Martin Meenagh blog

  Andrew Jackson was one of the most consequential of American presidents, but also had a great impact on the republic before his presidency. The Battle of New Orleans, which he commanded, for instance, was a rare British defeat following the events of the War of 1812 and, though won after the peace was signed at a distance, allowed white Americans to attempt to salvage some dignity from the humiliation. Jackson’s campaign in the ‘Creek War’ associated with the larger 1812 conflict was also part of a move into West Florida which was very much a Jacksonian initiative and unimaginable without him. It strengthened forces in Georgia and the wider southeast in the confrontation with Tecumseh and Tenkswatawa’s confederacy which later produced a momentum for Indian removal and nullification in the region. This drive also allowed for President Monroe and John Quincy Adams to negotiate with Spain in 1820 for the West Florida territory, producing an agreement which created a boundary for...

  The United States was essentially produced and maintained in its security during a period of intense Anglo-French competition. In the hundred years after 1702, the United Kingdom and France were at war for some fifty-two years. For most of the same period, the forces and Companies of the Dutch Republic were also amongst dominant sea-powers and international lenders. France and Britain maintained extensive insular and continental bases and colonies in North America, along with Spain. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, both faced competition and revolt in the Caribbean and Sargasso seas, not least during the rise of the Republic of Haiti, which successfully resisted massive French assaults between 1795 and 1804. During this competition, inspired financially and then with critical naval and military support by the Kingdom of France, the United States succeeded in their expensive rebellion against London. The USA nevertheless maintained a position of neutrality in the F...

    The Constitution of the United States is a document with seven articles and twenty-seven amendments at the time of writing in 2020. It does not represent a codified body of law, but nor is it the changeable Act of a sovereign parliament, as British constitutional documents are. Instead, the Constitution creates a flexible system of checks and balances which lay out the ‘ground rules’ for the institution, allocation and limitation of government power at the federal level. In itself, it makes any sort of positive governance difficult to begin beyond the core functions of foreign policy and defence, but once capacities and elaborations have been added, they have proven very difficult to reform. It is certainly the case that the original document, ratified in 1788 was both a response to the perceived weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation which preceded it, and a document which was less idealistic and more informed by Hobbesian and tough-minded ideas of power and capa...

  The Missouri compromise was a legal and political construction of the US Congress. It was built into the accession of the Missouri Territory to Statehood in 1820, and held that a line on a map could be used to differentiate southern slave territory and northern free territory across that part of the North American continent controlled by the USA. It was drawn from the division of Virginia and Carolina in 1665 and then reinforced by the use of 36 degrees and 30 minutes by surveyors as a way to delineate the borders of Tennessee and Kentucky, and allowed for the future introduction of ‘slave’ and ‘free’ states into the American Union. The Compromise must be seen in the context of other acts of expansion. During the time when it was mooted, the United States in the form of the Monroe Administration was seeking the conclusion of a treaty with Spain that would incorporate the Territory of West Florida into the Union, but also settle the boundary line of the USA in regard to what was...

The Revolutions of the late eighteenth century in Europe and the United States are inevitably bound up with the history of Freemasonry. This is because many of the most prominent revolutionaries were members of Masonic Lodges, or drew upon ideas of governance and Reason which had been touted by Masons as essential to their movement. In addition, Masonry offered a semi-secret link between established money and new money, and a way for men to validate their social mobility with established rituals and a common fraternal bond that involved the promotion and protection of each other (women were not added to this structure until the 1850s, and then in a separate order). Masons were and are Deists who were opposed to Churches, particularly of the Catholic sort, and hierarchical, to the point of obsessive secrecy and obscurity in their higher rites. Nevertheless, many prominent American leaders, such as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Andrew Jackson were open about their member...