Era of Good Feelings

The Era of Good Feelings was a period in American political history in which partisan bitterness abated. It lasted from 1817 to 1825, during the administration of U.S. President James Monroe, who deliberately downplayed partisanship.[1]

The phrase was coined by Benjamin Russell, in the Boston newspaper, Columbian Centinel, on July 12, 1817, following Monroe's good-will visit to Boston. It has been widely adopted by historians.[2]

Contents

Overview

The political bitterness declined because the Federalist Party had largely dissolved after the fiasco of the Hartford Convention in 1814, and President Monroe avoided partisan criteria in handing out patronage and appointments. The Democratic-Republican Party was nominally dominant, but in practice it was largely inactive at the national level and in most states. The Era of Good Feelings started after the end of hostilities in the indecisive War of 1812 against the British Empire, which had severely strained American finances and sharpened existing political divisions between Federalists and Republicans, the North and South, and the East coast cities and settlers on the western frontier. In the election of 1820, Monroe was re-elected with near unanimity.[3]

The era gave a pause to bitter debates over the protective tariff and the Second National Bank. The First Seminole War and the Adams-Onis Treaty led the US to gaining control of Florida from Spain. President Monroe promulgated the Monroe Doctrine, which declared US hegemony in the New World (tacitly supported by the British Royal Navy) and advised European powers against attempts to reassert their control over newly-independent colonies in Latin America.

End of the Era of Good Feelings

After the Panic of 1819 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the national mood grew more tense. In 1820 slavery came to the forefront as a divisive national issue, pitting North against South, but Henry Clay's negotiation of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 resolved the crisis. The solution was to balance admission of Missouri Territory as a slave state, with the admission of Maine as a free state. The issue of slavery was part of the larger issue between the North and the South of economic and social sectionalism. At this time, local politics were still largely conducted without party labels or party conventions.

However, the relentless daily bitter attacks by one party against the other did not resume until about 1828. Before 1820, the Democratic-Republican Party members of Congress had met in caucus and decided on the party's presidential candidate. That system collapsed in 1824 as four men competed: John Quincy Adams, William H. Crawford, Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson.

The four formed regional coalitions with state politicians and pursued the electorate. At the polls, turnout was light because there were no parties to mobilize voters. Then, because no one received a majority in the electoral college, the decision on the presidency went to the House of Representatives. Clay, who was Speaker of the House of Representatives, swung the election to Adams, who then appointed Clay as Secretary of State.[4] The result outraged Jackson and his supporters. They alleged that a "corrupt bargain" had taken place and immediately began their crusade to gain the "stolen" presidency, which Jackson won in 1828.[5]

References

  1. ^ Harlow G. Unger, The last founding father: James Monroe and a nation's call to greatness (2009) ch 15
  2. ^ Dangerfield, 1952
  3. ^ A myth has arisen that one elector deliberately voted against him so that George Washington would remain the only unanimously elected president. In fact the elector in question disliked Monroe's policies; at the time he cast his vote, he could not have known that his would be the only one to prevent a unanimous election. Turner, Lynn W. (September 1955). "The Electoral Vote against Monroe in 1820-An American Legend". The Mississippi Valley Historical Review (Organization of American Historians) 42 (2): 250–273. JSTOR 1897643. 
  4. ^ Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832 (1998) ch 5
  5. ^ Lynn H. Parsons, The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828 (2009) ch 1

Further reading