The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, commonly known as the American Colonization Society (ACS), is established by the Reverend Robert Finley of New Jersey on December 9-21, 1816, to support the emigration of free African Americans to Africa.

Charles Fenton Mercer, a Federalist member of the Virginia General Assembly, had discovered accounts of earlier legislative debates on black colonization in the wake of Gabriel Prosser's rebellion, and Mercer had pushed the state to support the idea.

One of his political contacts in Washington City, John Caldwell, in turn contacted, his brother-in-law and a Presbyterian minister, who had endorsed the plan.

Officially established at the Davis Hotel in Washington, D.C., attendees include James Monroe, Bushrod Washington, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, and Daniel Webster, with Henry Clay presiding over the meeting.

Its co-founders are considered to be Henry Clay, John Randolph of Roanoke, Richard Bland Lee and Bushrod Washington.

Mercer is unable to go to Washington for the meeting.

Although Randolph believed that the removal of free blacks will "materially tend to secure" slave property, the vast majority of early members are philanthropists, clergy, and abolitionists who want to free African slaves and their descendants and provide them with the opportunity to "return" to Africa.

Few members are slave-owners, and the Society will never enjoy much support among planters in the Lower South.

This is the area that will develop most rapidly in the nineteenth century with slave labor, and initially it has few free blacks, who live mostly in the Upper South.

The colonization effort results from a mixture of motives.

Free-born blacks, freedmen, and their descendants, encounter widespread discrimination in the U.S. of the early nineteenth century.

Whites generally perceive them as a burden on society and a threat to white workers because they undercut wages.

Some abolitionists believe that blacks cannot achieve equality in the United States because of discrimination and will be better off in Africa where they can organize their own society.

Many slaveholders worry that the presence of free blacks is a threat to the slave societies of the South, especially after some are involved directly in slave rebellions.

The Society appears to support contradictory goals: free blacks should be removed because they can not benefit America; on the other hand, free blacks will prosper and thrive under their own leadership in another land.

Some Society members are openly racist and frequently argue that free blacks will be unable to assimilate into the white society of America.

John Randolph, a Virginia politician and major slaveholder, says that free blacks are "promoters of mischief."

At this time, about two million African Americans live in the United States; two hundred thousand are free persons of color, with most in the North, where they are restricted by law in various states.

Henry Clay, a US Representative from Kentucky, considers slavery to have a negative effect on the southern economy, but in this period Kentucky has become a state that is selling slaves to the Deep South, where demand is booming because of the rise of cotton.

Clay thinks that deportation of free blacks is preferable to trying to integrate them in America.

Reverend Finley suggestsat the inaugural meeting of the Society that a colony be established in Africa to take free people of color, most of whom had been born free, away from the United States.

Finley means to colonize "(with their consent) the free people of color residing in our country, in Africa, or such other place as Congress may deem most expedient."

The organization will establish branches throughout the United States, and will be instrumental in establishing the colony of Liberia.

Cornelius Vanderbilt now begins gaining control of much of the shipping business along the Hudson River.

Vanderbilt's great-great-grandfather, Jan Aertson or Aertszoon, was a Dutch farmer from the village of De Bilt in Utrecht, Netherlands, who emigrated to New York as an indentured servant in 1650.

The Dutch van der ("of the"/"from") was eventually added to Aertson's village name to create "van der Bilt" ("from De Bilt"), which was eventually condensed to Vanderbilt.

Born in Staten Island, New York, Cornelius Vanderbilt had begun working on his father's ferry in New York Harbor as a boy, quitting school at the age of eleven.

At the age of sixteen, Vanderbilt decided to start his own ferry service.

According to one version of events, he borrowed $100 from his mother to purchase a periauger (a shallow draft, two-masted sailing vessel).

However, according to the version of the first published account of his life, published in the magazine Scientific American in 1853, the periauger belonged to his father and he received half the profit.

He began his business by ferrying freight and passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan.

Vanderbilt married his first cousin, Sophia Johnson (1795–1868), daughter of his aunt Elizabeth Hand Johnson, on December 19, 1813; the newlyweds moved into a boarding house on Broad Street in Manhattan.

He and his wife will eventually have thirteen children, one of whom will die in childhood.

In addition to running his ferry, Vanderbilt has bought his brother-in-law John De Forest's schooner Charlotte, and trades in food and merchandise, in partnership with his father and others.

On November 24, 1817, a ferry entrepreneur named Thomas Gibbons had asked Vanderbilt to captain his steamboat between New Jersey and New York.

Though Vanderbilt has kept his own businesses running, he has become Gibbons's business manager.

When Vanderbilt had entered his new position, Gibbons was fighting against a monopoly on steamboats in New York waters, granted by the New York State Legislature to the politically influential patrician, Robert Livingston, and steamboat designer Robert Fulton.

Though both Livingston and Fulton had died by the time Vanderbilt went to work for Gibbons, the monopoly has continued in the hands of Livingston's heirs, who had granted a license to Aaron Ogden to run a ferry between New York and New Jersey.

Gibbons had launched his steamboat venture because of a personal dispute with Ogden, whom he hoped to bankrupt.

To accomplish this, he has undercut prices, and has also brought a landmark legal case—Gibbons v. Ogden—to the United States Supreme Court to overturn the monopoly.

Working for Gibbons, Vanderbilt has learned to operate a large and complicated business.

He has moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey, a stop on Gibbons's line between New York and Philadelphia, where Sophia operates a very profitable inn, using the proceeds to feed, clothe, and educate the children.

Vanderbilt has also proved a quick study in legal matters, representing Gibbons in meetings with lawyers.

He has also gone to Washington, D.C., to hire Daniel Webster to argue the case before the Supreme Court.

Vanderbilt has appealed his own case against the monopoly to the Supreme Court, which is next on the docket after Gibbons v. Ogden.

The Court never hears Vanderbilt's case, because on March 2, 1824, it rules in favor of Gibbon's, saying that states have no power to interfere with interstate commerce.

The case is still considered a landmark ruling, and is considered the basis for much of the prosperity the United States will later enjoy.

The Democratic-Republican Party had split into various factions during the 1824 election, based more on personality than on ideology.

When the election was thrown to the House of Representatives, House Speaker Henry Clay had backed Secretary of State John Quincy Adams to deny the presidency to Senator Andrew Jackson, a longtime personal rival and a hero of the War of 1812.

Before the elevation of Adams to the presidency in 1825, the Democratic-Republican Party, which had been the only truly national American political party for over a decade, had begun to dissolve, losing its infrastructure and identity.

Its caucuses no longer meet to select candidates.

After the election of 1824, factions had developed in support of Adams and in support of Jackson.

Adams politicians, including most ex-Federalists (such as Senator Daniel Webster of New Hampshire and even Adams himself), will gradually evolve into the National Republican party, and those politicians that support Jackson will soon help form the modern Democratic Party.

The protective tariff bill of 1828 is meant to protect industry in the northern United States from competing European goods by causing the prices of those goods to rise.

Vice president John Caldwell Calhoun, until now a strong nationalist, is a South Carolinian and thus strongly against the tariff.

Webster, who had opposed the increases of 1824 and 1816, backs the bill, perhaps influenced by New England’s rising mill-owning families, the Lawrences and the Lowells.

Freshman Senator John Tyler of Virginia, a strict state-rights Democrat, opposes it.

Senator Martin Van Buren of New York, who continues to lead both Senate opposition to President Adams and dominate New York State politics through the Albany Regency, takes no part in the debate but votes for the measure in obedience to instructions from the New York legislature.

Congress’s passage of the bill, which the state of South Carolina calls the "Tariff of Abominations," widens the growing rift between North and South and sets up President John Quincy Adams for a fall in the pending election.

Adams signs the act, although he realizes it will be used to discredit him politically.

Jackson, his political credentials burnished by his failed bid for the presidency in 1824, since many voters believe the "man of the people" had been robbed by the "corrupt aristocrats of the East", allies himself with Vice-President Calhoun; together they build a coalition.

In a storm of mudslinging and character assassination by both sides, Jackson, now a candidate under the banner of the new Democratic Party and promising tariff revision, unites farmers and workers, who call themselves "Jackson Men," against Eastern capital.

Unlike the 1824 election, no other major candidates appear in the race, allowing Jackson to consolidate a power base.

Adams decides, not without reason, to attack Jackson's ethics and moral character.

The notorious Coffin Handbills, produced by Charles Hammond, a colonel in the U.S. Army and a friend and political ally of Secretary of State Henry Clay, attacked Jackson for his courts martial and execution of deserters, for his massacres of Indian villages, and for his habit of dueling.

Jackson's marriage comes under attack: when he had married his wife Rachel, the couple had believed that she was divorced; however, the divorce was not yet finalized, so he had had to remarry her once the legal papers were complete.

In the hands of the Adams campaign, this becomes a scandal.

One of Hammond’s pamphlets asks: “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and christian [sic] land?” Another handbill claims that Jackson's mother was a prostitute brought by British soldiers to the United States.

Jackson and his supporters decried the use of such tactics, but Adams did not escape attack.

The Jackson campaign charges that Adams, while serving as Minister to Russia, had surrendered an American servant girl to the appetites of the Czar.

Adams is also accused of using public funds to buy gambling devices for the presidential residence; it turns out that these were a chess set and a pool table.

The Webster–Hayne debate on the topic of protectionist tariffs takes place in the United States Congress from January 12 to January 27, when  Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts debate, the question of states' rights versus federal authority.

The heated speeches between Webster and Hayne themselves are unplanned, and stem from debate over a resolution by Connecticut Senator Samuel A. Foot calling for the temporary suspension of further land surveying until land already on the market is sold (this would effectively stop the introduction of new lands onto the market).

Webster's description of the U.S. government as "made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people," will later be paraphrased by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address in the words "government of the people, by the people, for the people."

Those who disagree with Jackson's expansion of executive power have united and formed the Whig Party in 1834, calling Jackson "King Andrew I" and seeking to identify themselves as modern-day opponents of governmental overreaching, they name their party after the English Whigs who opposed seventeenth British monarchy,

The American Whigs are modernizers who see President Andrew Jackson as "a dangerous man on horseback" with a "reactionary opposition" to the forces of social, economic and moral modernization.

The Democratic-Republicans who form the Whig Party, led by Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, draw on a Jeffersonian tradition of compromise, balance in government and territorial expansion combined with national unity and support for a Federal transportation network and domestic manufacturing.

Despite the apparent unity of Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans from 1800 to 1824, the American people ultimately prefer partisan opposition to popular political agreement.

As Jackson purges his opponents, vetoes internal improvements and kills the Second Bank of the United States, alarmed local elites fight back.

In 1831, Henry Clay had re-entered the Senate and started planning a new party, defending national rather than sectional interests.

Clay's plan for distributing the proceeds from the sale of lands among the states in the public domain was intended to serve the nation by providing the states with funds for building roads and canals, which would stimulate growth and knit the sections together.

However, his Jacksonian opponents distrust the federal government and oppose all federal aid for internal improvements and they had again frustrated Clay's plan.

Jacksonians promote opposition to the National Bank and internal improvements and support of egalitarian democracy, state power and hard money.

The Tariff of Abominations of 1828 had outraged Southern feelings—the South's leaders hold that the high duties on foreign imports give an advantage to the North (where the factories are located).

Clay's own high tariff schedule of 1832 had further disturbed them as did his stubborn defense of high duties as necessary to his American System.

However, Clay had moved to pass the Compromise of 1833, which met Southern complaints by a gradual reduction of the rates on imports to a maximum of twenty percent.

Controlling the Senate for a while, Whigs passed a censure motion denouncing Jackson's arrogant assumption of executive power in the face of the true will of the people as represented by Congress.

The Whig Party begins to take shape in 1833.

Clay had run as a National Republican against Jackson in 1832, but carried only forty-nine electoral votes against Jackson's two hundred and nineteen and the National Republicans had become discredited as a major political force.

The Whig Party had emerged in the aftermath of the 1832 election, the Nullification Crisis and debates regarding the Second Bank of the United States, which Jackson denounces as a monopoly and from which he abruptly removes all government deposits.

People who help to form the new party included supporters of Clay, supporters of Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, former National Republicans, former Anti-Masons, former disaffected Jacksonians (led by John C. Calhoun), who view Jackson's actions as impinging on the prerogatives of Congress and the states; and small remnants of the Federalist Party, people whose last political activity was with them a decade before.

he "Whig" name emphasizes the party's opposition to Jackson's perceived executive tyranny and the name will help the Whigs shed the elitist image of the National Republican Party.

The Whig party was not yet sufficiently organized or unified to run one nationwide candidate—instead, William Henry Harrison was its candidate in the Northern and border states, Hugh Lawson White ran in the South, Daniel Webster ran in his home state of Massachusetts and in South Carolina the Whig's presidential candidate was Willie P. Mangum.

Whigs had hoped that four candidates would amass enough Electoral College votes among them to deny a majority to Martin Van Buren.

That would have moved the election to the House of Representatives, allowing the ascendant Whigs to select their most popular man as president.

Van Buren won 170 ballots in the Electoral College, with only 148 ballots needed to win, but the Whig strategy came very close to succeeding.

In Pennsylvania, which had 30 ballots in the Electoral College, Harrison got 87,235 votes to Van Buren's 91,457.

A change of just a few thousand votes in this state would have reduced Van Buren's ballot count to only 140, eight short of winning.

The third Anti-Masonic National nominating convention is held in Temperance Hall, Philadelphia, on November 11 and 12, 1838, by which time the party has been almost entirely engulfed by the Whig Party.

In any case, the AMP convention nominates William Henry Harrison for President and Daniel Webster for VP unanimously.

When the Whig National Convention nominates Harrison and John Tyler, the Anti-Masonic Party does not make an alternate nomination and vanishes, its membership largely merging with the Whigs.

William Henry Harrison defeats Martin Van Buren in a landslide victory in the U.S. presidential election on November 4, 1840.

President Van Buren's loss is due in part to the poor economic conditions caused by the Panic of 1837.

Van Buren had easily won renomination for a second term at the 1840 Democratic National Convention, but he and his party had faced a difficult election in 1840.

Van Buren's presidency has been a difficult affair, with the U.S. economy mired in a severe downturn, and other divisive issues, such as slavery, western expansion, and tensions with Great Britain, providing opportunities for Van Buren's political opponents—including some of his fellow Democrats—to criticize his actions.

Although Van Buren's renomination was never in doubt, Democratic strategists began to question the wisdom of keeping Richard Mentor Johnson on the ticket.

Even former president Jackson had conceded that Johnson was a liability and insisted on former House Speaker James K. Polk of Tennessee as Van Buren's new running mate.

Van Buren had been reluctant to drop Johnson, who is popular with workers and radicals in the North and added military experience to the ticket, which might, it was thought, prove important against likely Whig nominee William Henry Harrison.

Rather than re-nominating Johnson, the Democratic convention had decided to allow state Democratic Party leaders to select the vice-presidential candidates for their states.

Van Buren had hoped that the Whigs would nominate Clay for president, which would have allowed Van Buren to cast the 1840 campaign as a clash between Van Buren's Independent Treasury system and Henry Clay's support for a national bank.

However, rather than nominating longtime party spokesmen like Clay and Daniel Webster, the 1839 Whig National Convention had nominated Harrison, who had served in various governmental positions during his career and had earned notoriety for his military leadership in the Battle of Tippecanoe and the War of 1812.

Whig leaders like William H. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens believed that Harrison's war record would effectively counter the popular appeals of the Democratic Party.

For vice president, the Whigs had nominated former Senator John Tyler of Virginia.

Clay, although deeply disappointed by his defeat at the convention, had nonetheless thrown his support behind Harrison.

Whigs had presented Harrison as the antithesis of the president, whom they derided as ineffective, corrupt, and effete.

Whigs had also depicted Van Buren as an aristocrat living in high style in the White House, while they used images of Harrison in a log cabin sipping cider to convince voters that he was a man of the people.

They had thrown such jabs as "Van, Van, is a used-up man" and "Martin Van Ruin" and ridiculed him in newspapers and cartoons.

Issues of policy were not absent from the campaign; the Whigs had derided the alleged executive overreaches of Jackson and Van Buren, while also calling for a national bank and higher tariffs.

Democrats had attempted to campaign on the Independent Treasury system, but the onset of deflation had undercut these arguments.

The enthusiasm for "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too," coupled with the country's severe economic crisis, made it impossible for Van Buren to win a second term.

Harrison won by a popular vote of 1,275,612 to 1,130,033, and an electoral vote margin of 234 to 60.

An astonishing eighty percent of eligible voters go to the polls on election day.

Van Buren actually wins more votes than he had in 1836, but the Whig success in attracting new voters more than cancels out Democratic gains.

Additionally, Whigs win majorities for the first time in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The unwilling passengers of the U.S. brigantine Creole—one hundred and thirty-four enslaved blacks being shipped from Hampton Roads, Virginia, to New Orleans—seize the vessel in November 1841.

One white crewman is killed in the mutiny, led by Madison Washington, an African-American.

The mutineers then sail the ship to the British port of Nassau in the Bahamas, where the British refuse to hand over the ship or the mutineers, despite angry protests by the owners and American Southerners.

Ignoring the precedent recently set by the case of the Amistad Mutiny, U.S. secretary of state Daniel Webster demands the return of the mutineers because they are the property of U.S. citizens.

By British law, all the formerly enslaved men are freed except those who had actually participated in the mutiny; these are charged with murder and imprisoned. (In 1855, after the case is finally settled between the two countries, Britain will award $110,330 to the U.S. in compensation for lost slave property.)

Simpson and Marshall had left overland from San Blas on April 12 and reached Veracruz by May 1.

Simpson had continued to England, while Marshall had gone by ships and trains to Boston by June 2.

He spreads the news in the American press, and meets on June 4 with fellow Bostonians such as U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster and business partner and future minister to Hawaii Henry A. Peirce.

Webster gives him letters for Edward Everett, who is the American minister to the United Kingdom.