The machine worked. George Washington served as the first president and then, astonishing the world, gave the office up and went home. Political parties formed, argued bitterly, and handed power to each other without bloodshed. In 1803 the Louisiana Purchase doubled the country’s size overnight. The new republic survived a second war with Britain in 1812 — the British even burned Washington — and kept going.
The country began to move and make things. Canals and steamboats, then railroads, tied the regions together. Factories rose in the North, filled with farm girls and immigrants working long days for wages. And in the South, one machine changed everything: the cotton gin, invented in 1793, which cleaned cotton fifty times faster than hands could. Cotton became the country’s great export — and cotton was grown by enslaved people.
So slavery did not fade away, as some founders had told themselves it would. It grew. About 700,000 people were enslaved when Washington took office. By 1860 it was nearly four million. Enslaved people were bought and sold south and west in a huge forced migration that broke families apart, and the wealth they produced flowed north as well as south — into banks, mills, and ships. The bargain the country was built on, half slave and half free, got harder to hold every year.
The republic that promised liberty also cleared its land by force. In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, and the government drove the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations from their homes in the Southeast to territory west of the Mississippi — breaking its own signed treaties to do it. On the Cherokee road west in 1838, remembered as the Trail of Tears, thousands died of cold, hunger, and disease.
At the same time, democracy widened — for some. States dropped the rule that a man needed property to vote, and by the 1830s most white men could cast a ballot. Women could not. Black Americans, free or enslaved, mostly could not. And the people shut out began to organize. The abolition movement — the fight to end slavery — grew loud, led by people like Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery and told the country exactly what it was. In 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York, women held a convention and publicly demanded their rights, including the vote.
Every time the country grew, the question returned: will the new state be slave or free? Compromises — Missouri in 1820, and more after — bought time. They did not buy peace. The fault line, the crack running under the whole structure, was slavery, and by 1850 the ground had begun to shake.