Troubled Waters for a Young Nation
1In 1789 George Washington became the first President under the new Constitution. He faced hard questions with no earlier President to follow. Washington chose Alexander Hamilton to run the Treasury Department and Thomas Jefferson to lead the State Department, and the two men soon disagreed. Hamilton wanted a national bank and a strong central government that would help trade and manufacturing. Jefferson feared such a government would grow too powerful, and he believed the nation's future lay mostly with farmers. Their supporters formed the first political parties: the Federalists, who backed Hamilton, and the Democratic-Republicans, led by Jefferson and James Madison.
2Trouble came from outside and inside the country. In 1793 Britain and France went to war, and each wanted American help. Washington issued a Proclamation of Neutrality to keep the United States out of the fight. In 1794 farmers in western Pennsylvania rose up against a federal tax on whiskey. Washington sent nearly 13,000 militia toward the area, and the Whiskey Rebellion ended with little fighting. In his Farewell Address of 1796, written as he prepared to leave office, Washington warned Americans against bitter party quarrels and against permanent alliances with foreign nations.
3Baltimore, Maryland, was one of the busiest ports in the young nation. Its merchants shipped flour, tobacco and other goods across the Atlantic, and its shipyards built fast sailing ships. But as Britain and France kept fighting, both seized American ships. The British navy also stopped American ships and forced sailors it claimed were British into its service, a practice called impressment. In December 1807, President Jefferson's Embargo Act banned American ships from sailing to foreign ports. Jefferson hoped to pressure Britain and France without a war. In 1809 Congress replaced the embargo with a narrower law that still banned trade with Britain and France.
4Anger at impressment, and at British support for Native nations resisting American settlement in the West, such as the alliance led by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, pushed Congress to declare war on Britain in June 1812, under President James Madison. Many Federalists, especially in New England, opposed the war, which threatened their region's shipping trade. The British navy blockaded American ports. In August 1814 British troops burned public buildings in Washington, D.C., including the President's House. A few weeks later British ships bombarded Fort McHenry, which guarded Baltimore's harbor. The fort held, and Francis Scott Key, watching from a ship in the harbor, wrote the poem that became "The Star-Spangled Banner."
5The Treaty of Ghent, signed in December 1814, ended the war without changing any borders. News crossed the ocean slowly, so in January 1815 Andrew Jackson's army defeated a British attack at New Orleans before word of the treaty arrived. Many Americans celebrated the victory as proof that the nation had stood up to Britain. Some New England Federalists had met at the Hartford Convention during the war to protest it, and after the peace their party lost much of its support.