The Jeffersonian Republicans at first tried to undo much of what the Federalists had created in the 1790s, but their promise of a simpler government gave way to the complexities of domestic and foreign issues. The Louisiana Purchase and the Barbary Wars required powerful government responses, and the challenges posed by Britain on the seas finally drew America into declaring war on the onetime mother country. The War of 1812, joined by restive Indian nations fighting with the British, was longer and more costly than anticipated, and it ended inconclusively.

The war elevated to national prominence General Andrew Jackson, whose popularity with voters in the 1824 election surprised traditional politicians and threw the one-party rule of Republicans into a tailspin. John Quincy Adams had barely assumed office in 1825 before the election campaign of 1828 was off and running. Reformed suffrage laws ensured that appeals to the mass of white male voters would be the hallmark of all nineteenth-century elections after 1824. In such a system, Adams and men like him were at a great disadvantage.

Ordinary American women, whether white or free black, had no place in government. Male legislatures maintained women’s feme covert status, keeping wives dependent on husbands. A few women found a pathway to greater personal autonomy through religion, while many others benefited from expanded female schooling in schools and academies. These substantial gains in education would blossom into a major transformation of gender in the 1830s and 1840s.

Two other developments would prove momentous in later decades. The bitter debate over slavery that surrounded the Missouri Compromise accentuated the serious divisions between northern and southern states—divisions that would only widen in the decades to come. And Jefferson’s long embargo and Madison’s wartime trade stoppage gave a big boost to American manufacturing by removing competition with British factories. When peace returned in 1815, the years of independent development burst forth into a period of sustained economic growth that continued nearly unabated into the mid-nineteenth century.