By 1830, the United States had changed dramatically from what it had looked like in 1776, and the decade set the scene for the massive westward expansion that started in the 1840s.

The Revolutionary War had started more than half a century before, and the nation’s first President, George Washington, had taken office 40 years before. The nation was so young and so novel still that a French nobleman, Alexis de Tocqueville, would immortalize it in one of the decade’s most enduring works, “Democracy in America,” which examined why the democratic system was thriving in the United States when it had failed to take root elsewhere in the world.

In 1828, the country had elected one of the Presidents who would reshape the way the office is looked at: Andrew Jackson.

His vision of a strong executive and his populist politics made him one of the most important Presidents of the early 19th century.

The 1830s also saw the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, with inventors from Samuel Colt to Cyrus McCormick filing patents on innovations that would change history.

The U.S. Constitution established the decennial census system, and 1830 was the fifth in the country. It found a total population of 12,866,020 people, up nearly 34% from 1820.

While the nation was still predominantly rural and agricultural, cities were becoming larger and more important. New York City was the largest in the United States, with a population of 202,589. Baltimore was second with 80,620, while Philadelphia was a close third with 80,462.

Pittsburgh was the fifth biggest city in Pennsylvania and the 17th largest in the nation, with 12,568 residents.

New York was the most populous state, with nearly 2 million residents, while Pennsylvania was second, with 1.35 million.

The United States was founded during what’s sometimes called the European Age of Enlightenment, a period where rational thought, scientific experiments and a more worldly perspective influenced society. Starting in the late 19th century, though, new religious movements started gaining converts and influencing American culture at large.

Known as the Second Great Awakening, the increase in religious feeling and fervency helped lay the groundwork for many modern Christian denominations.

Many Baptist churches have roots that go back to the Second Great Awakening, along with Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly referred to as Mormons.

In 1830, Joseph Smith Jr., the son of a farmer in upstate New York, published “The Book of Mormon,” which he said was an English translation of a series of golden plates that documented the visitations of Jesus to the New World.

In January 1831, Smith would move to Kirtland, Ohio, where the church would be based for much of the decade, even as it sent out missionaries to make converts around the country and in other nations, as well.

Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh President, is one of the most well-known, if also one of the most polarizing, and he’s responsible for reshaping the power of the Presidency.

Born in 1767 in the Piedmont region of the Carolinas, Jackson was taken prisoner as a young teenager during the Revolutionary War and would rise to national prominence by defeating the British at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, several weeks after the Treaty of Ghent, which would end the War of 1812, was signed, but before word of it had made it across the ocean.

He made a fortune on his plantation, Hermitage, and his trading of enslaved people is one of the reasons many modern historians consider him a polarizing figure, and, indeed, his participation in the slave trade raised political objections at the time.

Jackson served in the U.S. Army for several more years, and in 1824 made his first run for President. He won a plurality of both the popular and electoral vote, but no candidate received a majority, which put the result in the hands of the U.S. House of Representatives. What Jackson’s supporters would come to call a “Corrupt Bargain” led Kentucky Rep. Henry Clay to support John Quincy Adams, who’d received the second-most votes, giving him the Presidency.

But four years later, Jackson ran again and soundly defeated Adams, taking 55% of the popular vote and winning the Electoral College 178 to 83.

Jackson’s actions shaped the 1830s, and he greatly expanded the powers the President claimed the ability to exercise.

One of his most consequential decisions was to veto the reauthorization of the charter of the Second Bank of the United States. The bank, which had been formed in 1816 by President James Monroe in an attempt to solidify the nation’s finances after the War of 1812, held public money but was also a for-profit institution.

Jackson saw the bank as a fourth branch of government, one that served the elites at the expense of what he called “real people,” such as farmers, laborers and artisans. In 1832, when the bank’s charter was reauthorized by Congress, Jackson vetoed it, forcing the bank to wind down its operations.

Federal money that had been held in the Second Bank of the United States was transferred to state banks, a move that, along with several others, helped lead to the Panic of 1837.

In 1828, before Jackson was elected, Congress passed a high tariff designed to keep consumer prices stable but also protect manufacturers from competition from Britain and other trade partners.

The tariffs hurt Southern cotton planters, however, and shortly after the tariff was passed, “South Carolina’s Exposition and Protest” was sent to the U.S. Senate.

The author — it was written by John C. Calhoun, who would be Jackson’s Vice President — argued that the U.S. Constitution was a compact between the states and the federal government should have a very limited role based on the duties set out in the Constitution. If one state believed the federal government had overstepped, it had both the right and the obligation to declare the unconstitutional act null and void.

An attempt at a compromise by lowering the tariffs failed to satisfy anyone, and in November 1832, shortly after Jackson won reelection, South Carolina passed a law to nullify the tariffs and to secede from the United States if the military was used to collect the duties.

Eventually a pair of bills — one adjusting the tariffs further and another authorizing Jackson to use force to collect the tariffs — solved the problem, but Jackson seemed to see into the future.

Historian Jon Meacham quoted Jackson as saying this about the crisis: “The tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question.”

Jackson’s actions toward the Native American tribes living inside and on the borders of the United States are his most controversial.

Jackson joined the militia during the First Creek War, part of the War of 1812, and his actions during the war led to his appointment as a major general in advance of the Battle of New Orleans.

After the war he led the invasion of Florida during the Seminole War, which led to the acquisition of the land from both Seminole tribes and Spain.

As President, Jackson signed the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which established a way for Native American tribes to sell land east of the Mississippi to the government in exchange for land west of the Mississippi.

Jackson’s history in the Creek and Seminole Wars shaped the public’s view of him, and how he presented himself.

Historian Amy H. Sturgis wrote, “Jackson earned and emphasized his reputation as an 'Indian fighter,' a man who believed creating fear in the native population was more desirable than cultivating friendship.”

Though the program was supposed to be voluntary, Jackson used the federal government to force some tribes to sell.

One result was the Trail of Tears, where the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations were removed to what is now Oklahoma. Thousands died during the move.

The removal of the tribes wasn’t supported universally in the country, but it made Jackson even more popular with his constituency, because it added nearly 200,000 acres of public land, opening up further space for agriculture.

Jackson had never gotten along well with his first Vice President, John C. Calhoun, a political opponent who had served as John Quincy Adams’ Vice President from 1825 to 1829 before winning reelection.

The two were on opposing sides of the Nullification Crisis, which eventually led Calhoun to resign.

Martin Van Buren, who had served as Secretary of State during Jackson’s first term, ran for and won the Vice Presidency in 1832. He would go on to succeed Jackson as president in 1837 and would continue Jackson’s policies during his term.

He became only the third President to lose reelection to a second term, falling to William Henry Harrison in the Election of 1840.

Following the Mexican War of Independence, which culminated in Mexico’s freeing itself from Spanish overlordship in 1821, newly liberalized immigration policies started drawing English-speaking American citizens to the territory of Texas.

Over the course of the 1820s and the early 1830s, more and more came to settle, but the Anglos remained distinctly apart, speaking English and holding onto their Protestant religion, as opposed to the Spanish-speaking Catholic Tejanos.

Cultural differences, attempts to stop Anglo immigration and a ban in slavery all contributed to the increasing tension.

A group of Mexican soldiers tried to confiscate a cannon from small town in October 1835, which led to the Battle of Gonzales. As word of the battle reached the United States, prominent Americans went to Texas to join a new revolutionary war. Some of their names have been familiar to American schoolchildren for generations, including Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, both of whom would die in the Battle of the Alamo.

In early 1836, a garrison of about 100 Texian soldiers held the Alamo Mission, near what’s now San Antonio. A call for volunteers brought between 100 and 200 more people to defend the complex.

The Mexican Army arrived on Feb. 23, 1836 with thousands of soldiers against perhaps 300 Texian defenders.

One of the garrison commanders, William Travis, wrote a letter the next day in which he promised to never surrender and asked for reinforcements.

He closed the letter with an iconic phrase.

“I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible,” he wrote, “and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country — Victory or Death.”

On March 5, the Mexican forces launched two assaults on the Alamo, which the defenders were able to repulse. A third attack succeed, though, and the Mexican troops broke through.

All but perhaps 50 of the Texians who fought at the Alamo would meet death, but the ferocity of their resistance and the brutality of the troops commanded by President Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana inspired the other troops throughout Texas.

By April 21, 1836, the Texians had defeated Santa Ana’s army at the Battle of San Jacinto, captured him and negotiated a treaty.

The Republic of Texas would last less than a decade before becoming part of the United States in 1845.

Slavery would become the issue that would tear the Union apart, but in the 1830s, that was still decades in the future, though events like the Nullification Crisis gave a glimpse of the disunion to come.

But the debate over slavery — and what to do with the free Black people whose numbers were starting to grow — started to seep into the public consciousness during the 1830s.

Among the first publications dedicated to the abolition of slavery in the U.S. was The Liberator, founded by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831. Garrison was a longtime, staunch abolitionist who wrote in an open letter in the first issue of The Liberator in January 1831: “I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

A few years later, in 1834, Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, hosted nine nights of public debate on both abolition and the colonization movement, which supported creating African colonies to send free Black people to.

In the audience for the debates was a Who’s Who of future prominent abolitionists.

Lyman Beecher was the president of the seminary and his children, Henry Ward Beecher, who’d be among the most prominent clergymen of the 19th century, and the future Harriet Beecher Stowe, who would write “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in the 1850s, were both there.

Garrison would write summaries of the debates in The Liberator, spreading the message even further.

But in a sign of what was to come, many residents of Cincinnati were hostile to the abolition movement and to the seminary itself, and the seminary’s trustees forbade future debates.

That move led to the resignation of students and one member of the board of trustees and the foundation of Oberlin College.

The debate over slavery would continue in the public eye, partly thanks to the Amistad affair in 1839.

A group of Mende people were kidnapped in what’s now Sierra Leone and put aboard a Spanish ship as part of the by-then illegal slave trade. The Africans were able to fight back while onboard the schooner La Amistad and eventually were found off Long Island by and American ship.

After legal wrangling, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal judge’s ruling that because the U.S. had banned the international slave trade in 1808, the Africans were free and had been legally justified in killing their captors.

While the public was debating slavery, the U.S. House of Representatives not only wasn’t, it couldn’t. From the early days of the nation, the first weeks of a Congressional session were taken up dealing with public petitions. Throughout the 1830s, more and more addressed slavery.

In 1836, group of pro-slavery Congressmen got rules passed that prevented the House from even discussing slavery, whether from a petition or from a member’s resolution. Those rules were reapproved annually through 1844, something many historians blame for the increasing polarization around the issue of slavery during that time.

Some of the most famous inventions from the 1830s would take time to find an audience but would go on to change entire industries and the world itself. Many of those would come from American minds.

Among the most important inventions of the decade were the mechanical reaper, patented by Cyrus McCormick in 1834, though it would be more than a decade before that product found success, and the revolver, patented by Samuel Colt in 1836, though his business would fail in 1843 and he would have to restart his company in the late 1840s.

In 1837, Samuel Morse invented Morse code for use in telegraphy, and he would hold his first public demonstration of his telegraph the next year.

In 1839, William Otis invented the steam shovel and Charles Goodyear invented the process of vulcanizing rubber, which makes it more pliable and durable.

Also in 1839, French inventor Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype, the first practical photographic process. It would quickly spread worldwide and spur innovation and new processes through the 1840s and beyond.