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The election of 1800 further divided the young republic into warring political factions and marked a major turning point in the nation’s history. It was the first time one party had relinquished presidential power to the opposition, and it was the only election that pitted a sitting president (Adams) against his own vice president (Jefferson).
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The Louisiana land engulfed 530,000,000 acres of treaty. The United States purchased it from the French for 15 million dollars.
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The War of 1812 marked the first time that Congress declared war. Great Britain was preoccupied with defeating Napoléon in Europe, and in fact, on June 16, 1812, it had promised to quit interfering with American shipping. President Madison and the Republicans, however, believed that only war would end the practice of impressment and stop British-inspired Indian attacks along the western frontier.
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As the financial panic deepened, another cloud appeared on the horizon: the onset of a fierce sectional controversy between North and South over extending slavery into the new western territories. Ever since the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, most Americans had sought to bury the toxic issue of slavery in the misbegotten hope that it would simply die away. Instead, the importance of slavery grew enormously, year after year.
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The most important diplomatic policy crafted by President Monroe and Secretary of State Adams involved a determined effort to prevent future European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere.
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The Second Great Awakening also spawned new religious groups. The burned-over district in New York gave rise to several movements, the most important of which was Mormonism. Its founder, Joseph Smith Jr., the child of an intensely religious Vermont farm couple who settled in the western New York village of Palmyra, was born and raised amid the excitement of revivalism.
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In response to a request from Jackson, Congress in 1830 debated the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the president to ignore previous treaty commitments and force the 74,000 Indians remaining in the East and South to move to federal lands west of the Mississippi River—at the expense of the federal government.
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Harrison defeated Van Buren easily, winning 234 electoral votes to 60. The Whigs had promised a return to prosperity without explaining how it would happen. It was simply time for a change. The most remarkable aspect of the election of 1840 was the turnout. More than 80 percent of White American men voted, many for the first time—the highest turnout before or since, as almost every state had dropped property qualifications for voting.
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the Kansas-Nebraska Act soon placed Kansas at the center of the increasingly violent debate over slavery. While Nebraska would become a free state, Kansas was up for grabs. According to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the residents of the Kansas Territory, not Congress, would decide whether to allow slavery. The law said nothing about when Kansans would decide about slavery, so each side tried to gain political control of the vast territory and worked to recruit emigrants to the Kansas territory.
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By 1860, the center of the “cotton kingdom” stretched from eastern North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia through the Alabama-Mississippi “black belt” (so called for the color of the fertile soil), through Louisiana, on to Texas, and up the Mississippi River Valley as far as southern Illinois.