legal in the four Union states that still practised it so as not to provoke them into joining the rebels.

In November 1863 Lincoln gave what would become known as the Gettysburg address. It erased any question as to whether the war was a moral enterprise or merely an attempt to keep the states together. The 272 words Lincoln spoke that day—proclaiming that “all men are created equal” and that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth”—became enduring touchstones. The war would grind on for two more years. But after that day its purpose, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom”, was firmly established.

John Wilkes Booth certainly had a knack for drama. A famous actor and Confederate sympathiser, he first devised a harebrained scheme to kidnap Abraham Lincoln and ransom him for Southern prisoners. When that plan collapsed, he simplified the plot: shooting the president in the back of the head during a performance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. Afterwards Booth leapt from the presidential box onto the stage, apparently broke his leg, and escaped (briefly).

America had lost Lincoln at a crucial moment. The civil war was ending and Reconstruction was beginning. Lincoln, who possessed both moral clarity and an instinct for conciliation, looked an ideal leader for salving America’s wounds after the war. Instead that task fell to the more ornery, less capable Andrew Johnson.

The civil war’s wake was a period of radical change known as Reconstruction. The states ratified three amendments to the constitution. These banned slavery and enshrined citizenship for all persons born in America, putting a torch to the Dred Scott decision. Crucially they also guaranteed equal protection under the law, which would become the foundation for some of the most important Supreme Court rulings of the 20th century. With northerners in Congress and the federal military applying pressure, there was a Renaissance in the South for black people, who registered to vote in droves and about 2,000 of whom were elected to federal, state and local office in the formerly Confederate states. The southern states also rewrote their constitutions, striking down discriminatory laws, expanding women’s rights and guaranteeing a public education for all.

Tragically, Reconstruction was short-lived. Southern whites engaged in a concerted campaign of racist terror across the South, and forged political alliances with moderate Republicans to erode the federal government’s grip on their affairs. President Grant’s support for Reconstruction grew tepid, and a divided Congress pulled back as well. In 1876 the Supreme Court ruled that the new constitutional amendments applied only to actions of governments, not private individuals. The following year Rutherford Hayes, Grant’s successor, withdrew federal troops from the South. A century of white supremacist rule across the region ensued, waning only with mid-20th century civil-rights legislation.

Think you know your American history? Prove it in our quiz. Each month brings five new questions on the era covered in that chapter.

American workers rejected the idea that free markets alone could sustain liberty. They toiled long hours for low pay in unsafe conditions. Economic shocks led to mass layoffs. With little bargaining power, workers began to organise. Railroad men led the first nationwide strike in 1877. In several states governors sent in armed militia to put it down; they killed dozens of strikers.

A turning point came in 1886. On May 1st hundreds of thousands of workers struck for an eight-hour workday. Two days later police fired on strikers outside Chicago’s McCormick works, killing several. At a protest rally in Haymarket Square the next evening, an unknown assailant threw a bomb at police, who opened fire. Seven officers and at least four civilians died. In the short term the affair set off anti-labour and anti-immigrant hysteria. Several anarchists were convicted in a controversial trial; four were executed. But eventually Haymarket became a symbol of labour’s struggle. May Day acquired global meaning, and the eight-hour movement gathered momentum.

The journalist Ida Tarbell (pictured) watched with suspicion as Rockefeller’s Standard Oil dominated the petroleum business and her father, an independent oil producer and refiner, fell into financial ruin. In 1902 she began publishing a 19-part series exposing Rockefeller’s perfidies, including a scheme that helped ruin her father: colluding with railroads, which carried Standard’s oil at big discounts and paid Rockefeller a fee for every barrel of competitors’ oil they transported. (Her findings were also compiled into a book, which in 1905 we reviewed as “worthy of perusal”.) By 1911 the Supreme Court ordered the Standard Oil trust to be broken up.

Not everyone was enamoured of this new journalism of accountability. President Theodore Roosevelt (who, as we shall see later, wanted all the credit for busting trusts) cautioned journalists against becoming “the Man with the Muck-rake”. Apparently he worried that reporters would dig dirt just to sell magazines. (Outrageous, we say!) Muckraking journalists wore the label with pride and more bombshells followed.

During the civil war Congress opened America’s doors wide to immigrants. The Homestead Act granted land on the frontier to citizens and immigrants alike, and the creatively named Act to Encourage Immigration allowed employers to recruit workers from abroad. Millions came; by 1910 nearly one in seven Americans was born abroad. Irish and Germans were joined by eastern and southern Europeans, especially Italians, Poles and Russians, as well as East Asians.

But every economic shock inspired backlashes against immigrants for taking American jobs. Nativists accused Irish and German Catholics of being culturally inferior to Anglo-Saxon Protestants, prone to criminality and unsuited to the “American way of life”. (Catholics were also accused of being more loyal to the pope than to American democracy.) In 1882 Congress closed the doors first to Chinese workers, passing the Chinese Exclusion Act (the Statue of Liberty, associated with welcoming all comers, was dedicated four years later). In 1891 the Office of the Superintendent of Immigration was formed to police migration. By 1924 Congress had virtually barred migrants from outside the Americas.

On June 7th 1892 Homer Plessy, a shoemaker from New Orleans, sat down in a train car reserved for white passengers. The conductor told him to “retire to the coloured car”; Plessy refused, and was arrested. He appealed his case all the way up to the Supreme Court, arguing that Louisiana’s law requiring separate trains for black and white passengers violated the constitution’s new Reconstruction-era amendments. Segregation, his lawyer told the court, precluded equal protection under the law.

The Supreme Court disagreed, ruling in 1896, by a 7-1 vote, that Plessy was mistaken in believing that “the enforced separation of the two races stamps the coloured race with the badge of inferiority.” This decision entrenched the “Jim Crow” regime of segregation that white Southerners had begun to impose after Reconstruction. The lone dissenter in Plessy v Ferguson, Justice John Marshall Harlan, wrote that “our constitution is colour-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its citizens.” It would take nearly 60 years for the court to decide that Harlan was right after all.

By the 1890s America’s armies had run out of parts of the continent to conquer. Its factories were also churning out more than domestic markets could consume. The country looked abroad for an elegant—one might say British—solution.

Cuba, then ruled by Spain, provided an excuse for adventurism abroad. In the small island’s fight against its colonial master Americans saw their earlier selves (if they squinted). Lurid reports of Spanish atrocities in American newspapers helped stir interventionist spirits. An explosion—probably accidental—sank the USS Maine while it was in Havana harbour, providing a casus belli. American forces attacked in 1898, driving Spain out of Cuba and Puerto Rico within months. On the other side of the world, the American navy also destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila, swiping the Philippines and Guam from Spain.

The Spanish-American War made heroes of the young Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders—a cavalry unit made up of cattle ranchers, coppers and polo players. And it gave America staging posts from which to sell goods to South America and Asia. It also made America a colonial power with 10m subjects. Taxation without representation, anyone?

In 1901 an unemployed anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. One bullet ricocheted off a button on the president’s vest; but a second bullet pierced his abdomen. McKinley died eight days later. His murder was part of a global wave of assassinations by anarchists. In America suspicion of immigrants and radicals intensified; Czolgosz was executed. The Secret Service’s role in presidential protection expanded (they had been more focused on another scourge that we also abhor, counterfeit money). And Roosevelt, who was McKinley’s vice-president, would begin a historic presidency that would establish America’s conception of itself as a force for liberalism in the world.

As the writer H. L. Mencken quipped, Roosevelt “didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government.” An enthusiastic pugilist, he would box all comers. When he clashed with Big Business, he would bully it with regulators and antitrust law.

History will remember better how he flexed his muscles abroad. Motivated in part by a belief in the natural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon man, Roosevelt sent American troops overseas to expand America’s influence. His reasoning became known as the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine: that America may be forced, “however reluctantly” (raised eyebrow emoji), to exercise “an international police power”. He quadrupled spending on the navy, turning it into a modern force that would support an empire. He fomented a rebellion in Panama against Colombian rule to take control of the nascent canal project. These moves represented the “big stick” in Roosevelt’s famous expression, “Speak softly and carry a big stick”. His flair for diplomacy fulfilled the first part of that expression, winning him a Nobel peace prize for his role in mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. Rarely in all this did he bother to ask Congress for permission.

For years progressives had argued that the state—guided by science and expertise (don’t tell RFK Jr)—should be used to improve social conditions, promote equality and curb the worst excesses of the Gilded Age. In Roosevelt, they found a champion. New regulatory bodies took shape; reforms such as child-labour restrictions and workplace-safety measures gained ground. The civil service expanded and became more professional. The press called him a “trust-buster” and he proudly wore the moniker, promoting himself as a heroic smasher of corporate monopolies.

The Progressive Era had its blind spots. Many reformers were also elitists who believed in their own (genetic) superiority and moral purity, supporting literacy tests for voters, immigration restrictions and a proposed constitutional amendment banning alcohol. Segregation became more deeply entrenched, including in the civil service under one of Roosevelt’s successors, Woodrow Wilson. The state became more muscular—for better and for worse.

By the 20th century America was the world’s largest industrial economy but had an outdated financial system. Between 1836 and 1913 it had no central bank. Bankers like J.P. Morgan set interest rates. Market shocks were frequent, partly because the country lacked a formal lender of last resort when banks ran short of cash.

One crisis came in 1907, when a run on a trust company prompted a wider panic. The heroes that “came to the rescue”, wrote our correspondent, were financiers from New York City led by Morgan. He locked his peers in his library until they agreed to provide emergency liquidity. But, impressed as we were then, Americans did not need The Economist to tell them that relying on a few rich men to save a country’s financial system is foolish. The episode also dealt a blow to the populist reputation of Roosevelt. He not only fell silent about the “malefactors of great wealth” he had attacked weeks earlier; he also let Morgan’s US Steel swallow a financially distressed rival. In 1913 a congressional committee warned of the “growing concentration of money and credit in the hands of comparatively few men”. That same year Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act. A new central bank would set interest rates, sometimes lowering them and sometimes, to the great annoyance of future presidents, raising them.

Think you know your American history? Prove it in our quiz. Each month brings five new questions on the era covered in that chapter.