In 1816, in the midst of the nation’s economic resurgence, James Monroe, a Democratic-Republican from Virginia, won an easy victory in the presidential election over Rufus King, a New York Federalist. Monroe, who had served as secretary of state under Madison, hoped to use improved relations with Great Britain to resolve Indian problems on the frontier. Believing that hostile Indians would “lose their terror” once the British no longer encouraged them, he sent John Quincy Adams to London to negotiate treaties that limited U.S. and British naval forces on the Great Lakes, set the U.S.-Canadian border at the forty-ninth parallel, and provided for joint British-U.S. occupation of the Oregon Territory. In 1817 and 1818, the Senate approved these treaties, which further limited Indian rights and power in the North.
President Monroe harbored grave concerns about the nation’s southern boundary as well. He sought to limit Spain’s power in North America and stop Seminole Indians in western Florida and Alabama from claiming lands ceded to the United States by the defeated Creeks. Shifting from diplomacy to military force, in 1817 the president sent General Andrew Jackson and his Tennessee militia to force the Seminoles back into Florida. Nonetheless, he ordered Jackson to avoid direct conflict with Spanish forces for fear of igniting another war. But in the spring of 1818, having chased the Seminoles deep into Florida, Jackson attacked two Spanish forts, hanged two Seminole chiefs, and executed two British citizens allied with local Indians.
Jackson’s attacks spurred outrage among Spanish and British officials and many members of Congress. Indeed, the threat of conflict with Britain, Spain, and hostile Indians prompted President Monroe to establish the nation’s first peacetime army in 1818. In the end, however, the British chose to ignore the execution of citizens engaged in “unauthorized” activities, while Spain decided to sell the Florida Territory to the United States rather than fight to retain it. In the Adams-Onís Treaty (1819), negotiated by John Quincy Adams, Spain ceded all its lands east of the Mississippi to the United States along with ancient claims to the Oregon Territory.
Success in acquiring Florida encouraged the administration to look for other opportunities to limit European influence in the Western Hemisphere. By 1822 Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico had all overthrown Spanish rule. In March of that year, President Monroe recognized the independence of these southern neighbors, and Congress quickly established diplomatic relations with the new nations. Yet Monroe also secretly attempted to survey Mexican lands in hopes of gaining more territory for the United States. The following year, President Monroe added a codicil to a treaty with Russia that claimed that the Western Hemisphere was part of the U.S. sphere of influence. Although the United States did not have sufficient power to enforce what later became known as the Monroe Doctrine, it had quietly declared its intention to challenge Europeans for authority in the Atlantic world.
By the late 1820s, U.S. residents were moving to and trading with newly independent Mexican territories. Southern whites began occupying Mexican lands in east Texas, while midwestern traders traveled the Santa Fe Trail. Meanwhile New England manufacturers and merchants had begun shipping their wares via clipper ships to another Mexican territory, Alta California, whose residents eagerly purchased U.S.-made shoes, cloth, and tools.
Some Americans looked even farther afield. U.S. merchants had begun trading with China in the late eighteenth century, and by the early nineteenth century, ships from eastern ports carried otter pelts and other merchandise across the Pacific, returning with Chinese porcelains and silks. In the 1810s and 1820s, the Alta California and China trades converged, expanding the reach of U.S. merchants and the demand for U.S. manufactured goods. The desire to expand trade also led some Americans to look to the Pacific, especially Hawaii and Samoa, for additional markets and land.
Extended trade routes along with wartime disruptions of European imports fueled the expansion of U.S. manufacturing. By 1813 the area around Providence, Rhode Island, boasted seventy-six spinning mills with more than 51,000 spindles. Two years later, Philadelphia claimed pride of place as the nation’s top industrial city, turning out glass, chemicals, metalwork, leather goods, and dozens of other products. Workers in factories, artisans’ shops, and homes as well as in prisons and poorhouses contributed to an economic boom that seemed boundless.