America has tried the “tiny federal government” experiment before. After the War of 1812, Jefferson’s minimalist republic simply couldn’t handle a big-power world—so a new generation rebuilt the state.

This episode traces how Calhoun, Clay, Jackson, Adams, and the Marshall Court turned a weak agrarian republic into a nationalist market power between 1815 and the early 1820s.

America has tried “small government” in a big-power world before. After the War of 1812, Jefferson’s tiny federal state—low taxes, a skeleton army and navy, deep suspicion of banks—collapsed under the pressure of war, markets, and territorial expansion.

In this episode of How the HELL Did We Get Here?, I walk through Chapter 3 of Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 and show how a new generation of Republican leaders—John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Marshall Court under John Marshall and Joseph Story—rebuilt the United States as a national market state.

We’ll cover:

How the War of 1812 exposed the limits of Jeffersonian “small government”

Calhoun and Clay’s nationalist agenda: the Second Bank of the United States, the American System, and the Dallas Tariff of 1816

The constitutional fight over internal improvements and the Bonus Bill

The Marshall Court’s “market constitution”: Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, McCulloch v. Maryland, Dartmouth College v. Woodward, and Gibbons v. Ogden

Andrew Jackson’s wars against Native Americans as economic conquest—Creek lands, Florida campaigns, early Indian Removal—and the rise of the Cotton Kingdom

John Quincy Adams’s diplomacy: the Adams-Onís Treaty, Rush-Bagot, the Convention of 1818, and the road to the Monroe Doctrine

Why “national republicanism” looked triumphant in the early 1820s—and why slavery, Native resistance, taxes, and sectionalism were already tearing it apart

Along the way, I also draw on:

The American Pageant (AP U.S. History)

Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (Oxford History of the United States)

If you’re interested in how the Market Revolution, federal power, Native dispossession, slavery, and early 19th-century nationalism fit together, this is the episode for you.

In this episode of Past Is Prologue, John looks at more than 200 years of American economic history to answer a deceptively simple question:

Why does the United States keep crashing its own economy?

Starting with the Panic of 1819 and running through 1837, 1873, 1893, the Great Depression, and the 2008 financial collapse, John shows how the same boom-and-bust pattern repeats with stunning consistency. Rather than treating each crisis as a fluke or “black swan,” he traces the underlying structural forces that make meltdown a recurring feature of the American system.

He examines the development of the market economy, waves of reckless speculation, weak or nonexistent regulation, new financial instruments that outpace oversight, and political failures that allow predictable disasters to become national catastrophes. And he explains why the people who design the riskiest systems almost never pay the price — but ordinary workers, farmers, and homeowners always do.

If you’ve ever wondered why America has endured so many economic collapses — or why the next one shouldn’t surprise anyone — this episode lays it out clearly.

In this episode of How the Hell Did We Get Here?, John digs into Chapter 2 of Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 — a pivotal moment when the United States was pushed, pulled, and coerced into a radically new economic order.

Rather than a smooth evolution into a “modern” market economy, Sellers shows a far more turbulent reality: political battles over surplus capital, state-driven development, forced restructuring of everyday life, and deep conflicts between the winners of the new order and the many people who never asked to be part of it.

John walks through the major forces Sellers identifies:

The collapse of Jeffersonian agrarianism

Madison’s surprising embrace of nationalist economics

The foundational role of banks, credit, and internal improvements

How market relations began invading households, communities, and farms

The early psychological and cultural backlash against this new economic regime

Along the way, John explains why this chapter matters far beyond the 1810s and 1820s. Sellers’ arguments shed light on how economic revolutions actually happen: unevenly, with immense pressure, through political struggle, and often against the preferences of ordinary Americans.

This episode is for anyone trying to understand how the U.S. was pushed into capitalism — and how the tensions born in this period still shape American life today.