The First Seminole War begins in 1817 with General Andrew Jackson's excursions into West Florida and Spanish Florida against the Seminoles after the conclusion of the War of 1812.

The governments of Great Britain and Spain both express outrage over the "invasion".

However, Spain is unable to defend or control the territory, as several local uprisings and rebellions make clear.

The Spanish Crown agrees to cede Florida to the United States per the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819, and the transfer takes place in 1821.

According to the Treaty of Moultrie Creek of 1823, the Seminoles are required to leave northern Florida and are confined to a large reservation in the center of the Florida peninsula.

The U.S. government enforces the treaty by building a series of forts and trading posts in the territory, mainly along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.

James Monroe, U.S. Secretary of State, is nominated on March 16, 1816, by a caucus of Democratic-Republican Party members of Congress, to be its party's representative in the U.S. presidential election, Monroe receiving sixty-five votes and Secretary of War William H. Crawford receiving fifty-four votes.

The instability of state banks leads to the chartering of the Second Bank of the United States in 1816.

Political support for the revival of a national banking system is rooted in the early nineteenth century-transformation of the country from simple Jeffersonian agrarianism towards one interdependent with industrialization and finance.

In the aftermath of the War of 1812, the federal government suffers from the disarray of an unregulated currency and a lack of fiscal order; business interests seek security for their government bonds.

A national alliance has arisen to legislate a central bank to address these needs.

The political climate—dubbed the Era of Good Feelings—favors the development of national programs and institutions, including a protective tariff, internal improvements and the revival of a Bank of the United States.

Southern and western support for the Bank, led by Republican nationalists John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and Henry Clay of Kentucky, is decisive in the successful chartering effort.

The charter is signed into law on April 10, 1816 by President James Madison, who had presided over the expiration of the First Bank of the United States's charter in 1811.

However, the war had convinced him of the need for a central bank, which he hopes will aid the government in borrowing money and also help curb inflation. 

Designed along the same lines as the first bank, the new charter empowers the US president to name five of the bank’s twenty-five directors.

William Jones becomes the bank’s first president.

Opposition to the Bank's revival emanates from two interests.

Old Republicans, represented by John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, characterize the Second Bank of the United States as both constitutionally illegitimate and a direct threat to Jeffersonian agrarianism, state sovereignty and the institution of slavery, expressed by Taylor's statement that "...if Congress could incorporate a bank, it might emancipate a slave".

Hostile to the regulatory effects of the central bank, private banks—proliferating with or without state charters—had scuttled rechartering of the first BUS in 1811.

These interests will play significant roles in undermining the institution during the administration of U.S. President Andrew Jackson, from 1829 to 1837.

The BUS is launched in the midst of a major global market readjustment as Europe recovers from the Napoleonic Wars.

The central bank is charged with restraining uninhibited private bank note issue—already in progress —that threaten to create a credit bubble and the risks of a financial collapse.

Government land sales in the West, fueled by European demand for agricultural products, insures that a speculative bubble will form.

Simultaneously, the national bank is engaged in promoting a democratized expansion of credit to accommodate laissez-faire impulses among eastern business entrepreneurs and credit hungry western and southern farmers.

The Treaty of St. Louis of 1816, signed on August 24 by Ninian Edwards, William Clark, and Auguste Chouteau for the United States and representatives of the Council of Three Fires (united tribes of Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi) residing on the Illinois and Milwaukee rivers, will be proclaimed on December 30, 1816.

Despite the name, the treaty is conducted at Portage des Sioux located immediately north of St. Louis.

By signing the treaty, the tribes, their chiefs, and their warriors relinquish all right, claim, and title to land previously ceded to the United States by the Sac and Fox tribes on November 3, 1804.

By signing, the united tribes also cede a twenty-mile strip of land to the United States, which connects Chicago and Lake Michigan with the Illinois River.

In 1848, the Illinois and Michigan Canal will be built on the ceded land and, in 1900, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

In exchange the tribes are to be paid one thousand dollars in merchandise over twelve years.

The land i surveyed by John C. Sullivan and its land is originally intended as land grant rewards for volunteers in the War of 1812.

Many of the streets in the survey run at a diagonal that is counter to the Chicago street grid.

Today, Indian Boundary Park in West Ridge, Chicago, commemorates this treaty.

President James Madison approves Indiana's admission into the union as the nineteenth state on December 11, 1816.

In order to decrease the threat of Indian raids following the Battle of Tippecanoe, Corydon, a town in the far southern part of Indiana, had been named the second capital of the Indiana Territory in May 1813.

Two years later, a petition for statehood had been approved by the territorial general assembly and sent to Congress.

An Enabling Act had been passed to provide an election of delegates to write a constitution for Indiana.

On June 10, 1816, delegates had assembled at Corydon to write the constitution, which was completed in nineteen days.

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.

The successes of the Canal du Midi in France (1681), Bridgewater Canal in Britain (1769), and Eider Canal in Denmark (1784) had spurred on what was called in Britain "canal mania".

The idea of a canal to tie the East Coast to the new western settlements had been discussed as early as 1724: New York provincial official Cadwallader Colden made a passing reference (in a report on fur trading) to improving the natural waterways of western New York.

Gouverneur Morris and Elkanah Watson were early proponents of a canal along the Mohawk River.

Their efforts led to the creation of the "Western and Northern Inland Lock Navigation Companies" in 1792, which had taken the first steps to improve navigation on the Mohawk and construct a canal between the Mohawk and Lake Ontario,[ but it was soon discovered that private financing was insufficient.

Christopher Colles (who was familiar with the Bridgewater Canal) had surveyed the Mohawk Valley, and made a presentation to the New York state legislature in 1784, proposing a shorter canal from Lake Ontario.

The proposal had drawn attention and some action but has never been implemented.

Jesse Hawley had envisioned encouraging the growing of large quantities of grain on the western New York plains (then largely unsettled) for sale on the Eastern seaboard.

However, he went bankrupt trying to ship grain to the coast.

While in Canandaigua debtors' prison, Hawley had begun pressing for the construction of a canal along the ninetey-mile (one hundred and forty)-long Mohawk River valley with support from Joseph Ellicott, the agent for the Holland Land Company in Batavia).

Ellicott realized that a canal would add value to the land he was selling in the western part of the state. He later became the first canal commissioner.
Engineering requirements

The Mohawk River (a tributary of the Hudson) rises near Lake Ontario and runs in a glacial meltwater channel just north of the Catskill range of the Appalachian Mountains, separating them from the geologically distinct Adirondacks to the north.

The Mohawk and Hudson valleys form the only cut across the Appalachians north of Alabama, allowing an almost complete water route from New York City in the south to Lake Ontario and Lake Erie in the west.

Along its course and from these lakes, other Great Lakes, and to a lesser degree, related rivers, a large part of the continent's interior (and many settlements) would be made well connected to the Eastern seaboard.

The problem is that the land rises about six hundred feet (one hundred and eighty meters) from the Hudson to Lake Erie.

Locks at this time can handle up to twelve feet (three point seven meters) of lift, so even with the heftiest cuttings and viaducts, fifty locks would be required along the three hundred and sixty-mile (five hundred and eight kilometers) canal.

Such a canal would be expensive to build even with modern technology; in 1800, the expense was barely imaginable.

President Thomas Jefferson called it "a little short of madness" and rejected it; however, Hawley has interested New York Governor DeWitt Clinton in the project.

There is much opposition, and the project is ridiculed as "Clinton's folly" and "Clinton's ditch."

In 1817, though, Clinton receives approval from the legislature for seven million dollars for construction

The U.S. Congress passes a law to split the Mississippi Territory, after Mississippi drafts a constitution, creating the Alabama Territory, effective in August.

John C. Calhoun has proposed legislation to earmark the revenue "bonus", as well as future dividends, from the recently established Second Bank of the United States for an internal improvements fund.

Opposition to the Bonus Bill of 1817 has come from sectional rivalries in the older eastern states, fearing that providing the means for settlers to travel west would drain their population and from questions of the bill's constitutionality.

Proponents of the bill stressed the nearly universally accepted need for improvements.

Although President James Madison has urged a variety of measures, including federal support for roads and canals, he vetoes the bill as unconstitutional on March 3 under the enumerated powers of Congress in Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution; his veto message represents an important explication by the "Father of the Constitution."

James Monroe is sworn in as the fifth President of the United States the following day.

The Rush-Bagot treaty provides for a large demilitarization of lakes along the international boundary, where many British naval arrangements and forts remain.

Signed on April 29, 1817, the treaty stipulates that the United States and British North America can each maintain one military vessel (no more than one hundred tons burden) as well as one cannon (no more than eighteen pounds) on Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain.

The remaining Great Lakes permit the United States and British North America to keep two military vessels "of like burden" on the waters armed with "like force".

Named for Acting United States Secretary of State Richard Rush and the British Minister to Washington Sir Charles Bagot, the treaty, and the separate Treaty of 1818, lays the basis for a demilitarized boundary between the U.S. and British North America.