Chapter in Perspective

When Washington became the first president of the United States in 1789, American society was divided into a small commercial sector along the seaboard and a larger semi-subsistence economy in the interior. The party battles that erupted in the 1790s reflected competing views of social and economic development. The Federalists hoped to create a commercial nation, while the Jeffersonian Republicans championed an agrarian, semi-subsistence republic. In the quarter-century after 1789, these two parts of the country developed economically and socially independent of one another. As white settlers began pouring across the Mountains, the lack of cheap land transportation prevented the integration of eastern and interior societies. But developments over the next generation would both link the regions together and transform America into an integrated commercial nation.