Episode 513: Slavery's Long Shadow

It is the elephant in the room in every discussion, and oftentimes the addressed elephant in the room. And so it's important to understand how it gets to be the level that it does, and why in the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties it becomes such an intractable problem that it results in the only civil war in American history, I guess I should say yet, but the only civil

war in American history to date. Now today, our story actually begins by going backwards in the dense, humid tide water of seventeenth century Virginia, where back then the tobacco fields were like the factories of the modern day, power belonged to the plant or elite that possessed them. In sixteen seventy six, a young, restless aristocrat named Nathaniel Bacon

led a rebellion that would reverberate far beyond its immediate violence. Now, the cause of Bacon's rebellion is much much less important than its impact. Bacon's rebellion was loosely premised on the

idea of protecting frontier colonists against Native American attacks. Really, if you back up, it's a lot more about economic tensions between the wealthy plan or elite and poor white farmers, in particular former indentured servants who served out their time after passage to the New World and then believed that they were entitled to a plot of land. The problem was the plot that they often got was worthless. That

bread a lot of resentment. And so what you see during Bacon's rebellion is you see the dispossessed peoples of the Tide Water region reaching out to one another and making connections. And they often reached out over ethnic and racial lines. You had some Native Americans involved, you had

some enslaved Africans, you had some former enslaved Africans. All of them were rallied by Nathaniel Bacon against Governor William Berkeley, claiming that the colonial government had failed again here's the pretext, to protect community governments from Native American attacks. There was a bitter social reality though underneath all of this, Virginia was a deeply divided colony, divided between wealthy planters and

a large mass of landless laborers. When Bacon's multi racial coalition set the torch to Jamestown, the planter class looked on the flames with a new clarity. The rebellion ultimately failed. Nathaniel Bacon dies of dysentery, but it reveals something terrifying to the elite in Virginia, and that was that poor whites and enslaved Africans had the capacity to unite against them, and as a consequence from the ashes of Jamestown, a

new social order started to harden. Over the next decades, Virginia, like much of the English Atlantic world, for the first time, began to codify race into law, where earlier statutes had sometimes been ambiguous. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries forged a new, brutally simple rule of law. Africans would be enslaved for life, their children enslaved after them. That's what makes it chattel slavery. It's passed on from generation

to generation. Then you can be sold like a piece of channel, like a piece of livestock, piece of farm equipment. That's part of the inhumanity of the cysts, and whiteness would become not a badge of class anymore, but a badge that meant freedom. Now, I think it's important to again back up and sort of walk through the value of the transformation of slavery that happens after Bacon's rebellion. Because Bacon's rebellion's at the tail end of the seventeenth century.

You know, it's still very much early colonial American history. We're talking about clusters of European settlers really hugging the coast. At this point, there's not a great deal of penetration to the interior all along the eastern seaboard. But by the early seventeen hundreds, so maybe only twenty five thirty years from Bacon's rebellion, the Chesapeake Bay had now fully embraced racial slavery as the foundation of its agricultural economy.

The demand that tobacco placed on labor was basically relentless, indentured servitude. Once the dominant labor system declined steadily, as more reliable and hereditary enslaved labor took its place. Enslaved Africans, previously a small percentage of the population, grew rapidly in number. During this period. Slave codes were tightened, Baptism no longer free to slave, interracial marriage was banned forever, masters were legally empowered to use deadly force if they felt it necessary.

In other words, slavery was no longer merely an economic institution. It had become part of the social architecture, a way of organizing life and hierarchy. In the colonies, particularly in the southern colonies Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas. They all built societies where race, labor, and law quickly became infused into one single system. Other South, in the rice swamps of South Carolina and Georgia, no cotton yet, that's going

to come later. Enslaved Africans carried agricultural knowledge from West Africa that made plantation wealth possible. In places like the Low Country, Africans formed the majority of the population, working under the punishing task system that allowed planters to demand immense labor while keeping a distance from the deadly, diseased environments that would kill them but not the African slaves. Through this brutal system, African languages, spiritual practices, and kinship

networks persisted. Though The Gulla and Geechee cultures emerged from these crucibles of trauma and resilience stronger than ever. But really, by the time we're inching up to the middle of the eighteenth century, so we're getting close to the revolution.

At this point, slavery was deeply rooted in the colonies, which was fascinating, of course, right because the rhetoric of the coming American Revolution would introduce into all of this a dangerous tension, just like we saw with the French Revolution. Patriots spoke of liberty, natural rights, and resistance to tyranny. Enslaved people like they would in San Deman. Now Haiti listened to all these words, many began hearing their own struggle in these same exact phrases. They started to petition

to courts. Eventually they fled to the British lines when the revolution broke out, and in small scales they tried to negotiate their own Freedom. Lord Dunmore, the British commander in seventeen seventy five, promised freedom to enslave men who joined the British during the American Revolution. This positively electrified the South, making the South a lot more fertile ground right the way for the British. Throughout the conflict, thousands

fled plantations to fight for the British Crown. For slave holding revolutionaries like, of course, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, the War for Independence brought moments of reflection, but rarely any sort of conviction Publicly. All these men wrote about equality privately their plantations ran on enslaved labor. But the Revolution did change slavery in a couple of really important ways that will start to matter later on

in our story. First, the Northern States began a process of gradual emancipation, beginning with Pennsylvania in the year seventeen eighty. Slavery didn't disappear overnight in the northern parts of the United States, but by the early eighteen hundreds it had essentially faded away from New England and even some parts of the mid Atlantic. You're starting, therefore, to see a crucial break and divide amongst the country on regional lines, where one part would be slave in one part would

be free. In other words, out of the ashes of the American Revolution or some of the seeds of the American Civil War. The Upper South saw its numbers rising, especially for manumission, particularly in Virginia, where wartime ideology and economic changes, albeit briefly, opened opportunities for black freedom. The free black population grew steadily, concentrating itself in cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore,

and New York. The south of the Potomac, another transformation was coming, one that would make slavery far more potent than ever before. In the seventeen nineties, a young nation faced westward expansion with hungry eyes. The cotton gin, patented by Eli Whitney in seventeen ninety four, had transformed everything and changed Western history. Lands that were once seemed unprofitable suddenly promised fortune because now there was a new cash crop, king cotton. It would be the white gold of the

new Republic that required labor, enormous labor. You see, before the cotton gin, there was cotton production in the American South, but it was relatively limited. Why because picking the seeds out of cotton fibers was extremely I'M consuming, and so you needed huge amounts of labor on all sides of the production capacity in order to produce the cloth that was necessary for New England textile mills and textile mills in Great Britain. But with the invention of the cotton gin,

those seeds could be taken out mechanically. All of a sudden, your labor was all on the cultivation and harvest side, and that changed the formula dramatically, and the Southern states responded with renewed vigor. The internal slave trade exploded. Over one million enslaved people would be marched or sold from the Chesapeake and Upper South to the Deep interior Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas.

Families were torn uparents in staggering numbers. Slaves coffels lined the roads, shipped filled with human cargo, sailed up and down the coast. This is oftentimes referred to as the Second or New Middle Passage, the transition of enslaved peoples from states like Maryland and Virginia to states in the Deep South. And then, of course, there was the Louisiana purchase in eighteen oh three, which opened up new territories for slavery. While Jefferson privately hated the institution of slavery

we know this, he still publicly facilitated its expansion. New states now emerged as battlegrounds between freedom and slavery, each admission threatening to tip the balance in Congress. Because, of course, after the Constitutional Convention, every single new state brought with it two senators, regardless of the population of that state. The slave owners in the South realized, as long as they kept a grip on the Senate, they could keep

a grip on their property and their power. As cotton profits soared, white Southerners rewrote their own history, recasting slavery not as the head in the past, as a necessary evil, but now as a positive good, vital to national prosperity, and ordained by both God and nature. By the early nineteenth century, the South's political class defended slavery with a zeal that frankly, would have shocked earlier generations that lived

in the exact same state. And then, of course, there was the Haitian Revolution, which cast a long shadow across the United States. Here was suddenly an enslaved people who had Risen defeated European armies and founded a Black Republic. To enslaved Americans, Haiti was a beacon of possibility, but to slaveholders positively, it was innatemare to be avoided at all costs, and so across the South, legislatures tightened up

slave codes even further. Any expression of literacy, mobility, or independent worship among enslaved people was treated as a potential spark for revolt. The possibility of widespread rebellion became a justification for even greater repression. As James Madison's tenure in the White House, still smoldering from the War of eighteen twelve, came to an end, the era of good feelings opened

with President James Monroe. When James Monroe took the oath of office on a mild March day in eighteen seventeen, the nation watched as a familiar figure rose into leadership. These are still the era of all of the Revolutionary Guard. Monroe had fought at the Battle of Trenton, It served as a diplomat in Paris and London, and he held basically every cabinet role that the young American Republic could offer. He was in actually a lot of ways, the last

of the revolutionary generation to guide our country. And yet his presidency wouldn't be a nostalgic return to earlier days. It would become an era of sweeping transformation, expansion, and profound nation building, all of which is going to add a fuel to the fiery of the tension growing between the North and the South. Now. Monroe's arrival in Washington came on the heels of the War of eighteen twelve, a conflict that had nearly broken the young Republic but

had ended with a surge of national pride. The Federalist Party had collapsed after the Hartford Convention, and the Democratic Republicans stood unchallenged. Newspapers hailed the dawn of an era of good feelings, a phrase him Monroe himself never used, but which clung stubbornly to his administration. Nevertheless, to reinforce this sense of unity, Monroe embarked on a series of good Wins tours, traveling through New England, the Midwest, and

the South. Dressed in his Revolutionary War uniform, he visited towns and cities still bearing the scars of the British invasion from the War of eighteen twelve, crowds greeted him with parades, cannons, and patriotic banners. The symbolism was clear. Monroe wanted to stitch the nation together after years of war and partisan bitterness. But of course, beneath the surface,

regional tensions simmered. Economic instability, Western expansion, and debates about national infrastructure hinted that unity wasn't going to come so easily now. One of the defining questions of James Monroe's presidency was how to modernize this country? After all, Great Britain was now already within the throes of the Industrial Revolution.

How could America catch up? Roads, canals, harbors. These were the arteries of a rapidly expanding nation, and many leaders called on the federal government to invest heavily in them. But Monroe was a strict constitutionalist. While he believed internal improvements were essential, he doubted the Constitution gave Congress broad authority to fund them. In eighteen seventeen, he vetoed the Bonus Bill, which would have created a national fund for infrastructure.

Yet his veto message was unusually conciliatory. Monroe encouraged Congress to attempt a constitutional amendment that would make such programs clearly legal. He wasn't necessarily blocking progress. He was safeguarding the rule of law, and so states took the hint

and took the lead. Over the next eight years, it was the states themselves, not the federal governments, that launched ambitious improvement projects, while private companies built the Erie Canal, which opened in eighteen twenty five and reshaped American commerce. Monroe's caution on federal power foreshadowed future debates that would define the nineteenth century. But in the meantime, of course, the country kept spreading westward, hungry for land and an opportunity.

One of the things I always find really fascinating about Monroe, though, is if he's cautious when it comes to domestic policy, he was definitely the boldest president to date when it came to foreign affairs. Under a brilliant guidance from his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, the United States quickly redefined its place in the world. The first question was Florida. For years, Florida had been a problematic frontier, officially a

still a Spanish colony. The border was as porous as it gets, refuge for runaway slaves, frustrating to those Southern states. It was a base for the resistance of the Seminole people and a launching point for conflicts all along its long border with Georgia, and so in eighteen eighteen, General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, was sent to police the frontier, and as soon as he got there he decided instead he would just invade

Spanish Florida. He executed two British subjects and quickly toppled the Spanish governor. Diplomatic disaster seemed imminent, but John Quincy Adams seized the moment. In the Adams Owners Treaty of eighteen nineteen, Spain ceded Florida to the United States and recognized the American claim to the Pacific Northwest. In return, the US relinquished shaky claims to Texas, at least for the moment. More on that soon, Monroe signed the Tree with satisfaction. In one stroke, the Republic gained a new

territory and neutralized a diplomatic crisis. But perhaps no moment defines Monroe's presidency more than his message to Congress in December of eighteen twenty three. The revolutions which we'll turn to in our next episode. That were sweeping. Latin America had toppled colonial governments from Buenos Aires to Mexico City. The old Spanish Empire was crumbling, and European monarchies Russia, France,

Austria appeared eager to restore European control. At the same time, Britain, with its enormous navy and expanding commercial interests, urged the United States to join in a joint declaration warning Europe to stay out of the Western Hemisphere. Monroe and Adams considered Britain's offer carefully. Adams urged caution. He told Monroe, quote we must not come in as a cock boat in the wake of a British man of war end quote.

The United States, he argued, had to speak alone in its own voice to lay claim in a new sphere of influence, and Monroe agreed. The statement that emerged soon known as the Monroe Doctrine, declared the Western Hemisphere was no longer open to European colonization period. Any attempt by Europe to interfere in the Americas would be viewed as a threat to US peace and security. In return, the United States would not meddle in European affairs or in

any of its existing colonies. That was a virtually meaningless code at the end, since the United States had no power to do those things, and that's what makes it such an incredibly bold pronouncement. The Monroe Doctrine was a huge step forward for a still growing republic with a modest at best, navy. But the doctrine captured the spirit of the age. America didn't see itself as a fragile

experiment anymore. Now, America saw itself as a rising power, confident enough to redraw geopolitical boundaries, and in the decades to come, the Monroe Doctrine would become the cornerstone of US foreign policy, invoked, expanded, and reinterpreted by nearly every single administration. But for all the optimism of the era, Americans felt the sharp sting of the first major crisis

in its national history, the Panic of eighteen nineteen. A boom in Western land sales fueled by easy credit, collapsed when the United States banked the second one suddenly tightened its lending practices, plummeted, banks failed, farms were seized, Unemployment surged in Eastern cities. Monroe did what presidents of that era typically did. He stepped back, believing that the crisis

would resolve itself through market forces. The political fallout was long lasting, however, Western farmers instantly grew distrustful of Eastern

financial mechanisms. The calls for banking reform intensified, and the crisis also sparked new political movements, particularly among settlers who believed the government should play a more active role in protecting ordinary citizens and critically, While farmers moving out West were impacted a lot by the Panic of eighteen nineteen, King Cotton emerged relatively unscathed, building Southern confidence that their slave based economy was the key to their financial security,

a lesson they wouldn't forget now. Though Monroe remained personally very, very popular, the Panic of eighteen nineteen revealed cracks in the seemingly calm facade that had become the Era of Good Feelings. As Monroe's second term drew to a close, honestly,

the old Revolutionary generation was fading forever. He would be the last president ever to wear a powdered wig, the last whose political instincts were shaped on the battlefields where the Continental Army had faced off against British imperial might. His successor would ultimately be chosen in a hotly contested election of eighteen twenty four, an election that James Monroe

watched with a mixture of pride and apprehension. His presidency had overseen growth diplomatic triumphs, but he sensed the storms that were coming. Sectional divides were starting to widen. Ambitious new leaders men like John Quincy Adams and General Jackson were preparing to reshape American politics forever. Monroe would ultimately

retire to his estate in Virginia. A quiet man by temperament, he actually presided over a moment in which the United States defined its borders, asserted its place in the world, and tasted both the promise and the fragility by the fragility is important of national unity. But despite the successes of the Monroe administration, the United States future continued to be dominated by the question of slavery, bringing us to our next touch point, misery. By eighteen nineteen, the nation

had grown used to a delicate balance. Free states and slave states were paired together, neither side gaining advantage in the Senate. But when the mis Zuri territory applied for stateshood as a slave state. The balance quickly trembled. Representative James Talmadge Junior of New York introduced an amendment proposing that enslaved people born in Missouri be freed at age

twenty five. At the proposed Talmadge Amendment, Southern politicians positively erupted. Slavery, they argued, must expand in whatever direction settlers chose to bring it. Anything else threatened the Constitution, the Union, and the Southern way of life. The debates quickly grew venomous. Thomas Jefferson watched from Monticello, writing that the controversy was quote like a fire bell in the night end quote the alarm he feared signaled a crisis that could one

day divide the nation irreparably. Now Luckily, instead, the United States reached the Missouri Compromise of eighteen twenty one of a first string of compromises we'll be working through over the next couple of weeks to show how the United States tries to stave off the Civil War but ultimately can't stamp down the breaks quite enough. And when we get to the outbreak of the conflict, I'll explain why. But The Missouri of Compromise of eighteen twenty was pretty basic.

They had a few parts. One Missouri will enter now as a slave state. Two Maine, which would break off from Massachusetts, would enter simultaneously as a free state, which would preserve that balance in the Senate. Then slavery north of the thirty six thirty parallel in the remaining Louisiana purchase territory would be banned forever. This is always confusing because if you look at a map, the thirty six

thirty line is actually the southern border of Missouri. So the compromise itself is kind of contradictory in that it says, well, Missouri can come in as a slave state, but we're also going to ban slavery north of Missouri's southern border, which should have bannoned in Missouri. Now, none of this is actually going to matter, by the way, because all of these compromises are going to be quickly superseded by other compromises. They're going to obviate the ones that come

before them. So just understand that it's a little bit of a catch twenty two here. Now, the end of the day, of course, was that this was a temporary piece. It was a political tourniquit at best, wrapped around a gaping wound. The compromise settled the debate for the moment, but revealed the inescapable truth. The United States have been built on slavery, and slavery would shape its future as

violently as it had shaped its past. And speaking to violence, I mean first, next must to the presidency of John Quincy Adams and the corrupt Bargain of eighteen twenty four. At the beginning of John Quincy adams presidency was rocky at best. He was like a man stepping into a storm. Now, Adams had spent his entire life in service to the

United States. He had been a minister to Europe before he was even a teenager, a diplomat in half a dozen capitals, of course, related to the former President, John Adams Secretary of State during most of the triumphant years of American expansion. He was, I guess, by just about any measure, one of the most qualified men ever to

enter the White House. However, when he took the oath of office in March of eighteen twenty five, the air was thick not with gratitude and admiration for this management accomplished so much, but suspicion because the election that had brought John Quincy Adams to power, the election of eighteen twenty four was unlike anything the Republic had ever seen. So this was the first time that we had a divided field. Four different candidates had run for president, Adams,

Andrew Jackson, William Crawford, and Henry Clay. Now, Jackson won the popular vote, and he won most of the electoral votes. But that's not what it says. Under the constitution, you cannot just simply win a plurality. You have to win a majority. Under the constitution, you have to win fifty one percent of the electoral votes to win outright. If you don't, then again pursue it to the Constitution. The

House of Representatives gets to decide who wins. Now, I went through this once before in the election of eighteen hundred. In that case, the circumstances were different. Though Thomas Jefferson had won the popular vote, it was essentially a tie in the electoral college. In this case, Jackson had won the popular vote and he had won the most electoral votes,

albeit he hadn't won fifty one percent. Now, one of the four men running, Henry Clay happened to be the Speaker of the House of Representatives and therefore the most

powerful broker available. Now, he hadn't come close to winning enough electoral votes or popular votes to justify the House voting for him, but instead, what Clay did was he threw his support behind John Quincy Adams, even though Adams had not won as many popular votes and as many electoral votes as Jackson, and almost immediately after Adams took power, he named Clay Secretary of State, which was the unseen is really the second most powerful position in the United States.

To Jackson's supporters, the deal was unmistakable. For years thereafter. It would be referred to as the corrupt bargain, an absolute theft of the people's will. Now Adams, an honest man to his core, denied any wrongdoing, but the shadow of that bargain would trail him for the four long years of his presidency, turning his presidency into a battle notp between parties, but between vision and resentment, national ambition,

and what was turning into regional or sectional anger. Because Jackson, among everything else that he represented, represented the poor farmers of the West and southern interests and so for the first time, really what you are starting to see is the rise of sectionally related parties. And this has everything to do with slavery again. And that is the mole that we're going to see dominate American politics all the

way through. Where the South is going to vote effectively as one enormous block, the North is going to do the same. And then there's a question about where the Western States as they come into the United States are going to land. Now that being said, Adam's presidency was relatively successful. He came into office with what had been seen as the most probably ambitious domestic agenda of any

president before. Some say sense he believed that the federal government shouldn't be hands off, that it should lift the nation upward, that it was actually it's his responsibility to build roads and canals, promote science, support the arts, foster higher education, and create infrastructure that would slowly but surely

bind the continent together. And so he sent to Congress of sweeping domestic proposal calling for a one national University, two naval Academy, three vast networks of roads and canals, for federal support for scientific research, including astronomical observatories, and five, a coherent national strategy for the country to moderize and

above all industrialize. It was, in many ways a blueprint for the America of the twentieth century presented in the Americas of the eighteen twenties, but Adam had misjudged the mood the country was drifting towards a more democratic, anti elitist, states rights political culture. To many Southerners and Westerners, Adam's proposals felt like federal overreach, a government of Boston intellectuals

telling the frontiers meant how they should live. To Jackson's supporters, every proposal was further proof that the corrupt Bargain had put an out of touch aristocrat in the White House, and so Congress stonewalled grand projects, stalled before they had a chance to take off, and Adams himself, though brilliant and principled, lacked the political instincts to compromise. He governed

as if Congress should simply see the wisdom of his ideas. Congress, however, saw an opportunity to weaken him before the next election. As Secretary of State under Monroe, Adams had engineered some of the most significant diplomatic achievements in US history. The Adams Owners Treaty, the joint occupation of Oregon with Great Britain, and of course, the articulation of the Monroe Doctrine. As President, Adams hoped to continue shaping America's role in the world,

but even here Congress resisted his efforts. When Adams proposed sending US delegates to the Panama Congress, that was a hemispheric conference organized by the Columbian liberator Simon Bolivar, who was going to start to get into in the next few episodes, the Southern politicians revolted. They feared that the conference would force the United States to address the issue of slavery, because several Latin American nations, freed from the

Spanish yoke, had already abolished it. And so, after months of delay, Congress grudgingly approved the mission, but they did so too late for the delegates to actually get there on time. Was again, slavery had intervened, this time in American foreign policy, and the moment was lost. Now Adams could read the writing on the wall. The foreign policy vision he had crafted the United States as a leader among free republics was colliding with domestic distrust and the

volatile politics of slavery. Now, Adams was able to achieve some well say, quieter successes. His administration strengthened commercial treaties, it defended fishing rights, and maintained peaceful relations during a period of global instability, which, like I said, we'll start

to get into in the next episode. But these accomplishments, steady as they were, didn't do much to shift the political wins that were already just so heavily blowing against him, and an enter stage left the Tariff of eighteen twenty eight. In eighteen twenty eight, Congress passed a new tariff designed to protect American manufacturers. That tariffs come up a lot today, and they're going to come up a lot in American history during this particular period. So let's just go over

really quickly what a tariff is. A tariff is a tax on an imported good. It is generally paid by the importer. So the moment that you take the item, whatever the heck that item is, let's just say, a widget off the ship, you have to pay the tariff duty for that good. Now, most of the time an importer will try to pass that cost along to the customer in some way, shape or form. Or maybe get

the manufacturer to eat some of it. In any event, the purpose behind a tariff is to try to make imported goods more expensive so that your domestic purchasers will buy domestic goods, thereby supporting your own industry. That's the whole purpose of it. It's trade protectionism, one on one. Now. The Tariff of eighteen twenty eight was a complex, heavily political bill drafted in part by Jackson's allies to trap Adams. They expected him either to lose northern support by vetoing it,

or to anger the South by signing it. Now, the tariff dutally passed and became known in the South as the Tariff of Abominations, sailed through Congress fairly easily. Now. Technically, Adams, interestingly enough, didn't sign it. He didn't evolve for the trap, and so under the law it simply became a law without presidential signature at the end of Adam's term. Nonetheless, John Quincy Adams was blamed for the Tariff of Abominations

throughout the South. Southern planters saw their export driven economy threatened, and so South Carolina began whispering about a radical new doctrine nullification, the idea that a state could invalidate a federal law it deemed unconstitutional. Now Adams recognized the danger immediately. It always believed in the strong, cohesive national government envisioned by the Constitution. The tear of crisis revealed now just how fragile that unity was becoming because of the underlying

issue of shadow slavery. Now, as the election of eighteen twenty eight approached, the contrast between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, who was running again, became stark. Jackson's supporters organized mass rallies, They published campaign songs, and pioneered modern political messaging. Adams, who believed that public canvassing was beneath the dignity of his office, refused a campaign. But the nation was changing and Adams didn't get it. Politics was

becoming democratic, emotional, and highly personal. Adams restraint, which he thought was positive, looked like he was standing aloof looked like he was another elite out of touch with the people. Jackson's populism looked like authenticity, and so the attacks grew more and more vicious. Adams was smeared as a corrupt aristocrat, a monarchist in disguise. Jackson was attacked ultimately as a murderer, adulterer, and an unstable military triumph. It was a dawn of

modern American politics, brutal, partisan, and utterly relentless. In November eighteen twenty eight, to the verdict came there would be no backdoor deals this time, because Andrew Jackson won the election of eighteen twenty in an absolute landslide. John Quincy Adams left the presidency with his reputation battered and his ambitions unfulfilled. He was the first president who, not by choice,

didn't serve two terms. Interestingly enough, though, just a real quick code to here, John Quincy Adams's story was far from over. He returned to Massachusetts expecting a quiet retirement, but instead he found a second life in Congress. In eighteen thirty, his neighbors elected him to the House of Representatives, making him the only former president in history to serve in that chamber. There he became a fearce champion of civil liberties, a relentless critic of slavery, and one of

the most influential congressmen in American history. He fought the gag rule that sought to silence anti slavery petitions, and as we'll talk about soon, he defended enslaved Africans in the Amistad case. He stood year after year as a

moral counterweight against the rising tide of sectionalism. But all of those facts will have to wait, as will Andrew Jackson, because next week we're going to shift south and deal with the years and convulsions of revolutions and counter revolutions that are going to sweep Central and South America, creating all that instability I talked about before, and creating the conditions for which the Spanish would, finally, with the exception of Cuba, be hurled completely out of the Western hemisphere.