10/28/24

Today is all about Thomas Jefferson. And, um, coming in as president, and changing some things
up, um, Jefferson, he was worried

Alright, now...

To create a monarchy through Hamilton's financial plan. Jefferson accused him of this. To
Washington. Washington said no.

Washington says, Hamilton, can you just write Jefferson and settle this whole thing down?
Hamilton, I think, wrote a 14,000 word essay. Hamilton basically said, this is all because of
sexualism. We talked about that, right? Yes, we did.

Sectionalism, right?

Which is different groups competing to push their interests, right? In this case, we're referring to
geographical sectionalism, right?

Hamilton basically said, look, the South assumes that the North wants big government, and at the
same time the North just thinks that the culture in the South is not compatible with the style of
government that we think is necessary to hold a country like this together.

Both these guys are in Washington's cabinet. Every meeting is really intense. Washington has
them both to kind of chill out. They both explain themselves to Washington. Some of Jefferson's
most aggressive words he ever wrote were to Washington about this.

He promised, he said, I'm going to retire soon, but he's like, I'm not going to. I'm not going to
give anything up to this guy, Hamilton, who I think is a threat to Americans. Nobody Jefferson
hated more, ever, than Alexander Hamilton. He saw Hamilton as being just this guy from the
Caribbean.

He thought of Hamilton as being like... Lesser than, like, more barbaric than, like, a Native
American at the time. And he wrote that, too. If the people don't do something, if they don't rise
up and support this Republican Party, this whole thing is going to fall apart.

Remember, political parties were pretty slow to form at first. We generally agree that the first
party system was the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, right? And then the Anti-Federalists
kind of became the Republicans, or sometimes we call them the Jeffersonians.
Typically, titles that people in the future put on them to kind of explain what happened. A lot of
people call themselves Federalists, especially up in New England. But nobody ever used the
word, especially the word Democrat, nobody ever used the word Democrat until the 1820s,
right?

Because Americans thought the word Democrat was associated with like mob rule. Barbarian,
chaotic, right? My uncle Dan still thinks that. So many people though of themselves at
Republicans so much so that it lost meaning. which is why Washington didn’t want political
parties because he thought that it will split the country apart. he believed that the only party
should be for the public good.

Anything outside of that is going to lead to the end of this republic. So, Jefferson did not start the
Republican Party, but he and James Madison pretty quickly saw that the latching on to this party,
becoming the spokespeople for it, was going to be the best way to—it was all about preventing
the Federalists from getting their way.

And so that election of 1800 that we talked about the other day was—

And this was an opportunity for this new government to kind of pick up and embrace some new,
totally new ideas and principles.

The other thing that's interesting that Jefferson wanted, and it's hard for us to kind of understand
this.

Jefferson wanted to make sure that the United States was talked about and referred to as a Like a
plural, does that make sense? Like United States, not a one country United States. Like we think
of it today.

So a union of separate states, kind of like the European Union. The other thing he really wanted
was he thought that only the educated elite should lead and rule the country.

Now his vision for the country was that this class of people, have you ever heard this before?
Yeoman Farmer

But also, this was the class of people that he kind of championed for. How does that make sense?
What was Thomas Jefferson's... There's three things written on his gravestone that he asked for.
Do you know what they are? His three proudest accomplishments.

Pretty much all of America was pretty rural and farm-agriculture based, especially in the South,
except Virginia. There are three things that he has to be written on in his gravestone. One was
that he wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.
The other, he wrote the Declaration of Independence. And the third, is that he founded the
University of Virginia. Alright, so he was huge on education. So he believed that this was the
class that would lead someday. And his hope was that as many people as possible would become
educated so they could be part of that religious movement.

And he pushed forward at this time, we are expanding voting rights to Now, today, we think we
have this idea that, oh no, every single person, every citizen should be able to vote. Back then,
property ownership was the requirement, and why would that be a requirement?

I hope that makes sense to these people.

Oh, you think they did it to specifically exclude enslaved people? And women. Native
Americans.

Excluding those groups was not the main purpose. What do people who own property have that
other people don't? Money?

People who own property have an actual stake in the decisions being made by the government,
right? People who don't own property... They're just existing. They don't care. They didn't trust
those people to make, actually to commit to voting for what they believed in because this was a
world where if you don't own land, you don't have anything.

So why let those people vote? So it does make sense, and we'll talk about the expansion of voting
rights as we go on, but at this time period, That's what Jefferson pushed for, and that's what we,
you know.

Anyway, so his first president to take office in D.C. These are kind of the things he wanted. This
is all freedom of religion, freedom of press, no alliances, cut spending, abolish. He basically
abolished all taxes except for tariff. One of the big things Jefferson wanted to do was kind of
reverse everything that the Federalists had done.

Undo all the stuff that Washington and Adams had done. So he is going to, um, you know, not
subscribe to all those, uh, fancy ceremonies. Um, he's gonna basically sell all of the nice stuff
that John Adams has. He wasn't into parades. He actually walked to his own inauguration from
his house on

He got rid of all these formalities. He just kind of was available to visitors, very informal. It
didn't matter if they were an ambassador from England or just like a normal person

Removed a lot of those like European protocols that state dinners, all that kind of stuff. That's
just the kind of guy he was. All right, switch gears a little bit for one minute.
So, this has to do with the judicial branch, not really anything to do with Jefferson. But it's
happening about the same time that he...

Now, there's this guy, his name, who you might have heard of before, John Marshall.

John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Very important guy. He was a Federalist guy.
That was appointed by John Adams. And now he's going to be pretty famous for making a lot of
court decisions that are going to really favor strong senators.

And these are a few early, what we call landmark cases. At the end of the day, it strengthens the
power of the federal government and the Supreme Court. Marbury v. Madison is the most
famous one. I tried to appoint a couple of last-minute judges, federal judges, literally hours
before his presidency was over.

Obviously, he was appointing Federalist judges. And Jefferson, the incoming president,
obviously didn't want any of those people to be appointed. So he told the Secretary of State,
James Madison, he said, don't deliver the official appointments to these judges.

And he didn't. And one of the judges, William Marbury, Therefore, William Marbury did not get
appointed as a judge. Now, this is very important. Of course, this guy, Federalist, why would he
not want all these Federalist judges to be appointed? Well, he's like, I could give up a short-term
victory for the Federalists.

for a long-term victory for not just the, well, for the Supreme Court by establishing a very
important concept here. called judicial reviews

The power of the Supreme Court to say that a congressional law is unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court would be the people that have the power to decide this, whether an act of the
President or an act of Congress was allowed by the Constitution. So this is the Supreme Court
now getting to overrule an action from the other two branches.

Alright, very important. The next two court cases, less important but still important. Gibbons v.
Ogden, basically

(someone asked exactly what marshall did). Marshall is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
that is issuing these decisions. He's a judge. Gibbons vs. Ogden. This has to do with the state of
New York giving a monopoly to a company that ran like a ferry over the Hudson River.

Marshall used judicial review to say that New York's law was unconstitutional. And this
reiterates that the federal government has... It has control of interstate commerce because this
was an issue, this was a New York versus New Jersey issue on the Hudson River.
Alright, so again, establishes the federal government's control of interstate commerce. That's
what Jim and Chris Ogden did. And the last one, McCulloch vs Maryland

The state of Maryland tried to tax a branch of the Bank of the United States because it had a
physical location in Maryland.

Marshall ruled that a state is not allowed to tax a federal institution because of the supremacy...

All right, so these three cases are going to establish

The supremacy of federal institutions over state institutions. All right, so all of these court cases
are, again, are not only gonna strengthen the power of the federal government. But they are
going to strengthen the power of these Supreme Courts.

Congress was the main party of government. The executive branch and the judicial branch were
only there to kind of...

So that Congress can't have a ton. So they didn't give the president a ton of power. They didn't
give the Supreme Court, the judicial branch, a lot of power. And what we're seeing over time is
that the president And the Supreme Court are going to level the playing field.

All right, I was gonna get in Louisiana Purchase, but we have two groups that wanna go here,
right? Or they're three. Three, two, one.

11/6/24
Louisiana Purchase: Jefferson bought the Louisana Purchase from france for like $15 million. it
went against his policies though so He's going to refer to, probably for the first time, that
necessary and proper clause to justify it. Now, the thing is, you see these lines, those boundaries?
They're not exact. They're pretty hazy, right? Because, basically... This line, I mean, I don't know.

The boundary is kind of like, okay, how far west can we go before a Spanish person kills them?
So you want to take advantage of all these boundaries because at the end of the day, the nation
that has done the most exploring, knows the most about this area, really has the strongest claim
to this area.

So, he actually sent his private secretary, his name was Meriwether Lewis... That's L-E-W-I-S.

And then that guy got another guy named William Clark, and you guys have heard of Lewis and
Clark, right? Jefferson, he didn't only want to have those people, and it wasn't just those two,
they took out a group that was called the Quoros.
I want to say 60 guys to go out and explore this area. They made it all the way to the Pacific
Ocean and back.

So the goal is we're not only going to explore, but we're going to also...

Spread Jefferson's vision to native people out there, which at this time, all right, just like
Washington Adams. I believe Jefferson wanted Native American tribes to be assimilated into
American culture, become civilized, or not civilized, become citizens, all that kind of stuff.

So, this took them a while, right, almost two and a half years to do it. They were very successful.
They opened this whole, like, fur trade empire out in the West. They, by exploring, it's cut off
there, but by exploring that Oregon country, which was a piece of land disputed by both England
and the United States, they're strengthening their claim to that.

Brought back a ton of new scientific information. They found like 180 new plant species. I think
120 new animal species.

Very important exploration discovery purchased by Thomas Jefferson in the United States here,
which adds to the work. It makes up about a third of the country

This is the center of the next couple issues in the United States. This is an act of impressment.
This was a very common practice by anybody who could do it.

France and England have been doing this to the United States and to a lot of other countries for a
long period of time.

Impressment, obviously taking the ship in its contents, but impressment is more about taking the
people on that ship and forcing them into your navy.

Why would a country do this? Uh, okay. Sure, yeah. More specifically, why did they have to do
this? I guess I should have started with that. But why? Now, we're talking everybody. England,
France, whoever. So you're right, yes, but... Why did countries have the need to do this?

And this happens very regularly.

No, that could be a small reason, but no, no. There's two big reasons. And one is just the fact that
a lot of times there weren't enough trained sailors, especially in times of peace, right? Sailors on
a ship, they take a lot more training. It takes a lot longer to train people to do that.

So it's really hard when a conflict breaks out to start to get new people to run a ship, all right?
The other reason was that even if they did, ships were typically shorthanded, all right? It
wouldn't be uncommon for a ship's crew to be at like 50% capacity, because what was the
disease that was typically found on a ship?
Now there's other stuff too. It could be things like smallpox, but scurvy was a big problem and if
you don't know what that is, it's like a vitamin C. I think your skin gets real wonky, you can
probably google image that.

But it was very common for, again, like half of a ship's manpower to be totally, like, depleted.
So, when a ship, let's say a French ship, comes upon a... We're going to take all your stuff
because most of it's supplies, all right, but there's also people on this ship.

If you're short, if you're that low on manpower, you know, you have two options when you get to
those people. What are they? Kill them or use them, right? So, this was, again, very, very
common. This was happening for, you know, decades. This was not a new thing.

But at this point, the United States, as an up-and-coming country, is kind of going to get fed up
with this.

So this is the last thing that Jefferson kind of dropped the ball on. So, again, under international
law... A neutral country has the right to trade with other countries. Non-military goods.

In this case, France and England. Now, both those countries, France and England, they had
created these blockades against the United States to prevent us from trading to the other
countries. And also, by this point in 1807, England alone had impressed about 6,000 American
sailors.

So to Jefferson, the economic health of this country depended on free trade, which was not
happening because of these blockades between us and England and France. Now, the United
States had done some things in the past, put some embargoes, or I'll just call them like more
economic sanctions, on England.

You know, that goes all the way back to even the 1770s. But the main event that more directly
causes this was an event we call the... The Chesapeake Leopard affair

Those two terms refer to boats, ships. They are the names of the ships. So, the USS Chesapeake
was on its way out of Norfolk, on its way to the Mediterranean. When it got out of the
Chesapeake Bay, it ran into the British ship, the Leopard. And the Leopard stops it and says, hey,
we're going to board your ship because we're looking for some British deserters.

And the Chesapeake said, no, you're not going to board our ships. The leopard fires at the
Chesapeake and kills a couple of Americans.

Alright, so they're going to end up boarding the Chesapeake and impressing, I think, another four
of their sailors. Now, this was a huge deal in America. You guys have probably never heard of
this, but this was like... I think Jefferson said that the country hadn't been this excited since the
Lexington and Comfort started in the American Revolution.
Now, the response to this was Jefferson starting the Embargo Act of 1807 and that just basically
made it illegal for the Americans to trade with any other country. Now, again, weird. I thought
this guy was like a small government president. Is this a thing that a small government president
would do?

No. Ban trade with everybody? Now, there are a lot of arguments over this, obviously. One of the
weird things is we're not really 100% sure. Jefferson's total rationale for doing this. We know that
one of the things was, he thought this was a way to prevent actual war with one of those
countries.

He thought that it would, you know, negatively affect one of those countries so much that they
would, you know, end up kind of throwing their hands up and saying, all right, we'll stop this
blockade. It didn't work, okay. It actually kind of ended up helping France and Napoleon by not
letting the United States trade with England.

All right. So by the time England even started to feel any... Americans would be willing to deal
with a bad economy for a short period of time just for the sake of principle, but he was wrong.
There were a lot of debates. New England, the New England states, they actually talked about
seceding.

You know, remember Jefferson at this time never explained the purpose of the embargo.

It made it pretty easy for people opposed to this to accuse him of oppressing his own people for
what was eventually Napoleon.

Jefferson was weirdly indecisive about this, about what to do. For some reason he clung to it.
Again. Probably designated to be a substitute for a war, but all he created was more of a war at
home amongst the people. Right? So again, weird thing with Jefferson.

Here's a president who's committed to personal freedoms, but now he's doing something that
violated his freedom. It is his most basic belief about basic rights and civil liberties and all that
kind of stuff. Alright, that last part, we'll get to that in a second.

We're going to repeal that in 1809. Before we get to that, we've got to talk about these folks. And
I realize this is my old slideshow. There used to be more. There is more stuff on this, the one I
posted.

I think maybe if not, I'll re-post it and we'll figure it out. Alright, the Barbary states refer to these
four countries here in North Africa. Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli. Now, this is what they
were back in the day. Obviously, those are not what all those countries are today.

Tripoli is now a city in this country.

What? Yeah, Libya. Right. Algeria is still there. Morocco is still there. So, here's the issue.
Before the United States declares independence from England, you know, Americans traded
everywhere. Caribbean, Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean. American ships, though, used to
always be protected by the British because we were within the British Empire, right?

What the Barbary states would do, and this was not new, this goes back decades and decades,
maybe even longer than that. Barbara states would extort European ships for basically just like
safe passage through the Mediterranean, right? They basically just made European countries pay
annual tribute, money, bribes, yeah.

It's extortion, right? It's you pay us every year, let's say England, you pay us X amount, your
ships can travel through here, we're not going to tell you.

Well, it was usually not killing. It was usually, if we come across one of your ships and you
didn't pay, we're going to go attack your ship, take it, take all your crew members. Alright, so
that's what was happening. Again, not a new thing. Most countries, for this time period, it was
just easier and cheaper to pay the money.

So this became an issue. This was a constant issue since the formation of the United States once
the Constitution was written. Except for, actually, what do you guys know about Morocco? Any
fans? Alright. Everyone hates Morocco? Well, I mean, I know where it is.

Like, I know where it is. Well, I didn't ask if you know where it was. It's right there on the map.
Yeah. I said, what do we think about Morocco?

I'm going to give you an opinion right now. Morocco was not an issue because... 1786 1786 We
signed a peace treaty with Morocco. We signed a peace treaty with Morocco. That still exists
today, and it is our oldest, longest-standing treaty with any country that is still alive today.

Morocco. Morocco is our original bff

So, my point is, Morocco is not, they were part of this group we call the Barbarians. Oh, by the
way, what's with that, what's with that name, Barbarian State? What does that mean? Like,
barbarian? No, that's a good guess, obviously, but no. Um, that comes from...

This group of people that originally occupied the region of North Africa were known as the
Berbers.

Um, anyway. So.

The Barbary states are doing this to the United States. Remember, under the Articles of
Confederation, Congress didn't have any power to tax it, didn't have money. We couldn't do
anything about it, right? We couldn't pay them, nor could we pay the ransom to get people back.
The United States has been paying this tribute under Washington, under John Adams, I think it
was about $25,000 a year. Alright, going all the way back to the 1780s, Jefferson was the only,
well, I'll say, the only guy that actually preferred to go to war with these countries rather than pay
the tribute.

Because he thought it was kind of a slap in the face to, like, a sovereign country, right? It
violated free trade principles, all that kind of stuff. So, Jefferson's thing forever was military
force, only way to deal with it. Alright, again, Congress is always going to pay this because it's
easier, it's cheaper than going to war.

We, so in the 1790s, Algeria would capture like a couple dozen American ships. They would
impress at least a hundred American sailors. That finally later got Congress to spend like a
million dollars just in the ransom to get those people back. And another million to build.

The one thing we did, I think in like 1796, was the United States actually built an entire warship
as a gift for the King of Algeria, as an apology for the Late payment for the tribute. So when we
get to Jefferson's presidency, this was kind of embarrassing to the United States.

All the money that we had spent, all of the hoops we had jumped through just to please the
barbarous states. Now, fast forward to 1801 when Jefferson's president, Tripoli, declares war on
the United States. Why? Because we had different treaties with these different countries.

Tripoli didn't think that they were being treated equally compared to the treaty that we had with
Algeria. So they just went ahead and declared war on the United States. Now, good timing,
because Jefferson's in the office and he's been wanting war for the last 20 years, right?

And he comes into office pretty determined to end all this. So, this war starts. This war was more
of a war of... of a defensive trade rather than on a war war, right? And now at this point,
Jefferson's like, well, you know, he originally wanted to shrink the military but now that we have
the Louisiana Purchase, right, bigger country means bigger army to protect everything, right?

And you know. This goes especially true with the Navy. So, we do that. This war went back and
forth for like four years. Really nothing significant happening until 1805 when the U.S. Marines
Stormed the beaches of Tripoli there and captured the city of Durna.

This is the first time that a United States flag was flown over a foreign conquest. So, whoo!

All right, and that causes the Pasha of, the word for king, the Pasha of Tripoli to sign a peace
treaty here. All right. Oh, any marine parents? I'm not a single Marine fan. Does anyone know
the Marine Corps song?

You know it? No, I don't. No, I'm not going to ask you to sing it. Oh, I mean I know it, but like,
not by heart. Do you know like the first words of it? Like, prove it.
Alright, you're good. 3, 2, 1, go. Ready, and go. Alright, ready. Just whenever you're ready, go.
No, no, it's from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. It's all about

I just said it. I'm not going to sing it. If I could sing, would I be here right now?

Anyway, so the United States wins the four-year war. This is the first war with the Barbary.

We refer to this as the war with the Barbary Pirates. Alright, here's a concept for you.

What is that? What is a privateer?

Isn't it like a ship with some, I don't know what? Okay, yeah.

It's an armoured ship owned and officered by private individuals holding a government position.

Is there like a crew to take other crews down? Ah, okay, yeah. Did you Google this? No. Isn't the
privateer like with the government and the pirates just like by themselves? By the way, so this is
what countries would do, the United States would use privateers all the time because they didn't
have big navies, right?

So it's like, alright, we did this in, remember the quasi-World War I? Alright, didn't have a big
navy. The United States government was like, Logan, you got a boat? You're just a regular guy.
You have a boat, so we're gonna let you, you outfit your ship with guns and whatever.

And you're allowed to go attack French boats whenever you see one, alright? That's a privateer.
A pirate is what? Just like someone with a boat that's just like without the government. They're
just like, I'm going to take this. So the difference is that actually these are the same thing.

These are the same thing. The difference is this one is allowed by the government and this one is
not. They do the same thing though, right? Pirates act independently. So, when we talk about
these people who were going out and attacking ships on the Mediterranean, were they pirates or
were they privateers?

We call them pirates. Because it kind of makes it sound bad. But were they really pirates?

No. No, because they were sanctioned by their governments, right. So when you see the words in
some of the books and what not, you'll hear Barbary Pirates.

Anyway, this war, Jeffrey, this war, you've probably known, this is the first War of Barbaric
Pirates, by the way. You guys have probably never heard of this, alright? Nothing crazy
happened. I think at this point we're three out, right? American Revolution, Quasi-War, War of
Barbaric Pirates.
Zero losses. I know there'll be a tie, there'll be a tie. It's a tie. Come on, are you real American or
not? It's a tie. (vietnam war)

It's a tie, but let's not jump into the future quite yet. 3-0. We're not there yet.

So, this, this is important because

This is important because...

This was the first. Guys, shut up.

This was the first, this was the true beginnings of the United States relationship with the Islamic
world, alright? In the past, I mean, it's not like no American has ever had contact. Okay, people
traded, people visited here, individuals. But this is the first time where we have the U.S.

military and, just based on news of the war and all that kind of stuff, the American public having
their first real kind of experience, not actual contact with people living in the United States, but
like knowledge of things happening in this part of the world, and in this case, Islamic countries.

What this all, what the future relationship is all, and viewpoints are all going to kind of revolve
around. There's one thing that where we see a difference. Jeffrey. Exactly. Right. So we've talked
about this. Americans, going back, we're very proud of separating church and state and do you
remember why?

He's a religious guy. He wanted to separate them because he thought that the government was
what corrupted religion. So, why are you...

It could be, but that wasn't a typical viewpoint of why Americans want a separate view. So, in a
lot of Islamic countries, they combine church and state, and to Americans, they thought that kind
of signified political and or religious oppression, alright?

So, Americans are going to learn more about Islamic countries, and they're going to be like, oh,
well we strive for enlightenment. Openness and rationality and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Okay, so that's going to be the origins of that and not so much this semester but definitely second
semester we'll talk about the evolution of that. Later. James Madison.

Alright, first thing that this guy is going to deal with...

What did the Embargo Act say again? Noah? The embargo act says no trade with anybody. That
was a problem. Shortly after, in 1809, They're going to fix that with what we call the
Non-Intercourse Act of 1809. I would have called it...
But the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809 opened up trade to all countries except for France and
England. So we're still going to continue to not trade with those two countries.

But we didn't want that.

We didn't want to not trade with England or France, or we wanted to trade both of them because
that brings in money. It's all about money. So, what they came up with was something called
Macon's Bill No. 2. Macon's Bill No. 2. So some of you are wondering...

Why haven't the Makin's been over one? And who the hell is Makin?

The answers to those questions do not matter.

Macon was a congressman. Macon's bill number one fell through the cracks and the refined
version was Macon's bill number two.

What this did...

This laid out the steps for how England and or France It has been edited to include proper
punctuation. They say, whatever one of those countries lists their trade restrictions on us, we will
be exclusive trade partners with you and not the other countries.

That can be confusing to people. Does that make sense?

At this point, England and France both have blockades on us to prevent us from trading to the
other one. So yeah, but wouldn't it be better to at least start with being able to trade with one of
those?

With Macon's Bill No. 2, if that happened, the United States would say, well, you started it.

We gave the opportunity for both of you guys to make normal trading relations with us. You
didn't do it.

Now, guess who won.

France is going to open or revoke their trade restrictions. We are going to continue to have
tensions with England, which leads us to the War of Independence. War in 1812 was a...it's a
weird war. It's a war in the United States, but it's weird for a lot of reasons.

It's a war in the United States, but it's also part of a larger war between France and England that's
going on. In Europe, and for a lot of this war, England is going to be so focused on taking care of
France and Europe that...
On June 1st, 1812, James Madison gives his war message to Congress. He talks about these two
things as being his reasons for. War, right? The impressment of Americans and violation of
neutral rights. This is referring to trading rights, okay? War message to Congress.

House of Representatives votes in favor of this war. This is the first time that Congress declares
war on another country. I think we only declare war 11 times in U.S. history.

This is also the closest vote for war in U.S. history. Usually votes in Congress are pretty
unanimous on one side. Now this is a weird war because...

There are going to be people in the United States that want this war for different reasons.
Congressmen who voted for this war, the people that we call war hawks, The people, the
congressmen who voted for this war were typically from the South and the West.

People who voted against this war were typically from the East Coast. Now that's weird because
people who were closer to the East Coast were typically more affected by these two issues.
People from the South and the West, really those two things didn't affect them.

Alright, so this was the 12th Congress. Had a bunch of these young war hawks. These two guys,
very famous people, that handsome gentleman on the left. This is Henry Clay from the great state
of Kentucky.

The guy on the right with the mom bob is John C. Calhoun from South Carolina. These two guys
are going to do some pretty important things, not only here, but throughout their careers as things
that are kind of worthy of us talking about them, but we'll get to that later.

Alright, so remember their names. Now, these guys, from Tennessee, no, I'm sorry, from
Kentucky, well, and Tennessee, Kentucky, Tennessee, and South Carolina, they wanted this war
because they wanted more.

What's the only land England has over here now? Canada. Canada, thank you. What about
Canada? Is that what you're going to say? No, I was going to say the West Coast. Now, Canada.
So, they thought that Canada would be very vulnerable. They thought it would be easy to take
over.

They thought at the end of the day with the treaty it would be very cheap. And the other reason
that they wanted the British out of here. was because the British had a big influence over Native
American tribes in the West and the Northwest. So eliminating the British would give the United
States more of the, not control, but more of the day-to-day dealings with those tribes, all right?

So people, again, wanted this war for different reasons. This vote was also split over party lines.
So Republicans typically voted for this war. Federalists typically voted against this war. Now,
again, talking about Republicans, these were people who were small government people, but
they're voting for a war.

Why? Because. These issues, impressment and abusing neutral rights, that had really come to
symbolize what Republicans wanted the most from England, which was just recognition of
sovereignty and independence and all that kind of stuff. And so we start this war, and like every
single war the United States has ever gotten in before the 21st century, we were not prepared for
this at all.

We had like 7,000 people spread across 20-something, 25 forts across the United States. We
didn't have any generals, because remember Democratic-Republicans were cutting the military in
half in war. It has been edited to include proper punctuation.

So, what was the Treaty of Greenville, 1795?

In what is today Ohio, there are 12 tribes that ceded most of their lands to the federal
government, which was at that point in time, kind of the end of the major resistance. by Native
American tribes in that area. Ever since the Treaty of Greenville, American settlers have been
pushed which way is west?

Oh yeah. Pushing west. And after that time period, we call this dozen years the age of prophecy
among Native American tribes. Because we have a lot of people, not a lot, But we have a few
people, like this guy, that was Hanson Lake from the Seneca tribe.

He starts to preach against things that were really, like, plaguing Native American tribes, which
were things like fighting, drinking, and gambling, all that kind of stuff. He also preached that...
Native Americans could regain their autonomy without directly standing up to Americans.

Like, we don't need to fight Americans. What he said was that we need to learn how to farm. two
other guys, tecumseh and tenskwatawa, called for a complete separation from Americans. They
said, let's boycott American stuff, ignore all their federal government policies. And they also
said, hey, let's really stop negotiating our territory with the United States government because
that hasn't been going well for us.

Alright, so those two guys, they actually gather in a place called Prophetstown, Indiana.

And what Americans saw were reports of the British encouraging Native Americans to attack the
American people. All right, and so right towards the end of this time period, like 1810, we see a
lot more raids on on America. So now, Americans kind of feel like they're up against this really
well-organized Native American conspiracy.

His name was William Henry Harrison, who you might have heard of. He was really determined
to make Indiana a state, so he wants to push back. The federal government give him like 1,200
troops, he takes them, he burns down, profits down in what is very famously called the Battle of
Tippecanoe, which he's going to use when he runs for president later.

Alright, the first thing we try to do is invade Canada and it does not work. Not because Canada
was really good at fighting, not because they had some superior fighting force, it was because the
United States couldn't recruit and organize armies.

Why did America get into so many wars if we didn't have a strong army?

No, like there was always a cause for it. I know, but if there was a cause, why didn't they, like... I
know, like, money, but isn't there, like, a way to still create, like, a strong army without a lot of
people, though? Because money was an issue. Because money was an issue, obviously, so they
didn't have a large army.

But the army they did have, couldn't they make them stronger? So this is the first time we
actually declare war on another country. Now, we're not going to count the quasi-war, because
that was just a mini-war with some ships. This is the first war that we...

To answer your question, the reason that we thought we could do this were probably two reasons.
Geographically isolated, and England, we probably assumed, were more focused on the stuff in
Europe and what was going on versus France, where we could probably have an advantage there.

We also thought that if we took over Canada right away, that they would kind of give up. Which
probably would have worked if we could have done it, right? So that didn't work. Our fault, that's
fine. There was a little war at sea going on, and not only here, like in the Caribbean, off the coast
of Brazil, the Canary Islands is up here, where we have a lot of significant victories.

None of those victories at sea contributed to the end of this war. They were more like a big
morale boost.

But it did help to get Madison re-elected. In which she decides to build some new ships and blah
blah blah. Alright, we tried to attack Canada again. The only good thing that came out of this,
none of this was successful, except we did go to what was the capital of Upper Canada today,
Toronto.

What's like the better final, like, we got you, but burn the capital to the ground? Okay, whatever
way you want to do it, it is what it is.

But I bring that up because this is going to be important later.

Let's go south. So, Americans, we had built a fort right here, north of Mobile, Alabama, called
Fort Mims. This was built to protect against a tribe called the Creeks, who were both kind of at
war with them. There were some creeks. The creeks were kind of split.
There were some creeks that wanted to be included in American society. And there was another
group that we referred to as the Red Sticks. They wanted to go to war with the United States, and
that's what they did. And so that group of the Creeks, they were resisting American expansion
into the Southwest.

So Fort Memphis was built as a buffer there. It was made up of friendly Creeks, obviously just
regular white Americans. There are actually several hundred Africans here, too.

What complicated life for those people was that the United States declared war on England, and
Spain and England were supposedly going to ally with the Greeks and basically set like 15,000
of them loose. And that was a nightmare for people at Fort Mims.

There was a group of creeps that went down to Pensacola to basically get some weapons, a
militia attacked them. The result of that was that in 1813, a group of Creeks went and attacked
Fort Mims and massacred and killed a little over 400 of them. This, guys, was a big deal to the
people in the Southwest.

They thought, at the time, this was their Pearl Harbor, what happened here.

In response, a major in the Tennessee militia whose name was Andrew Jackson Led a few
thousand Tennessee militia against the Creeks to chase down the leader of the Red Sticks, his
name was like William Crawford or something.

They were like, the Creeks sided with England during the American Revolution. The Creeks
were not happy that England gave as a result of that war. England gave the United States their
land as part of that treaty. So Andrew Jackson and the Tennessee militia is going to wipe out
around a thousand of the Creeks in their army at the Battle of Horseshoe Bay.

This has, again, nothing to do with England. It did not lead to the end of the War of 1812, but
that was the most significant battle of the entire war to Americans. It ends with the Treaty of Fort
Jackson, which forced the Native Americans down in this area to give up about 23 million acres
of their land.

That was about half of what they had in total.

And by the end of 1813, because of some developments in Europe, the British were able to focus
more of their attention on the war in the United States. A lot of people in England didn't even
know that England was at war with the United States two years into this.

What England tried to do is they wanted to invade New Orleans and New York and to trick us
into coming to New York. They were going to invade the Chesapeake Bay and make it look like
they were going to do something there. That was not the intention.
But lucky for us, this didn't work. But the invasion of the Chesapeake did. Jeffrey, you know
what they did. Do you know what they did?

In retaliation for us burning down the capital of Canada, they came into Washington, D.C. and
they set it on fire.

Hopefully it was only for less than a day, because there was a hurricane that came through and
put all the fires out. This is where, oh, this is where, y'all know Dolly Madison? Yeah. Y'all
know the whole thing where she saved all the artwork and stuff?

You guys heard of this elementary school? You guys know it didn't happen? She didn't do it. So
she took credit for it. Basically, one of the... You can Google this, it's true.

One of the guys, basically one of the slaves in the White House, is responsible for doing all this,
and he wrote that Dolly Madison just took a couple of her valuable things and her purse and
bounced. Go Google this. It's true. Dolly Madison is a fraud.

She didn't do anything. She ran away.

But, um, you guys know that, um, when they... When the British invaded Washington, D.C., they
had to get all these important documents out of D.C. like the Constitution, Declaration of
Independence, all this stuff, you know? And they got it out of D.C., and one of the places they
hid it was here.

Do you guys know where the Evergreen Mill Sports Complex is? Alright, right behind there,
there's a farm. It's called... Something weird. There's a farm, and that's where we that's where all
these documents were kept up Evergreen Mills Road. Or at least most of them, maybe not all of
them.

They moved them around a couple of times.

It's not that property, it's right behind it. It's a historic site now. It's called Cousin Farm.

Keep documents, Jane Madison. No?

Wrap it up real quick. So, the invasion of DC was not successful. The British turned to
Baltimore, Inner Harbor, they tried to go up the Chesapeake, and they bombarded this place
called Fort McHenry for like a whole day. This is where that guy wrote the national anthem.

America has held this for us, so the British had to evacuate the Chesapeake Bay. And this is what
led the British to...

to come to terms with the United States to end this war. Now, the end of the war—oh, by the
way, our first—it's not the Treaty of Paris this time, it's the Treaty of Ghent.
Anyway, the British government realized they were not going to be able to take care of England.
It's a peace treaty. No country got anything from it. It was more just like, we're going to stop
fighting and we'll go back to normal.

We signed the treaty again.

I think before Christmas, but nobody got the news, so... They're going to fight another battle after
the war ends in New Orleans because the British were invading New Orleans. And Jackson, this
is where he's going to get really famous. He held off the British even though he was
outnumbered by like two thousand.

So, what does the Treaty of Ghent do?

What does the treaty again do? Nothing really.

I don't know. This was important for the United States because, oh, we just beat the British a
second time? Like, the world superpower? The British? This war, again not on a global scale, but
personally to Americans, establishes that we are legitimately independent.

This is a real thing. Other countries are still doubting us. We need to give Madison a lot of credit
that most people don't today. Back in this time, people loved Madison more than anybody. That's
why there's more towns named after James Madison than the first three presidents combined.

The thing with Madison, the kind of the amazing thing... Madison and the national government,
they were able to organize all this over like 50,000 soldiers and spend millions of dollars without
like treason, sedition, anything like that. Oh, by the way, two more things here quick.

So, we have the First Barbary War. Settled in 1805. It wasn't really settled. The Barbary States,
they took advantage of the United States being at war with England and they took that as an
opportunity to try to take Americans prisoner on the Mediterranean again.

So at the end of the War of 1812, Madison decided to deal with the Barbary States again. And
they declared war again in 1815. We sent a squadron of warships, including the ship that is
currently docked at Inner Harbor. We're going to sign a treaty with Algeria that guarantees
shipping rights forever.

And the United States will never have to pay tribute again after the Second Barbary War. We are
now 3, there's 4, 5 and 0. 5 and 0, America.

We'll get there, we'll get there. Who else? Why do you want to push? Why can't you just say a
tie? I'm willing to compromise, Logan, and say tie. You're right, that's what a tie is. We didn't
win.
Last thing!

The Bank of the United States, the charter was for 20 years, right? It ended in 1811. We were
supposed to take care of it. We were a little busy with the war with England. Do you guys
remember why James Madison left the Federalist Party? Yeah, because he didn't agree with the
Bank of the United States.

Now, because of the War of 1812, James Madison and some other Democratic Republicans
realized, oh, we kind of need this thing. Because if we didn't have this Bank of the United States,
we have no shot at this whole war. So they realized they needed the Bank of the United States
and they signed the second Bank of the United States into existence in 1816.

It's going to have another 20-year charter. We're going to have to revisit this again when Andrew
Jackson is president, which we will get to very shortly. But not today, because I'm tired of
talking.

11/8/24
War of 1812 at least for the first half of U.S. history, it is sometimes seen as kind of a turning
point.

Because this is a point where the United States is really starting to look like a legitimate country,
right? And... I don't know why I have this.

From the end of the War of 1812, or after it ends.

It's only going to take about 30 years for the United States to spread from looking like this to
basically taking over the whole North America and getting all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

At this point, we really have three countries that are controlling North America, right? United
States, England, and... For now, we'll say Spain, but Spain's pretty much going to lose all of their
stuff to Mexico shortly, so.

Growing very rapidly. Alright, this population more than doubled in the last 25 years since they
took the first census in 1790. And the United States is going to continue to grow faster than any
other country in the Western world. And you guys know what I mean by the Western world?

Most of these people, so we're still in a situation where 98% of everybody that existed focused
on agriculture, right? Most people lived in small houses. The standard of living was pretty much
like what a third world country would be today.
But people didn't think about it like that. They thought that all Americans did was they compared
their situation to how people were living in Europe. And they felt pretty good about it.

Again, most Americans just lived on a small family farm, and they spent pretty much all their
time working that land that they owned. And that was, at the time, This was different than how
land was controlled in Europe, because in Europe everyone was close together.

Land was controlled by a handful of people. Not the case over here. Americans, we just, we were
healthier. We ate better, we lived better, we were taller, mostly because we had more food. And
being more spread out, we had a lot more isolation from all the contagious diseases that were
spreading through the urban areas.

So it's just a country full of small farms. We have cities. They're not big cities like we think of
cities today. By the way, this is where the gender roles come from.

The family that the family structure was the most important thing to run a farm, right? You
wouldn't find there weren't very many farmers who weren't married. There weren't single
farmers. All right. And actually, the word husband originally meant farmer, but then it just
became synonymous with married guy, right?

So the farm, it couldn't exist, it couldn't operate without the labor of the guy and then the wife,
right? They have different kind of roles that both kind of mutually work together to make all this
successful. All right, and that's where we get all this wrong, right?

So the man was typically the head of household, right? Legally and by custom, but In practice, at
this time period is where we start to see other members of the household start to get a lot more
kind of independence and autonomy in America. So what we see is the guys starting to not be
able to control.

But, again, it was this way because a family or a farm worked best when those two people
worked closely together and their different types of labors and roles kind of complemented each
other. We had a very young society too. Did not live to be over, like, 45.

Now, that number goes up if you take out that like, the infant age, right? If you made it out of, if
you were... If you made it till 10 years old, you were good. But most people, like a third of kids
died before they reached adulthood. For obvious reasons, infant mortality rate was pretty bad.

We don't really have doctors.

If there were hospitals, more people would have probably died going to hospitals than just
staying home.
That said, most people are still living pretty close to the coast. So we talk about all this westward
expansion, which is really important. The idea of it was really important to America. But there
was no...if you did move west at this time, you were...

It was the same price to ship something 30 miles west as it was to ship something across the
ocean to Europe. Just how common the shipping industry was. Alright, so we have these states, a
couple territories out there that are on their way to becoming states.

Only about a million of these 8 million people live west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. So not a
lot of people yet. Because, you know, most Americans agreed that westward expansion was the
goal, but for people actually moving, going west was risky. It didn't mean you were going to be
successful, right?

Because those people went out, they were basically cut off from the rest of society and trade
networks and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes they, you know, crops failed. They were forced to
grow crops that weren't as profitable based on, you know, the climate and the People who went
out west typically kind of adopted a lifestyle that was pretty much the same as what the Native
Americans were doing out there, which was kind of a mixed, you know, agriculture mixed with
some hunting, that kind of thing.

Alright, um, Europe. Alright, all we've been talking about this whole class was, um, Constant
fighting in Europe, now that Napoleon is out of the way.

And we are still, the United States is still, really the only republic country in the world. In a
world that is mostly run by monarchies.

So after the War of 1812, Americans kind of feel like, okay, we now have a real, like, national
identity. Alright, we don't have this connection with England anymore. Most of the people at this
time, about 80, at least 80% of the people living after that war, were never...

We have the Federalist Party. That's out of the way, too. Right? Madison and Jefferson were
pretty successful in ending the Federalist Party. And, of course, the Adams-Hamilton split in that
party weakened them. Then Hamilton died. And, really, the Federalists, like, all that elitist
rhetoric that the Federalists were, and, you know, the way that they didn't trust popular
government, that just didn't, he couldn't keep up with this growing sense of democracy and all
this.

You know, at the end of the day, most of America was rural and agricultural-based. Most people's
lives depended on agriculture. The largest city in North America at this point in time is Mexico
City. Philly was the largest American city, but they weren't even close population-wise to Mexico
City.

So, we got this guy, James Monroe.

Who will be the last president of what we call the Virginia Dynasty of Presidents? What number
are we?

And when he's president, this is a period that we call the era of good feelings. Why is everyone
feeling so good, Hayden? What are they feeling good about? I don't know. No?

So the Federalist Party is gone. So this is a period of time, and a relatively short period of time.
Where we have one political party basically right issues, it's not like you know politics weren't
really affected by these partisan issues All right in the government now

As we're going to see, not long after this, in the next couple of years, is individuals within the
government are going to kind of take advantage of that and do things that kind of boost their
own, like put themselves on the stage and try to get themselves elected and appointed for
different things.

And then we'll talk about how different parties work. Alright, so a relatively calm political era in
the United States that doesn't really last longer than James Monroe's presidency. The first issue,
oh it's up there. Really the first issue that James went around to deal with was the Pensacola
seizure.

Alright, remember that Andrew Jackson guy? He was now head of the Southern Division of the
Army.

You know, Jackson always believed that Spanish Florida was the biggest threat to the United
States. He thought that this was a gateway for Europeans to come in and invade through the Gulf
of Mexico. So he didn't like the Spanish, he didn't like what was going on down in Florida.

And he's in charge of basically, uh, the army.

Andrew Jackson kind of got the green light from both James Monroe and the Secretary of State
John C. Calhoun, who I mentioned the other day. The Secretary of State basically told Andrew
Jackson that he's allowed to use the Army and the militia to In his words, do whatever is
necessary.

Alright, basically the freedom to do whatever he thought was best. Alright, James Monroe... One
of the big issues at this time was a group of Native Americans, the Seminoles, you've probably
heard of this group. All right, who were kind of operating a little bit in Georgia, James Monroe
said that Andrew Jackson, yes, you need to go take care of the Seminoles and Monroe said, look,
you can only go into Florida if you're chasing the Seminoles into Florida.

So Jackson does invade Florida. Now, there's some...

If Monroe purposely gave him that vague go ahead and do this, knowing that Jackson was going
to do it so that he could separate himself from Jackson or something like that, probably that's
what he'd think. Alright, but Jackson basically goes into Florida and takes over this fort where
Pete Bolt actually is.

Jackson goes into Florida and he takes over a fort where he captures two British citizens that the
United States thought were using Native Americans as, you know, kind of pawns against the
United States. He executes two of these guys and Jackson was like, hey, I'm already in Florida.

I'm gonna go take Pensacola. I don't see why Alright, Jackson told the Spanish that he was there
by the right of south of bay.

The British and the Spanish wanted some answers. They actually found out before Monroe did.
By the way, Monroe is able to blame what happened on Jackson.

Jackson actually ended up avoiding jail time just because of how much Americans loved him.
Now, the major consequence of all this is the Spanish realize... We can't keep Florida anymore.
We can't protect Florida. It was a burden on them. They couldn't afford to keep sending settlers
there, military there.

They also couldn't control the Seminoles, which are raiding up into Georgia, so Monroe opens up
some negotiations. In today's money? No.

So we get Florida in the Adams-Onís Treaty. All right, Adams was Monroe's vice president. So
that's John Quincy Adams, that is John Adams' son. All right, negotiates this treaty with the
Spanish guy, who he has one of those long Spanish names, but we just refer to him as onis.

So, we get Florida in exchange for the United States recognizing The Spanish border in what was
Spanish, Texas. Alright, now, six months later. Spain ends up losing all that territory anyway
when Mexico gets its independence.

So that is how Florida becomes part of the United States. What did I say, 1819? Did I say that?

Alright, some other small things. Oh, the Treaty of 1818? All the Treaty of 1818 does was sets
this border between the United States and Canada on the 49th parallel.

They refer to a line of latitude as a parallel because those lines are parallel.

Now, usually...

Usually, borders are based off of, like, geographical mountains, water, all that kind of stuff. They
made it a straight line on purpose to make surveying easier. And they actually, under the Treaty
of 1818, gave joint control of the Oregon Territory.
So basically the United States and England shared this territory for 10 years. Why? Well, there
weren't that many people out there. There was actually almost nobody out there. So they wanted
to give a 10-year period where both countries were able to kind of explore the area, maybe even
claim parts of it.

But down the road, we're going to have a couple more treaties in the 1840s that give the United
States control of all of it. And the panic of, that says 1919, but it is not, it is 1819. Not a lot to say
here. It was our first, like, depression. Our first kind of...

More importantly, was a big contentious issue called the Missouri Compromise.

All right. In.

1819. Enough people moved into the Missouri Territory that it met the requirements for
Missouri to become a state. Alright, so Congress authorizes the people there to say, you
can write your state constitution, go through this process. Now while this is all
happening, a congressman from New York All right, Missouri. Congressman from New
York says, all right. Missouri will let you become a state, but as a condition for you
becoming a state, slavery is going to be...

It has been edited to include proper punctuation. Debates over the issue of slavery had already
started, alright, after the American Revolution. Now, they were small, but political leaders were,
in various parts of the country, were starting to talk about this, okay?

And it's really going to start to come to light with this Missouri issue.

Even people like Jefferson wrote that he hoped slavery would end. The issue of, oh, that
Northwest Ordinance of 1787, that was supposed to ban slavery in the Northwest. Does that
apply to Missouri? I don't know. Where's the line? Now, what these debates showed is how the
South had become so much more committed to defending slavery ever since the American
Revolution ended.

Now, why? At this point, we aren't growing tobacco really anymore. Because I was kind of over
farmed and overdone. What are we now growing in the South? Cotton. Because of the demand,
the worldwide demand, the land that was available for people to grow this and sell this.

It was big money, a big deal. Alright, so cotton allowed, cotton caused the demand and the value
of the slavery to increase. Now, the debate in Congress was pretty split, so when Congress
adjourns, when they leave the session in Congress, they take the debate to the people.

And this was a big deal kind of across the board. This was really the first time that slavery in the
West was ever brought up. People obviously had their opinions. Some people were right about
their opinions. Jefferson, when he heard about this, he said, this is going to be the end of the
Union.

John Quincy Adams, the Vice President, he wrote that he thought this issue would actually lead
to a civil war.

The compromise, after a lot of debate here, was, alright, Missouri, you are allowed to be a slave
state, alright, but. Adding a state that allowed slavery would upset the balance between slave
states and free states in Congress. So the compromise was, Missouri, you may be a slave state,
we are going to add the great state of Maine to the Union.

The other thing they added was this line, this red line here, the Missouri Compromise Line. It
said, in the future, slavery will not be allowed anywhere north of this line in any of these future
territories. Even though, Missouri was.

Now, later that's going to bring up a bigger debate, right? Because there's going to be questions,
right? Like, where does this line end? Right here? So, in the future...

Does this line automatically extend to the west coast? I don't know. That's something they're
going to have to revisit.

The other important thing, the most important thing, that James Monroe did

Was something called the Monroe Doctrine

Which you guys are going to read about and answer some questions.

11/12/24
The point is, let's just establish, assuming we didn't talk about it, what is a doctrine? So this is the
president, James Monroe. This is a speech he gave, right? The doctrine is what? Is it a law?

It doesn't even have to be a document. I mean it was a speech. It was written down, like every
speech was. Correct. It is not a law. It is just a policy, an attitude, right? And I certainly talked
about it, Dr. McCormick. This, I'll say, this is definitely the most important one in this semester.

There's going to be another very important one later that has to do with communism. So, the
Monroe Doctrine said a couple things. The United States, actually, I would change that first
phrase, because it's not just the United States, it is what? What area of the world are they talking
about? The Western Hemisphere are henceforth not to be considered s=as subjects of future
colonization by any European power. So at this point in time.
European countries are basically completely out of the Western Hemisphere, with the exception
at this point of Spain a little bit. All right, so it's really the United States and Spain. They say, any
European political intervention in the Western Hemisphere will be seen, will be viewed as
dangerous to our peace and safety, implying that, what?

If you try, we will do something about it and the tone is something you won't like, right? And we
can assume they mean military force.

The deal was what we refer to as reciprocal isolationism. What the United States is saying is,
Europe, if you stay out of the Western Hemisphere, we will stay out of Europe. We're not going
to intervene in European wars or any of that stuff. Don't think that this applies to trade.

Trade is still on the table. They want everyone to trade with everybody. It benefits everybody
involved. Trade is always on the table. This is specifically talking about military and political
intervention. There's one more thing, but this, number four, the no-transfer principle, this was not
included.

Hey. Was the Monroe Doctrine, like the isolationism, is that why we didn't get involved in the
world wars, or is that like another thing? No, that's exactly why. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, this is the
policy that the United States is going to stick with for the next...

This fourth part, the no-transfer principle, this wasn't included in the original speech or in the
speech at all, but U.S. policy makers thought that this was equally important to the other part. So,
the no-transfer policy said that Spain, because Spain still did have some colonies-slash-territory
left in the western hemisphere, It said that Spain was not allowed to transfer any of its new world
possessions to any other European country.

So they were hoping that Spain would be out of the picture eventually, but they're like, Spain,
let's say you control Panama right now. If you ever, the only thing you can do is give Panama
their independence. You can't give Panama to England, you can't give it to France, anything like
that.

Alright? This was a very important time. It was 1823, I think. After the War of 1812, now the
U.S. feels strong enough to defend what they would come to view as their, and I'm going to say
this word a lot, this phrase a lot, their sphere of influence, which to the United States was the
whole Western Hemisphere.

So the United States wanted to be the country that kind of influenced all these other smaller
countries in the Western Hemisphere, not Europe, because, you know, what usually happens
when Europeans get involved in history? We're the United States, we're confident enough, we've
proved ourselves twice against England, we've had our dealings with France, all that kind of
stuff, and other major powers should respect that.
Europe, we're done with you. We've spent the last how many decades dealing with you, again,
whether it was France, Spain, England. This is where we really stop caring about Europe and we
really start to focus on spreading West. Conflicts between political parties and stuff in the future
is going to be about different attitudes over westward expansion, whereas before, all of the issues
between Federalists and Republicans were what?

Topics were which party is pro-England and which party was pro-France. Now it's all about
westward expansion. So this is going to be the main thing that is going to shape public opinion,
foreign policy, until World War I. So even when World War I starts in 1917, Americans are going
to stick to this.

It's going to be hard. Americans are going to say, well, that's a European thing. We don't care
about this. Even in the 1960s, when we talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis, they're going to refer
to this as well. Alright, very important. If there's one thing you remember from this whole
semester, it's the Monroe Doctrine.

Moving on to this dork. John Quincy Adams. I don't know. This guy, yeah, he was a Federalist
just like his dad. He was actually kicked out of the Federalist Party because he was one of the
few people that supported Jefferson's Embargo Act. Now, when this guy comes into, this guy
was actually kind of interesting.

He was like the U.S. diplomat to Russia at like 16 because he was like the only person that could
speak Russian. I think they say that, I don't know how they measure this, but I think they say that
he had the highest IQ of like any president. His thing was to promote, and again this reflected the
general attitude at the time,

Agriculture, commerce, manufacturing. Alright, the big difference between Jefferson and this
guy was, remember Jefferson wanted a country of small independent farmers and independent
states that were kind of friends. Now the attitude for the federal government was...

We want one single country that goes from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The way this guy
actually got elected, here we have our second example of election issues. The first one we talked
about was... The whole Jefferson-Aaron Burr thing, remember that one?

Where Hamilton flipped the vote, blah, blah, blah. Kind of the same thing. There was a tie. Well,
not really a tie. There were four candidates in the election of 1824. None of the four people won
enough electoral votes. Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, but none of the four won the
electoral vote.

So, this goes to the House of Representatives again. Now, at this point, we have the 12th
Amendment. Now, the 12th Amendment says that if the vote goes to the House of
Representatives, only the top three candidates can be considered. Which means that the guy who
did the worst out of all those four, his name was Henry Clay, who I think we've heard of before,
right?

He's out, right? He's not being considered, and this is what we'll call a tiebreaker. What happens
is... Andrew Jackson had originally won the popular vote, but all of a sudden, the House of
Representatives elects this guy. And all of a sudden, guess who becomes his Secretary of State?

Henry Clay. So, Jackson and his supporters are like, whoa, this doesn't make any sense. They
claim that a, that's why they call this election the corrupt bargain, because they thought that there
were some like backroom dealings and some people traded some political favors to have some
some votes flipped.

All right, and that's going to actually get Jackson's supporters to kind of rally later for the next
election. But anyway, so we have John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay as the Secretary of State.
By the way, back in the day, The Secretary of State was like the second most, second biggest
position in the government.

All right, usually people saw that position as being the stepping stone to being the next president.
All right, so that's kind of, and Henry Clay does not become president ever, but that was a big
deal. Now, Henry Clay's, what else do we have? Anything important here?

Cool, whatever. Henry Clay.

We know Henry Clay for being one of the war hawks that pushed for war against England for the
War of 1812. He's obviously made a name for himself and becomes very influential. He's very
famous for introducing what he called his American system. These are kind of the things that he
wanted.

It has been edited to include proper punctuation. Alright, we are going to talk about what tariff is
and why a government wants it. It's to protect American industries and also, obviously, get
money for the federal government. Now, the problem at this time was the West and the South had
always hated a tariff.

Raw materials that you produce now that part didn't work out because the South realized they're
like, Hey, we never supported the tariff before this and we're doing just fine. The north is still
gonna

It's a little more successful in convincing the West of that. What else do you want? High public
land prices. That, again, just like the tariff, was all to get money for the federal government. You
want it to keep the second bank of the United States that we signed into effect in 1816.
For obvious reasons, right, we wanted to promote a single currency for the country, get the
government to be able to loan money, all that kind of stuff. The end goal here was... To develop a
system of internal improvements, and by that he meant things like roads, canals, railroads.

Anything that would kind of knit the country together, make it easier for goods and people to
travel and be shipped and transported, especially from the West to the East. Now, all of this, all
these internal improvements were going to be financed by all this other stuff that he included in
his American system.

But again, a lot of Americans were on board with this. This is what the federal government set
out to do. And it all goes hand-in-hand with this growing.

This idea, this push for a concept that we know as Manifest Destiny, which you all hopefully
heard about before, yeah? I hope so. It's pretty self-explanatory, right? The United States had
people, and when I say the United States, virtually everybody, right?

I don't think there were many people that said we shouldn't do this, but the belief was that this
was like a mission from God, They thought that anybody who stood in the way, Europeans,
Native Americans, Mexicans, whoever, if you stood in the way, you were standing in the way of
progress, you were in the way.

And obviously America was ready to deal with that. This painting, this painting actually didn't
come out until the 1870s, but this is probably the best depiction of what manifested. It was, right,
the modernization of the West, that person floating there.

That is the, it's like the personification of America, that's Columbia. But she has shown, you
know, leading Americans from the east to the west, kind of bringing the light into the dark. This
shows all the different types of economic, forms of economic activity and transportation.

You probably can't see, but in the back we have steamboats, we have railroads. We have
American settlers going west. She's stringing a telegraph wire. Some people think that's a Bible.
That is not. That is an American school textbook, right, to show that we're spreading American
ideals and blah, blah, blah.

And then, obviously, pushing out the people who are there and the animals if you care about
them. Manifest destiny was actually a term that the press came up with, not like American
leaders. We're not really sure who came up with it first. The first time this term shows up was in
like 1845 in a magazine, but people believed this going back 50 plus years easily.

A lot of different groups supported Manifest Destiny. Farmers, settlers, obviously wanted access
to this land. But even industrial workers in the North wanted Americans to do this because they
saw this as being a way to secure their own land. You know, economic opportunity and higher
wages and all that kind of stuff.
One of the big reasons... One of the big reasons for taking over the whole continent was to
protect it from Mexico. What was the issue with Mexico? It was the same issue they had with the
Spanish. What are they scared of? War?

Great to be here. Or them taking over territory? Yeah, but who's them? Like Mexico taking over?
Yeah, but what about them? They were Catholic

So they thought that taking over the whole continent would protect the United States from
Catholic Mexico. A lot of people thought that the Spanish, and then later when Mexico gets its
independence, a lot of people thought that they were going to bring the Inquisition back to North
America.

Expansion was just seen as guaranteeing liberty to people. Remember, owning land is the most
important thing to people. And so they thought we, as individuals, we should have the right to
claim land, build a community, form these democratic governments, become part of the United
States, and join the union, and all that kind of stuff, so.

Anyway, this, this...

You guys, this is a time period we've, or a concept we've referred to as the market revolution.

Which I'm not going to really go over too much because it was in the part of the textbook that I
told you to read over break and probably nobody did it. But a lot of it is kind of self-explanatory.
This is all, the main concept here is the transportation revolution.

And there's a bunch of different ways we did this. The first step was the Erie Canal, which was
only a part of the entire canal system. I hope I don't have to explain to you what a canal is. The
Erie Canal was one of the earliest achievements of the overall goal, which was to kind of unite
the country economically.

Now, the federal government wasn't involved, well, not really involved in this. This was the state
of New York. They were responsible for funding this and organizing and building it. It took like
9,000 people to build all this. But again, they wanted to do this to turn a lot of these kind of local
economies into one nationwide market economy.

This thing was and probably still is a big deal. There was twice as much stuff went through the
Erie Canal than went up and down the Mississippi.

There's more than just this canal on the map, I'll show you in a little bit. But it eventually all
flows into New York City. And this is with the help of the New York Stock Exchange. This
makes New York now the most attractive place to do business in the world.
New York City is going to triple its population by like 1850. And then as a result of this, New
York is going to trade more than Boston and China and a bunch of other places. Alright, so the
Erie Canal, very important, read about that in the book. Some other kind of self-explanatory
stuff.

Turnpike, this is not up here, but you guys know what a turnpike is, I hope.

Yeah, it's a road, but a road built by who?

Private companies. Alright, it's like the dulles toll road. It's a turnpike, a Pennsylvania turnpike.
It's built by a private company. They charge people to drive on it.

Obviously the federal government supported this because it was another thing that united
different parts of the country, but the federal government doesn't have to pay for anything. The
roads that Congress authorized to be turnpikes, the one you guys probably can't see, the National
Road, which went from Western Maryland out here to St.

Louis, and then the Coastal Road, which was kind of the basis for what is today Interstate 95.
Which, by the way, the National Road doesn't really exist anymore. It was like Route 68 or half,
doesn't matter. But we got turb pipes, steamboats. That's self-explanatory.

Steamboats first used in the Hudson River in 1807. What's the big deal with a steamboat?

It ships things more efficiently over water. What does a steamboat not have to worry about?
Wind. Wind and currents, right? You can just drive your boat anywhere, right? What else do we
have here? Railroads, canals, all the blue there is a bigger map of how all the canals were
connected to rivers.

Pretty much everywhere was linked. All this, railroads, the increase in the construction of
railroads. All this just all this stuff just opens all this new land to settlement. It's going to lower
transportation costs, make it easier for people to sell their products and get their products to
market.

All right, all right, so most of this market revolution is all about transportation, but there were
some things more technologically, communication-wise, like Morse code, which you guys all
know Morse code, the little dots and dashes, click click click, that

This was originally meant for, this is all made for businesses and newspapers, right? So that
information and prices could be spread very quickly. But then obviously people realized, oh, I
can communicate with people I'm friends with or my family back in wherever.
So this is going to be the first step in kind of the communication revolution. But anyway, all this
spreading west and linking everybody closer together at the end of the day is all going to lead to
something I mentioned before. I post these slideshows around.

Sectionalism. This is something that Washington kind of warned against in his farewell address.
All right, but being a country so big, this is going to kind of happen naturally.

Alright, and we very simply split the country into three parts. It technically is a lot more
complicated than this, but for our purposes, it's fine. This is all about Northeast vs. Southeast vs.
West. Or sometimes, well, I'm not gonna confuse you, it doesn't matter.

All these regions, because they're different, kinda mostly economically, but also kinda culturally
too, right, we're gonna see a divide and all these regions are gonna kinda push to accomplish
things that affect them specifically, all right? We have some people who kinda lead these
different regions.

Daniel Webster we haven't mentioned yet because that's probably the last time I'll mention him
because I don't care about him. John C. Calhoun was going to be very important in the South and
Henry Clay in the West. You guys can, again, a lot of this is self-explanatory.

You guys can read through this. What eventually this is all going to boil down to is who... Who is
against slavery and who is not, right?

Slavery becomes so much more important to the South because of cotton

Alright, after Jackson does his thing in the South, and we kind of displace a lot of the Creeks.
What drove this migration was the high price of cotton.

Interesting thing, a lot of people, so slavery got a boost like, you know, North America started to
get into the Atlantic slave trade because of tobacco, right? That was a crop that One of the
reasons that the South doesn't really become very protective, so to speak, of slavery is because
once tobacco kind of fizzles out, a lot of people got into crops.

Like, for example, George Washington, he stopped growing tobacco and he turned to wheat. And
wheat was a plant, or was that what we called it? A crop. It has been edited to include proper
punctuation. Cotton is in such demand, it is so expensive, meaning that the people who grow it
can make a ton of money.

Some places in the South can grow up to 1,000 pounds of cotton per acre. Alright, so this is a
time where worldwide, globally, we have a huge demand for just like textiles in general. And the
South, there's opportunity to have property, to, for, you know, everybody to have property and
not just have property, but like thousands and thousands of acres to be able to take advantage of
this economically.
But cotton is gonna be the thing that, where the United States is gonna be past India of being the
world's leading producer of cotton. By the middle of the 18th century, the United States is
responsible for about 70% of the whole world's cotton production.

You guys know what that machine is, right? Is it up there? No.

Now, what does it do?

It does the hard work of separating the actual cotton from the seeds and the rest of the plants.
Right, so, you would think, oh we got this machine now. We don't need to depend on slavery,
right? You would think. But, no. Because of this machine, this actually increases the demand for
slavery because now that we have this machine and can do this part faster...

Now people are growing even more cotton, right, which actually does the opposite of what you
think it would do. So that was invented by Eli Whitney, if you care. So this makes southerners
want more land so they can grow more cotton. And then that means they had even more, they
enslaved even more people.

And something I think I don't know if I mentioned.

So remember when they wrote the Constitution and they added those clauses talking about
slavery, right? One of them was that they banned the Atlantic slave trade. That's not true. They
did the opposite. They basically banned the ban of the Atlantic slave trade for 20 years, right?

Until 1808. In 1808, the first thing Congress did was they banned the Atlantic slave trade. Now,
that didn't mean that slavery was illegal. That meant importing enslaved people from other
countries was illegal. When they banned the Atlantic slave trade, the interstate slave trade was
still legal.

But that made this institution in higher demand, and it made things more expensive. And now
there was a bigger dependence on this market within the United States. So there's a lot of factors
that lead to the growth of slavery. One of them was cotton.

Well, a big one was cotton. Anyway, this guy. What do you think about Andrew Jackson? You
guys like this guy? What do you think you know about this guy? He is on the $20 bill. But, uh,
and you guys, I wouldn't expect any of you to really know much about him.

I don't think there's any history buffs in this room, so it's okay. But, I think kind of socially...

Jackson, I think in this day and age people hear the name Andrew Jackson and what do you
think?
Do we like him? What do we do? What do you think when you hear this guy's name? I mean, I
like money, so... Can I go to the bathroom? I know he's like, he was like a general.

Did he do something with an election? I feel like there's some really important election that he
was a part of. Well, the one I just talked about. He was mad that he won the popular vote, but
when it went to the House of Representatives... Suddenly they voted for the other guy and he
thought some shady stuff happened, which it probably did.

So that was the corrupt bargain. For a bargain to be clear. He's kind of reusable. Is he? He's my
type. He's on the $20 bills. He's on top of it. Oooh. Technically, no. We also, yes. No. It's a no.
What did he say? So here's the thing. Well, a lot of people...

So today's...

Like, hey, there's things that I'm allowed to do that you're not allowed to do. It's just like, let me
do it. Sorry.

Most of American history loves this guy.

He was always seen as like the symbol of American democracy and a true representative of the
actual common average American in the White House. So for his president, long after his
presidency, you know, Democrats always celebrated like, oh, we're the party of Jefferson and
Jackson, right?

Republicans always love this guy for keeping the union together.

This guy, you know, in the future, anti-imperialists are going to, even though they generally hate
Jackson, they love his small government mentality, right? Go to the 1920s and 30s, the New Deal
liberals, they loved him, even though he was an economic libertarian that would have hated the
New Deal, but whatever.

They're going to use Jackson to justify a strong executive, sort of like a precursor to FDR and
what he does. And you guys might not know anything about that. It's basically in the 1960s
where we have some views of Jackson that start to change. One of these views was these Marxist
people who said that, you know, yeah, Jackson is like the champion of the common man, but he's
also a corrupt capitalist and an imperialist and a white supremacist, and mainly the only thing
people today look at him and judge is the whole Native American policy thing, which we're
going to get to hopefully later.

And then in 2007, this author, David Walker Howe, I don't think I have his book somewhere, he
said, and he wrote one of the pieces of the Oxford History of the United States, he just says, you
know, Jackson was an authoritarian, all he cared about was forced Indian removal, and he
compared him to, like, all these dictators from back in the day and blah blah blah.
So it's really a very recent thing in the last couple decades where people start to really look at
him as kind of a negative connotation with his name, which I disagree with. I think he's top 10
for me, OG, but what?

We're going to get to that. Yeah. This is the time period we're talking about. But who's this guy?
Tennessee, right? He was, uh...

He was just a dude's dude on the frontier, right? How did we get him? Well, I told you that thing
about the election of 1824. He's not very happy about it, and the people who support him are not
happy about it either.

And after that election, his supporters really start to organize. And there's a guy, the guy that led
this organization, his name was Martin Van Buren. You might have heard of him before, too.
Never, Logan? Nope. Nope? You're not a Martin Van Buren fan?

No, you shouldn't be. He was definitely our worst president ever. Martin Van Buren was a New
York Senator, and this is a guy who believed that political parties were actually a good thing. He
thought that having competition between political parties is how there was a check on the power
of whatever party.

Mark Vandburen was not a smart person, but he was a really good politician. The Wake Party.
That name comes from a political party that used to exist back in England back in the day. So,
and we're going to do more with this later, so don't worry about that.

We'll compare them later. This is an era, an age that we call an age of Jacksonian democracy,
where really politics is intertwined in everybody, every part of life. The thing with Jackson is that
he thought that politics should be open to all the people, not just the elites, not just the educated,
privileged class.

The one thing that people kind of frown upon when they hear about Jackson is up here, this. Has
anybody heard this term, the spoils system? The actual name for this that he started was rotation
in office. Anyone ever heard of this? Rotation in office was this concept that the president should
reward people who are loyal to him with jobs in the government.

Now is that good or bad? Bad. Is it? Why is that? Because just because you support someone
doesn't mean that you're the right person to have the job. You don't have any qualifications.
Alright, so a bad consequence of this is that less qualified people should get jobs, or would get
jobs in the government.

Yeah. Alright, is there anything else bad about this? Potentially.

Okay. Okay. People could potentially do things. Well, I mean, is that, if the executive is the
executive, shouldn't the people working for him do things that support him, even if they're not
hand-picked by him? What if they just got a job, like, through interviewing?

They're still supposed to do that, right? Right? Maybe. I don't know. I'm just kind of, like,
throwing things out there. What you said could potentially be a bad thing, but what's the good
thing about this? Because they start this for, I think, a good reason.

More people like the President? Hm? More people will like the President? Oh, you think that the
President will get... Well... I think people are still going to support a candidate, or this candidate,
assuming that their candidate is going to win, right?

So it's not like he becomes president, then I become loyal to him expecting a good job. There are
usually people that have been in his circle for a long time. The people who hated this called this a
spoiled system, and it makes it really, I think, makes it...

It gives the wrong impression of the whole purpose of this. The key word here is rotation.
Jackson thought that... Rotating political appointees to job was actually the duty of whoever won
any type of election or political contest. So he thought that incorporating the ability of the
president to handpick whoever he wanted would encourage regular people to participate.

Oh. Is this like, is this the cabinet?

Part of it is, yeah. But it's pretty much any job within the executive branch. Yeah, I thought, yes,
yes. So the whole point of this was to get regular people involved in the government. The other
point, so to go off of what you said.

Mr. President, I'm going to handpick hatems to be in this position. What's the potential good
thing about that system?

The... Even if Hayden's not as qualified as Val, but she's been following me for a long time, I
think she deserves it. The President trusts his people more.

Half of the point of this was, alright, if I hand pick Hayden and she screws up, Whose shoulders
does this fall on at the end of the day? Mine. Right? If Hayden gets her job by applying and some
HR department gives her the job and she screws up? The whole point was to make the person
doing the appointing accountable for the actions of the people he appointed.

People also kind of assume that this means, all right, Val, you can follow me forever. You're
going to be in this position for my whole presidency. No, that was not the intention of this,
alright? The key word was rotation, alright? People thought, Andrew Jackson thought that, um...
People, the process of serving in a position for a long time is what eventually caused corruption.
So the idea was, this is going to be done regularly, all right? You're going to have this job, I don't
know, you're this job for this year. Maddie, you're going to have this job next year, and next year,
next year, all right?

Constant rotation to kind of keep things fresh, and also hold me accountable for what this whole
branch of the government does. All right, now yeah, this would maybe lead to incompetent
people having these jobs, but this was all at this time period of getting regular people to be active
participants in the government, which is what a democracy kind of is, right?

All right, so Jackson, he's kind of an interesting guy because he was, um, He was a nationalist in
terms of he wants the union to stay together at the end of the day, but he was also a big believer
in the states being the center of the government, not the people in D.C.

So, he's going to oppose any attempt by the federal government to interfere with the economy or
with the private lives.

Jefferson, Jeffersonian Democracy, and we have Jacksonian Democracy. Don't get those two
things confused because they are very different. Jefferson, Jeffersonian Democracy, and we have
Jacksonian Democracy. Who did Jefferson extend voting to? Hmm?

What was his thing? Who do you think should be the only people that should have suffrage
rights? Oh, um, educated people. No, so his intended vision was that everybody eventually
would be educated and only educated people would rule, but we're talking voting.

Who should be who? No, it wasn't the farmers because then he said that the farmers shouldn't
vote because...

And again, going back to the education, yeah, Jefferson said only the educated elite should vote.
Jackson was not an educated guy. He was like, no. You don't need education to be qualified to
vote. Jefferson was all about that yeoman planer class. Jackson agrees, but Jackson is also going
to expand that to laborers, the planter class, all that kind of stuff.

The only real thing that Jefferson and Jackson both agreed on was... No bank. No national bank.
And we're going to watch Jackson destroy that here in a little bit. Really the first president that
all the people could identify this because he's the first Westerner to be president, you know, we
already talked about him being a war hero, a self-made man, and unlike all of the presidents that
came before him, he was the first one to not be kind of traditionally educated, right, not going to
college, all that kind of stuff.

Some people say he's actually the first real American president, meaning he's the most like an
actual American person. He's also at the age where he was never, and also not being from the
East Coast, he was the first president to not be raised and shaped by British customs.
He just identified himself as being the voice of the people, right? Defending them against the
special interests.

He also proposed an amendment to abolish the Electoral College because of what happened in
his, uh...

That election of 1824, and he calls for reform. His inaugural address is when he actually calls for
the purging of federal officials, all right? In his presidency, he does basically fire hundreds of
federal employees, all that kind of stuff.

Here, this is not really important, but the end is. Alright, long story short. This is actually what
he has to deal with for his entire first term.

So this is the real, this is like the first kind of scandal in a presidential cabinet. Basically, this
lady, Peggy, wife of the Secretary of War, she was being, so the other cabinet wives were not
including her. They thought that she never divorced her first husband before married John
Easton, so Jackson stands up for her for his wife. Jackson’s wife died from a heart attack, he
thought that something else was going on. He thought the stress from her and the attacks on his
wife was what actually killed her.

So anyway, basically he comes to her side and he goes to his vice president John C. Calhoun and
he says, hey, tell your wife to cut it out. She's one of you guys, blah, blah, blah, that kind of stuff.

But the cabinet wives don't want to, so most of his cabinet resigned, including John C Calhoun.
And this is how John, the whole point of this is, this is how Calhoun resigns

John C. Calhoun, going back to South Carolina, leads us to this big issue, alright, the
nullification crisis.

I told you before, the South doesn't like tariffs, alright? The federal government passes the Tariff
of 1828, which was like a 45% tax on... South Carolina, and I told you before, South Carolina is
a state that really causes most of the trouble in early American history.

It brings up this old concept that Jefferson came up with decades before this called nullification.
The leadership of John C. Cowan.

We're going to nullify this law of Congress. It is unconstitutional. South Carolina is not going to
follow this law. And South Carolina said we are going to secede from the United States for trying
to enforce this. What does Andrew Jackson do? Andrew Jackson basically says if you don't
follow this, I'm coming down to South Carolina with the entire U.S.

military.
But the nullification, this is why a lot of Republicans always liked Andrew Jackson because
again, he was all about states' rights and states having most of the authority, but at the end of the
day this was threatening to break the whole union apart and Andrew Jackson supported the
union.

But this is what caused Calhoun to leave the Democrats, blah, blah, blah.

I had this thing.

I have this thing that we're going to do.

But I think we should do this in class next time.

I contemplated just now to give it to you now and say, have you done it by any chance?

Wait, wait, wait. Do we have to write an essay or do we just have to look at one? Please. I don't
know, we just have to look at it. In the spirit of only having 15 minutes left, it doesn't make a lot
of sense.

11/18/24
There's a lot of information I didn't give you and kind of on purpose because I wanted to see
some people I don't know if it was this block

But what were his or Andy Jackson's intentions, or his reasons for the Indian Removal Act?

And so a lot of people listed them out, but then added, well, some people just said, well...

Some people said, well, he said this and this, right? But somehow, people came to the conclusion
that concern for Native Americans was just kind of a facade. So the reason I left out some
sources of information was to see why or how you would

And that's the whole point where I think people kind of put their own feelings into and they
assume that Jackson I think kind of main reasons for the actual removal at this point, which were
what?

Something with economics. It would benefit the country's economy. Yeah, and so that was the
main thing. So that Americans could go in and settle this land, which would ultimately benefit
the American economy. We did. So what was the main difference?

It didn't make sense for Americans and a lot of other European countries to, uh, it didn't make
sense that there's all this land, but it's only occupied by a relatively small number of people.
You either do it, switch to agriculture, become an American citizen, or we're going to need you
to leave. And the other part of that was... The federal government is still very, very small and
relatively powerless compared to what they can do today.

So what the federal government wanted to do or wanted to happen in the West was It was
different than the realities of the constant conflicts that was happening. And that varied state to
state, group to tribe, group to group, Americans, whatever. We have his explanation of what
would become the Indian Removal Act of— can we talk about the Ford-Stanley Treaty?

Sure, did we do anything? Is this all just like a free vision setup, Amy? We just came to our
group and that happens. So I didn't do this at all, is what you're saying? Yeah, it wasn't me, yeah.
So, that hopefully makes a lot of this make more sense.

Like I just said, so Europeans typically came over, and it was very acceptable for Europeans to
claim lands. They called it a title by discovery, and you did it in the name of a monarch, king,
queen, whatever. All right. The way that you prove this was you flew your flag over this land.

And if there were some people there. Well, if they don't have a legitimate political system, like a
king that already claimed exact boundaries, then, you know, whatever. Like every other country,
the English, the Americans, the French, they always negotiated with these groups through written
treaties, right?

Now keep in mind, a lot of times, those discussions were more like spoken rather than written.
But at the end of the day, the U.S. government, for the most part, pretty much executed what was
written in those documents.

But again, as an ethical question, right, agriculture was always superior to the

And that comes from the religious belief that God made the earth for people. So the land should
be used in the best way that it benefits the most people. Hunting is not the lifestyle that makes
the best use of land. It was agriculture, because I could sustain my family forever on an acre of
land, but if I'm a small community that hunts, I need a lot more than an acre.

I'm going to need square miles, right? And that's just to take care of a couple people. And the
reason that these tribes moving wasn't a big deal to people was because, okay, well, you're kind
of just like moving around this piece of land and hunting it.

At some point, typically, those people over hunt and they move to a different land anyway. It's
not like you have a lot of stuff, right? You don't have these these big houses built or anything like
that. You're a little bit more nomadic anyway. So in the American federal government's mindset,
You physically just have to move yourself and maybe a couple things you got with you and
you're going to do the same thing and live the exact same way, whether you're in Georgia or in
what where they would move them, which was Oklahoma.
So, the United States, when they did this, at first, for a long time, recognized that Native tribes
had...

These people want to get into Mississippi, Alabama, all that kind of stuff. That Fort Stanwix
Treaty in 1784... That set the precedent for Native tribes being under the protection of the United
States. So the United States dealt with Native Americans pretty much just the same way as all
European countries did.

But, I will say, whether it's especially the Spanish and the English, and maybe not so much the
French, but no other country contributed to or attempted to educate Native Americans, and I
don't mean educate as in like school like this, education in terms of learning how to farm, and no
other country Europeans constantly instigating Native American tribes to attack the American
frontier and resist that expansion.

We have some tribes, especially in that Ohio River Valley. This is a voice memo. This is a voice
memo. This is a voice memo. So the most realistic solution was, for Washington, let's create a
bunch of different territories that we could separate Native Americans from Americans to kind of
guarantee the peace of both.

So there's not this conflict.

And the reality was, for a long time, until the 1900s, well into the 1900s, It was impossible for
the federal government to make the people in those states, the state governments, land
speculators. It was impossible to control them. It was impossible to get them to treat Native
Americans fairly.

So a lot of this is what we want in theory versus what actually is happening in practice. And this
is true for Adams. Thomas Jefferson, we already talked about his goals for Native Americans.
Assimilation into the population. Some tribes did take some steps to do this.

The group that took this a little bit more seriously was the Cherokee, who built schools, did write
some laws.

And then we get to Jackson, and Jackson was the guy who always supported states' rights to
defend themselves from Native American attacks, which at this point, and when we get to the
1820s, was a super common thing. So, he wanted to protect Americans from Native Americans,
but Jackson also, uh...

The original 13 states had the legal right to

Again, Tennessee, and what else is over there? Kentucky, Ohio, all those. He thought they should
have the same right to do that as well. The situation at the time that really got Jackson irritated
about all this was, he hated, you know, most people in Congress were just like either uninformed
or unsympathetic to the stuff that was going on in the frontier, so Jackson hated those people.

Jackson, remember, Jackson, you know, is Jackson a southerner or is he a westerner? Kind of

both. We, some, a lot of people refer to him as being a southerner because technically, you know,
south. But his South in Kentucky or Tennessee was a lot different than like the South that was
this area Virginia.

All right so he hated the East Coast like congressmen he thought that they were just you know
he's like it must be nice for you to sit in your cozy office in D.C. and make policy over what's
going on out here when you've probably never even been out here.

When people in the West were pretty much fighting like a constant war out there. But Jackson
did try and help convince John Quincy Adams to negotiate with the Cherokee again hoping that
it would protect settlers because They don't have food and they die, right?

So, you know, Jackson got kind of famous for fighting and displacing Native Americans with all
his military stuff we talked about. But he did have kind of a subtle positive influence. It has been
edited to include proper punctuation. So he wanted punishments for Native Americans that were
doing that kind of stuff.

He also wanted punishments for white Americans who mistreated them. Alright, the thing with
Jackson was, um, I need a map here, and I might have told you guys this too. So, Jackson, he,
War of 1812, he fights in the Creep War, if you guys remember this.

After the war with the Creeks, Jackson wants to draw this boundary line, and he does draw this
boundary line.

around where Montgomery, Alabama is today. And he, in the Treaty of Fort Jackson, made the
creeks move, all move north of that line. Friendly ones and unfriendly ones. Why? Because if
they stayed south of that line, it would be very easy for Europeans, in this case mostly the
Spanish and the British, to continue to get those Native Americans to instigate what the
Seminoles were doing, what the Creeks were doing.

So he wanted Native Americans out of this area, and he wanted Americans, he wanted the
federal government to start to push for American settlement to fill this area with Americans,
because he thought that that could be a buffer against European invasion and all that kind of
stuff.

He said it was a national security thing for the United States, but at the same time it was also for
the security of, in this case, the Creeks, to avoid conflict in the future. All right.

The Indian removal stuff all comes from the Treaty of Ghent, if you guys remember that one.
The Treaty of Ghent is the treaty that ends the war in 1812, right? So, I told you the Treaty of
Ghent. Made everything go back to how everything was before the war started, so nobody gained
anything, but part of the treaty again, I think it was Article 9, that doesn't matter.

The United States had to give everything back to the American people. But Andrew Jackson
thought that that article of the treaty didn't apply to this because he's like, the Creeks, this is
between the Creeks and the United States and they signed the treaty, right?

Not the British, had nothing to do with that. So, when after the war, when basically the army is
split into two in peacetime, we have the Southern Army and the Northern Army, and Jackson has
control of the Southern Army, he... The removal of natives continued to go on.

Now, what happened next was all about the lack of clarity of these boundary lines. What's that
territory called? What territory? The one that you shaded. It's not like a territory. Well, I mean,
Florida. Just like the northern part of Florida? Yeah, and, well, all of Florida.

So, I know this is a modern day map. So basically, this area right here was the Mississippi
Territory, and then obviously this is Georgia and the rest is Florida. So, this is all about the
creeps, but the Cherokee get involved. Because they say that some of the land being taken from
them...

Some of the land being taken from the Creeks actually belonged to the Cherokee. The United
States found out that that land was only loaned to the Cherokee from the Creeks. They didn't
actually own it, so the treaty is still, they still get all that land.

And Jackson goes to the Cherokee and he says, If you can prove that you own the land and it
wasn't just loaned to you, then we'll give it to you. It's yours. This is not part of our issues with
the Creeks. But they obviously couldn't. And then Jackson finds out that a group of Cherokee
actually went to D.C.

to appeal this and the United States government signed a new treaty that actually gave them land
from the Creeks, or from the Treaty of Fort Jackson. And now Andrew Jackson's mad about this,
not only because of the land thing. But because they accuse Jackson of stealing Cherokee
property and not just land, but like animals and whatnot.

Alright, um... So, we get to...

The actual Indian Removal Act in 1830, which is the first thing you read the other day, was the
explanation for it by Andrew Jackson, which he obviously signs and goes in the law.

The Indian Removal Act.

This is a law, we are coming for you, and we are going to force you out tomorrow. Which is a
detail that I think a lot of people overlook. The deal was... To the Cherokees, too.

They gave them, I believe, about two years. The federal government told the Cherokee If you
guys want to stay...

We will give you, I think it was 160 acres for each person, alright? If you want to become an
American citizen, stay, have your own land, you may. They said if you don't, you have two years
to leave or we are going to escort you out. Alright? And they were also, as a tribe, I believe, they
were going to be given about $5 million as well.

Now, I noticed in some people's papers, a couple people's, they wrote that that is illegal. people
out of their homes. Is that illegal? No. Can we do that? Does that happen today? It's called
eminent domain. Where the federal government can, Jeffrey, tomorrow, the federal government,
if they want your parents' house or property, they can make you leave.

Correct. What, for what your house is worth. That's kind of what this is, right? They are giving
them, well, first of all, they're giving them the opportunity to stay and assimilate into American
society, which a handful did try to do that. And that's where the split comes.

All right, we have, and what you guys didn't know about was John Ross and the situation with
the Cherokee. John Ross was kind of like a half Cherokee, half Irish guy, who When the two
bigger leaders of the Cherokee kind of pass away roughly close to each other, John Ross just
kind of...

More or less takes over, like he assumes that he is the new chief. And the thing about the
Cherokee was they were kind of split. So when you read stuff like, okay, John Ross got 16,000
votes for a petition against this. Well, I don't know. What this boils down to is, who is the actual
leader of the Cherokee?

Is of the 16,000 votes for the petition, you know, out of how many Cherokees? Is that the
majority of them? How does the government deal with that?

So, anyway, they appeal, obviously, which leads to these. Oh, actually, there's one before this,
which isn't up here. In 1823, there's a Supreme Court case called Johnson v. Johnson.

And in 1823, the Supreme Court ruled that Native Americans were not owners of their land.
They just had a right of occupancy, was the term. And this reflects that viewpoint that... Native
Americans were more nomadic. They were hunter-gatherers. They were not farmers.

That was the basis for the Supreme Court ruling. Anyway, that was before. Now, we have the
Indian Removal Act. Obviously, the Cherokee are not happy with this, or at least a lot of them
are not, so they also appeal and sue, right? In this case, the state of Georgia.
So, in Cherokee Nation versus Georgia, so what had happened was Georgia passed a law that
said that Cherokee land could be

It has been surveyed, broken up, and given to American settlers. The Cherokee said this is
unconstitutional because we have these previous treaties that were between us and the United
States.

Oh, by the way, this is John Marshall still, remember him? Supreme Court Chief Justice, who
issues this ruling. And in this, in Nation vs. Georgia, Marshall says that... Native Americans,
they're not a foreign nation. They are, we call them a domestic dependent nation.

Or, what they called them were, they said that Native Americans are wards.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were awarded to someone on So they deserve protection, but they were
not citizens and therefore did not enjoy the same rights as others. Cherokee Nation v. GA (1831)
was a big win for states' rights people and Andrew... Nope, sorry. Not that one. This one.

And a big one for people like Andrew Jackson, who pushed for states' rights to deal with Native
Americans. So because of this definition, the Supreme Court didn't have the jurisdiction to rule
over this case. Now, the problem was, the next year... There's issues, and it goes back to the
Supreme Court on the same exact case.

So, Worcester v. Georgia, the court completely changes its mind and ruled that Native Americans
were a distinct kind of foreign group of people with the right to have a separate identity. And
because of this ruling, They can only be dealt with by the federal government, not the states.

Now, Jackson and other people, especially people in the South, are very upset with this because,
again, in one year, the Supreme Court does a complete 180. Like, this doesn't happen in the
Supreme Court. Especially not in a year after the previous voice memo.

Now, Jackson is going to, as president, is not going to enforce that Supreme Court ruling because
he disagrees with it. Before Jackson is out of the picture, he has to take care of the National
Bank. Andrew Jackson. We talked about the purpose for the bank and what it serves to do to
raise money, promote economics, blah blah blah.

Jackson does not like banks. He does not trust banks. He thought that banks only operated to
benefit certain people. And what he really didn't like was tapered money. He thought that
inflation reduced a person's actual income. So Jackson was a guy who advocated for only hard
money or species, gold and silver, that kind of thing.

The guy who was in charge of this bank at the time was a guy named Nicholas Biddle.
And Nicholas Biddle was very good at his job, very effective head of the National Bank. And he
said a lot of things that made some people, especially Jackson, not trust him. He basically told
Congress that his, he called it his bank. He said, my bank can destroy...

Nicholas Biddle is going to use all his power and resources to maybe oppose Jackson in the next
election. So, what does Jackson do? He vetoes this bill. And this is good for Jackson because a
lot of Americans don't even use the banks. A lot of Americans are kind of skeptical of this.

So, he kind of looks like he's defending the common people with this deal. And what he does is
he, Jackson, takes all the money from the bank and he deposits all this money into different state
banks across the country that people said they were his pet banks because they were banks that
were kind of loyal to him.

And now, with all the money gone, the Bank of the United States has the ability to, well,

The Bank of the United States starts to print and issue more and more paper money. All right,
especially to fund things like the canals and the railroads and all that.

Long story short, and there's no, you can't really pinpoint one cause, alright, but the economy
kind of goes. Land being sold very quickly, bought and sold very quickly, land speculation,
there's some stuff that happens in England that affects it too.

And so this eventually, again, there's not one thing, so it's not like Jackson vetoing the bank
causes this, but we do get to the panic of 1837 where, you know, all the bad still happens. People
lose jobs, farms, land, all that kind of stuff. But, so a lot of negative things do happen, but
Jackson succeeded in his big goal of separating the government from the economy, and Andrew
Jackson's actually the only president to make our national debt zero.

But it will quickly go back up.

Mark Van Buren, what did he do? We know him.

No, before. Martin Van Buren. I talked about him before. There's one thing we're going to credit
him with.

Did he found the Democratic Party? Yes, he created the Democratic Party. Alright, not a smart
guy.

Just very good at organizing political parties, all that kind of stuff. So, he creates the Democratic
Party, which Andrew Jackson was our first Democrat.

And Martin Van Buren is going to win the election of 1836. Actually, before, yeah, ooh, why
does this class go so much faster than other classes?
Alright, so we have the Democrats now, and we have the party that opposed them, which was the
Whigs. This should only take you about probably 10 minutes.

Martin Van Buren of all ties to the government, and so that kind of stuck later. But he didn't do
anything for the panic of 1837. People thought maybe the government should, and they didn't.
The only other thing that we're going to talk about under Martin Van Buren was Trail of Tears.

So, the Indian Removal Act was in the 1830s. Remember it said... You guys can stay, become
American citizens, or we're going to give you time. Yeah, I think you have two. I think it was
two years. You have two years. You can leave. If you're not gone in two years, we are going to
come help you do that, okay?

And what had happened was a lot of the groups of what they call the Five Civilized Tribes,
including the Cherokee, did not leave. So during Martin Van Buren's presidency, Martin Van
Buren directs the federal troops Go and escort them out of this area up here into the present day
great state of Oklahoma.

And they didn't call the Trail of Tears. A couple thousand people moved. I don't know how many
people died on the journey.

So, again, this is associated with Andrew Jackson, however he wasn't president when this took
place. We're going to get into election stuff with William Henry Harrison. So there's two things
we have to do before our quest, which is cover.

Wednesday, if I see you, we have our CLT number 4 research day. So we will see if our request is
still right before break or if I'll...

11/22/24
You guys did that thing, we know the difference between the wigs and the dress, right? Yeah. We
good there? Alright, so Van Buren, remember him? He couldn't hold his popularity without
Jackson. The Whigs took his own political techniques and used them against him in the election
of...

They nominated William Henry Harrison, this guy, we've heard of him before, right? Famous
for... You know, another, a spokesperson for the common American, but he was actually from
Virginia and from one of the, he's a rich guy, from one of the wealthiest families here, so not
really, you know, whatever.

He gets elected, and then he gave a two-hour inauguration speech out in the cold and got
pneumonia and died a month later. So he was president for roughly a month. John Tyler was his
vice president and he's also from Virginia. John Tyler was one of these, he actually was a
Jacksonian Democrat.

He left that party and joined the southern wing of the Whig party, right? So he was a big states
rights guy, southerner, and the Whigs put him on this ticket thinking that his kind of states rights
beliefs would balance out William Henry Harrison's more nationalistic ideas.

But when Harrison died and the Whigs, the congressional Whigs, tried to push all this
nationalistic stuff, Tyler's going to veto all of it because he doesn't believe in it. And that became
a problem because John Tyler was like, I never lied about Whigs.

Now, Texas. 1821, Mexico gets independence from Spain, and that's what Mexico looked like.
They have those three northern provinces up there, which are today Texas, New Mexico, and
California. California had, you know, not really many people, maybe like 3,000-ish.

Spanish missionaries, soldiers, settlers, they were outnumbered by about 20,000 natives out
there. New Mexico, a little more people once we move closer to where the center of civilization
is over here.

Mexico was trying to encourage people to move into California to populate it.

But Texas was the first part of this part of Mexico that was being settled by a large number of
Americans. Originally, there's only about 2,000 Spanish people that they called Tejanos there.
And Mexico wants to try and develop this region, so he...

So, California negotiates with this guy, Moses Austin, a guy from Connecticut, to colonize the
Texas province with America, and Mexico gave him a land grant to do it. Now, he dies soon
after, but his son, Stephen Austin, kind of kept up with all this stuff, continued his plan, and he
was going to sell portions of the land in Texas to Americans real cheap, right?

Makes sense, right? Because Americans are continuously starting to spread into the Southwest,
right? Now, this happened a lot faster and more people moved in than Mexico thought, right?

Oh, so all this population shift happens pretty quickly. And in about less than 10 years all of a
sudden there's like 7,000 Americans in Texas and now they're outnumbering the Spanish
Tejanos, right? And now Mexico's worried that they're losing Texas to the Americans so they
cancel the land contracts and they say no more Americans can come into Texas.

Now, at this point, Stephen Austin and, you know, the community's pretty settled there in Texas
and Stephen Austin and the people who lead this kind of provisional government that they made
Started to ask Mexico for more autonomy. They're like, hey, we got this up here.
Like we're still part of Mexico, but we can manage things, so don't bother us. Now, one of the big
issues that Mexico had was slavery. Mexico had abolished slavery already, but Americans kept
bringing enslaved people into Texas, which kind of made everything worse.

Stephen Austin and all these people are like, we're not gonna really listen. Alright, Mexico's
ruler, their kind of military ruler, he has a long name, we just refer to him as Santa Ana. He sent
an army into Texas, this kind of like a... This sparked a revolt in Texas.

Texans got together, made this new government, and they called for Texan independence. This
starts a little war between Texas and Mexico. We don't need to go through all of this, but this is
where you all heard of the Alamo, hopefully. It's right in San Antonio, Texas, where the Mexican
army came in and basically massacred a fort with like 180-something people in it.

So, remember the Alamo became like a rallying cry for Texas. About a month later, this guy Sam
Houston, you've seen where all the names from Texas are coming from, Forced him to recognize
Texas as an independent country. Yes, any six-flag stands?

Six flags. The original six flags in Texas. Because six different countries have rolled over Texas
before you know it. France, Mexico, Texas, United States, Confederate States of America, and

United States.

Netherlands? England?

Texas, Stone Country, who else?

It's not a European country. It's not an Asian country. It's not an African country. It's not a South
American country. It's not Central American. California.

Confederate States of America. If you count them as a country, we'll talk about that later.

Texas dismissed their defendants, and then Texas asked Congress to be part of the United States.
Now, this issue goes back to, like, Andrew Jackson times, Martin Van Buren, like, Jackson and
Martin Van Buren, they didn't want Texas, and a big part of that was they didn't want to deal with
the slavery question of, okay, if this is a new state, you know, I'm just like a deserter, and I'm not
going to do it.

We have negotiated territories with countries like the Louisiana Purchase, but never actually
annexed one, or a literal country. And Marvin Buren is also like, we're kind of at peace with
Mexico, so we don't want to stir the pot, right? Now, John Tyler, who becomes president, he does
want Texas.
Why? Well, this fits in with Manifest Destiny. Texas is already made up of mostly Americans.
They have a similar government. And John Tyler is like, why would this cause war with Mexico?
Now, who's ever heard of James K. Polk? This is how corrupt the public education system is.

You don't even know who James K. Polk is. Society has done you such a disservice. This man, I
love this guy. He's the best. He's the top 10 president ever and if you disagree with me, you're
wrong. And when I have to back it up, I'm like, nah. Dude, he's top 10.

I don't know where... So, Polk used the Texas issue to kind of get elected in 1845, even though
that was kind of already... It would have happened even if he wasn't president. Congress admitted
Texas as part of the United States like two days before he took office.

Jake Polk is the, he's like, he's probably one of the only presidents who ran for president and like
he, when he ran he said, I'm gonna do this, this, this, and this, and then he got in the office and he
just did all of it. Just like, boom. So, in 1844, he ran.

When he ran for president, the Whigs had no idea who this guy was. Nobody outside the
Democratic Party ever heard of him. But he had been in politics for a long time, from Tennessee.
A Jacksonian Democrat. Really, this guy was what we call a compromise candidate.

At the convention, when the Democrats couldn't agree on who to pick, they were like, alright,
we'll settle for this guy. But, Polk, in this time period, between Jackson and Lincoln, he is the
most influential and powerful president we have. One of his goals here was to bring California
into the Union.

So he sends a dispatch to offer to buy California from Mexico and Mexico says no. So Polk
sends the military under a guy named Zachary Taylor. Heard of him? Zachary Taylor. Alright,
into this area that is claimed by both the United States and Mexico.

Well, the third is in Texas, but now Texas is part of the United States. And they both think they
own this area, so some fighting breaks out, and when that happens, Polk says, hey, American
horses were attacked on American soil. So he asks Congress for war against Mexico in what
would become the Mexican-American War.

Long story short, the United States wins this war. We don't need to talk about all the stuff that
goes on. Most people supported this war because of, obviously, Manifest Destiny. There were
people who didn't like it. Mostly northerners didn't like this because they saw this as an attempt
to expand slavery to the west coast.

People like, you guys know Ulysses S. Grant? He didn't like it because he was like, United States
is a much... More powerful country than Mexico. Is this really a fair fight? He was kind of like,
are we acting like European monarchs now, just going and taking over?
Guys like Lincoln, there was a lot of questioning of, there was a lot of question of, you know,
was Polk allowed to do this? Lincoln said, hey, you know, a president shouldn't be able to go
declare war, or I'm sorry, invade another country to... Prevent a future invasion.

There was kind of some hazy, you know, what really happened out here, but whatever. So we
don't worry about, we actually don't care about this stuff.

This war ends, and the important part is what we get from it, alright? And the treaty that settles
this war is the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. in 1848, all right? The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
does two things. First, it recognizes the annexation of Texas, all right?

And more importantly, since that kind of was already happening, the biggest part of the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo was the Mexican Cession. So Mexico gives present day California, Arizona,
Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico to the United States. All right.

Also in this time period, not part of either of these things, but remember back in the day we
signed a little treaty with England that gave us and the United States joint control of the Oregon
country. And it gave it like 10 years to explore and claim.

Eventually in 1846 the United States gets control of all of that. So, one of the reasons Polk is
amazing is because he basically got us a third of the entire continental United States. Oh, except
for this. This little sliver down here, we really wanted that.

It wasn't included in this one. Alright, what's so cool about that area? Anyone been down to
Phoenix lately?

Yeah, been there? What's there? Or, what's not there?

What's all up here? Trees. Mountains. Rocky mountains, right? What can't you do through and
over the mountains?

By what? By horsewood. By wagon?

They needed this area to complete the Transcontinental Railroad to get to the West Coast. So,
that area was really important.

And we get that with the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. Alright, Continental United States is now
completed under James K. Polk. So you guys don't forget the tree of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Jimmy
Fallon has a skit on this.

It is the Gold Rush. Alright, like I told you, California wasn't very heavily populated. These two
guys, so John Sutter, he was a German guy. He moved here because he basically failed at
everything and he left his wife and kids to come to the United States and start over.
James Marshall, an East Coast guy, I think he's from Connecticut, it doesn't matter. He goes and
he lives on Sutter's property and he was supposed to build a sawmill on the American River.
And, uh, you know, he finds some shiny stuff in the river, picks it up, it's gold.

They go, him and Sutter test it, confirm that it is gold. Now, um, they try to keep it a secret, but
obviously rumors are going to spread. And there's actually this guy named, um, Sam Brannan,
who's the one who took it, who took a sample to San Francisco to show people.

And, um, why? Well, that guy, he wanted people to flood out to this area so he could sell them
the mining equipment and get rich that way. Um, so, but, you know, there's not a lot of people
out here. The communication's not, we don't have, like, a telegraph situated.

Um, so... Californians had the gold kind of all to themselves for a good year, all right, until 1849
when the word spread. And then once it does, people flood out here. This is the biggest, one of
the biggest mass movements in human history. And this had a lot of implications for California
and the United States.

Alright, this is going to kind of help to replace that old kind of Puritan work ethic that we talked
about a long time ago with, you know, now it's more like a let's get rich quick type of deal. It's
going to cause a lot of new industries to spring up in the area, which contribute to the, you know,
modern-day California.

Mining, innovation, obviously, stuff like denim, like blue jeans, like Levi Strauss starts out here
because they realize that that stuff that used to be used for making tents is good for clothes and
it's good for the rough mining work and all that kind of stuff.

If you care about the environment, this is going to change the landscape of California with all the
mining, pollution rivers, littering, blah, blah, blah. People dying in the mines, what else can we
say, but probably most importantly is a lot of this is going to contribute to the Civil War because,
you know, the gold rush meant that the issue of slavery is going to be brought up in this new
land.

It is going to be very impactful to the economy of the United States with adding half a billion
dollars to the country's wealth. Now, neither Sutter nor Marshall benefited from any of this,
right? John Sutter spent the rest of his life trying to...

Very shortly, we'll get out of that. I'm not feeling the quest on Tuesday.