UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

any of the 90 trial courts of general jurisdiction in the U.S. federal judicial system. Each state and the District of Columbia has at least one federal District Court, and a populous state may have more than one (at most, four). The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico also has a district court comparable to those in the states. Each District Court has at least one district judge and can have more than a score of district judges, as well as a clerk, a United States attorney, a United States marshal, one or more United States magistrates, bankruptcy judges, probation officers, court reporters, and their staffs. Decisions of a District Court are subject to appeal to a United States Court of Appeals (q.v.), except that certain injunction orders and certain decisions holding acts of Congress unconstitutional may be appealed directly to the United States Supreme Court. Certain appealsnotably those involving contracts, patents, and other relations to which the United States government is partyare taken to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. History The United States from 1816 to 1850 The Era of Mixed Feelings The United States, 181222. The years between the election to the presidency of James Monroe in 1816 and of John Quincy Adams in 1824 have long been known in American history as the Era of Good Feelings. The phrase was conceived by a Boston editor during Monroe's visit to New England early in his first term. That a representative of the heartland of Federalism could speak in such positive terms of the visit by a Southern president whose decisive election had marked not only a sweeping Republican victory but also the demise of the national Federalist Party was dramatic testimony that former foes were inclined to put aside the sectional and political differences of the past. Effects of the War of 1812 Later scholars have questioned the strategy and tactics of the United States in the War of 1812, the war's tangible results, and even the wisdom of commencing it in the first place. To contemporary Americans, however, the striking naval victories and Andrew Jackson's victory over the British at New Orleans created a reservoir of good feeling on which Monroe was able to draw. Abetting the mood of nationalism was the foreign policy of the United States after the war. Florida was acquired from Spain (1819) in negotiations the success of which owed more to Andrew Jackson's indifference to such niceties as the inviolability of foreign borders and the nation's evident readiness to back him up than it did to diplomatic finesse. The Monroe Doctrine (1823), actually a few phrases inserted in a long presidential message, declared that the United States would not become involved in European affairs and would not accept European interference in the Americas; its immediate effect on other nations was slight, and that on its own citizenry was impossible to gauge, yet its self-assured tone in warning off the Old World from the New reflected well the nationalist mood that swept the nation. Internally, the decisions of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall in such cases as McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) promoted nationalism by strengthening Congress and national power at the expense of the states. The congressional decision to charter the second Bank of the United States (1816) was explained in part by the nation's financial weaknesses, exposed by the War of 1812, and in part by the intrigues of financial interests. The readiness of Southern Jeffersoniansformer strict constructioniststo support such a measure indicates, too, an amazing degree of national feeling. Perhaps the clearest sign of a new sense of national unity was the victorious Republican Party, standing in solitary splendour on the national political horizon, its long-time foes the Federalists vanished without a trace (on the national level) and Monroe, the Republican standard-bearer, reelected so overwhelmingly in 1820 that it was long believed that the one electoral vote denied him had been held back only in order to preserve George Washington's record of unanimous selection. History Civil War Prelude to war, 185060 The United States, 185461. Click on legend entries to see states and territories with dates Before the Civil War the United States experienced a whole generation of nearly unremitting political crisis. Underlying the problem was the fact that America in the early 19th century had been a country, not a nation. The major functions of governmentthose relating to education, transportation, health, and public orderwere performed on the state or local level, and little more than a loose allegiance to the government in Washington, D.C., a few national institutions such as churches and political parties, and a shared memory of the Founding Fathers of the republic tied the country together. Within this loosely structured society every section, every state, every locality, every group could pretty much go its own way. Gradually, however, changes in technology and in the economy were bringing all the elements of the country into steady and close contact. Improvements in transportationfirst canals, then toll roads, and especially railroadsbroke down isolation and encouraged the boy from the country to wander to the city, the farmer from New Hampshire to migrate to Iowa. Improvements in the printing press, which permitted the publication of penny newspapers, and the development of the telegraph system broke through the barriers of intellectual provincialism and made everybody almost instantaneously aware of what was going on throughout the country. As the railroad network proliferated, it had to have central direction and control; and national railroad corporationsthe first true big businesses in the United Statesemerged to provide order and stability. For many Americans the wrench from a largely rural, slow-moving, fragmented society in the early 1800s to a bustling, integrated, national social order in the mid-century was an abrupt and painful one, and they often resisted it. Sometimes resentment against change manifested itself in harsh attacks upon those who appeared to be the agents of changeespecially immigrants, who seemed to personify the forces that were altering the older America. Vigorous nativist movements appeared in most cities during the 1840s; but not until the 1850s, when the huge numbers of Irish and German immigrants of the previous decade became eligible to vote, did the antiforeign fever reach its peak. Directed both against immigrants and against the Roman Catholic church, to which so many of them belonged, the so-called Know-Nothings emerged as a powerful political force in 1854 and increased the resistance to change. Sectionalism and slavery A more enduring manifestation of hostility toward the nationalizing tendencies in American life was the reassertion of strong feelings of sectional loyalty. New Englanders felt threatened by the West, which drained off the ablest and most vigorous members of the labour force and also, once the railroad network was complete, produced wool and grain that undersold the products of the poor New England hill country. The West, too, developed a strong sectional feeling, blending its sense of its uniqueness, its feeling of being looked down upon as raw and uncultured, and its awareness that it was being exploited by the businessmen of the East. Whitehall Street, Atlanta, Georgia. A typical commercial street in the American South during the The most conspicuous and distinctive section, however, was the Southan area set apart by climate, by a plantation system designed for the production of such staple crops as cotton, tobacco, and sugar, and, especially, by the persistence of Negro slavery, which had been abolished or prohibited in all other parts of the United States. It should not be thought that all or even most white Southerners were directly involved in the section's peculiar institution. Indeed, in 1850 there were only 347,525 slaveholders in a total white population of about 6,000,000 in the slave states. Half of these owned four slaves or fewer and could not be considered planters. In the entire South there were fewer than 1,800 persons who owned more than 100 slaves. Nevertheless, slavery did give a distinctive tone to the whole pattern of Southern life. If the large planters were few, they were also wealthy, prestigious, and powerful; often they were the political as well as the economic leaders of their section; and their values pervaded every stratum of Southern society. Far from opposing slavery, small farmers thought only of the possibility that they too might, with hard work and good fortune, some day join the ranks of the planter classto which they were closely connected by ties of blood, marriage, and friendship. Behind this virtually unanimous support of slavery lay the universal beliefshared by many whites in the North and West as wellthat blacks were an innately inferior people who had risen only to a state of barbarism in their native Africa and who could live in a civilized society only if disciplined through slavery. Though by 1860 there were in fact about 250,000 free blacks in the South, most Southern whites resolutely refused to believe that the slaves, if freed, could ever coexist peacefully with their former masters. With shuddering horror they pointed to an insurrection of blacks that had occurred in Santo Domingo, to a brief slave rebellion led by the Negro Gabriel in Virginia in 1800, to a plot of Charleston, South Carolina, blacks headed by Denmark Vesey in 1822, and, especially, to a bloody and determined Virginia insurrection led by Nat Turner in 1831 as evidence that black persons had to be kept under iron control. Facing increasing opposition to slavery outside their section, Southerners developed an elaborate proslavery argument, defending the institution on biblical, economic, and sociological grounds. History Reconstruction and the New South, 18651900 Reconstruction, 186577 Reconstruction under Abraham Lincoln The United States after 1861. The original Northern objective in the Civil War was the preservation of the Uniona war aim with which virtually everybody in the free states agreed. As the fighting progressed, the Lincoln government concluded that emancipation of the slaves was necessary in order to secure military victory; and thereafter freedom became a second war aim for the members of the Republican Party. The more radical members of that partymen like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevensbelieved that emancipation would prove a sham unless the government guaranteed the civil and political rights of the freedmen; thus, equality of all citizens before the law became a third war aim for this powerful faction. The fierce controversies of the Reconstruction era raged over which of these objectives should be insisted upon and how these goals should be secured. Lincoln's plan Lincoln himself had a flexible and pragmatic approach to Reconstruction, insisting only that the Southerners, when defeated, pledge future loyalty to the Union and emancipate their slaves. As the Southern states were subdued, he appointed military governors to supervise their restoration. The most vigorous and effective of these appointees was Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat whose success in reconstituting a loyal government in Tennessee led to his nomination as vice president on the Republican ticket with Lincoln in 1864. In December 1863 Lincoln announced a general plan for the orderly Reconstruction of the Southern states, promising to recognize the government of any state that pledged to support the Constitution and the Union and to emancipate the slaves if it was backed by at least 10 percent of the number of voters in the 1860 presidential election. In Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee loyal governments were formed under Lincoln's plan; and they sought readmission to the Union with the seating of their senators and representatives in Congress. History The transformation of American society, 18651900 National expansion Growth of the nation The United States after 1861. The population of the continental United States in 1880 was slightly above 50,000,000. In 1900 it was just under 76,000,000, a gain of more than 50 percent, but still the smallest rate of population increase for any 20-year period of the 19th century. The rate of growth was unevenly distributed, ranging from less than 10 percent in northern New England to more than 125 percent in the 11 states and territories of the Far West. Most of the states east of the Mississippi reported gains slightly below the national average. Immigration Much of the population increase was due to the more than 9,000,000 immigrants who entered the United States in the last 20 years of the century, the largest number to arrive in any comparable period up to that time. From the earliest days of the republic until 1895, the majority of immigrants had always come from northern or western Europe. Beginning in 1896, however, the great majority of the immigrants were from southern or eastern Europe. Nervous Americans, already convinced that immigrants wielded too much political power or were responsible for violence and industrial strife, found new cause for alarm, fearing that the new immigrants could not easily be assimilated into American society. Those fears gave added stimulus to agitation for legislation to limit the number of immigrants eligible for admission to the United States and led, in the early 20th century, to quota laws favouring immigrants from northern and western Europe. Until that time, the only major restriction against immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882, prohibiting for a period of 10 years the immigration of Chinese labourers into the United States. This act was both the culmination of more than a decade of agitation on the West Coast for the exclusion of the Chinese and an early sign of the coming change in the traditional U.S. philosophy of welcoming virtually all immigrants. In response to pressure from California, Congress had passed an exclusion act in 1879, but it had been vetoed by President Hayes on the ground that it abrogated rights guaranteed to the Chinese by the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. In 1880 these treaty provisions were revised to permit the United States to suspend the immigration of Chinese. The Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed in 1892 for another 10-year period, and in 1902 the suspension of Chinese immigration was made indefinite. History Imperialism, the Progressive era, and the rise to world power, 18961920 American imperialism The Spanish-American War Militarily speaking, the Spanish-American War of 1898 was so brief and relatively bloodless as to have been a mere passing episode in the history of modern warfare. Its political and diplomatic consequences, however, were enormous: it catapulted the United States into the arena of world politics and set it, at least briefly, on the new road of imperialism. To be sure, specific events drove the United States to hostilities in 1898; but the stage had already been set by profound changes in thought about the nation's mission and its destiny. Before the 1890s, roughly speaking, most Americans had adhered stubbornly to the belief, as old as the Revolution itself, that their country should remain aloof from European affairs and offer an example of democracy and peace to the rest of the world; but slowly in the 1880s, and more rapidly in the 1890s, new currents of thought eroded this historic conviction. The United States had become a great power by virtue of its prodigious economic growth since the Civil War; numerous publicists said that it ought to begin to act like one. Propagandists of sea power, above all, Captain Alfred T. Mahan, argued that future national security and greatness depended upon a large navy supported by bases throughout the world. After the disappearance of the American frontier in 1890, the conviction grew that the United States would have to find new outlets for an ever-increasing population and agricultural and industrial production; this belief was particularly rife among farmers in dire distress in the 1890s. Social Darwinists said that the world is a jungle, with international rivalries inevitable, and that only strong nations could survive. Added to these arguments were those of idealists and religious leaders that Americans had a duty to take up the white man's burden and to carry their assertedly superior culture and the blessings of Christianity to the backward peoples of the world. It was against this background that the events of 1898 propelled the United States along the road to war and empire. Cuban rebels had begun a violent revolution against Spanish rule in 1895, set off by a depression caused by a decline in U.S. sugar purchases from Cuba. Rebel violence led progressively to more repressive Spanish countermeasures. Cuban refugees in the United States spread exaggerated tales of Spanish atrocities, and these and numerous others were reprinted widely (particularly by William Randolph Hearst's New York American and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, then engaged in a fierce battle for circulation). President Cleveland resisted the rising public demand for intervention, but by early 1898 the pressure, then on his successor, McKinley, was too great to be defied. When an explosioncaused by a submarine mine, according to a U.S. naval court of inquirysank the USS Maine with large loss of life in Havana harbour on Feb. 15, 1898, events moved beyond the president's control. Though Spain was willing to make large concessions to avoid war, it adamantly resisted what had become the minimum public and official U.S. demandSpanish withdrawal from Cuba and recognition of the island's independence. Hence Congress in mid-April authorized McKinley to use the armed forces to expel the Spanish from Cuba. For Americans it was, as Secretary of State John Hay put it in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, a splendid little war. An American expeditionary force, after quickly overcoming the Spaniards in Cuba, turned against Spain's last island in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, on May 1, 1898, the American commodore George Dewey, with his Asiatic squadron, destroyed a decrepit Spanish flotilla in the harbour of Manila in the Philippines. The fighting was over by August 12, when the United States and Spain signed a preliminary peace treaty in Washington, D.C. Negotiators met in Paris in October to draw up a definitive agreement. Spain recognized the independence of Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States, but the disposition of the Philippines was another matter. Business interests in the United States, which had been noticeably cool about a war over Cuba, demanded the acquisition of the entire Philippine archipelago in the hope that Manila would become the entrept for a great Far Eastern trade; chauvinists declaimed against lowering the flag under Spanish pressure. Concluding that he had no alternative, McKinley forced the Spanish to sell the Philippines to the United States for $20,000,000. But a strong reaction in the United States against acquisition of the Philippines had already set in by the time the Treaty of Paris was signed on Dec. 10, 1898; and anti-imperialists declared that the control and governance of distant alien peoples violated all American traditions of self-determination and would even threaten the very fabric of the republic. Though there were more than enough votes in the Senate to defeat the treaty, that body gave its consent to ratification largely because William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic leader, wanted Democrats to approve the treaty and then make imperialism the chief issue of the 1900 presidential campaign. The new American empire McKinley easily defeated Bryan in 1900. The victory, however, was hardly a mandate for imperialism, and, as events were soon to disclose, the American people were perhaps the most reluctant imperialists in history. No sooner had they acquired an overseas empire than they set in motion the process of its dissolution or transformation. By the so-called Teller Amendment to the war resolution, Congress had declared that the United States would not annex Cuba. This pledge was kept, although Cuba was forced in 1903 to sign a treaty making it virtually a protectorate of the United States. The Hawaiian Islands, annexed by Congress on July 7, 1898, were made a territory in 1900 and were hence, technically, only briefly part of the American empire. Puerto Rico was given limited self-government in 1900; and the Jones Act of 1917 conferred full territorial status on the island, gave U.S. citizenship to its inhabitants, and limited its self-government only by the veto of a governor appointed by the president of the United States. Establishing any kind of government in the Philippines was much more difficult because a large band of Filipinos resisted American rule as bravely as they had fought the Spanish. The Philippine insurrection was over by 1901, however, and the Philippine Government Act of 1902 inaugurated the beginning of partial self-government, which was transformed into almost complete home rule by the Jones Act of 1916. History The territory represented by the continental United States had, of course, been discovered, perhaps several times, before the voyages of Columbus. When Columbus came, he found the New World inhabited by peoples who in all likelihood had originally come from the continent of Asia. Probably these first inhabitants had arrived 20,000 to 35,000 years before in a series of migrations from Asia to North America by way of the Bering Strait. By the time the first Europeans appeared, the aborigines (commonly referred to as Indians) had spread and occupied all portions of the New World. The foods and other resources available in each physiographic region largely determined the type of culture prevailing there. Fish and sea mammals, for example, contributed the bulk of the food supply of coastal tribes, although the acorn was a staple for California Indians; plant life and wild game (especially the American bison, or buffalo) were sources for the Plains Indians; small-game hunting and fishing (depending again on local resources) provided for Midwestern and Eastern tribes. These foods were supplemented by corn, which was a staple food for the Indians of the Southwest. The procurement of these foods called for the employment of fishing, hunting, plant and berry gathering, and farming techniques, the application of which depended, in turn, upon the food resources utilized in given areas. Foods and other raw materials likewise conditioned the material culture of the respective regional groups. All Indians transported goods by human carrier; the use of dogs to pull sleds or travois was widespread; and rafts, boats, and canoes were used where water facilities were available. The horse, imported by the Spanish in the early 16th century, was quickly adopted by the Indians once it had made its appearance. The horse came to be used widely by the buffalo-hunting Indians of the Great Plains. Indian culture groups were distinguished among other ways by house types. The dome-shaped ice houses were developed by the Eskimos; rectangular plank houses were produced by the Northwestern Indians; earth and skin lodges and tepees by plains and prairie tribes; flat-roofed and often multistoried houses by some of the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest; barrel houses by the natives in the Northeast. Clothing, or the lack of it, likewise varied with native groups, as did crafts, weapons, and tribal economic, social, and religious customs. At the time of Columbus' arrival there were probably roughly 1,500,000 Indians in what is now the continental United States, although estimates vary greatly. In order to assess the role and the impact of the American Indian upon the subsequent history of the United States in any meaningful way, one must understand the differentiating factors, such as those mentioned above. Generally speaking it may be said, however, that the American Indians as a whole exercised an important influence upon the white civilization transplanted from Europe to the New World. Indian foods and herbs, articles of manufacture, methods of raising some crops, war techniques, words, a rich folklore, and racial infusions are among the more obvious general contributions of the Indians to their European conquerors. The protracted and brutal westward-moving conflict caused by white expansionism and Indian resistance constitutes one of the most tragic chapters in the history of the United States. Oscar O. Winther The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica Colonial America to 1763 The European background The English colonization of North America was but one chapter in the larger story of European expansion throughout the globe. The Portuguese, beginning with a voyage to Porto Santo off the coast of West Africa in 1418, were the first Europeans to promote overseas exploration and colonization. By 1487 the Portuguese had traveled all the way to the southern tip of Africa, establishing trading stations at Arguin, Sierra Leone, and El Mina. In 1497 Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed up the eastern coast of Africa, laying the groundwork for Portugal's later commercial control of India. By 1500, when Pedro lvares Cabral stumbled across the coast of Brazil en route to India, Portuguese influence had expanded to the New World as well. Though initially lagging behind the Portuguese in the arts of navigation and exploration, the Spanish quickly closed that gap in the decades following Columbus' voyages to America (see Columbus, Christopher). First in the Caribbean and then in spectacular conquests of New Spain and Peru, they captured the imagination, and the envy, of the European world. France, occupied with wars in Europe to preserve its own territorial integrity, was not able to devote as much time or effort to overseas expansion as did Spain and Portugal. Beginning in the early 16th century, however, French fishermen established an outpost in Newfoundland, and in 1534 Jacques Cartier began exploring the Gulf of St. Lawrence. By 1543 the French had ceased their efforts to colonize the northeast portion of the New World. In the last half of the 16th century, France attempted to found colonies in Florida and Brazil; but each of these efforts failed, and by the end of the century Spain and Portugal remained the only two European nations to have established successful colonies in America. The English, although anxious to duplicate the Spanish and Portuguese successes, nevertheless lagged far behind in their colonization efforts. The English possessed a theoretical claim to the North American mainland by dint of the 1497 voyage of John Cabot off the coast of Nova Scotia, but in fact they had neither the means nor the desire to back up that claim during the 16th century. Thus it was that England relied instead on private trading companies, which were interested principally in commercial rather than territorial expansion, to defend its interests in the expanding European world. The first of these commercial ventures began with the formation of the Muscovy Company in 1554. In 157678 the English mariner Martin Frobisher undertook three voyages in search of a Northwest Passage to the Far East. In 1577 Sir Francis Drake made his famous voyage around the world, plundering the western coast of South America en route. A year later Sir Humphrey Gilbert, one of the most dedicated of Elizabethan imperialists, began a series of ventures aimed at establishing permanent colonies in North America. All of his efforts met with what was, at best, limited success. Finally, in September 1583, Gilbert, with five vessels and 260 men, disappeared in the North Atlantic. With the failure of Gilbert's voyage, the English turned to a new man, Sir Walter Raleigh, and a new strategya southern rather than a northern route to North Americato advance England's fortunes in the New World. Raleigh's efforts to found a permanent colony off the coast of Virginia, although they did finally fail with the mysterious destruction of the Roanoke Island colony in 1587, awakened popular interest in a permanent colonizing venture. During the years separating the failure of the Roanoke colony and the establishment in 1607 of the English settlement in Jamestown, English propagandists worked hard to convince the public that a colony in America would yield instant and easily exploitable wealth. Even men like the English geographer Richard Hakluyt were not certain that the Spanish colonization experience could or should be imitated but hoped nevertheless that the English colonies in the New World would prove to be a source of immediate commercial gain. There were, of course, other motives for colonization. Some hoped to discover the much-sought-after route to the Orient in North America. English imperialists thought it necessary to settle in the New World in order to limit Spanish expansion. Once it was proven that America was a suitable place for settlement, some Englishmen would travel to those particular colonies that promised to free them from religious persecution. There were also Englishmen, primarily of lower- and middle-class origin, who hoped the New World would provide them with increased economic opportunity in the form of free or inexpensive land. These last two motives, while they have been given considerable attention by historians, appear not to have been so much original motives for English colonization as they were shifts of attitude once colonization had begun. History The American Revolution and the early federal republic Prelude to revolution Britain's victory over France in the Great War for the Empire had been won at very great cost. British government expenditures, which had amounted to nearly 6,500,000 annually before the war, rose to about 14,500,000 annually during the war. As a result, the burden of taxation in England was probably the highest in the country's history, much of it borne by the politically influential landed classes. Furthermore, with the acquisition of the vast domain of Canada and the prospect of holding British territories both against the various nations of Indians and against the Spaniards to the south and west, the costs of colonial defense could be expected to continue indefinitely. Parliament, moreover, had voted Massachusetts a generous sum in compensation for its war expenses. It therefore seemed reasonable to British opinion that some of the future burden of payment should be shifted to the colonists themselveswho until then had been lightly taxed and indeed lightly governed. The prolonged wars had also revealed the need to tighten the administration of the loosely run and widely scattered elements of the British Empire. If the course of the war had confirmed the necessity, the end of the war presented the opportunity. The acquisition of Canada required London officials to take responsibility for the unsettled western territories, now freed from the threat of French occupation. The British soon moved to take charge of the whole field of Indian relations. By royal proclamation (1763) a line was drawn down the Appalachians marking the limit of settlement from the British colonies, beyond which Indian trade was to be conducted strictly through British-appointed commissioners. These steps were not in time to prevent a serious uprising under the Ottawa chief Pontiac, however; and the proclamation, which sprang in part from a respect for Indian rights, caused consternation among British colonists for two reasons. It meant that limits were being set to the prospects of settlement and speculation in western lands, and it took control of the west out of colonial hands. The most ambitious men in the colonies thus saw the proclamation as a loss of power to control their own fortunes. The tax controversy George Grenville, who was named prime minister in 1763, was soon looking to meet the costs of defense by raising revenue in the colonies. The first measure was the Plantation Act of 1764, usually called the Sugar, or Revenue, Act, which reduced to a mere threepence the duty on imported foreign molasses but linked with this a high duty on refined sugar and a prohibition on foreign rum (the needs of the British treasury were carefully balanced with those of West Indies planters and New England distillers). The last measure of this kind (1733) had not been enforced, but this time the government set up a system of customs houses, staffed by British officers, and even established a vice-admiralty court. Sitting at Halifax, N.S., the court heard very few cases, but in principle it appeared to threaten the cherished British privilege of trials by local juries. Boston further objected to the tax's revenue-raising aspect on constitutional grounds, but, despite some expressions of anxiety, the colonies in general acquiesced. Parliament next affected colonial economic prospects by passing a Currency Act (1764) to withdraw paper currencies, many of them surviving from the war period, from circulation. This was not done to restrict economic growth so much as to take out currency that was thought to be unsound, but it did severely reduce the circulating medium during the difficult postwar period and further indicated that such matters were subject to British control. Grenville's next move was a stamp duty, to be raised on a wide variety of transactions, including legal writs, newspaper advertisements, and ships' bills of lading. The colonies were duly consulted and offered no alternative suggestions. The feeling in London, shared by Benjamin Franklin, was that, after making formal objections, the colonies would accept the new taxes as they had the earlier ones. But the Stamp Act (1765) hit harder and deeper than any previous parliamentary measure. As some agents had already pointed out, because of postwar economic difficulties the colonies were short of ready funds. (In Virginia this shortage was so serious that the province's treasurer, John Robinson, who was also speaker of the assembly, manipulated and redistributed paper money that had been officially withdrawn from circulation by the Currency Act; a large proportion of the landed gentry benefited from this largesse.) The Stamp Act struck at vital points of colonial economic operations, affecting transactions in trade. It also affected many of the most articulate and influential people in the colonies (lawyers, journalists, bankers). It was, moreover, the first internal tax levied directly on the colonies by Parliament. Previous colonial taxes had been levied by local authorities or had been external import duties whose primary aim could be viewed as regulating trade for the benefit of the empire as a whole rather than raising revenue. Yet no one, either in Britain or the colonies, fully anticipated the uproar that followed the imposition of these duties. Mobs in Boston and other towns rioted and forced appointed stamp distributors to renounce their posts; legal business was largely halted. Several colonies sent delegations to a Congress in New York in the summer of 1765, where the Stamp Act was denounced as a violation of the Englishman's right to be taxed only through elected representatives, and plans were adopted to impose a nonimportation embargo on British goods. A change of ministry facilitated a change of British policy on taxation. Parliamentary opinion was angered by what it perceived as colonial lawlessness, but British merchants were worried about the embargo on British imports. The Marquis of Rockingham, succeeding Grenville, was persuaded to repeal the Stamp Actfor domestic reasons rather than out of any sympathy with colonial protests. The repeal was passed, however, on the same day as the Declaratory Act, which declared that Parliament had the power to bind or legislate the colonies in all cases whatsoever. Parliament would not have voted the repeal without this assertion of its authority. The colonists, jubilant at the repeal of the Stamp Act, drank innumerable toasts, sounded peals of cannon, and were prepared to ignore the Declaratory Act as face-saving window dressing. John Adams, however, warned in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law that Parliament, armed with this view of its powers, would try to tax the colonies again; and this happened in 1767 when Charles Townshend became Chancellor of the Exchequer in a ministry formed by Pitt, now Earl of Chatham. The problem was that Britain's financial burden had not been lifted. Townshend, claiming to take literally the colonial distinction between external and internal taxes, imposed external duties on a wide range of necessities, including lead, glass, paint, paper, and tea, the principal domestic beverage. One ominous result was that colonists now began to believe that the British were developing a long-term plan to reduce the colonies to a subservient position, which they were soon calling slavery. This view was ill-informed, however. Grenville's measures had been designed as a carefully considered package; apart from some tidying-up legislation, Grenville had had no further plans for the colonies after the Stamp Act. His successors developed further measures, not as extensions of an original plan but because the Stamp Act had been repealed. Nevertheless, the colonists were outraged. In Pennsylvania the lawyer and legislator John Dickinson wrote a series of essays that, appearing in 1767 and 1768 as Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, were widely reprinted and exerted great influence in forming a united colonial opposition. Dickinson agreed that Parliament had supreme power where the whole empire was concerned, but he denied that it had power over internal colonial affairs; he quietly implied that the basis of colonial loyalty lay in its utility among equals rather than in obedience owed to a superior. It proved easier to unite on opinion than on action. Gradually, after much maneuvering and negotiation, a wide-ranging nonimportation policy against British goods was brought into operation. Agreement had not been easy to reach, and the tensions sometimes broke out in acrimonious charges of noncooperation. In addition, the policy had to be enforced by newly created local committees, a process that put a new disciplinary power in the hands of local men who had not had much previous experience in public affairs. There were, as a result, many signs of discontent with the ordering of domestic affairs in some of the coloniesa development that had obvious implications for the future of colonial politics if more action were needed later. History The United States since 1945 The peak Cold War years, 194560 The Truman Doctrine and containment Truman, who had been chosen as vice president for domestic political reasons, was poorly prepared to assume the presidency. He had no experience of foreign affairs, knew little about Roosevelt's intentions, and was intimidated by the giant shoes he now had to fill. His first decisions were dictated by events or plans already laid. In July, two months after the German forces surrendered, he met at Potsdam, Ger., with Stalin and Churchill (who was succeeded at the conference by Clement Attlee) to discuss future operations against Japan and a peace settlement for Europe. Little was accomplished, and there would not be another meeting between Soviet and American heads of state for 10 years. Hopes that good relations between the superpowers would ensure world peace soon faded as a result of the Stalinization of eastern Europe and Soviet support of communist insurgencies in various parts of the globe. Events came to a head in 1947 when Britain, weakened by a failing economy, decided to pull out of the eastern Mediterranean. This would leave both Greece, where a communist-inspired civil war was raging, and Turkey to the mercies of the Soviet Union. Truman now came into his own as a national leader, asking Congress to appropriate aid to Greece and Turkey and asserting, in effect, that henceforth the United States must help free peoples in general to resist communist aggression. This policy, known as the Truman Doctrine, has been criticized for committing the United States to the support of unworthy regimes and for taking on greater burdens than it was safe to assume. At first, however, the Truman Doctrine was narrowly applied. Congress appropriated $400,000,000 for Greece and Turkey, saving both from falling into unfriendly hands, and thereafter the United States relied mainly on economic a