A History of the American People

far from land.' Cheves decided that the worst of all outcomes was for the SBUS to go bust too, so
he intensified the deflationary policy and contrived, with some difficulty, to keep the SBUS's
doors open, thus earning his title the Hercules of the United States Bank.' But everyone else had to pay for it. As one contemporary expert, William Goude, put it,The Bank was saved but the
people were ruined.’
The result of the bank Blow Up was a crisis in manufacturing industry. The Philadelphia
cotton mills employed 2,325 in 1816; by autumn 1819 all but 149 had been sacked. In New
England the crisis was mitigated by sound banking but it was still acute and unemployment shot
up. John Quincy Adams, always quick to strike a note of gloom, recorded in his diary on April
24, 1819: In the midst of peace and partial prosperity we are approaching a crisis which will shake the Union to its center. The news of trouble reached Europe too late to affect the 1819 sailings, so tens of thousands of immigrants continued to arrive, to find no work and rising hostility. One observer, Emanuel Howitt, wrote thatthe Yankees now [1819] regard the
immigrant with the most sovereign contempt ... a wretch, driven out of his own wretched
country, and seeking a subsistence in this glorious land. It would never be glad confident morning again.' In March 1819 Congress, in a panic attempt to stop ships arriving at New York and other ports, slapped a two-persons-for-5-tons rule on incoming ships, effective from September-the beginning of control. The State Department, in a prescript published in Niles's Weekly Register, announced its policy-lines:The American Republic invites nobody to come.
We will keep out nobody. Arrivals will suffer no disadvantages as aliens. But they can expect no
advantages either. Native-born and foreign-born face equal opportunities. What happens to them
depends entirely on their individual ability and exertions, and on good for tune.'
There is something magnificent about this declaration, penned by John Quincy Adams
himself. It epitomizes the spirit of laissez-faire libertarianism which pervaded every aspect of
American life at this time-though, as we shall see, there were state interventionists at large too.
Libertarianism was, of course, based upon an underlying, total self-confidence in the future of
the country. There was something magnificent too about the speed and completeness with which
America recovered from this crisis, which within a year or two seemed a mere mishap, a tiny
blip on a rising curve of success. Mass immigration soon resumed, thanks this time to Ireland.
Hitherto, America had taken in plenty of Ulster Protestants, but few from the Catholic south. But
in 1821, when the Irish potato crop failed, one in an ominous series of failures culminating in the
catastrophe of the mid-1840s, the British government tried to organize a sea-lift to Canada. There
was panic in Mayo, Clare, Kerry, and Cork, where rumor had it the ships would transport them
to convict bondage in Australia. But, once the truth was known, the idea of going to America, at
virtually no cost, caught on in the poorest parts of Ireland. When the first letters reached home in
1822, explaining how easy it was to slip from Canada into America, and how the United States,
albeit Protestant, gave equal rights to Catholics, the transatlantic rush was on. In 1825 50,000
Southern Irish applied for a mere 2,000 assisted places on a government scheme. It was a
foretaste of the exodus which was to transport one-third of the Irish nation to America." This, in
turn, was part of the process whereby the continuing English (and Welsh and Scottish)
immigation to the United States was now balanced by new arrivals from outside Britain. The
number of Continental Europeans rose from 6,000 to 10,000 a year in the early 1820s to 15,000
in 1826 and 30,000 in 1828. In 1832 it passed the 50,000-a-year mark and thereafter fell below it
only twice. An Anglicized United States was gradually becoming Europeanized.,'