in order to bind together the East and West. But Madison as a strict constructionist questioned the constitutional power of Congress to undertake such works and on March 3, 1817, he vetoed the so-called "Bonus Bill," which proposed to set aside the profits derived from the government shares in the bank of the United States as a permanent fund for internal improvements. Clay continued to champion the policy, however, and for some years it was a burning political issue. Monroe and Jackson both followed Madison's course and vetoed all appropriations for internal improvements.

Meanwhile Virginia, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New York spent large sums of money on the construction of roads and canals. The most important of these enterprises was the Erie Canal, which was undertaken by the State of New York in 1817 at the instance of De Witt Clinton and completed in 1825 at a cost of $7,000,000. This canal, which extended from Albany to Buffalo, was 363 miles long, and became the great agency in the development of the States bordering on the Great Lakes. It also made New York the greatest city on the Atlantic seaboard.

Some time before the presidential campaign of 1816 opened, the so-called Virginia "dynasty" had decided that Monroe, Madison's secretary of state, should Election of have the presidency. The opposition gathered 1816 around William H. Crawford, of Georgia. Nominations at this time were regularly made by party caucuses of members of Congress. When the Republican caucus met in March, 1816, Monroe received 65 votes and Crawford 54, while Daniel D. Tompkins, of New York, was nominated for the vice-presidency. The Federalists made no regular nomination, but it was generally agreed that they should support Rufus King of New York. In nearly half the States the electors were still chosen by the legislatures; in the others, in response to the rising spirit of democracy,

they were chosen by the people. Monroe received 183 votes to King's 34.

This election marked the end of Federalism. That party never put up another candidate for the presidency. Monroe was noted for his conciliatory disposition, but, while lacking in brilliancy, he was a man of real ability, for it takes something more than a conciliatory manner to control political factions and to give the country an eight-year "era of good feeling," something which no other president ever succeeded in doing. He displayed sound judgment in the selection of a very able cabinet. John Quincy Adams was appointed secretary of state, William H. Crawford secretary of the treasury, John C. Calhoun secretary of war, and William Wirt attorney-general.

Decisions of

right to declare a law unconstitutional

John Marshall took his seat on the Supreme Bench as Chief Justice in 1801. Between that time and his death in 1835 he handed down a series of great decisions the Supreme which fixed for all time the fundamental princiCourt; the ples of constitutional interpretation. While the Constitution gives the Supreme Court the right to decide all cases arising under that instrument, its right to declare an act of Congress or the law of a State unconstitutional was at first not generally admitted. Marshall gave a decision in 1803 holding an act of Congress unconstitutional, and another in 1810 holding an act of the State of Georgia unconstitutional. Both these decisions raised a storm of protest. The spirit of nationality developed rapidly after the War of 1812, and enabled Marshall to apply further without serious opposition his principles of constitutional construction.

In 1819 in the famous case of McCulloch v. Maryland Marshall expounded the doctrine of the implied powers of Congress. The questions involved were the power of Congress to establish a bank and the right of a State to tax the notes of such a bank. On the first point Marshall said:

"Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all the means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are The doctrine not prohibited, but consistent with the letter of implied and spirit of the Constitution, are constitutional." powers He held, therefore, that the bank was constitutional, and he held further that a State had no power to tax it, for, he said: "The power to tax involves the power to destroy."

In a case which came up from Florida in 1828 Marshall affirmed the constitutional right to acquire territory in these words: "The Constitution confers absolutely upon the government of the Union the powers of making war and of making treaties; consequently that government possesses the power of acquiring territory, either by conquest or by treaty." These decisions met with general approval, save on the part of the extreme States' rights advocates, and strengthened immeasurably the Federal power.

In the famous Dartmouth College case, decided in 1819, the jurisdiction of the Federal courts was extended in a new direction. In this case, which involved the power of the legislature of New Hampshire to modify the charter of the college without the consent of the trustees, Marshall held that a charter granted to a corporation was a contract within the meaning of the clause of the Constitution which declares that no State shall pass a law "impairing the obligation of a contract." This decision brought under Federal jurisdiction numbers of cases involving corporations.

When the Declaration of Independence was adopted, slavery existed in all of the thirteen States, but it was by

no means evenly distributed. According to Slavery

the first census in 1790 more than nine tenths

of all slaves were found in the Southern States, and there they formed about one third of the entire population: 648,651 slaves to 1,226,057 whites. The Revolution cut off the foreign slave trade and by 1783 importations had

almost ceased. In fact most of the States had prohibited the importation of slaves by statute, Virginia leading the way in 1778. When the Federal Convention met in 1787, South Carolina and Georgia were the only States which permitted it.

Meanwhile emancipation was making progress at the North. In 1780 slavery was declared by the supreme court of Massachusetts to be inconsistent with the bill of rights. Other States passed acts providing for immediate or gradual emancipation as follows: Pennsylvania in 1780, New Hampshire in 1783, Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1784, New York in 1799, and New Jersey in 1804. The Northwest Territory became free by the Ordinance of 1787. When the Federal Convention adopted the compromise permitting the continuation of the slave trade for a period of twenty years, it was thought by many that slavery was a decaying institution.

Cotton

A simple mechanical invention was destined, however, to give a new lease of life to slavery and to make it the corner stone of an industry in which the South culture was to enjoy a world-wide monopoly. In 1793 Eli Whitney, a native of Massachusetts and a graduate of Yale, who was teaching school in Georgia, invented the cotton gin. Prior to this invention a slave could pick the seed from about five pounds of cotton a day; with the gin he could clean three hundred pounds. South Carolina and Georgia were the only cotton-producing States and the culture was limited largely to the sea-island or long-staple variety, which could be more easily cleaned. The invention of the gin made it profitable to cultivate the short-staple variety, which could be produced in the interior or Piedmont section of the South.

Improvements in the textile industries in England had already made the demand for cotton greater than the supply. The invention of the gin, therefore, gave a great impetus

to the cotton industry. In 1790 the entire cotton crop of the South was 2,000,000 pounds; in 1800 it had risen to 40,000,000; in 1810 to 80,000,000; and in 1820 to 177,000,000. The production of cotton continued to double with each decade until in 1860 it amounted to 2,154,820,800 pounds, which was seven eighths of the world's supply.

In any study of the economic organization of the South the plantation system demands first consideration. This system was well established in Virginia before The plantaslavery became a factor of any importance. The tion system culture of tobacco was introduced in Virginia in 1616, and it almost immediately became the staple product. Tobacco is very exhausting to the soil, and under the system of cultivation then in vogue it required the constant clearing of new lands and the abandonment of the old. Even if the scientific care of soils had been understood, it would have been cheaper, under the large land grants of the early days, to bring new lands under cultivation, than to care for the old. The staple export crop and the large land grant were two elements of the plantation system. The third was non-free labor, first in the form of indented servitude and later of slavery.

We have thus at an early date in Virginia the three characteristics of an agricultural system totally different from that of the North, which had free labor, small land grants, and cereal or food products. The population of the North became denser, and the surplus wealth was employed in new industrial enterprises, while the population of the South spread over wider areas, and the surplus gains of successful planters were spent in buying up the lands of their poorer neighbors and enlarging the tracts of the original plantations, or in starting new plantations in the Southwest.

After the invention of the cotton gin North Carolina and Virginia took up the culture of cotton, but its main field of extension was the Southwest, where it spread with