Domestic Politics in the Era of Good Feelings

The period between 1816 and 1824 is commonly referred to as the Era of Good Feelings, because the nation was spared the exhausting partisan bickering of the last two decades. James Monroe was guiding the country dutifully through a period of domestic and foreign calm and the nation became focused on the improvement of the nation within its borders without worry for foreign powers. Three factors led to the inevitable end of this era: the supremacy of the Supreme Court, the Panic of 1819, and the Missouri controversy.

The dominant figure in early American judicial history was Chief Justice John Marshall of the Supreme Court, who presided over the nation’s highest court from 1801 to 1835. Marshall was responsible from taking the Court to a basement-dwelling second class judiciary to a dominating figure in American politics. The premier case for Marshall was the 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, in which the Court established its right to judicial review of all congressional and executive actions. In the 1819 cases Dartmouth and McCullough, Marshall and the Court established protections for private business from the federal government and the supremacy of the Court’s jurisdiction throughout the nation and across many sectors of American society. While Marshall was an important figure and did much to help the Court, he was also responsible for much of the rancor felt between the Court and Andrew Jackson in the early 1830s, especially in dealing with American Indian relocation.

The economy took a precipitous downward spiral in 1819 in one of the more devastating depressions in early American history. The causes for the panic were multiple: crop prices leveled out, unemployment increased greatly in a short period, agricultural holdings contracted, foreclosures on unpaid property skyrocketed, and the failure of the Bank of the United States to adequately protect debtors from losing their property and defaulting on their loans. This revealed a long term tension between creditors and debtors that had been whitewashed over since independence. However, the Bank issue and the issue of what to do with agricultural prices would not be resolved for years to come.

Finally, the Missouri controversy sounded the death knell for the Era of Good Feelings. In 1819, the territory of Missouri wished to be added to the Union as a slave state. In the first debates over the issue of slavery in Congress, two issues came up: whether or not slavery was inhuman and whether or not a radical amendment to the Missouri entrance bill could be passed. The so-called Tallmedge Amendment would include Missouri as a slave state but include every other subsequent state as a free state and every slave over twenty five would become free. The bill was indeed too radical for many in the South and West but a compromise was established by 1820. The Missouri Compromise maintained senatorial balance by adding Missouri as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and establishing a line at 35’30” across the entire American continent, with all territory north of that line free and all territory south slave. While this compromise avoided a prolonged debate on the topic, it only served to feed the beast of states’ rights and the acceptance of slavery in America. The confluence of these events helped usher in the second American party system and laid the foundation for Civil War.