CHAPTER XX.

THE ERA OF GOOD FEELING.

HE portion of our history to be considered in

istrations of the fifth President, James Monroe, and that of President John Quincy Adams. It introduces us to the administration of the hero of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson, a man whose salient characteristics inspired his followers with enthusiastic admiration, and whose arbitrary acts made him at times an unsafe director of public affairs.

The period is to be remembered for the renewal of confidence in the future of the country, and the temporary burial of party and sectional jealousies, which made it possible for Monroe to be chosen President for a second term, by the unanimous vote of the Electoral College; but it was also the time of those vigorous discussions of the subject of slavery which led to the "Missouri compromise" of 1820. It was President Monroe * who promulgated the doctrine that still bears his name (though its real author is said to

*The genesis of "The Monroe Doctrine" is very fully presented in the volume on James Monroe, in the series of sketches of American Statesmen, by Daniel C. Gilman, President of John Hopkins University, pp. 156–174. The earliest suggestion of it (1780) is traced to Thomas Pownall, Governor of Massachusetts, New Jersey and South Carolina; the person who first called American citizens "sovereigns."

have been John Quincy Adams, then Secretary of State), which declares that the American continents. are not to be considered as subjects for colonization by any European power. During this period (in 1819) Spain ceded Florida to the United States. The aged Lafayette visited the country that he had aided in its struggle for freedom (in 1824), the Indian Territory was established, and the plan to remove the Indians thither was perfected.

This was a time when public improvements were carried forward with great energy. The Erie Canal was formally opened in 1825; the first steamship, the Savannah, crossed the Atlantic in 1829, and the first steam locomotive began to draw trains on the Delaware and Hudson Canal railroad in 1829; the semicentennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence, in 1826, was marked by the simultaneous deaths in Massachusetts and Virginia respectively,* of Presidents Adams and Jefferson, who half a century before had signed their names to the document that had given the keynote to all the patriotism of the revolution, and still stands, like the Magna Charta of England, as the corner-stone of our rights and freedom.

The period began with an amount of good feeling that seemed to promise the entire obliteration of sectional and party strife. Commerce revived, slowly, it is true, manufactures prospered, and all old parties actually died out as the reasons for their existence disappeared, but the very improvement in business,

*By an interesting coincidence, President Monroe also died on the anniversary of the Nation's birth in New York City, in 1831. Up to the end of the administration of the younger Adams, Virginia and Massachusetts were the only Commonwealths that had furnished Presidents to the United States.

and the increase of population that resulted from emigration, brought new subjects to the front, and new parties were formed, new complications arose.

Before the end of Monroe's administration, the original thirteen States had become twenty-four. During the administration of Washington, Vermont (1791), Kentucky (1792) and Tennessee (1796) had been admitted to the Union. Vermont was harrassed by claims of New York on one side, and New Hampshire on the other. It had applied for admission to

the Union as early as 1777, but had been refused on account of the claims of New York. Vermont then received overtures from Canada which alarmed Congress and led to a proposal for her admission to the Union on certain terms, in 1782. Madison afterwards explained that the causes of the delay in this case were jealousy on the part of the other States of the growth of "Eastern interests," and the inexpediency of giving to so unimportant a State a vote equal