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The stunning success that was the Battle of New Orleans prevented the British from seizing parts of the Louisiana Purchase illegally from the United States after the Treaty of Ghent was ratified. The British suffered 2500 casualties and the death of General Packenham while the Americans had only 72 casualties, but the commanding officer, General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, was slain by a lucky snipers bullet as he toured the battlements, encouraging his outnumbered soldiers to repulse the British foe.

The news of the victory, though it did not change the peace treaty in any way, electrified the American people who had believed New Orleans was lost to a large British army numbering 25,000. The news of the victory also convinced the American public that they had won the War of 1812, though the Canadian invasion was repulsed and Washington was burned. To honor the fallen General, President James Madison renamed the Territory of Mississippi to the Territory of Jackson.

The election of 1816 saw Secretary of State James Monroe run on the Democratic-Republican ticket with Daniel Tompkins against Rufus King and varied running-mates on the Federalist ticket. The Federalist Party, having been discredited in the War of 1812 by attaching themselves with New England’s have baked attempts at secession ran a miserable campaign and only succeeded in capturing four states with 34 electoral votes out of 221 possible. This would be the Federalist’s last national campaign.






Quickly after President Monroe took office, the territory of Jackson petitioned Congress to become a state. Having met the requirements, Congress had little choice but to accede and on July 4th, 1817 Jackson became a state with its capital at Natchez on the Mississippi River and the capital of the Jackson Territory.

Monroe took a tour of the New England in 1817; many New Englanders distrusted his predecessor, James Madison, and he wanted to show them they had nothing to fear from his Administration. Monroe traveled from Washington City north to Concord, New Hampshire where on April 19th he spoke at the anniversary of the start of the War of Independence, saying that “America is not a nation of cities, nor of rivers nor even of great mountains. Rather, America is the highest embodiment of liberty that human civilization has produced since our ancestors embarked on a republican experiment in the city of Rome.”

From Concord, he traveled back to Washington with stops in Boston, New York, and Hartford, site of the convention advocating secession, and spoke at length about the differences they had with previous Presidents and Monroe promised “A New Understanding”, as it would be called in Washington.


Monroe’s tour of New England in 1817 in black.



The 1818 House elections saw the Democratic-Republicans capture fourteen seats from the dying Federalist Party, giving the Democratic-Republicans 160 out a possible 186 seats, or control of 86%.


Illinois was admitted to the Union on December 3rd, 1818, as the 21st state in the Union.


The Panic of 1819 was the first bust in the boom-and-bust cycle in free market economies and the North wanted higher tariffs so their manufactured goods would sell easier, something the South always hated because it drove the cost of selling their cotton overseas up. The Panic was over by 1823


It was around this time that Seminole Indians operating out of Spanish Florida started raiding settlers in Georgia and they exerted pressure on their representatives in Congress to urge the federal government to do something about it. President Monroe ordered the commander of army forces in the region, General Winfield Scott to post his men along the Florida border to be ready to stop any Seminoles from raiding in the future.

The strategy worked, the next raid was killed as the Indians were crossing the border and were heading for farms outside of Savannah and Monroe sent a polite note to the Spanish government asking them to buy the Territory, “to quash Indian raids into American land”. There was also the unspoken threat of having Scott’s men march through Florida, taking it anyway and denying the Spanish government what little they would have gotten from a sale.

The Spanish ambassador saw the light and advised his government to sell Florida for a sum of 5 million dollars to the United States.

America on January 1st 1820
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