3.7 The Era of Good Feelings  

The Era of Good Feelings had arrived. This was the period following the War of 1812, but it was misnamed. Beneath the surface, lurked darker problems. The 14th Congress that began in December 1815 would turn the nation in a new direction economically by embracing the market revolution. They envisioned staple crop production being replaced by a growing economy. The domestic market took the place of international trade.

In 1816, Virginian James Monroe was elected to the first of two terms. His goal was to cultivate good feelings, and to conciliate and consolidate all divisions created by faction. The era actually gets its name from the apparent lack of partisan politics, but this is largely due to the deterioration of the Federalists. The Panic of 1819 cut the good feelings short and with only one political entity in existence, there was only on “party” to blame. As a result of the Era of Good Feelings, attitudes toward politics began to change. Politics became the forum for the will of the common man.

By far the most important issue during this period was the growing sectional division among North, South, and West. The economies of the North and West depended largely on small to mid-sized farms, some industry, commercial pursuits, and free labor. The economy of the South depended largely on small to mid-sized farms plus the great plantation systems growing tobacco and cotton with slave labor. Although most southerners did not own slaves, the majority aspired to do so.

Democracy in the Early Republic

Today, most Americans think democracy is a good thing. We tend to assume the nation’s early political leaders believed the same. Wasn’t the American Revolution a victory for democratic principles? For many of the founders, however, the answer was no.

A wide variety of people participated in early U.S. politics, especially at the local level. But ordinary citizens’ growing direct influence on government frightened the founding elites. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Alexander Hamilton warned of the “vices of democracy” and said he considered the British government—with its powerful king and parliament—“the best in the world.”¹  Another convention delegate, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who eventually refused to sign the finished Constitution, agreed. “The evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy,” he proclaimed.²

Too much participation by the multitudes, the elite believed, would undermine good order. It would prevent the creation of a secure and united republican society. The Philadelphia physician and politician Benjamin Rush, for example, sensed that the Revolution had launched a wave of popular rebelliousness that could lead to a dangerous new type of despotism. “In our opposition to monarchy,” he wrote, “we forgot that the temple of tyranny has two doors. We bolted one of them by proper restraints; but we left the other open, by neglecting to guard against the effects of our own ignorance and licentiousness.”³

Such warnings did nothing to quell Americans’ democratic impulses in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Americans who were allowed to vote (and sometimes those who weren’t) went to the polls in impressive numbers. Citizens also made public demonstrations. They delivered partisan speeches at patriotic holiday and anniversary celebrations. They petitioned Congress, openly criticized the president, and insisted that a free people should not defer even to elected leaders. In many people’s eyes, the American republic was a democratic republic: the people were sovereign all the time, not only on election day.

The elite leaders of political parties could not afford to overlook “the cultivation of popular favour,” as Alexander Hamilton put it.⁴  Between the 1790s and 1830s, the elite of every state and party learned to listen—or pretend to listen—to the voices of the multitudes. And ironically, an American president, holding the office that most resembles a king’s, would come to symbolize the democratizing spirit of American politics.

Notes

1. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), 288.
2. Ibid., 48.
3. Benjamin Rush, “Address to the People of the United States,” in Hezekiah Niles, ed., Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America (Baltimore: William Ogden Niles, 1822), 402. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000315501.
4. Alexander Hamilton to James A. Bayard, April 1802, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-25-02-0321. From The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, Vol. 25, July 1800–April 1802, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 605–610.