Creating a Republican Culture
1790-1820
Chapter 8
Entrepreneurial Spirit
• Factors of Production:
“If movement and the
quick succession of
sensations and ideas
constitute life, here
one lives a hundred
fold more than
elsewhere; here, all
is circulation, motion,
and boiling agitation.”
“Experiment follows experiment;
enterprise follows enterprise, riches and
poverty follow.”
Banking
– Government sponsored land banks and credit from
suppliers
•
– Bank of North America (1781)
•
– Bank issued notes
– Commercial loans
•
– 1816 – $68m in banknotes in circulation
–
– 1821 - $45m in banknotes in circulation
Another Revolution Affects America
• Manufacturing moved from
– Power-driven machinery
– Specialized workers
• Industrial Revolution
– Social and economic reorganization
• Started in Great Britain
Transportation
•
– 1816
– 1831
•
–
–
–
The Commonwealth System
• The American state legislatures passed
measures they thought would be “of
great public utility” and increase the
“common wealth.”
• Was this republican?
Cumberland (National Road)
Conestoga Covered Wagons
Conestoga Trail, 1820s
Erie Canal, 1820s
Begun in 1817; completed in 1825
Erie Canal System
Robert Fulton
& the Steamboat
1807: The Clermont
Principal Canals in 1840
Inland Freight Rates
Be careful
reading
the Y axis!
"The American System"
• 1815 Madison urged Congress to develop a
plan to unify the country
• Henry Clay’s American System:
– A strong banking system, to provide
easy and abundant credit
– A protective tariff (20-25%)
• The Tariff of 1816
– 1st protective tariff
– A network of roads and canals
• Funded from tariff
*President Madison vetoed the bill to give states aid for
infrastructure
– Felt intrastate projects were unconstitutional
Would unite
the US and
make it selfsufficient
The Missouri Compromise
•
introduced the compromise that
decided whether or not Missouri would be
admitted as a slave state. Congress decided to:
– Admit
as a
in 1820
–
, which was a part of Massachusetts, was
to be admitted as a separate,
– Therefore, there were slave states and free
states
• The Missouri Compromise by Congress
banned slavery in the remaining territories in the
Louisiana Territory north of the line of
,
except for Missouri.
Slavery and the Sectional Balance
•
Amendment
And provided, That the further introduction
of slavery or involuntary servitude be
prohibited, except for the punishment of
crimes, whereof the party shall have been
fully [duly] convicted; and that all children
born within the said State, after the
admission thereof into the Union, shall be
free at the age of twenty-five Years.
The Missouri Compromise
The Second Great Awakening
“Spiritual Reform From Within”
[Religious Revivalism]
Social Reforms & Redefining the
Ideal of Equality
The Rise of Popular Religion
In France, I had almost always seen
the spirit of religion and the spirit of
freedom pursuing courses diametrically
opposed to each other; but in America,
I found that they were intimately
united, and that they reigned in common
over the same country… Religion was the
foremost of the political institutions of
the United States.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville, 1832
Charles G. Finney
(1792 – 1875)
“soul-shaking”
conversion
The ranges of tents, the fires,
reflecting light…; the candles
and lamps illuminating the
encampment; hundreds moving
to and fro…;the preaching,
praying, singing, and shouting,…
like the sound of many waters,
was enough to swallow up all the
powers of contemplation.
Converted had a duty to spread the word about personal salvation 
Second Great Awakening
Revival Meeting
“The Benevolent Empire”
1825 - 1846
Second Great Awakening
• 1790 into 1840s
• Rejection of
Calvinist idea of
predestination
• Emphasized
individual
responsibility for
salvation