4.1 The Era of Good Feelings & Postwar Nationalism (1815–1824)
Key Takeaways
- Benjamin Russell of the Columbian Centinel coined 'Era of Good Feelings' in July 1817 during President Monroe's goodwill tour of Federalist New England.
- The Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 with a twenty-year charter and $35 million in capital — created by the same Republicans who had let the First Bank lapse in 1811.
- The Tariff of 1816 was the first American tariff whose primary purpose was protection rather than revenue, shielding infant industries from a postwar flood of British imports.
- Madison vetoed the Bonus Bill on his last full day in office in March 1817, holding that federally funded internal improvements required a constitutional amendment.
- Monroe won reelection in 1820 with all but one electoral vote, the only time after Washington that a president ran essentially unopposed.
Why This Decade Matters on the Exam
The CLEP blueprint names "the intellectual and political expressions of nationalism" and "the changing role of government in American life" as distinct themes. Both come to a head between 1815 and 1824. This is also the pivot in the exam's chronological weighting: the period after 1790 carries 70% of the questions, and this decade supplies the bank, the tariff, and the internal-improvements debate that structure every political fight down to the Civil War.
The Collapse of the First Party System
The War of 1812 ended in a military draw but a psychological triumph. Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans (January 1815), fought after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed but before news reached America, convinced Americans they had beaten Britain twice. The Hartford Convention of New England Federalists, which met in December 1814 to demand constitutional limits on war and embargo powers, arrived in Washington just as the news from New Orleans and Ghent broke — and the party was branded disloyal beyond recovery.
The Federalists ran a presidential candidate for the last time in 1816 (Rufus King, who carried three states) and vanished as a national force. James Monroe, the last of the Virginia Dynasty and a Revolutionary veteran, won in 1816 and again in 1820 with 231 of 232 electoral votes — New Hampshire elector William Plumer cast the lone dissenting vote for John Quincy Adams. It is the only presidential election after Washington's in which the incumbent faced no organized opposition.
In July 1817, during Monroe's goodwill tour through the once-Federalist strongholds of New England, the Boston newspaper editor Benjamin Russell wrote in the Columbian Centinel that the country had entered an "Era of Good Feelings." The label stuck — and it is a phrase the exam expects you to treat skeptically.
The Republican Nationalist Program
The war had exposed real weaknesses: no national bank to finance the fight, no roads to move troops, no domestic industry to supply them. Madison's Seventh Annual Message (December 1815) asked Congress to remedy all three. The resulting program was a near-inversion of Jeffersonian orthodoxy.
| Measure | Year | Content | The irony |
|---|---|---|---|
| Second Bank of the United States | 1816 | Twenty-year charter, $35 million capital, headquarters in Philadelphia, one-fifth government-owned | Chartered by the same Republicans who let Hamilton's First Bank die in 1811 |
| Tariff of 1816 | 1816 | Roughly 20–25% duties on cotton and woolen textiles and iron | The first American tariff written primarily to protect, not to raise revenue; John C. Calhoun of South Carolina voted for it |
| Bonus Bill | 1817 | Would have dedicated the Bank's $1.5 million charter bonus and dividends to roads and canals | Vetoed by Madison on his final full day in office, on strict-construction grounds |
Henry Clay bundled these into what he named the American System: a protective tariff to build industry, a national bank to supply sound credit, and federally funded internal improvements to knit the sections into one market. Each region was supposed to gain — northeastern factories, western food and transport, southern cotton for northern mills.
The system never worked as designed, for one reason: the South rejected its own assigned role. Southern planters bought manufactured goods on the world market and sold cotton on it. A protective tariff raised their costs and invited retaliation against their exports; internal improvements they would help pay for ran east–west, not through the cotton belt. Calhoun's shift from nationalist to nullifier between 1816 and 1828 traces this reversal exactly.
The Constitutional Question That Would Not Die
Madison's Bonus Bill veto (March 3, 1817) is worth understanding precisely, because it defined the internal-improvements fight for forty years. Madison supported roads and canals as policy; he denied that Congress had the constitutional power to build them without an amendment. Monroe took the same position, vetoing the Cumberland Road toll bill in 1822.
The practical result was a patchwork: the federal government funded the National (Cumberland) Road as a territorial project, but the great canal projects were built by states. New York's Erie Canal (1817–1825), financed entirely by the state, is the emblem — and its spectacular success set off a state-funded canal boom that ended in a wave of defaults after 1837.
An Aggressively Nationalist Judiciary
The same decade produced Marshall's most nationalist rulings — Dartmouth College v. Woodward and McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819, Cohens v. Virginia in 1821, and Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824. McCulloch upheld the Second Bank on implied-powers grounds in the very year the Bank became politically toxic. Constitutional nationalism reached its high point precisely as popular nationalism began to fracture.
Cultural Nationalism
Political nationalism had a cultural twin, and CLEP's 20% cultural-and-intellectual weighting means it is fair game:
- Washington Irving's Sketch Book (1819–20), containing "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," was the first American literary work to win serious European respect.
- James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels, beginning with The Pioneers (1823) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826), invented the American frontier romance.
- Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) codified distinctly American spelling.
- Nathaniel Bowditch, Benjamin Silliman, and the founding of the American Journal of Science (1818) marked the emergence of American scientific institutions.
- The North American Review (founded 1815) gave the country its first durable intellectual quarterly.
Why "Good Feelings" Is a Misleading Label
Beneath the one-party surface, four fault lines were widening:
- Sectional economics. The tariff united the Northeast and divided the South from it.
- Constitutional theory. Strict constructionists — the "Old Republicans" led by John Randolph of Roanoke — regarded the bank and tariff as a Federalist betrayal.
- Finance. The Second Bank's reckless early lending, then its abrupt contraction, helped trigger the Panic of 1819.
- Slavery. Missouri's 1819 application for statehood as a slave state produced the first open congressional confrontation over slavery's expansion.
Because there was only one party, these conflicts could not be resolved through party competition — they had to be fought out as personal and sectional factions, which is exactly what happened in the four-way election of 1824. The Era of Good Feelings did not end in harmony; it ended in the "Corrupt Bargain" and the birth of the Second Party System.
What made the Tariff of 1816 a departure from earlier American tariffs?
On what grounds did President Madison veto the Bonus Bill in March 1817?
Why did the South ultimately reject Henry Clay's American System despite supporting parts of it in 1816?
Which statement best explains why historians regard 'Era of Good Feelings' as a misleading description of 1815–1824?