nfidence, the country entered upon a new and richer epoch.

The dominant tone of this dawning period was nationalism. The nation
was to be made great and rich and free; sectional interests and
ambitions were to be merged in the greater national purpose. Congress
voiced the sentiment of the day by freely laying tariffs to protect
newly risen manufactures, by appropriating money for "internal
improvements," by establishing a second United States Bank, and by
giving full support to the annexation of territory for the adjustment
of border difficulties and the extension of the country to its natural
frontiers.

Under the leadership of John Marshall, the Supreme Court handed down
an imposing series of decisions restricting the powers of the States
and throwing open the floodgates for the expansion of national
functions and activities. Statesmen of all sections put the nation
first in their plans and policies as they had not always done in
earlier days. John C. Calhoun was destined shortly to take rank as the
greatest of sectionalists. Nevertheless, between 1815 and 1820 he
voted for protective tariffs, brought in a great bill for internal
improvements, and won from John Quincy Adams praise for being "above
all sectional...prejudices more than any other statesman of this
union" with whom he "had ever acted."

The differences between the nationalist and state rights schools were,
however, deep-rooted--altogether too fundamental to be obliterated by
even the nationalizing swing of the war period; and in a brief time
the old controversy of Hamilton and Jefferson was renewed on the
former lines. The pull of political tradition and of sectional
interest was too strong to be resisted. In the commercial and
industrial East tradition and interest supported, in general, the
doctrine of broad national powers; and the same was true of the West
and Northwest. The South, however, inclined to limited national
powers, large functions for the States, and such a construction of the
Constitution as would give the benefit of the doubt in all cases to
the States.

The political theory current south of the Potomac and the Ohio made of
state rights a fetish. Yet the powerful sectional reaction which set
in after 1820 against the nationalizing tendency had as its main
impetus the injustice which the Southern people felt had been done to
them through the use of the nation's larger powers. They objected to
the protective tariff as a device which