So imagine launching a brand new country. Right.
Oh, an incredibly stressful thought. Yeah. And
within three years, your capital city is evacuated
because of a deadly biological virus. Right.
Your citizens are in open armed rebellion over
the price of whiskey. And your founding fathers
are secretly drafting legislation to basically
overthrow each other's authority. It really paints
a different picture. Welcome to the United States
in the 1790s. It completely shatters that mythological
painting we all have in our heads, doesn't it?
Oh, total. The one where, you know, a group of
men in powdered wigs just calmly sign a flawless
piece of parchment, step outside and politely
hand over this perfectly functioning society.
It totally shatters it. And I mean, that actually
brings us to our mission for you, the listener,
on today's deep dive. Right. Because you might
think the founding of the U .S. was this really
neat orderly process of enlightenment engineering.
But our mission today is to uncover how this
incredibly fragile new country actually survived
its first 30 turbulent years. Without completely
tearing itself apart. Exactly. And to do that,
we are using a massive comprehensive historical
timeline of the United States, specifically looking
from 1790 to 1819. And this source is just packed.
It really is. It's full of treaties, armed rebellions,
massive legal showdowns, and groundbreaking inventions.
Right. And we're going to use all of it to figure
out how this nation made it out of its infancy.
So, okay, let's unpack this. We're starting in
the 1790s, where the blueprint finally meets
reality. And, um, reality hits with the force
of a freight train here. Yeah, it does. Because
the 1790s is the exact moment where all those
abstract philosophical theories of the Constitution
suddenly have to function in the mud and the
dirt of the real world. Governing real people.
Right, real people who have fiercely competing
interests. Well, looking at these early dates
on the timeline, the best analogy I can come
up with is that the 1790s feel exactly like launching
the beta version of a massive new software app.
Oh, I like that. Right. Like, the Constitution
is the underlying code. The developers have launched
it to the public. But immediately, you have to
get everyone to actually log on and use the platform.
Which is always the hardest part. Exactly. So
in 1790, Rhode Island finally gives in, ratifies
the Constitution, and becomes the 13th state.
They finally log on. Yep. Then Vermont logs on
in 1791. But Vermont was basically operating
as his own independent republic before that.
Right. Then Kentucky joins in 1792 and Tennessee
in 1796. You aren't just adding lines to a map
here. You are shifting the balance of power away
from the original coastal elites and handing
it to frontier settlers. Which fundamentally
changes the user base of this new country, to
use your analogy. Yeah. And to manage that rapidly
expanding user base, the government rolls out
major feature updates, like the Bill of Rights
is adopted in 1791. Right, the first big patch.
Exactly. It guarantees certain individual liberties,
mostly to calm the fears of folks who thought
the federal government was already getting way
too powerful. And in that same year, Alexander
Hamilton pushes through the charter for the first
bank of the United States. Which is huge. Right.
Because he realizes you just can't have a functioning
nation if you've got 13 different state currencies
floating around, plus these massive unpaid war
debts. Right. So he creates the bank to literally
bind the wealth of the country to the survival
of the federal government. But... I mean, as
soon as the citizens actually start interacting
with this new operating system. bugs pop up everywhere.
Oh, yeah. And they aren't just minor glitches.
They are catastrophic failures. Well, what's
fascinating here is that the physical disruptions
alone were nearly fatal. Yeah, look at 1793.
Right. A devastating yellow fever outbreak hits
Philadelphia, which was the nation's capital
at the time. Yeah, it wasn't Washington, D .C.
yet. Exactly. And this wasn't just some local
-ars tragedy. It essentially collapsed the federal
government for months. George Washington and
his cabinet literally had to flee the city. Just
pack up and run. Yeah, the entire apparatus of
the state completely shut down because of a mosquito
-borne virus. But the human bugs in the system
were honestly even more severe than the biological
ones. I'm looking at the rebellions on this timeline.
Oh, the rebellions are the ultimate stress test.
You have the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 and later
Fry's Rebellion in 1799. And let's look at the
mechanism of the Whiskey Rebellion, because it's
not just a random riot over alcohol. Right. It's
way deeper than that. It represents the terrifying
friction between massive federal ambition and
fierce individual resistance. So the federal
government, led by Hamilton's economic plan,
decides it needs to tax domestically produced
distilled spirits. To pay off those revolutionary
war debts. Exactly. And the citizens on the Western
frontier look at that and say, hold on a second,
we literally just fought an eight year bloody
war against a distant centralized authority taxing
us without our consent. Right. And now you, a
distant centralized authority in Philadelphia,
are doing the exact same thing. Yeah. Yeah, we
aren't paying. And the defiance is so absolute
that George Washington realizes, you know, if
he doesn't enforce this tax, the new Constitution
is just as worthless as the old Articles of Confederation.
Wow. It forces this unprecedented moment in history.
George Washington, the sitting president of the
United States, literally puts his old military
uniform back on. That is wild. He mounts his
horse and leads a federalized militia of nearly
13 ,000 men into western Pennsylvania to the
rebellion of his own citizens. So the developers
are literally bringing in the military to force
the users to accept the monetization strategy.
That's one way to put it, yeah. But that intense
friction doesn't just happen out of the frontier.
It completely affects the halls of power, too.
Because when you look at the late 1790s on the
timeline, the political infighting spikes into
full blown paranoia. Oh, absolutely. John Adams
is president. And in 1798, his administration
passes the Alien and Sedition Acts. This is just
a staggering piece of legislation. Under the
guise of national security, because there's this
quasi war with France going on, the Adams administration
essentially makes it a criminal offense to publish
of false scandalous and malicious writing against
the federal government. Which is incredibly broad.
Exactly. They were throwing newspaper editors
who disagreed with them into prison. It was a
direct legislative attempt to criminalize political
opposition. They were actively trying to ban
the users from leaving bad reviews of the government.
Pretty much. And the pushback is immediate and
honestly incredibly dangerous for the survival
of the union. Thomas Jefferson, who, by the way,
is Adams's own vice president at the time, he
and James Madison secretly draft the Virginia
and Kentucky resolutions in 1798 and 1799. And
the mechanism they propose here is wild. They
essentially argue for this concept of nullification,
the idea that if a state believes a federal law
is unconstitutional, the state has the inherent
right to just ignore it. And think about the
intellectual danger of that idea. If any state
can unilaterally decide which federal laws it
wants to follow, you don't have a country anymore.
You have a loose suggestion of a country. Right.
The system was entirely at war with itself, and
they were actively realizing that the initial
programming needed urgent patches to prevent
a total collapse. Which brings us to a literal
patch on the timeline, the 11th Amendment passing
in 1795. Yeah, the 11th Amendment perfectly illustrates
how reactionary early American governance actually
was. How so? Well, in 1793, the Supreme Court
heard a case called Chisholm v. Georgia, which
basically ruled that a citizen of one state could
sue another state in federal court. Okay. The
states were absolutely horrified by this. It
was a massive breach of their perceived sovereign
immunity. They realized the Constitutional Code
allowed a loophole that stripped them of their
power. Oh, that's what I see. So Congress and
the states rapidly banded together, drafted the
11th Amendment, and explicitly revoked the federal
court's ability to hear those specific kinds
of lawsuits. It's just constant reactive survival.
And, you know, looking at the timeline, we really
must impartially report on a glaring contradiction
regarding this foundational framework. Right.
Right alongside the triumphant adoption of the
Bill of Rights in 1791. The timeline notes the
passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793. Yes,
it does. The foundational code of this ostensibly
free nation explicitly enforced the institution
of human bondage across state lines, allowing
slaveholders to capture enslaved people who had
escaped into free states. We aren't making a
political point here. Just reporting with the
source shows these deeply ingrained contradictions
were present right from the beginning. It is
a stark, unavoidable reality of the era based
on the text. The framers were designing a system
of liberty while simultaneously institutionalizing
human bondage into the very legal framework of
the republic. And that fundamental contradiction,
along with the intense debates over federal versus
state power, acts like a pressure cooker throughout
the entire 1790s. Because none of these issues
are actually resolved. Exactly. They are merely
deferred. And that deferral directly causes the
total system failure we see as the timeline shifts
into the 1800s. Right, because this complete
breakdown in state versus federal trust didn't
just cause protests. It completely broke the
electoral system, forcing a massive constitutional
crisis during the election of 1800. Oh, the election
of 1800 is where the original blueprint of the
Constitution spectacularly fails its first major
transition of power. this incredible electoral
tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr.
And the mechanism of how this happened is fascinating
because they were actually on the same ticket.
Jefferson was supposed to be the president and
Burr was supposed to be his vice president. But
the original constitutional code didn't account
for separate ballots. Electors just cast two
votes for president. So Jefferson and Burr ended
up with the exact same number of votes, creating
a dead tie for first place. And Burr, you know,
seeing an opportunity, he just refuses to step
aside. And Hersey does. The code literally didn't
have an automated fix for this edge case. So
the election gets thrown to the House of Representatives.
What a mess. It takes 36 separate agonizing ballots.
endless backroom deals, and the active intervention
of Alexander Hamilton to finally break the deadlock
and put Jefferson in the presidency in 1801.
So what's their solution to the fact that their
electoral system nearly triggered a civil war?
They deploy another patch. The 12th Amendment
is ratified in 1804. explicitly separating the
electoral votes for president and vice president.
So a tie like that could never happen again.
And that establishes a really critical pattern
for the survival of the United States. Right.
When the system breaks, they don't scrap the
constitution, they amend it, they adapt. Yeah.
But, you know, the 1800s aren't just about fixing
the political machinery in Washington. It is
a decade defined by an absolute explosion of
boundaries. Yeah, the physical map of the country
is suddenly ripped wide open. You've got the
Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Napoleon needs cash
for his European wars. And Thomas Jefferson strikes
a deal to buy a massive chunk of the continent
from France for 15 million dollars. Which is
wild to think about. Overnight, the physical
server space of the nation basically doubles.
Ohio becomes the 17th state that same year. And
by 1804, Lewis and Clark are funded and sent
out to actually walk the land and figure out
what the government just bought. And this is
where the timeline reveals something incredible.
At the exact same moment, the physical boundaries
of the country are expanding westward. The legal
boundaries of the government are being radically
redefined back in Washington. How so? Well, in
1801, outgoing president John Adams appoints
John Marshall as the chief justice of the Supreme
Court. That appointment leads directly to arguably
the most important legal event on this entire
timeline, Marbury v. Madison in 1803. OK, let's
pause on that for a second because I have to
push back on behalf of the listener here. Sure.
Marbury v. Madison is the famous case where the
Supreme Court invalidates a law passed by Congress
for the very first time. Right. But wait, did
the Supreme Court just magically give itself
the power to strike down congressional laws in
1803? Was judicial review actually written into
the original blueprint or did John Marshall just
invent this power out of thin air to solve a
partisan dispute? If we connect this to the bigger
picture, I'd argue it's a brilliant piece of
political judo. OK, explain that. So the Constitution
establishes a Supreme Court, but it is remarkably
vague about its actual day to day authority.
The mechanism of this case is fascinating. Marshall
is navigating a petty political dispute over
undelivered judge commissions left over from
the outgoing Adams administration. Marshall knows
if he orders Jefferson's administration to deliver
the commissions, Jefferson will just ignore him,
which would prove the court is completely powerless.
So what does he do? He sacrifices the small battle
to win the massive war. Wow. Marshall rules that
Marbury deserves his commission, but says the
Supreme Court can't force the delivery because
the specific congressional law giving the court
that power is unconstitutional. Oh, that's clever.
Right. In doing so, Marshall boldly declares
that, quote, it is emphatically the province
and duty of the judicial department to say what
the law is. He essentially claims the absolute
power of judicial review for the court. He stakes
the flag in the ground. Exactly. He willingly
gives up a tiny bit of immediate jurisdiction
in order to permanently crown the Supreme Court
as the ultimate arbiter of the Constitution.
The institutions of the United States were actively
defining their own power limits in real time.
The framework of the country was expanding physically
with the Louisiana Purchase and legally with
Marbury v. Vadison at the exact same moment.
And as they stretch those physical and legal
boundaries, the contradictions we talked about
earlier are stretched right along with them.
Yes, they are. The timeline shows New Jersey
abolishing slavery in 1804. In 1807, the U .S.
officially ends its participation in the international
slave trade with Africa. On paper, you see these
legislative steps. But simultaneously, because
of the Louisiana Purchase, the nation is rapidly
expanding westward into vast new territories
where the economic institution of slavery will
fiercely take root and expand domestically. It
is the defining unresolved tension of the era.
You cannot double the size of a country, rapidly
increase its population, and continually defer
its deepest moral and economic contradictions
without eventually reaching a breaking point.
Which means all of this rapid expansion is about
to hit a brick wall. Oh, definitely. Because
you can't double the size of a country in the
early 1800s without eventually needing to physically
connect it, defend those new massive borders,
and actually pay for all of it. Right. And that
consequence brings us crashing into the 1810s.
The geographical isolation of the American frontier
was a massive existential vulnerability. If you
couldn't efficiently move agricultural goods,
migrating people, or federal armies across this
vast new space, the nation would simply splinter
apart into regional factions. It would be impossible
to govern. And so the nation starts building.
Here's where it gets really interesting. I look
at the 1810s. And it initially reminds me of
a teenager who just got their first car. OK,
I can see that. Right. They finally have the
keys and there is this exhilarating, almost reckless
sense of freedom and acceleration. For the U
.S., that acceleration is the explosion of new
infrastructure and rapid statehood. Right. Robert
Fulton invents the first commercially successful
steamboat in 1807, which fundamentally changes
the physics of trade. You can finally travel
up a river against the current. Which is revolutionary.
And by 1818, the Cumberland Road opens, which
is the first major improved highway funded entirely
by the federal government, cutting right through
the Appalachian Mountains. But we have to elevate
that analogy. from a teenager's car to a macroeconomic
reality. It's fair enough. The steamboat and
the Cumberland Road aren't just vehicles for
freedom, they are the required economic arteries
for a booming empire. Look at the states being
minted during this decade. Louisiana in 1812,
Indiana in 1816, Mississippi in 1817. Illinois
in 1818, Alabama in 1819, the country is accelerating
at a breakneck pace. And what happens when a
teenager accelerates recklessly without proper
defenses? They crash. They crash hard. And in
this case, the collision with reality is the
War of 1812. Yeah, the War of 1812, which the
timeline accurately notes, is essentially a North
American offshoot of the global Napoleonic Wars.
It was the ultimate brutal stress test for this
new infrastructure and this new government. It
is a devastating crash. They often gloss over
it, but in 1814, British troops literally march
into Washington, D .C., sit down at the White
House, eat the president's dinner, and then burn
the Capitol to the ground. The physical seat
of the federal government is set on fire. Yeah.
It's only when the British are forced into a
stalemate at Baltimore, and eventually decisively
defeated at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815,
that the nation manages to secure the Treaty
of Ghent. They barely survived the crash. And
surviving that war triggers a massive paradigm
shift. How so? Once the smoke clears, the federal
government realizes how incredibly close they
came to losing the country. How do you stabilize
a system that almost just collapsed? You aggressively
lock down its economic and legal architecture.
So sticking with the analogy, you essentially
get hit with the devastating insurance bill for
your reckless driving and you realize you need
a better bank. Precisely. The War of 1812 proved
that trying to fight a national war and manage
massive national debt without a centralized bank
is practically impossible. Right. So in 1816,
Congress charters the second bank of the United
States to stabilize the currency and manage the
explosive growth happening out on the Cumberland
Road. And the Supreme Court jumps right back
into the fray to protect this new interconnected
economy. They do. The timeline lists a critical
case, Dartmouth College v. Woodward in 1819.
The mechanism here is vital because the court
rules that a private corporate charter is a contract.
and state legislatures cannot arbitrarily interfere
with or change those contracts. It lays the absolute
legal foundation for modern corporate capitalism.
And then, in that same year, you have McCulloch
v. Maryland, where the Supreme Court explicitly
prohibits state governments from taxing the new
second bank of the United States. This raises
an important question, though. Think about what
that means when you synthesize all these events.
Physical infrastructure, like the Cumberland
Road, is merging with legal protections for commerce
from the Supreme Court. They are naturally, inevitably
leading to the creation of a deeply interconnected
national economy. A frontier farmer in Illinois
is now financially linked to a merchant in Philadelphia
who is linked to a bank in London. But an interconnected
economy comes with a massive, terrifying new
vulnerability. Yes. Because when you link all
the markets together, a failure in one isolated
sector no longer stays isolated. It cascades
violently through the entire system. Which leads
exactly to the insurance bill we mentioned. Right.
The timeline caps off this 30 -year diagnostic
with the Panic of 1819. It is the first major
catastrophic economic crash in U .S. history.
Cotton prices collapse globally, land speculation
out west completely bursts, and suddenly, because
everything is connected, Local banks fail. Foreclosures
skyrocket. Mass unemployment hits the cities.
They built this incredible economic machine.
They turned it on. It ran beautifully for a moment
and then the engine completely seized up. It
is the painful birth of the modern macroeconomic
cycle, the boom and the bust. The panic of 1819
proved that the United States had survived its
political infancy and it had survived a second
war with Great Britain. But it was now entirely
at the mercy of complex global market forces
that its leaders barely understood. Wow. So what
does this all mean for you, the listener, today?
That's the real question. When you open a news
app on your phone or turn on the television,
it is incredibly easy to feel overwhelmed by
the modern news cycle. We are constantly bombarded
with terms like unprecedented times or constitutional
crisis. Right. It feels like everything we are
living through right now is uniquely chaotic.
But taking a deep dive into this span from 1790
to 1819 proves that unprecedented times are actually
the historical norm. The baseline condition of
this nation has never been peace. It has always
been turbulence. Exactly. The modern infrastructure
you drive on, the centralized banking systems
you use, the legal precedents that govern your
daily contracts, they weren't handed down perfectly
on pristine parchment by calm men and powdered
wigs. No, they weren't. They were hammered out.
through literal gritty survival. They were forged
through trial and error, through devastating
yellow fever outbreaks, through the burning of
the capital city, through electoral ties that
nearly broke the government, and through massive
cascading economic panics. The American system
wasn't designed perfectly from the start. It
was patched, updated, and violently rebooted
over and over again. It really forces us to reconsider
our definition of stability. Oh, definitely.
Stability isn't the absence of chaos. True stability
is the ability of a system to absorb chaos, adapt
to it, and keep functioning. And looking closely
at the specific events on this timeline, there
is one final incredibly specific detail that
I think offers a fascinating window into the
psychology of the people who actually lived through
this endless adaptation. Well, I saw this on
the source list, and I was really hoping you'd
bring it up. Yeah. So if you look at the late
1790s, right in the middle of the timeline, sandwiched
between the tyrannical alien and sedition acts
and the armed tax revolt of Fries's Rebellion,
The source explicitly includes the publication
of two novels by an author named Charles Brockton
Brown. The books are Wheeland, published in 1798,
and Edgar Huntley, published in 1799. Wait, fiction
books? Amidst all the treaties, the Supreme Court
cases, and the constitutional amendments, this
historical timeline specifically lists two works
of fiction. Yes. And they aren't just standard
frontier romances. Charles Brockton Brown is
widely considered the father of the American
Gothic novel. Oh, wow. These books are filled
with a dark, psychological horror. We are talking
about spontaneous combustion, sleepwalking, religious
mania, and deep existential paranoia. That is
wild. Right in the middle of all that real world
chaos. It really is. And it leaves us with a
lingering, provocative question to mull over.
Let's hear it. What does it say about a chaotic,
newly formed society that, right in the middle
of literal armed rebellions, yellow fever wiping
out the capital, and a government seemingly on
the brink of total collapse, its citizens were
eagerly starting to consume early Gothic horror
fiction? Ah. Is reading about imaginary instability,
ghosts, and psychological horror a society's
subconscious way of coping with the very real
world chaos surrounding them? That is such a
compelling thought. It's almost as if when the
real world feels like an airplane falling out
of the sky with the wings coming off, maybe we
just need to retreat into a story about a haunted
house so we can finally feel like we're in control
of the fear. Exactly. It just goes to show the
hardware changes, the software updates, the geopolitical
borders expand, but the users, well, users always
stay exactly the same.