By 1810, the American experiment was well underway.

It was a time when the Founding Fathers were not just still alive, but actively involved in politics. The original 13 colonies had already grown to 17, with vast swaths of territory in the country’s interior waiting to be settled.

By the end of the decade, the number of states had grown to 22, with even more territory added.

But the borders were not the only thing that changed during that decade. On the international stage, the U.S. found itself once again in conflict with the United Kingdom, a fight that would lead to the first declaration of war in the nation’s history.

At home, the nature of politics itself changed. The 1810s saw the collapse of the Federalist Party, leaving the Democratic-Republican Party firmly in control. Historians call it the Era of Good Feelings, even if that name isn’t entirely accurate.

John Jacob Astor was born in 1763 near Heidelberg in present-day Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany. At the age of 20, just after the end of the American Revolution, Astor emigrated to the U.S.

On his journey, he met a fur trader, an encounter that would change his life.

Before long, Astor was working with his brother in New York City and buying raw animal hides to process and resell in London.

Over the next 15 years, his business would continue to grow, and in 1808 he started the American Fur Company. One of the company’s plans was to launch an expedition to the Pacific Northwest.

In 1810, employees of the newly formed Pacific Fur Company left on a voyage that would take them around the southern tip of South America and then back north to what is now Oregon.

There, at the mouth of the Columbia River, they established Fort Astoria, the first American settlement on the Pacific coast.

The work was hard, the terrain was unforgiving and the competition was formidable. And while fur trapping expeditions were happening, the War of 1812 broke out.

With no military protection, the Pacific Fur Company was unable to last, selling to a British-Canadian company by 1813.

Historian Arthur S. Morton summed up the experience of the company.

“The misfortunes which befell the Pacific Fur Company were great, but such as might be expected at the initiation of an enterprise in a distant land whose difficulties and whose problems lay beyond the experience of the traders,” he wrote.

But though the venture failed, Astor made a tremendous amount of money in the fur trade, becoming the first American multimillionaire.

And beyond the success of Astor and his descendants — one of whom would die aboard the Titanic in 1912 — the Pacific Fur Company would be a benefit to many. On their journey overland from Fort Astoria to St. Louis in Missouri, members of the company found the South Pass through the Rocky Mountains, a vital leg of what would become the Oregon Trail in the subsequent decades.

While the railroad and the steamship would soon come to dominate the world, in the 1810s, the idea of steam power was still relatively novel.

In the early 1800s, Col. John Stevens created a primitive, single-screw steamboat. After several revisions, he launched Juliana, a twin-screw steamboat that offered the first steam-powered ferry service in the U.S.

The Juliana took passengers between New York City and Hoboken, N.J.

A few years later, Stevens and some investors would receive the first railroad charter in the nation, the Camden and Amboy Railroad.

The break between the United States and Great Britain following the American Revolution was never perfectly clean. From the beginning, the two nations had close but quite strained ties.

Their economies were closely linked from before the Revolution, and emigration from Great Britain to America remained very common. But the British still made demands on America and Americans, which led the Americans to resist.

There were several important issues that would eventually lead to the first declaration of war in American history. Restrictions that Great Britain tried to impose on trade between the Americans and the French frustrated American merchants. British vessels stopping American ones and impressing men they claimed were deserters further heightened tensions.

One incident in particular, known as the Chesapeake Affair, saw a British vessel attack, chase and then board an American warship, the seize four sailors as British Navy deserters. Because the British had fired upon an American ship, there were swift calls for war, but the British refused to back down.

Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison tried to use economic pressure to change the way the British acted.

Attempts at partial and full embargoes followed. By 1810, a bill was passed that would have committed the U.S. to embargoing Great Britain if France agreed to stop intercepting American ships.

Like the previous attempts, however, the measures did little more than further increase tensions between the two nations.

Meanwhile, on land, tensions between the two countries mounted as friction increased between the U.S. and Native Americans. In the wake of the Revolutionary War, many states had claimed all land held by Native Americans, and after the Louisiana Purchase, many Native peoples worried about American expansion.

The British supported many of those tribes as a hedge on American growth. As more and more conflict broke out between Native Americans and the U.S., British support for the Native Americans became another sticking point.

Tensions were high between the U.S. and Native American nations, too.

In 1810, William Henry Harrison, a future U.S. President, was governor of the Indiana Territory. Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief, demanded Harrison nullify a recent treaty where one tribe had ceded land to the U.S. because other tribes opposed the move.

They couldn’t come to an agreement. Despite Tecumseh’s opposition, his brother, Tenskwatawa, led a force into battle against Harrison’s militia in November 1811 near the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers. Despite sustaining heavy losses, Harrison’s troops turned back the Native American fighters.

That conflict laid the groundwork for further fighting on the Western frontier for decades to come.

On June 1, 1812, James Madison, who’d assumed office in 1808, spoke to Congress about the ongoing conflict between the U.S. and Great Britain, listing out the grievances Americans felt, though falling short of asking Congress to declare war.

But that was the message both the House of Representatives and the Senate took from the speech and voted to declare war, though not by an overwhelming margin.

Still, it was a historic moment, the first time Congress voted to authorize a declaration of war.

On June 18, weeks after his speech, and well after Congress had approved the declaration, Madison declared war on Great Britain.

Despite a lead-up that had stretched for more than a decade, along with steadily rising tensions punctuated by violent encounters, neither side was actually ready for war.

The British had a few thousand regular troops stationed in Canada, and the U.S. had fewer than 12,000 regular troops. Congress authorized recruiting more, to bring the total to 35,000, and states were expected to provide volunteer troops.

Many of those troops were reluctant to leave their home states, and after the war was declared and the decision was made to mount an invasion of Canada, many militia men refused to cross the border.

Since the very start of the war, some critics claimed the true motivation was the American desire to annex Canada. For evidence, they point to the first action of the war. Gen. William Hull attempted to invade Canada through what is now Windsor, Ontario.

He crossed the border on July 12, 1812, less than a month after the declaration of war. Hull demanded the surrender of all British in the area, but wasn’t able to accomplish much before withdrawing back to the U.S. a little more than three weeks later.

Close behind him was Maj. Gen. Isaac Brock, the colonial administrator of Upper Canada.

As the British approached Fort Detroit, Brock sent Hull a message, trying to play on the American soldiers’ fear of the Native American warriors.

“It is far from my inclination to join in a war of extermination, but you must be aware that the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops will be beyond my control the moment the contest commences,” he wrote.

That fear, along with a heavy bombardment by the British, led Hull to surrender the fort, despite his strong defensive position.

Hundreds of members of the regular Army were taken as prisoners of war, while hundreds more militiamen were sent back home. Hull’s reputation would never recover, and in 1814 he was court-martialed, found guilty of treason, cowardice and neglect of duty and sentenced to death, though Madison commuted that sentence.

One of the most famous ships of all time was already nearly 15 years old when the war started. The USS Constitution, known as Old Ironsides, was commissioned in 1796.

It fought along the Barbary Coast in the early 1800s and was freshly outfitted shortly before the start of the War of 1812.

It was involved in a dramatic pursuit in the early days of the war when a British squadron spotted the Constitution and gave chase.

The Constitution’s crew found themselves becalmed and were forced to row boats ahead of the ship to tow her.

For 57 hours, the crew worked to keep the ship moving — and ahead of the British squadron — and had to pump 2,300 gallons of drinking water overboard to accomplish the feat.

Her commander, Isaac Hull, put in at Boston and resupplied before evading a potential blockade. Shortly after setting off, he heard reports of a British frigate, HMS Guerriere, in the area.

Several days later, the two ships made contact and began to fight. They became entangled and as they pulled apart, Guerriere’s masts began to collapse.

It was during this battle when an American sailor allegedly noticed the Guerriere’s cannonballs bouncing off the sides of the Constitution and commented it was like they were made of iron.

From there, she took the name Old Ironsides, and some credit the dense live oak used to create her hull with the strength.

It would go on to defeat three further British ships in battle: HMS Java, HMS Cyane and HMS Levant. After the battle where it faced Cyane and then Levant, the crew found a dozen British cannonballs lodged in the hull, none of which had made it all the way through.

In 1830, when a rumor started the ship was to be dismantled for scrap, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. published “Old Ironsides,” a poem that made the ship so beloved that today it’s the oldest ship in the world that is still commissioned.

During the early years of the war, the British were actually fighting multiple opponents. The Napoleonic Wars raged through 1812 and 1813, but by early 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte had been defeated and was in exile — temporarily, at least — on the island of Elba.

That allowed the British to bring their superior firepower to bear on the Americans, and in August 1814, after a brutal defeat at Bladensburg, Md., the British attacked the U.S. capital of Washington, D.C., captured it and burned many buildings.

Madison and the rest of the government had fled the city after the defeat, and the British withdrew about a day later.

While they were in the city, they burned the U.S. Capitol and the White House, leaving both heavily damaged and destroying the entire 3,000 volume collection of the Library of Congress.

Among other targets was the newspaper the National Intelligencer, which had written harshly about Rear Admiral George Cockburn, who commanded the force.

He had originally ordered the building burned when some women from the city convinced him not to do that out of fear the fire would spread to their homes.

Instead, Cockburn had the building dismantled brick by brick and ordered his men to destroy all the letter Cs in the type room.

After targeting D.C., the British turned to a nearby city, Baltimore. In the city’s harbor was Fort McHenry, commanded by Major George Armistead and garrisoned by 1,000 troops.

Starting on Sept. 13, after a failed attempt at a land attack on Baltimore, British ships opened fire on the fort.

Over the course of the next 25 hours, they would bombard Fort McHenry with between 1,500 and 1,800 artillery shells, hoping to force the defenders to surrender the fort, giving them access to the port of Baltimore.

But despite the massive downpour of ordnance, the men inside the fort held firm. Of course, on board one of those ships was a Maryland attorney, Francis Scott Key, who was negotiating with the British for the release of one of their prisoners.

Impressed and inspired by the staunch defense, Key wrote “Defense of Fort M’Henry,” which would later be set to music and become “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

In late 1814, as negotiations to end the war were making progress, British forces moved to invade the south and take New Orleans. In early January, American troops led by Maj. Andrew Jackson would beat back the British assault, leading to a quick, decisive victory in the Battle of New Orleans.

Only about a dozen Americans would die in the fighting, with the British losing hundreds. The victory would help launch Jackson into the spotlight and, eventually, the Presidency.

The battle was the last major engagement of the war, and it came weeks after the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, but before the news had even reached the U.S., let alone been ratified by Congress.

Madison had been reelected in 1812. Following the precedent set by George Washington, he stepped aside after his second term.

His successor, elected in 1816, was James Monroe.

Monroe is the last Founding Father to serve as U.S. President. His two terms, spanning 1817 through 1825 has an enduring nickname: The Era of Good Feelings.

Historians use that name because of the seeming unity that emerged politically after the War of 1812.

Democratic-Republicans had by and large supported the war, while Federalists had largely opposed it. But the successful ending of the war after Jackson’s victory at New Orleans — even though the war had already been settled by treaty weeks earlier — changed the national mood and left many thinking of the Federalists as traitors.

The resulting nationalism essentially finished the Federalist Party as a national force.

Monroe’s image as a veteran of the Revolutionary War and as the one-time Secretary of War made him immensely popular, though the unity that seemed to grow during the Era of Good Feelings quickly collapsed when Monroe left office.

After the War of 1812, trade began to boom. New, less restrictive trade policies from the British drove growth and expansion in the United States.

One reason for the expansion was the sale of public lands in the Western parts of the country as a way to help reduce the debt the nation faced as it paid for war with a global empire.

The Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 and offered credit freely at first. By 1818, however, it found itself overextended and was forced to tighten its requirements for offering credit.

That, in turn, squeezed other banks, leading them to call in more and more loans. When people couldn’t pay those loans, they lost all the land they’d purchased.

That, coupled with a sudden drop in cotton prices caused the Panic of 1819.

It was the nation’s first widespread economic catastrophe, impacting the economy for nearly two years.

It also marked the movement of the United States from an economic colony of Great Britain to a member of the world economy.