402: Internal Improvements - By The Eternal!

0:00 You are a den of vipers and thieves, and I intend to rout you out. And by the eternal, if I find you, I will rout you out. Andrew Jackson, a powerful quotation on banking, a tribute to him as part of an address to a group of bankers during the controversy over the second bank of the United States, 1834. So in our last episode. John Quincy Adams lost the election of 1828, and this undermined the promotion of the American system internal improvements and all the associated programs for the next 30 years. The only reform advocated by Adams to be enacted, as we mentioned in the last episode, was the establishment of a Naval Academy in 1845. Welcome to the United States of Amnesia, the podcast that reminds us of what we have forgotten. History doesn't just tell us where we've been, it shapes how we understand the present. Yet the past is never as simple as we remember it. Over time, history becomes filtered through politics, ideology, and popular myth until the original story can be hard to recognize. History may not repeat itself, per se, but it often rhymes, as Mark Twain once remarked.

1:22 Join Marshall Newman, Mike Mendenhall, and Blake Hinckley as we explore history, politics, religion, and the connections between them. By understanding the past more clearly, we can better understand the present and prepare for history's next rhyme. In this episode, we are going to discuss the state of internal improvements or lack thereof between the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 and the beginning of the Civil War in 1861. Let's start by summarizing the later careers of John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, the central figures of our last episode, who had championed the idea of internal improvements in the 1820s. I would like to kind of talk about the two participants that we focused on in our last episode and kind of bring them up to date before getting into the seventh presidency of Andrew Jackson. So following his time in the White House, John Quincy Adams became a force in the House of Representatives.

2:37 Adams took a increasingly dim view of the demands of the slave states and the legal requirements and limitations they demanded to preserve slavery. such as the right of petition, insisting on censorship of the mails for anti -slavery literature, and so forth. These attitudes and measures so enraged the representatives of the slave -holding states, things that Adams was advancing, that he was threatened with expulsion, much to his delight. Adams spent the last years of his life defending the right of people to petition their representatives in Congress, even if it dwelt on slavery. He defended enslaved members of the ship Amistad before the Supreme Court, winning them their freedom. He was opposed to the addition of Texas to the United States because he saw it as a means of expanding slavery. One of the complaints of U .S. settlers to Mexican -controlled Texas was that slavery had been abolished and they wanted to restore it. Adams died in 1848 while denouncing proposed awards to participants in the Mexican -American War. I think an interesting aspect, too, of John Quincy Adams' career, he's the only president to serve in the House after his presidency.

3:47 And he actually viewed his time in the House as being more of the apex of his career, the part of his career where he thought he did the most for the country, where he... He thought he was the most effective. He was proudest of his time in the House. He was very proud for a number of reasons. Now, I will just say this. He could be equally proud of his role as Secretary of State, where he is usually rated, if not the best Secretary of State, then in the top five. And when was he Secretary of State? He was Secretary of State under Monroe's time, which was roughly 1812, 1813, 1816 to 1824. That's right. 1816 to 1824. was very effective in terms of being a Secretary of State. He was also very effective as a diplomat before that. But his career as a member of the House of Representatives, usually people who write biographies of Adams, they either focus on one aspect of his life or the other.

4:41 It's never the presidency. It's generally Secretary of State, foreign affairs, which is the first part of his life, and then post -presidency. which is his career in the House of Representatives, and he liked it. He really enjoyed himself, and he said that his election, one of his elections by the people of Haverhill and other cities in Massachusetts was more gratifying to him than anything else in his career because it was genuinely done. It showed that he has popular appeal in Massachusetts there, and this represented the people actually rallying to his position. And for him, he never was really much into politicking.

5:30 He was more about, I'm going to give you the arguments. These are sound arguments. Listen to them or not at your peril. He was interested in policy, not politics. That's right. And he kind of viewed party politics, he was worse at it than Clay was because he just viewed it as too shoddy for him to get down in the mud and deal with any of this stuff. I understand. Ironically, as Adams was dying, he was brought into a Capitol Hill anteroom and he asked to meet with Henry Clay so they could exchange a few last words. He was actually carried into that ante room by several younger congressmen, including a Whig congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, who we will encounter extensively in our next episode.

6:24 Henry Clay, who was a huge advocate for internal improvements, he was John Quincy Adams's... Secretary of State. And so with Adams' defeat, Clay is going to try to advance this program as a member of the Senate, which is where he's going to exist up until 1850 in the course of this story. He's a senator from Kentucky, is that right? Senator from Kentucky. Now, what we're going to see in this is it's not so much, even though we're talking about principles, it's actually the thing that's going to undermine Clay's ability to be able to enact these principles and these measures is more a question of political organizing skills.

7:11 Martin Van Buren, I know people think of him as a mediocre president. He was, but... He was a superb political genius, probably one of the great geniuses in American politics and totally underrated. As a political organizer. As a political organizer. Clay may have understood the operations of institutions like the House and the Senate. He was elected. immediately when he joined the House of Representatives as a speaker, as a freshman member of Congress. And he was a truly influential member of the Senate for most of his career when he was serving there. But he's hopeless at dealing with electioneering politics and putting on a truly national campaign and understanding vote counting and other particulars. that will appeal to the masses during all the times that he runs for president. His Whig Party, which he established to oppose Jackson and Van Buren and subsequent Democrats, only managed to win an election when it had a truly charismatic figure. That charismatic figure is never Henry Clay. What we're going to be looking at today... is the other side of internal improvements, what the states' right -centric approach in the age objection resulted in, and how its shortcomings paved the way for a rebound of the programs advocated by Clay and Adams during the Civil War. Adams and Clay did

8:41 continue to have political careers even after the end of the Adams administration. Clay was a perennial and unsuccessful candidate for the presidency. and continue to try to advance his vision for the future economic well -being of the United States and to oppose Jackson and his efforts to put forth his different vision. He will continue to be a major force in the Senate and his party throughout most of the years preceding the Civil War. His last significant act being the Compromise of 1850, which provided slavery in three states with a means to delay the outbreak of the Civil War for 10 years. Let's turn our attention to the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, war hero, savior of the nation in some circles. In the War of 1812. In the War of 1812. And his political fixer, Martin Van Buren. Martin Van Buren held a number of positions under Andrew Jackson, and each one kind of represented a greater confidence towards him. Van Buren wasn't necessarily a big supporter of Jackson during his initial run for the presidency, but Jackson inspired him. Van Buren was looking for some

10:15 way to create a political structure that would unite the North and the South. And with him, And Jackson, he kind of found the magic secret sauce here to make the modern Democratic Party a modern party with all the accoutrements of a modern political party. Political parties, they did exist before the election of 1828 when Van Buren set about organizing the Democratic Party. But they were not nearly as organized as they would become in the years between 1828 and Parties became more national. This was part of Van Buren's image. He could structure a whole national organization around the heroic general, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans. There were rallies, and it's more national, less local in character. Usually parties... focused on local issues, involved local leaders. This became a matter of slogans, parades, and all sorts of rallies that were designed to build enthusiasm because the franchise was expanding and Van Buren understood that and he understood the significance of it. So how was the franchise expanding at this point? Well, it used to be that in order to vote, you had to have a certain amount of property. in land, to be a voter. And also, the

11:47 issue that existed was that many states, six states, in the election of 1824, six states actually had their delegates to the electoral college decided at the legislative level. So you didn't really have popular, it wasn't really, presidential election wasn't really a popular It was a movement that became popular, became more razzmatazz, more show business -y by the standards of the time than it had been before when you're dealing with, OK, we need to go in and do caucuses in the state legislature in order to get these people to vote for our slate of delegates in the Electoral College. So the whole character is changing.

12:40 Also, property requirements, as you're expanding westward, property requirements become less meaningful to people. And then there's also a genuine ideological push to allow popular election of the electors to the electoral college that occurs in the early part of the 19th century. The founders originally intended for the electors in the electoral college to choose the president. The election, I guess you could think of it like a primary election nowadays. It informs the electors of what the people from their state think in terms of how the vote came out. But the electors were under no obligation in those days to vote the way the majority in their state voted. So you could have faithless electors, as they were called, which were the electors who voted against the majority of their state in terms of the electors vote for. for president. Now that has evolved over the decades and centuries since to the point now where most states require, if not all states, require the electors to just vote the way the majority in their state voted. There are a couple of exceptions. Maine and Nebraska, I think, are the two which actually divide their electors up according to a percentage of the popular vote, how it came out. But those are the only two.

13:59 The rest require, it's an all or nothing. but the electorate is required to vote the way the majority in the state did. So technically, it's still the electoral college that chooses the president, of course, not the popular vote. And for that reason, it's possible to have a president win without winning the popular vote, which has happened recently. Many times. But at least... Marshall, I think what you're saying is at least at this time, it's still very much in its infancy, but we're moving away from strictly the electors deciding on their own to the popular vote actually having something more influential to do with how they vote. Or the electors being selected by the people as opposed to the state legislature.

14:45 So this practice continued. It more or less went away, but it continued in South Carolina up until the Civil War. The practice of using the legislature to pick them. Yes. So, I mean, it kind of shows you, you know, just how much elite control. was enacted in South Carolina as opposed to, say, other states like New York. New York actually moved into popular election during this period. It was all a matter of just what the mechanics of getting somebody elected president from a state involved you the year before working to get people who supported your candidate. into the state legislature. That was the election that really counted. It was not something that occurred in the actual year of the election.

15:39 The founders envisioned a system in which the states were far more powerful than I think people today would be comfortable with. Remember that the U .S. Senate was chosen by state legislatures, not by popular vote until 19, was it 16? Election was the first one where you had a popular vote for U .S. senators. The electors from the states were supposed to pick the president, right? Not necessarily the popular vote and so on and so forth. So it was very much a system where the states were supposed to have a lot of influence and the states were supposed to be able to essentially overrule all that rabble out there, you know, and the way they voted. The rabble's representation was in the House. Yes. And so the House was supposed to represent them, not the Senate. And then the states were supposed to be the ones who were represented in the presidential election, not necessarily the people, right? So that's a whole different way of looking at the role of states in our federal government. It still exists today to some extent. The states are sovereign. But you have to keep that in mind that in this era, this is a much more important aspect of the way.

16:40 of the way our political system worked. But there were more people voting, too. You said that the first few elections, only about 1 % to 2 % of the people could vote. And by John Quincy Adams, it was 8%, I think, in 1824. It had gotten up to 8%, but we're still dealing with an inexact count because not everybody's elections are occurring. On the same basis, we're not having people go to the polls like we do today in every case. We're still having people and they don't all happen on the same day. We don't have the we don't have a quote unquote election day happening back then. We have a process by which by which electors are selected by December. And those electors meet to cast votes in favor of one candidate or the other. You kind of knew how things were going to happen because most of this was done out in the public sphere. But you don't really get, you can't really say that there are people who are winning elections by popular vote until there is. you know post -civil war so there was not there was not yet a uh general election on the first tuesday after the first monday november that didn't exist yet that came later yes okay so states ran their elections whenever they wanted to yes and then the election did not bind the electorate of vote for the president necessarily and of course you have to point out as well that you had to be white and male as well as as well as property let's let's be clear about that also right i'm just going to say this Yes and no.

18:12 Okay. There are exceptions. When I was doing the research on Van Buren, black people could vote in New York. Okay. You know, provided they met a property qualification. Okay. When they got rid of the property qualification for white folks, it still existed for black folks. Ah, okay. And we're talking about tiny, tiny groups of people that are being able to vote. Yes. Lots of people. We're talking about people of means that are allowed to vote in New York State. And things vary. I mean, because states get to determine at this point who gets to vote. The states run the election just as they do today. They are the ones who determine how elections occur. And it's hard to overstate the importance of property to people in those days. It might sound, well, it does sound incredibly elitist to say only property people can vote. But it wasn't just that people were trying to be elite. There's another idea that if you didn't have a stake in society, you didn't have a reason to care what happened in society, which they based on the concept of if you have property. You care about the value of the property. You care about the safety of the property and all that, right?

19:24 You care about whether the property is profitable to you, whatever the issues are. If the state is stable. Yeah. So you have a stake in society that makes you vote responsibly. But if you don't have that stake in society as measured by property, how can I trust you to vote responsibly for things? You're just going to vote for whatever's on your mind. You're going to act like a rabble. That was how they would look at it back in those days. That's why those property requirements existed. It's a very different way from the way we look at it now, but it really matters. Also, there was kind of this underlying feature that if you don't own property, you don't really have the leisure to acquaint yourself with the issues. Now, I'm just going to say this. That's a nice theory, but very few elections, even when we're dealing with property people doing a lot of the voting and legislatures doing a lot of the voting, we don't really get a lot of issues cropping up. in elections. They become contests about personalities. And I'm just going to say this.

20:24 In the election of 1960, Joseph Kennedy said that he was going to sell JFK like a box of soap flakes. Well, this was nothing new, selling somebody on just an emotional appeal. This was very much the meat and drink of politics in the age of Jackson, in the period that we're looking at in this podcast. So selling politicians like commodities, again, with fireworks and displays and clubs and all these other things, slogans that really mean nothing, but they're just catchy. Tippecanoe and Tyler, too. What does that mean?

21:06 So not much has changed. Not much has changed. I was thinking the same thing. Not much has changed. Despite this, despite the fact that politics and elections are being waged on personality and selling candidates like commodities, there are profound ideological differences between the Democrats and the Whigs. And I would like to go into some of that right now. So we'll start with the Democrats. They distrusted federal authority.

21:52 You know, in a sense, this harkens back to the old anti -federalist. They favored states' rights. They favored the yeoman farmer of Thomas Jefferson's imagination. They wanted minimal federal intervention. involved in the life of the country. They wanted low tariffs, and these were mainly for revenue because there was no income tax back then, and this was how you funded the federal government. But with low tariffs, you're not going to be funding a lot. And also, as we talked about last time, they saw the Constitution as clearly permitting the levying of tariffs in order to raise revenue. Yes. But they saw it as illegal. under the Constitution to use tariffs to protect industries. Now, this is true, but it's like the language actually just says you can have tariffs. It does not imply that the motivation is something that is specifically authorized, but their read of this was most definitely if you're going to have tariffs, they've got to be there just for revenue and only for revenue.

22:58 It was their interpretation of what that clause. We're going to get into that because there's some interesting interpretations where the Democrats come off as being, OK, we're going to be strict constructionalists on the Constitution. But they're going to be doing stuff that isn't really talked about either. And it's just assumed, just as it's assumed that you can have a national bank by the part of the Whigs. And actually, the Supreme Court said you could. Well, and for those who haven't listened to our last episode yet, first off, you should go back and listen to it. But second, just to make sure that everybody knows, so strict constructionism is the philosophy of the Constitution, which argues that unless the Constitution specifically permits the federal government to do something, then the federal government may not do it. It can only do what's specifically written down in the Constitution.

23:50 And that's as opposed to the other philosophy, which is called loose or broad constructionism. which argues that under the general welfare clause of the Constitution and also under the interstate regulation of commerce that the Constitution permits the federal government to engage in, it actually allows the federal government to do many things that aren't written down specifically in the Constitution. And so that push and pull exists in our country as all along, it still does today. And a lot of these issues were coming to a head back in the era that we're talking about. I would argue that both, both sides, They want their cake and they want to be able to eat it, too, in the sense that they will argue that certain things are not permitted under the Constitution because they're not explicitly stated as such, but they'll do them anyway. Right. So if the Constitution doesn't say you can do something I don't like, then that means you can't do it.

24:42 Yeah. But if I want to do something I do like and the Constitution doesn't mention it, well, then that's fine to do. Yes, exactly. Both sides are going to do this. Let's be clear about this. You know, the thing about the Democrats, the Democrats, again, are opposed to this national bank. So we're going to get into a little bit of that. supported an expansion of executive power, which is kind of contradictory. I was just going to say that, yeah. Yeah, I mean, they liked the idea of a powerful chief executive like Jackson. But they were big on states' rights. They're big on states' rights. And they opposed the National Bank. Yes. But they wanted a strong executive. Yes, and we're going to see, when you have a two -party system, People just tend to take these positions almost in opposition to the other side, whether it makes sense or not, ideologically, whether it's ideologically consistent. Democrats placed a great deal of emphasis also on the will of the people, and the president as the executor of the will of the people. They tended to denounce the opinions of experts as elitist. very much opposed to elitism, which we all know is a bad thing, even though it's not really fully defined. This all sounds very familiar to me. Yes, it does. But see, this is also a product of Andrew Jackson being a Westerner, I think, to a degree, and opposed to Eastern elites. Well, but he's being helped. He is being helped by an Eastern elite. He's being helped

26:15 by the gentleman who was the governor of New York. So there's a lot of window dressing that's going on. I am shocked by the hypocrisy that you're describing to us. Yes. Just shocked. We would never see something like that today. No, we would never see somebody... I mean, Van Buren, you know, when he was in office, he had a reputation, second maybe only to Chester Arthur, for being a high liver who liked gourmet food and lived in palatial splendor. Supposedly there was a rumor that he ate off of gold dishes as well.

26:58 But he was a man of the people. He tried to be, but he was better behind the scenes. Was he viewed as a man of the people? No. No, okay. No, he was not. In fact, there were actually comments about him as being just too elite. And this is fair. I mean, one of the positions that he got under Jackson was that he was going to be ambassador to the United Kingdom, to Great Britain. And he loved the idea. He loved being over in the center of civilization like London and just glorying in it, glorying in all the opportunities, the culture, the high living, the higher standard of living that he would get over in the United States. And then he had to come back because his position was not ratified by the Congress.

27:47 He was not approved, but he enjoyed his time over there reportedly. And he wasn't – I've been to his house. He is not somebody who is living this sort of basic ascetic life. He liked his comforts. He liked his high -living lifestyle there. So we can – and I would argue that all of the people that we're going to be looking at – and are going to be prominent in this period, none of them is running around trying to lead a simpler life and live amongst the people. They're all trying to advance themselves if they come from humble beginnings, or they're trying to do better if they don't. That's also shocking.

28:29 That's also shocking. Isn't it? So let's talk about the Whigs here, our elite friends, the Whigs. They wanted a more involved federal government. And in a way, they're the ideological descendants of the Federalists who, again, like the federal government, were fond of the federal government. They also felt the government had a need to support and promote economic growth. So a lot of these people are involved in industry. They're involved in trade. So you're saying they're successors of the Federalist Party. But would you also say they're successors of Adams and Clay? Yes, they are. Well, they're definitely Clay. The same things, right? Definitely Clay, yeah. Okay. I mean, Clay is— Just to be clear about that. Clay organized the federalist—organized the Whig party.

29:21 The Whigs, right. So he was carrying forward his ideas. Yes. And they— After the election of Jackson, they still wanted a national bank. There were several attempts after Jackson's election and after the second bank was dechartered to reestablish it. So Jackson was elected in 1828, took office in 1829. The second bank of the United States lost its charter in 1836. Yes. I'm just from the bank, more or less making it irrelevant. So Jackson in his first term wasn't successfully getting rid of the second bank, although he tried to block it as best he could. But after his reelection in 1832, then he really took action to get rid of the bank and succeeded that time. Yeah, he felt like he had the mandate at this point. Yeah, so it was dechartered in 1836 after 20 years in existence. And then it didn't actually completely disappear, but it withered away over the next few years. Yes. Because Jackson took all the money out of it. We'll get into that. Yes. The Whigs also favored protective tariffs, and they sought to implement them. Now, these tariffs were not constructed as a means to take revenge on trading partners. As is the case today. As is the case today. And such an idea would be seen at the time and even later as insane. But these were there to promote the establishment of American industry. Tariffs were placed on

30:51 things that America was trying to produce. There wouldn't be a tariff as we have today on coffee because we didn't grow coffee. There was no economic interest in putting this in. There was no native coffee industry to kind of promote. Tariffs can be useful under certain circumstances if, in fact, they will promote industry. We talked about this in the America First series. Yes. Remember that. It's not that tariffs are illogical or necessarily inherently a bad idea. They can be a good idea. But if you're a developing country that needs to give its industries an incentive to grow, then you can have protective tariffs to make their goods more competitive in your domestic market. In the initial stages, yeah.

31:33 There's nothing inherently wrong with that. If they get too high, it could be destructive. You can argue back and forth about the details. But it makes sense inherently. But if you're using it as a means of revenge against countries you don't like, That's a whole different mentality about it. And if by doing that you put a tariff on something your country doesn't produce, then you're not protecting your own industries in any way because you don't have that industry. All you're doing is making everything more expensive for your own population. Who winds up bearing the burden of paying that? It's a tax. It's a tax. It's a tax. On consumption is what it is. At some point, it's probably good to take off a protective tariff because if an industry is going to be competitive overseas, if you're going to try and export anything, you kind of need to have it capable of... competing with its overseas and that's things like price when it's mature and healthy quality yes that's what you're healthy that's what you should be driving toward yes and that's what you should exactly now the kind of weird thing about what the wigs are proposing is they were activists they were advocates of a more activist federal government with congress Vice and activist president taking control. This might have been just a reaction to Jackson, but it's kind of unclear to me, looking at the literature that the Whigs have, how exactly is Congress going to be implementing policy? Congress can pass laws, but it's not clear whether or not we're looking at maybe Congress becoming something

33:04 not unlike Parliament, where you have kind of executive functions being performed by the legislature? I don't know, but it doesn't sound like a workable program. I mean, there's a lot of things I can say that are good about the Whigs, but this thing, it just seems kind of crazy. Well, let's think about that for a moment. You're right that Congress doesn't literally straightforwardly make policy, but it's also true that through the power of the purse, by directing where money gets spent and how it can be spent, Congress can directly influence policy, right? I won't fund that policy.

33:45 I'll fund this money, and you have to carry out this policy in order to use that money. Is that what they meant? Yes, but then if, say, for example, the president doesn't want to do this, one of the reasons that they're saying Congress should sort of reassert itself is they're mad because Jackson is actually using the power of the veto. to veto legislation that's made it through Congress. And this was something new. And Jackson's basically saying that I have the same right as the Supreme Court, I as president have the same right as the Supreme Court to determine whether something is constitutional or not. So when you say it was new, the veto existed under the Constitution already, but using it in this way was a new idea?

34:29 Yes. I mean, Jackson actually ended up vetoing more pieces of legislation. than any other of his predecessors combined. You know, he would be confronted with things and he'd say, no, no, no, we're not going to do that. I think it's unconstitutional. And I have a role to play in that. This is kind of at odds with how we see who judges constitutionality Supreme Court. But we're in early days for judicial review at the same time. He could have just said he thought it was unconstitutional because he didn't like it. Yeah. That always works. Well, I mean, I suppose a president can just say, look, I think this is unconstitutional, so I'm going to veto it. That doesn't make it a court. Immersed in the Constitution. That doesn't make it a court decision. It just means that's his opinion. You go to court and say, no, it's not unconstitutional and win your court case. They need to have to veto it for different reasons, not because it's unconstitutional, I suppose. You've always had this three -way struggle between the three branches of government. And it's supposed to be a struggle between the three of them. Each of them trying to look out for their own interests, each of them trying to advocate their own power. The founders thought that that would give you the best results in terms of governance. We've lately moved away from that. Yes, unfortunately. Now, some historians... And there are many great historians on dealing with the age of Jackson. And they've tended, I think, unfairly to call the Whigs elitist.

35:58 We have that word again. I think they're not necessarily elitist. It's just they don't really understand how the political system is forming up in the period that we're looking at today, which is basically 1828 to... around 1850, 1856. So the Whigs don't understand what about it? They don't understand how they can sell their ideas, how they can promote candidacies on a national basis. At one point, they run an election where they have three separate candidates for president, all under the Whig label, running in different regions. And it's just, to me, when I'm looking at this, I'm like going, Why would you do something like this? I'm looking at this from the 21st century, but they clearly had thought this would end up in the House of Representatives, which was more common back then than it is now.

36:55 And they figured that this would be a way to kind of achieve those results. Again, approaching politics not as a national phenomenon, but as a regional phenomenon. And that's how they looked at things at that period. Van Buren is looking at... national politics. And the Whigs don't actually get a sense of how that works until 1840 with William Henry Harrison and John Tyler, Tippecanoe and Tyler too, in which they have these things like rallies and slogans and parades and fireworks and illuminations. that appeal to the growing popular audience here on a national level. So are you saying then that they were described as elite, as elitist? Yes. It wasn't so much that they were elitist. It was that they didn't know how to appeal to the common man.

37:51 Yes. But Van Buren did. The Jacksonian Democrats, they did know how to appeal to the common man. The Whigs took longer to figure that out and didn't figure it out until the 1840 election. I would say they never figured it out because the only way that they ever could win an election was by having— Running a charismatic general. A charismatic winning general from the previous war. Harrison was 1812. And then you would have Zachary Taylor as well. That was the only way they seemed to be able to get candidates that could win. You know, Taylor in the Mexican War. So they would have to look for a war hero. And then even that didn't work eventually. You know, we had Winfield Scott running. Then they split and fell apart. Yes. We're getting ahead of ourselves.

38:39 We're getting ahead of ourselves. But they weren't good with the politics for a while. They never were as good. As the Democrats. I mean, the Democrats were shocked by their loss in 1840. I don't think that it should be too surprising. But they basically thought that the Whigs had learned a thing or two about how to run a successful national campaign. They had. But they hadn't got to the point where somebody who was a politician. could run and win really ever. In 1840, it was William Henry Harrison defeated Van Buren, who was running for a second term. Who was running for a second term. Right, okay. And then he only was around for 31 days, and then you had John Tyler. Harrison gave the longest inaugural address in U .S. history, like over three hours in the cold and rain. Yes.

39:26 Got sick because of it and died a month later. Mm -hmm. The shortest presidency in history. But longest inaugural address still. Longest inaugural address and shortest presidency in history, and then Taylor came in. We're getting ahead of ourselves, but I just wanted to kind of pull a string on that and make sure we all understood where we were. I mean, one observation I'd like to make, again, about how the different philosophies with the parties worked out, there's actually been kind of like a... continuing problem that say like the Whigs are having and I think it's unfair because you have activist presidents say in the 20th century like FDR and Lyndon Johnson who definitely believe in a strong executive, a strong federal government which runs counter to the traditional view of the Democratic Party in the 19th century and they hold up people like Jefferson and Jackson as exemplars. FDR built the Jefferson Monument. He thought Jefferson was the greatest president ever. He appointed people who wrote books on Jefferson to ambassadorial posts, like historian Claude Bowers. He used a biographer of Jackson, Marquis James, as a speechwriter. LBJ had portraits of both in prominent places in the White House. Big picture of FDR is over the mantelpiece in the Oval Office when he's president. So they idealize these guys who

40:59 are actually looking at kind of the opposite view of the powers of the federal government when they themselves are enhancing the powers of the federal government and going against this whole states' right process. And it's all really a matter of... of how things are presented and how things are promoted, both in history then and now. Yeah, and the parties evolve over time, don't they? The Republican Party changed in the 19th century, so that by the time you get to FDR, you have a different Republican Party from what you were going to have under Lincoln. The Democratic Party changed. We see that in our time. The Republican Party of today, led by Trump.

41:47 has nothing whatsoever in common with the Republican Party. Well, with Lincoln. Or even with the Republican Party before Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015. Up until the 60s. The 60s. But certainly until then, yeah. The 1960s. Parties evolve over time, and sometimes they completely swap positions. Yes. And we've seen this over and over again, and you always have to keep that in mind. Back to Jackson in the 1830s. Well, one last thing on this, because there are historians, reputable historians, who will advocate that parties do not change. And I will call out Arthur Schlesinger, who wrote a book that won the Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Jackson. He was the court historian under John F. Kennedy and is the author of books that are very fawning about the Kennedy family.

42:37 So this position exists. not just in politicians, but it also exists in people who have reputable historical reputations who will take these positions even though they're not really accurate if we pull the string a little bit. I don't understand that at all, but okay. So let's talk about the implementation of Jackson's vision about the banks. We started off with a quote where Jackson denounced having a national bank and denounced banks in general. This does have a long -term catastrophic impact on the finances and banking of the United States. It may be that there is a bad feeling about corruption, but from practical matters in terms of banking, not having something that could function like a central bank, which is what the Bank of the United States did, created its own set of problems, which I think are worse.

43:49 And we talked about a lot of that in the last episode. Yes. The Bank of the United States... The way that Jackson brought it up was basically withdrawing deposits that the federal government had made to the Bank of the United States and haphazardly placing those deposits in what were known as pet banks. They're state banks, though. They're state banks, though, yes. And then there was the other matter, this matter of paper money as opposed to gold and silver. He refuses to accept paper money in payment for federal land sales. In the last episode, we discussed how paper money at the time was this chaotic mess of various notes issued by different banks that weren't necessarily accepted in other states or even in other cities in the same state. We talked about that. And so we're in that era.

44:40 We are in that era. And basically what the banks are doing is not the Treasury that is issuing. They may be issuing the gold and silver, and they are basically taking payments. Federal payments are made with gold and silver. Specie. Specie. We all like that word, specie. Specie, yes. But paper money, which is more portable, that's being done by banks themselves. And so these banks, depending on the bank and the state and the regulations, New York had very stringent. State regulations for banks. That didn't mean banks didn't fail, but let's just say there were other states that were chronic about bank failure. Michigan, eventually, far away from any sort of regulatory oversight, out in the frontier, banks were failing all the time. It was just a disaster. So they had very loose regulation in other states. If you can even call it that. Maybe no regulation at all.

45:38 No regulation at all, just anarchy. So the fact that we're kind of seeing with this paper money not being used for federal land sales, this paper money business kind of has a chilling effect on the settlement of the West. Because in order to buy federal land, you need to have gold and silver, gold or silver to pay for it. This is one of the things that is kind of ceasing. But it's like you don't have commerce. that goes across a lot of state lines happening back then just because there are limits with credit. There are, there are things that happen and things that don't happen. I mean, things like the sale of cotton to the North. That can actually result in payments being done, but I would say that's probably being done with gold and silver. And relying exclusively on gold and silver just kind of causes a constriction on the economy. People are thinking that this is a better way to do business because the money's sound. Well, the reason the money's sound is gold and silver is not being issued by banks that may or may not be stable. So there's kind of like a vicious circle approach that's happening with this way of doing things. There's another issue, I think, too, that has been largely forgotten by people nowadays, which is that the reason gold and silver coins, specie, were considered so much more stable and valuable is because they had actual intrinsic

47:10 value. Yes. The idea of coin originally was that if I hand you a coin, you could weigh it. And say, well, it's this much. Because it was made out of those elements. Of gold, let's say, right? And that's where the value comes from. Yeah, it's made out of gold. I can weigh it. Okay, gold, the amount of gold in the coin is worth that much. So you could say, well, that's a dollar's worth of gold. It's a dollar coin. Whereas paper money doesn't have any value. It's a piece of paper. Now, nowadays, we don't even think about it that way anymore, really. You don't look at the quarter in your pocket as being worth a... 25 cents worth of whatever quarters are made out of silver and whatever else is in them. You don't look at it that way. A quarter is a quarter to you. And a dollar bill, when you think about it, is a piece of paper. Yet we accept it as having value. Or a piece of plastic. Well, then there's that. Because it's like, look, I'm in the stage right now where I'm not using currency.

48:01 Yeah, yeah. But I'm just saying that in those days, the whole idea we have now, the idea of paper money having real value you could rely on, let alone. credit cards and things like that with no actual money changing hands, would be completely alien to people in those days. Well, it's still purely a fiction. It's just a fiction that we all believe in. But we accept it now. We press that I believe button. Paper money is a fiction. People back then had not... You're exactly right. People then had not pressed the I believe button yet. Right. And in fact, the idea of the bank money that was being handed out was that you could go and take that, and it was like a promissory note for that amount of whatever, gold, silver, You could go back and take that back and say, no, I want my gold and silver now. Because this was more portable.

48:45 The piece of paper money in my hand was easier to carry around than a chunk of gold or silver. But it means I get to have gold and silver whenever I want it. by giving it to the bank and they have to give it to me. Only from the bank that issued it, probably. Yes, and the bank that issued it has to be stable. And again, this is a wide open field here. You know, if you're letting the states decide this, let's just say that there's plenty of corruption that is associated with banks, whether they're state or federal banks, you know, national banks like the Bank of the United States was, that... allows you, permits you to kind of maybe fudge how much specie you have on hand versus how many notes you're actually issuing. Yeah. And to some extent, a bank makes money by having more loans out there, or in this case, bank notes, than it has actual money in the vault. If it's managed properly and regulated properly, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. But if it's unregulated and the bank acts irresponsibly and just goes way out over its skis in terms of how much it's loaning out compared to how much it actually has on head, you're going to have problems. And in fact, that's exactly what happened. Yes. Over and over and over and over and over again. Up until the 1930s.

49:56 But we'll get into that in a later episode or later series, perhaps. So, Marshall, if I can ask you then. So what Jackson did, let's just be clear, is he hated the Second Bank of the United States, wanted to get rid of it. He took money out of the bank. Yeah. He really went after it in his second term. When he was reelected in 1832, his second term began in 1833. He saw this as a mandate. He saw it as a mandate. He really went after the bank. It was dechartered. He got all the money out of it. He put the money in what became known as pet banks. Yes. And that was a derogatory term for them. And the reason they were called that is that what he did was he was the founder of the spoil system that ruled the country until the Civil Service Act came along. Yes. Decades later. And we're kind of returning to that system now. But anyway, the spoil system. So he was inclined toward viewing things in terms of political loyalty, in terms of who he was going to reward. And the pet banks were his cronies. So, like I alluded to earlier...

51:01 And what he wound up doing was he was against the Second Bank of the United States because it was Eastern interests supporting other Eastern interests at the expense of the rest of the country. But then what did he do? Under his system, he put the money in the banks of his cronies so that different people would benefit, but it was still corrupt. It was just a matter of who was being corrupt and who was benefiting from that corruption. That's all he changed. The problems that he saw in the Second Bank of the United States were not changed by putting the money in these private or state banks. Which became known as pet banks, his pet banks, right? Yes. And what the federal government was deprived of, the real benefit and the reason why the Bank of the United States was rechartered is that here was something that existed that could fund things that could create credit and loans for large enterprises. which did not exist there is no federal reserve system there is no we talked we talked about in the last episode how the first bank united states the charter expired and then we went broke trying to fight the war of 1812 yes so right after the war of 1812 we chartered the second bank of the united states to solve that problem but then it was hated for the same reason the first bank was and so it got dechartered i'm going to lay down a marker and say well again without having a a a responsible means of paying the government's bills, problems will emerge if you're fighting a war to the death here. And

52:34 we will see this issue come up when we look at the Civil War in our next episode, just as a little sweetener for people to tune in next. But at this point, it seems to me that what Jackson has done is he's simply changed the problem without doing anything to fix it. Yes. Yes. So... What we have now, Jackson leaves office and Van Buren becomes the eighth president in. This is the election of 1836, and the inauguration occurs in 1837. In 1837, we have the first collapse of the U .S. economic system. The panic of 1837. Yes. And why did the panic happen? Well, it was generally driven by speculation in railroads.

53:20 That was the cause of it. But the fact that you had... Unstable banks who own some of the revenue, these banks own some of the stocks in the banks and the railroads. They ended up losing – having assets that lost value, any sort of loans that they had granted to the railroads, they could no longer be paid. And so assets disappeared. Yeah. So what – because of Jackson's policies. with a lack of regulation of state banks yes the banks then were and no national bank to yes have any influence or control anything the state banks then went hog wild yes loaning up money irresponsibly and with a lot of easy cheap credit right a lot of easy money out there people started buying up land and why it's because railroads were becoming a thing at this point And you could see the future was going to be on railroads.

54:19 So people started buying all sorts of land out west. I'm like, right, Marshall, jump in when I got this wrong. Assuming that either they were going to put a railroad through that land so you could sell it to the railroads, or you'd develop a town or something that the railroad would need as a supply point, way station, whatever, right? Yes. And so all this was going on. And there was incredible amounts of credit being handed out. But what happens when you have that much money going into circulation? What do you get? Inflation. You get big time inflation. So there was inflation going on. Inflation got to be so bad that the paper money got to be pretty much worthless. But a lot of people's assets were essentially in paper money. They weren't backed by... Well, they were in the bank. Well, in the bank. But I mean, it was being handled via paper money without that really being connected to specie anymore, right? To gold or silver, which is what really mattered in those days.

55:11 And so with the money being so worthless, Jackson then, towards the end of his presidency... Well, this doesn't happen during Jackson's presidency. Well, Jackson started requiring... Okay, yeah, yeah. No, he did. Oh, yeah, with the federal land. Jackson started requiring gold and silver payment in specie for federal lands. Well, people didn't have that. Right. So the whole thing just started to collapse. Yes. All the speculators lost their money. The banks lost the money they had loaned out irresponsibly. All of a sudden, like you were saying, Marshall, all of this money, value in the economy disappeared, just evaporated. And that's how you get a depression. Yes. And that's the Panic of 1837, which occurred right after Van Buren took office. Yes. Correct? And so Van Buren spends a lot of time trying to fix things, but he's ultimately unsuccessful in getting his vision for... for writing the economy. To me, he's the Herbert Hoover of the time. He had the political philosophy that it was completely improper for the federal government to be involved in economic affairs. And he wanted to remove the federal government from economic affairs.

56:19 That was his solution. So now he has a depression going on. And what is his answer? Don't do anything. Because that's improper. And try to contract. the federal government's involvement with the economy, to just safeguard the federal government's assets, but to hell with how the economy... I don't even think that he would have been talking about something like, let's let MarketForce settle this. I don't think he was aware of MarketForce. He just was trying to save the federal government's money. Yes, and make sure that the federal government's money is handled in a responsible manner. Well, that's something. That's something, but it's still, in this case, I think you needed to be a little bit irresponsible in order to write things a bit and maybe a bit more responsible in order to regulate things. Well, you needed to get involved in what was going on in the economy.

57:07 And we're not going to get to that point for 100 years. We're not going to get to that point for 100 years. Why was Andrew Jackson so opposed to banking and a national bank in particular? He saw this as kind of a sink of corruption. He saw that he was a Westerner. And unlike Clay, who was also a Westerner, he saw the bank as a means of controlling the destinies of the people who lived west of the Appalachian Mountains. And that this enabled the East to control the West to a way that was totally unsatisfactory and ate away at their privileges. And this was about... We're talking here specifically about the second bank of the United States. The second bank, yes. Which we discussed in the last episode.

57:55 There was a first bank. There was a first bank earlier. That they let lapse. That they let lapse. And the second bank is one that's been chartered, which Jackson is upset about. And there was the idea out there, as we discussed last time, that from the point of view of the Jacksonian populists, the bank was a corrupt institution which... in which Eastern elite interests granted money to other Eastern elite interests to make money for Eastern elite interests at the expense of everybody else. And I had not heard that before, but I'm glad you said that. Yes. This has a double -edged sword to it because as... Mike mentioned, yes, this was supposed to be part of a general war on corruption, drain the swamp. The elimination of the second bank. Yes. But what I think we're going to find in the course of this episode is that it kind of just compounded the corruption.

58:54 Instead of having a single bank as the sink of corruption, you have numerous pet banks that are installed in the states that will... actually undermine the economic health of the United States over the course of the period that we'll be discussing, which is the events leading up to the Civil War. So all Jackson wound up really doing was creating a different set of corrupt banks benefiting different cronies. So it was just trading who was being corrupt and in whose benefit, but it didn't get rid of corruption at all. Which sounds like a familiar theme, unfortunately. It sounds very familiar to me. Some things never change. But we're going to get into this as we move on and explain more about this. Yes. And the panic, I believe, went on for like six years, the aftereffects of the panic anyway. It was like a six -year depression. Yes. And a very severe depression.

59:44 It was. And we would continue to see this in 20 -year cycles all the way up until 1929. And, you know, 29 actually was just the tip of the iceberg because the bank collapse that occurred in the 30s was worse than the stock market crash. 32, I think, was the deepest point. It was the deepest point. Or 33, 32. 32, I think it was. Anyway, moving on. This vision for the economy that we've discussed, with its limitation on the scope of the federal government's involvement advanced by Jackson, this vision is going to dominate U .S. policy up until the Civil War.

1:00:36 And it's going to be thought to be the more responsive position, relying on gold and silver, the pet banks, the lack of a corrupt eastern establishment bank. You mean responsible? Yes. Yeah, not responsive at all. I'm sorry, responsible. Because it's not responsive. They think that not being responsive is the responsible course of action. And despite Supreme Court decisions, they felt that the federal government did not have any real powers to do this. To be involved in the economy. To be involved in the economy, because it was not stated in the... Constitution that this was a role. Strict constructionism. Well, let's talk about strict constructionalism. One thing that they did think the federal government did have the power to do was to displace Indians and also to steal Mexican land and deliver the mail. The mail is actually something, a responsibility of the federal government that is actually specifically called out in the Constitution. So saying that is not just me being, trying to be cute here, but the Jackson felt like that they could displace the Cherokee Indians from their land in Georgia and force them to do the Trail of Tears, which was a forced ethnic cleansing that took Indian tribes that were more or less living similar to European settlers at this point in Georgia and forcing them to move out west. depriving them of their

1:02:08 possessions. Where did they go? Oklahoma, I think? Yeah, something like that. And I mean, this was as bad as anything the Nazis cooked up. People, agents would show up in villages or settlements. They'd say, you've got an hour to get underway. You can only take what you can carry, et cetera. And it's kind of like, what? gives the federal government the right to do this. Well, they're Indians, and there's gold that's been discovered, and speculators want your land. Now, the Cherokee aren't from Oklahoma. They're from Georgia. Yes. No, see, that's the Trail of Tears right there. The Trail of Tears right there. And there's something else, another aspect of this, too, that I think a lot of, at least certainly non -Native Americans, sometimes don't think about, which is that you throw the term Native Americans around, but these were all different tribal groups. Yes. And they had developed a culture and a society that was tied to the land in which they lived. Correct.

1:03:06 Now, Georgia and Oklahoma are not like each other. They are not. No, they are not. Physically, environmentally, they're not. Very different. You're taking people who are used to living in Georgia and you're marching them to Oklahoma and saying, here, live here now. And they don't know anything about living in Oklahoma. They're not from there. This isn't part of their native... Traditions here. Traditions. They don't have the skills to live there. They're not Plains Indians, as they're called, right? They're from Georgia. Yeah. So that's another aspect of this. And I'm seeing figures here. 60 ,000 Cherokee were on the Trail of Tears and thousands died. Yes. Terribly. I mean, starvation, exposure, disease. I think I've seen a figure of like 4 ,000 of them died or something. But on that, nobody cared because it was just happening to the Indians. Yes. So if we look at strict constructionalism and...

1:03:55 We now take it for granted that the Supreme Court is the supreme arbitrator, is what is in the Constitution and isn't. The Supreme Court ruled that the Bank of the United States was constitutional, but the removal of Native Americans was not. And this is in opinions drafted by Chief Justice John Marshall, both McCullough v. Maryland and the Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. Jackson would counter this, that the executive, again, has the power to determine what is and is not constitutional. And he is putting himself on the same position as, say, we would regard the Supreme Court. And so since he thought that the Supreme Court had made a bad decision, he did not feel compelled to follow it. And that is... Wooster versus Georgia, 1832, was the opinion that he disagreed with and ignored. Yes. And, you know, and again, look at the Constitution being, you know, the federal government does not have the right or the ability to deprive people of their land and property without due process. And this is basically due process is saying, no, you cannot take this land, this property away. But I suppose the thinking at the time was. They're not really people. They're not really people. Well, well, that's what they would have said. Yes. Those aren't really people.

1:05:17 So it doesn't apply to them. You know. Yeah. That's the thinking of the time. So in addition to talking about banking and land ownership, there is no specific provision in the Constitution authorizing the federal government to acquire additional land. But this would be a hallmark of the age of Jackson and the Democratic Party. A big issue was the status of Texas. So settlers started going into Texas at the invitation of the Mexican government in the 1820s and settled there. One of the things that many of these settlers found disagreeable was that Texas had abolished slavery. And this was one of the issues that the people who rose up in rebellion against the Mexican authorities had as a bone of contention.

1:06:16 So Mexico had abolished slavery. Yes. Previously. People are coming in with slaves to kind of— Into what is now Texas. Into what is now Texas. Which was part of Mexico at the time. Which was part of Mexico. And at the invitation of the Mexicans, because they felt like they needed to have— more settlers to come in and populate the area. These were all underpopulated areas. So Jackson was a huge believer in the annexation of Texas. The problem was the political implications of doing so. Henry Clay was opposed to... annexing Texas because he felt like if we annex Texas, we're going to have a war. We're going to have to fight with Mexico. We're going to have to fight with Mexico if this happens, and I don't want to have that happen. Adams is totally opposed to this, as I said, because he sees this as expansion of slavery through the back door here. And of course, Texas declared its own independence in 1836 and said, we're our own republic. Now, There's some issues. There is a cause to be made for annexation because the other European powers, France and Great Britain, took a keen interest in the Republic of Texas and were kind of thinking, maybe we might try to have some more influence back on the North American continent. Maybe we should... set up some sort of relationship with

1:07:49 Texas to see what might occur here. So the people who were living in Texas definitely wanted to be part of the United States, but that was not the only game in town for them. So annexation, yes, it is an expansion of slavery through the back door, but it's also good politics if we keep out foreign. European powers at the time from the North American continent. So there was a Texas War of Independence like you're talking about. That resulted in Texas winning that war. That's where the Battle of the Alamo took place. Yes. Which they lost. But that was a very instrumental battle. Yes. It was defeated. So the Texans won.

1:08:30 They established the United States would not annex Texas yet. They established the Republic of Texas. It existed for, I guess, nine years, I think, 1836 to 1845. Yes. The Texans wanted to be annexed, but the United States would not do it. Then, like you're saying, I guess the Texans, from their point of view, they'd rather be part of the United States, but they were willing to play the European powers kind of off the United States to get the best deal they could when annexation finally happened, right? Now, the annexation of Texas becomes a big issue in the election of 1844. And this was one of Clay's attempts to try and run for office to become president.

1:09:11 He totally waffled on this. This is one of the few elections where we actually see an issue playing a role. And the issue in this case was Texas. So James K. Polk, who was one of the few people to come and run for president after just holding office. as a congressman. He was Speaker of the House, but he had not had statewide office, which is normally a precursor to your other governor or senator, usually. And Polk actually was able to come into office and say, I have a clear vision for the future. One of these things involves the annexation of Texas. However, What is our Constitution about? It is a compact amongst states.

1:09:58 That is what it is supposed to be. There is no provision for you to go out and conquer areas or even incorporate them. None of this is mentioned. All of the things that we've done for Louisiana and that we've done for Texas and for California during the Mexican War, these are things that are kind of like outside of what is... allowed in the Constitution, despite the fact that Democrats are saying, hey, we are strict constitutionalists. But it does not say that you can't do it in the Constitution either. That's right. There is no provision preventing you from doing it. But if you're going to say the only thing that the federal government can do is what is allowed by the Constitution and specifically stated as such, then you're being guilty of hypocrisy here, in my estimation.

1:11:02 Looking at the results that we see brought about in the age of Jackson, there are positives for the United States and there are negatives. So under Polk, the territory controlled by the United States increased by one -third, reaching all the way to the West Coast to the successful conclusion of the war with Mexico. This not only gives us Texas, but it also gives us all the land up to California. Which includes what is now Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and California. Yes. And this was one of, I mean, Polk is a one -term president, but he's actually, I think, severely underrated because he had this. this plan. And his plan was to basically manifest destiny. And he basically made the United States into a continental power. So when I was a kid, I heard Polk rated as one of the greatest presidents because he did that. Now, since then, there's been a reevaluation saying, yeah, but he did it by stealing. two -thirds of Mexico from Mexico. Well, one -third of Mexico. One -third of Mexico from Mexico.

1:12:07 So, I mean, you know, okay, fine. He did that, but, you know, it's kind of the later way of looking at it. But anyway, for those who don't know, the Mexican War, now people call it the Mexican -American War, was fought from 1846 to 1848. And it was a pretty one -sided conflict, the United States. Yes, it was very decisive. Pretty much stomped in that one and won that war pretty decisively. It was one of the few wars, I'm just going to say this, where... Basically, the approach that the founders had where you're talking about citizen soldiers coming in, states raising militias, it actually works. And I think it works because there is a sort of unity of purpose to this. And the Mexicans were not able to put up a reasonable fight because their military was worse than ours at the time. But there was a strong national leadership in that. Yes, but the military was ineffective in terms of what it could do because there were all these revolutions that were happening in Mexico during this period and very great, there were periods, a strong central government ebbed and flowed in Mexico.

1:13:22 It was not a consistent thing throughout the 19th century. Until you get to Juarez, do you actually get consistent government? And then you end up with all sorts of dictatorships coming in later on. So what you're talking about, the Mexican side, what I'm saying is that at least you said that the United States military was raising these local militias that actually worked, but there was a top -down leadership that was actually pretty... Robust and very effective. Yes, we did have great generals during that war as well. A lot of the senior officers in the American Civil War, which is about 15 years later, fought together as junior officers on both sides of the Civil War. Fought together as junior officers in the Mexican War. They all knew each other.

1:14:11 Robert E. Lee was breveted to colonel in the Mexican -American War. Now, someone who was opposed to the Mexican War, other than John Quincy Adams, was Abraham Lincoln, who thought this was a horrible idea. This apparently did not do his political career much good because his total stance for elective office was one term in the House of Representatives. It was Porfirio Diaz, who was president slash dictator of Mexico. Yes. From 1876 to 1911, he had a quote. I won't attempt the Spanish, but in English it translates to, Pity poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States. Exactly. Exactly. We may want to, in subsequent episodes, deal with this relationship a little bit closer. But for right now, let's just say it was concluded. Also, another aspect of... Let me just add that we also did pay Mexico for all that land. We did take it by military force, but we then paid them. I don't know how much, but I know... A token amount.

1:15:20 It probably wasn't that much. Yes. The Mexican War, or Mexican -American War, ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. And what that did was Mexico ceded 525 ,000 square miles of land to the United States. That was 55 % of Mexico's territory at the time. Oh, 55%. 55%. And this became all or part of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. It resolved the Texas border dispute. recognized the Rio Grande as America's southern border, the border with Mexico. And in return, the United States paid Mexico $15 million and also agreed to assume $3 .25 million in financial claims that private American citizens held against the Mexican government. That seems like not a token amount. Well, I don't know. That much money, what does that work out to in terms of what we paid them for their territory per acre? So that works out to four and a half cents per acre in 1848. That sounds like a bit of a bargain. Which today would be $1 .89 per acre. Yeah. In 2026 money. I kind of don't, you know, yeah, it's millions of dollars and there's all these claims, but I kind of feel like the Mexicans might have done better to sell it off piecemeal than just to sell it to us. One other thing that Polk was able to do was also to settle the borders between

1:16:51 Canada and Oregon, which again solidified the United States as a continental power. And Canada was a British possession at the time. British possession, yes. And so really what we have, you know, if you're looking at this in terms of the growth of the United States, Polk was very successful in reaching that vision. Now, here's the downside. He was not a good delegator. And essentially he ended up collapsing and dying from overwork after his single term as president. Very soon after, is it? Very soon after. He was very content to leave. And yes, it was essentially him and he used his wife as secretary to kind of run the war here. And that was kind of Polk's administration. But let's turn to another. thing that Democrats favored that's not necessarily discussed in the Constitution as a power of the federal government, and this is the Fugitive Slave Act. This is part of the Compromise of 1850 legislation, and it was designed to appease the South, which was concerned about slaves fleeing North. And what was desired was to enlist the federal government to capture slaves once they had gone left slave states and had moved into free states or even going up to Canada, which

1:18:22 was another option if you were trying to escape bondage at the time. So there is nothing in the federal government that gives it this sort of like ability to enforce laws of a state in other states that have contradictory laws. uh to those laws of the of the state i mean in a place like massachusetts which was a center for abolitionist activity in the 1850s the i everyone hated the fugitive slave act i mean garrison hated it the transcendentalists who were liberals like emerson and thoreau they hated the idea of the fugitive slave act this was something that was roundly denounced by people in the North, and it also underscores the controversy that slavery is having in the various sections of the country at the time. But again, this is something that so -called strict constructionalists are saying is permitted by the federal government to do. as part of its sort of unnamed responsibilities. So they were against the government doing things they didn't like because it wasn't written down in the Constitution.

1:19:45 Like corrals. But they were in favor of doing things that they said the government had implied powers to do that weren't written down in the Constitution. No different than the Whigs. No different than the Whigs. So the idea, you know, a person who is a strict constructionalist tends to be somebody who is referring to something that his opposite number seeks to advance, seeks to promote. But let's go back to economics. And this is kind of the last issue that I want to talk about today in terms of where we are with... with sort of this Jacksonian approach to dealing with the United States. And this is going to take us up to 1857. The president at the time is one of the worst, used to be the worst, but there's some controversy about that now. And this was Buchanan, James Buchanan. So under Buchanan's administration, things went from bad to worse.

1:20:54 Throughout the period that we're talking about, there were a lot of banking collapses that had occurred in local areas. I mentioned Michigan. There's other states where banking was not strongly regulated. But in 1857, the national economy experienced yet another meltdown as a result of our old friend railroad speculation, which seems to be... both positive and negative, in terms of growing the economy. So railroads had overexpanded. They'd built railroads across the West faster than they could generate profit from those railroads. That made the railroads default on loans. Yes. When they defaulted on loans, it crippled the banks that funded them. Now, that made a lot of banks close, or at least suspend operations because they couldn't fund things anymore. So there was a run on the banks. There was something called the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, which was this huge financial institution. It collapsed because it had overinvested in railroads. Yes. And because its money in the banks was going poof or else no longer, you know, it was no longer accessible anyway. And to add on to the entire problem, there was a ship called the SS Central America. And she sank in a storm off California. She's taking a storm. I'm sorry.

1:22:15 Off of I think it was off the Carolinas or something. Yeah. Right. She was carrying 30 ,000 pounds of gold from California. This is the time of the California gold rush. Right. Was in this era still going on. And the loss of that gold. was a huge blow because the banks were counting on getting that gold in their vaults in New York. And there was another thing where the Crimean War had ended in 1856. There was a war, guess where, in the Crimea, in Russia. And during that time, Russia was the breadbasket of Europe. The wheat was all grown in Russia. Well, during the war, Russia wasn't exporting the wheat to anybody in Europe. Europeans needed a different source. The United States grew a lot of wheat. So they were importing wheat from the United States.

1:22:58 But when the war ended and the Russians again had access, I mean the Europeans again had access to Russian wheat. Then the Europeans didn't bother to import it from the United States anymore. And there was a huge crash in agriculture as well. This is similar to what happened after World War I. So all of these things came together to create the Panic of 1857, which lasted, I think, like maybe three months, the actual panic. But the after effects went all the way up until the beginning of the Civil War. Oh, they're still in play during the Civil War. When the Civil War is happening, in addition to secession occurring, the government is bankrupt. And the economy is in, you know, doldrums might be too kind a word for what we're talking about at the time here.

1:23:44 And Marshall, you mentioned that every 20 years there seems to be a financial problem. Yes. This is exactly on schedule. Yes. There was a panic of 1837 and there was a panic of 1857. The next big panic is going to be 1873. Pretty close. Yes. So it's within that range here. Yeah. So, one thing also to talk about. Since we're dominated by an ideology that supports the notion of the state, the individual states as being significant, I think it's important to consider that we see a growth with that ideology, a growth in sectionalism, in which people see themselves more as part of a section than as part of... the United States as a whole. So a kind of divisive political environment exists during this period. And it becomes difficult for individuals with national reputations during this period, such as Daniel Webster from Massachusetts.

1:24:49 He was a senator. He was a senator. These are all senators. This is the great triumvirate that I'm going to be talking about here. All these guys, Webster, John C. Calhoun, who was vice president under both Jackson and Adams. And he was from South Carolina. He was from South Carolina. And then our friend Henry Clay from Kentucky. It came harder for them because they come up and they become leaders of sections. but they're not necessarily able to get beyond that. And so you tend to have a lot of non -entities coming in and becoming president after Van Buren. Because they're the only people that they could agree on. Yes, because these people are not controversial, like somebody like Clay or somebody like... Calhoun or somebody like Webster. They weren't big on ideas. You're looking more for successful military leaders like William Henley Harrison or Zachary Taylor or second -tier politicians to come in and achieve the presidency. Now, Polk would be one of those. I mean, he's not even in the Senate.

1:25:58 He has never been a governor. He's a protege of Andrew Jackson. He's able to achieve the presidency. the first dark horse to come in. Someone like James Buchanan, he's doing all sorts of diplomatic assignments because a lot of his associates recognize that he has certain influence in Pennsylvania. They don't want him near any particular office of importance in the federal government. And so when he's running for president in 1856, he gets nominated because He doesn't have any—there's nothing—he hasn't done anything wrong. He hasn't been involved with any of the actual running of the government, which apparently becomes detrimental.

1:26:42 The importance that we have on states' rights during this period, I would argue, promotes this sort of sectionalism that is going to contribute to the Civil War. Well, it was by no means clear to Americans at this point that your first loyalty was to the United States. Yes. That was by no means clear. To a lot of people, the United States was a group of sovereign states who were in free association with each other. The Constitution was a compact, bringing them all together. But there was no requirement in their mind to be necessarily loyal to the United States first. You were loyal to your state. Right. And in the Civil War, a lot of people that were Confederate, they viewed their first loyalty as being to their state, not to the United States. And your section.

1:27:26 Well, and more broadly, your section. Your section towards your states, yeah. But even then, within a section, you might have an argument between two states. Well, you'd be loyal to your state, not to your section. So it wasn't the way Americans think now, mostly. But it was the way they really thought back then. And to understand them on their own terms, you have to understand that. To sort of wrap things up, I've got a few more points to raise here. We need to introduce a new player, which is going to play a significant role in our next episode, and this is the new Republican Party. And this occurs in the 1850s. So in the 1850s, we kind of have both political parties self -destruct. The Whigs go first, and then the Democrats kind of... blow up with great fanfare in the election of 1860, and we'll get into some of that in our next episode. So what happens to the Whig Party? So elements of the Whig Party, you know, come together, and there is a Free Soil Party that has come into existence as a kind of minority third party. There's also something called the Know -Nothings, which are...

1:28:45 anti -immigrant, anti -Catholic. These elements will come together to create the Republican Party that Lincoln is going to run on in 1860. Now, the Republican Party was explicitly anti -slavery. The Whigs were not pro -slavery, but they were not explicitly anti -slavery. But they're also, where the Whig contribution comes in, they're also... more interested in this idea of internal improvements and of the power of the federal government to do certain things that are implied in the Constitution. And that we will talk about in our next episode. But no, it would be a mistake.

1:29:28 We're seeing a kind of coming together, a coalescence of these groups here. The Whigs were more interested in keeping the country together and uniting it through economic ties, things like we talked before. So they were willing to compromise on slavery if that would keep the country together. The Republicans were directly anti -slavery. But the free soilers are the ones where you get the anti -slavery aspect. But there's an interesting aspect to the free soilers. Yes, there is. And that is that they didn't care about the holding of slaves that much in and of itself. They didn't care if there was slavery. They didn't want slavery to expand because they did not want the South to have such a disproportionate hammerlock on U .S. government policies. They were kind of thought like the South was, you know, dictating what was going to happen in the government too much. So the way to contain that was to not have slavery spread and instead have, you know, free soil, right? So that you'd have more in the future out there in the West where we'd gathered all this territory, you'd have free states coming in. That would make the free states far more powerful in the legislature. But it was not about emancipating the slaves necessarily. There's also an economic component to this. If we're looking at the western lands, small -scale settlers did not feel like they could compete with, say, southerners coming in with their boatloads of slaves to basically work the land. They did not want to have to go into competition with this.

1:30:55 They felt like bringing slavery into the West would kind of cheapen labor in terms of people's ability to realize profit from their own labor. It was a threat to the family farm? It was a threat to the family farm, and that is exactly what was driving a lot of this. anti -expansion of slavery into the territories. It was not a moral issue that people came to over reading Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is about meat and potatoes type economic issues. Am I going to be able to profit from being able to go out to the West and set up my own farm here? So that's what's driving this. That is an important component, and it's something that people don't really understand the dynamics of this. And again, there's this anti -Catholic sentiment, which is going to certainly have an interesting history within the Republican Party and is also part of this. When we talked about America first, this is one of the elements in the Republican Party that is going to still continue to persist up until the 1920s and over the whole immigration issue. It doesn't just stay Catholic. It doesn't stay anti -Irish as it was in the 1850s, but it is still with the Republican Party. This is one segment of it that has not gone away here. So to sort of sum up,

1:32:27 We kind of saw in the first episode that there was a lot of concern about this notion of internal improvements and how states' rights assumed great and remarkable proportions in terms of the national life here. And that slavery was a motivating factor in some cases about limiting the federal government's role to have in the economic life of the country here. The Civil War will serve as a catalyst to bring back to life the goals envisioned by Adams and Clay and would take those sentiments and refashion them into different but not necessarily inconsistent ways of managing the economy. This would happen as a result of the need to deal with wartime necessities. like having a standard currency in the United States.

1:33:31 At the time that we're talking about in 1860, there are 7 ,000 of them, each with their own different value that's different from the actual face value. There's also no longer an absence, there's an absence of an effective opposition to a lot of these programs. because the South has deserted the Congress, the halls of Congress, and now people who have been wanting to carry out certain reforms have a free hand. If you don't show up at the meeting, you don't get a say in what happens. Yes. And we will see how this comes into being subsequently in our next program. That's it for this episode of the United States of Amnesia. Thank you for listening. We hope you learned something and we hope you discovered new ways of looking at things you had already heard or thought about or perhaps hadn't heard about. If you enjoyed it, that's great. If we made you mad, that's okay too. Either way, email us at usa .amnesia at gmail .com and let us know what you think. Also, let us know about anything you think we missed or got wrong. We'd like to know about that too. And of course, Please like and subscribe and let your friends and neighbors know about us. We also have a website. It's www .usofamnesia .com. For Marshall, Mike, and myself, Blake Hinckley. Till next time.