2011 Theses Bachelor's

Bloody, Bloody Yazoo Jackson: The Crisis over Speculation and Sovereignty in the Early Republic

Edwards, Andrew

In the broadest sense, political struggles between Republicans and Federalists in the earliest years of the American republic were about a trade-off between freedom and power. According to early Chief Justice John Marshall Republicans resisted ―every attempt to transfer from their own hands into those of Congress powers which by others, Marshall‘s Federalists ―were deemed essential to the preservation of the union.

Conversely, as Republican newspaper editor and poet Philip Freneau wrote in 1793, ―the people rejoice in their freedom, and are determined to maintain it. Yet those two concepts, freedom and power, so familiar from history and manifest in the political discourse of George Washington and John Adams‘s administrations, remain opaque.