New England, the change was stubbornly resisted, and, for a time, with
success. For about twenty years, the general rule was that New England
and Delaware were federalist, and the rest of the country was
democratic. But even in New England, a strong democratic minority was
growing up, and about 1820 the last barriers of federalism gave way;
Connecticut, the federalist "land of steady habits," accepted a new and
democratic constitution; Massachusetts modified hers; and the new and
reliably democratic State of Maine was brought into existence. The "era
of good feeling" signalized the extinction of the federal party and the
universal reign of democracy. The length of this period of contest is
the strongest testimony to the stubbornness of the New England fibre.
Estimated by States, the success of democracy was about as complete in
1803 as in 1817; but it required fifteen years of persistent struggle to
convince the smallest section of the Union that it was hopelessly
defeated.

The whole period was a succession of great events. The acquisition of
Louisiana, stretching from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, laid,
in 1803, the foundations of that imperial domain which the steamboat and
railroad were to convert to use in after-years. The continental empire
of Napoleon and the island empire of Great Britain drifted into a
struggle for life or death which hardly knew a breathing space until the
last charge at Waterloo, and from the beginning it was conducted by both
combatants with a reckless disregard of international public opinion and
neutral rights which is hardly credible but for the official records.
Every injury inflicted on neutral commerce by one belligerent was
promptly imitated or exceeded by the other, and the two were perfectly
in accord in insisting on the convenient doctrine of international law,
that, unless neutral rights were enforced by the neutral against one
belligerent, the injury became open to the imitation of the other. In