Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/381

 CHAPTBE XL THE GROWTH OF THE NATION. (18151828.) THE bonfires, the bell-ringing, and the cannonading which welcomed the joyful news of the Peace of Ghent marked the dawn of a new and glorious era in the history of the United States. For two-and -twenty years past, the issues which divided parties, tormented Presidents and Congresses, and affected the whole course of events in America, sprang directly from the long wars abroad. From 1793 to 1815 the questions which occupied the public mind were neutral rights, Orders in Council, French Decrees, the Rule of 1756, impressment, search, embargoes, non-intercourse, non-importation, the conduct of Great Britain, the insolence of the French Directory, the X Y Z affair, the war with Great Britain, the triumphs, the ambition, the treachery of Napoleon. With the return of peace these issues disappeared. Napoleon was at Elba ; the old rulers were back on their old thrones ; old conditions in great measure returned; and the United States, free to turn its attention to its own domestic affairs, entered at once on a career of rapid development. The questions which for twenty years to come occupied the thoughts of the people, broke up the old parties and produced new ones, and rose in time to be great national issues, were purely domestic in origin. The state of the currency ; the use of the public lands ; the building of roads, canals, and turnpikes at the expense or with the aid of the Federal government ; the protection of manufactures ; the treatment of the Indians ; the authority of Congress to charter a national bank ; the extension of slavery to the territory beyond the Mississippi ; the authority of the Federal Courts ; the right of a State to nullify an Act of Congress these and many other issues of a similar nature now became the questions of the day. Just as diversity of opinion regarding the financial and the foreign policy of the government in the days of Washington and Adams parted the people into Federalists and Republicans, so diversity of opinion on these new issues destroyed old party lines and replaced Federalists and Republicans by Whigs and Democrats.