judicial process; they may tax all the means employed by the government, to an excess which would defeat all the ends of government." The only tax which states could lay upon the branches of the bank, he concluded, was the regular property tax on their buildings and land.

By these and other decisions Marshall became one of the great builders of the American constitutional system. Unlike the jurists of later times, he was not bound by the interpretations of predecessors, for there were few of consequence. His constructive mind and his long tenure, from 1801 to 1835, enabled him to create a consistent body of constitutional law on which all of his successors have built. The decisions discussed went far towards clarifying the limits of the powers of the states and federal government respectively. Some of them set restrictions on the authority of the states while others asserted the prerogatives of the national government. The Old School Republicans took alarm at the trend of the decisions, without being able to put forward a champion who was a match for Marshall. "All wrong," groaned John Randolph, "but no man in the United States can tell why or wherein." To him and his associates the decisions seemed to be undermining the rights of the states and bringing about a "consolidated" republic.

Some of Marshall's decisions have since been modified. While they struck out the first bold outlines of our constitutional law, the finer shading was added by later hands. For example, the states learned that by means of general laws prescribing the conditions under which charters might be had, they could reserve the right to alter or repeal charters, and that, despite the Dartmouth College case, the courts would uphold such laws.

BEGINNINGS OF A NATIONAL LITERATURE

Another evidence that national consciousness was stirring in this period is found in the appearance of the first signs of a truly American literature. The first generation after independence was an era of political writing. The controversy with England, the establishment of the Constitution, the contests of parties, furnished themes which filled men's minds, and left little energy for productive effort in the field of polite literature.

Then came, with the opening of the nineteenth century, writers of fiction and verse who were, for the most part, dull and uninspired imitators of English models. In the next decade, however, a new American school appeared in which the names of Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant stand foremost.

Irving's History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809) drew its inspiration from local sources, and displayed a quality of humor which stamped the author as a genius. He was the first American writer of fiction to command respect abroad, and while he later allowed himself to be diverted from native to foreign themes, some of the best of his work, such as the story of Rip Van Winkle (1819), found its setting in the Hudson Valley or Catskill Mountains.

After an attempt at a novel of the conventional English type, Cooper published The Spy (1821). It was a tale of the Revolution, and won immediate popularity. Next came The Pioneers. James K. Paulding had already published, in 1818, a poem, The Backwoodsman, which won the praise of critics because the writer forsook the giants, castles, and distressed maidens of European romances and portrayed the simple life of the American frontier. The Pioneers gave a vivid prose picture of the same life. Cooper's own experience provided the background for the book, as his father, an early settler of central New York, had brought him as an infant into what was then the wilderness. Although the stories of this pioneer among our novelists include tales of the sea, their significance in the history of our literature lies in the fact that they were products of American influences, little affected by English traditions.

With Bryant our poetry began. A few men before him had written a poem or two each; he was our first poet who wrote both much and well. Thanatopsis, written when the author was but a lad of seventeen, appeared in 1819.

The beginning of good work in literature is properly associated with the founding of The North American Review, in 1815. Innumerable magazines had sprung up in the years preceding, only to wither away after a few issues for lack of root and nourishment. The essays on natural and moral philosophy, and the "agreeable and entertaining moral tales" with which they were filled, were

substitutes for real literature which bored even the long-suffering reader of those days. In the hands of Jared Sparks as editor, the Review set a new standard of excellence, drawing both contributions and subscriptions from the young intellectuals of New England in sufficient numbers to give it a place as a permanent factor in the developing culture of the nation.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR CHAPTER XVII

After-war Readjustment. Adams, History, covers the attempts at reorganization during the last months of Madison's term. McMaster is exhaustive on the currency situation. Babcock has chapters on the Second Bank, the Tariff, Internal Improvements, and the Supreme Court. Taussig, Tariff History of the United States, is a standard work by a leading economist. The political aspects of the tariff are brought out more fully by Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century. Von Holst, John C. Calhoun, has a brief account of Calhoun's congressional career.

Cleavage of the Republicans. This topic has been little developed by writers. In this connection Gilman, James Monroe, and Adams, John Randolph, may be studied along with the lives of Clay and Calhoun. See also Hockett, Western Influences, chap. 4.

The Supreme Court and Nationalism. Corwin, John Marshall and the Constitution, is a handy summary of the topic. Beveridge, Life of John Marshall, is a monumental work both in bulk and value.

CHAPTER XVIII

EXPANSION

The legislation of 1816-1817 was enacted while the country was still in the shadow of the war, and all that Congress did was colored by the supposed necessity of preparing for other wars which might come. As it turned out, nearly a century was to pass before the United States again found itself embroiled in hostilities with a European nation. The year 1815 marked the beginning of a new era, in which for the first time the government found itself free from international entanglements. Peace permitted both government and people to "turn their backs on Europe" and devote their energies as never before to the settlement and development of their own vast, rich territory. Out of domestic activities were to arise most of the public questions of the "middle period" (1815-1860).

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

The westward movement of population had been somewhat retarded by the war, but with the Peace of Ghent it rose to unprecedented volume. The entire Atlantic Seaboard was affected by conditions which stimulated migration to the newer regions. The thin soils of the New England hillsides were incapable of producing grain in competition with the cheap and fertile lands already opened farther west. The decline of shipping added its quota of men upon whom altered economic conditions. forced a readjustment in manner of life. The opportunity to earn wages in the factories which were increasing in number under the stimulus of protective legislation did not attract these sturdy seamen and sons of the soil. They preferred a hazard of new fortunes elsewhere, leaving the indoor toil of the mills to women and children.

Equally conducive to migration were conditions in the southern states. The inhabitants of the back settlements of the Carolinas and Virginia were handicapped by the lack of roads and canals giving access to the markets of the coast, and they still suffered under the discriminations which since colonial days had maintained the political dominance of the tidewater planters. Many of them, moreover, belonged to religious sects, like the Quakers, which abhorred slavery. In the eighteenth century these interior settlements had been a region of small farms and free labor, but the cultivation of cotton by slave labor was now spreading into the South Carolina Piedmont, while tobacco planting was encroaching upon the area of small farms in Virginia and North Carolina.

The original region of cotton growing was the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. In this limited belt flourished the seaisland, or long-staple variety. Short-staple cotton throve in almost any southern soil, but was not a profitable crop before the invention of Whitney's cotton gin (1793), which reduced the cost of removing the seed to a negligible figure. Then, under the stimulus of the increasing demand of the European factories, its cultivation rapidly increased and it soon became a more important crop than any of the older staples, rice, indigo, or even tobacco.

As if to meet the demand of the restless population, the early years of peace saw the opening of new lands in the West. Even before the Treaty of Ghent was signed, the Creeks paid the price of their defeat at the hands of Jackson's men, by the cession of a large portion of their lands in Alabama, a district stretching northward from Mobile Bay almost to the Tennessee River.

In the Northwest the soldiers who followed Harrison had cast hungry glances upon the fertile fields of the Maumee Valley, reserved to the natives by the Treaty of Greenville; and the tribesmen, no longer having the moral support of the British in Canada, were soon persuaded to part with nearly all of their possessions in Ohio. Other treaties, some of them after wars, opened large tracts in Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. As a corollary of this policy of opening up the Indian country, there was developed the plan of removing the dispossessed tribes to tracts. west of the Mississippi, where, as was fondly imagined, they might