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350 New questions and new parties. [isi5 The transition was, of course, gradual. First, the Federalists disappeared as a national party, and after 1816 never again nominated a candidate for the presidency. Then came " the Era of Good Feeling " as it was called, an era which opened with the inauguration of Monroe in 1817, and was in reality the transition period between the old and the new. The old issues were dead ; the new were still sectional and had not risen to national importance ; and during this period there was but one national party. So completely were the Republicans under control that in 1820 but one candidate, Monroe, was nominated for the presidency, and to him was given the electoral vote of every State in the Union. Such complete harmony was of short duration, and on the day Monroe was a second time inaugurated (March 5, 1821) the "Era of Good Feeling " ended ; the once omnipotent Republican party began to fall to pieces ; rival and sectional leaders struggled for mastery ; and in the election of 1824, Adams, Clay, Jackson, and Crawford, each a staunch Republican and each representing a section of the Union, were candidates for the presidency. No one of them received a majority of the electoral votes; and for the second time the duty of electing a president fell upon the House of Representatives. Adams was chosen ; Clay became his Secretary of State ; and from the union of the friends of these two leaders sprang, ten years later, the Whig party. The supporters of Jackson and Crawford, driven into opposition by the defeat of their leaders, formed in time the nucleus of the Democratic party. To make it clear how these things came to pass, the story of the rise of the new issues and of the economic development from which they sprang must be told with some fulness of detail. A quarter of a century had now passed since the old Confederation fell to pieces and the States came under " the New Roof," as the Constitution was fondly called. In the course of these five-and-twenty years the material progress of the country was astonishing. The population had risen from a little less than four millions in 1790 to a little less than eight millions in 1815. The States had increased in number from thirteen to eighteen ; and the area of the country had expanded from the Mississippi river to the Rocky Mountains and the shore of the Pacific Ocean. The enormous trade enjoyed during the long war in Europe brought prosperity to New England and the commercial States. The demand in the West Indies for American lumber, grain, flour, and food products, brought wealth to the farming sections of the Middle States. The rise of cotton-planting in the South gave to that region a staple crop which, for a century to come, overshadowed every other form of industry, and powerfully affected the economic and political history of the country. Before the adoption of the Constitution, cotton, as a staple, had never been cultivated in the United States. But the repeated destruction of