United States History

B

Expansion: Northwest Territory

In the 1780s there were few white settlers in the Northwest Territory (the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and eastern Minnesota). By 1860 more than one in five Americans lived in the Northwest, and the geographic center of the population of the United States was near Chillicothe, Ohio. Nearly all white migrants were farmers, and they reached the area in two streams.

Before 1830 most migrants were Southerners, mainly poor and middling farmers from Kentucky, Tennessee, and western Virginia. In the southern regions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, they settled near rivers that empty into the Ohio River, providing access to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.

Southern migrants in the Northwest worked their land Southern style. They planted cornfields but left most of their land wooded, allowing hogs to roam freely and fend for themselves. In this way farmers subsisted (within their households and through bartering with neighbors) with relatively little labor or reliance on outside markets.

Trade down the Mississippi became safe only after Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory in 1803 and the army ended Native American resistance in the Northwest and Southwest in the War of 1812. The trade route became efficient and profitable only with the development of river steamboats in the 1810s.

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After 1830 a new stream of migration reached the Northwest Territory from the northeastern states. Most of the new settlers were New Englanders (many of whom had spent a generation in western New York) who reached their new lands via New York’s Erie Canal, Great Lakes steamboats, and other new forms of transportation. By the 1840s they were joined by immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. Most of these were intensive commercial farmers. Rather than allow cattle and hogs to roam freely (often trampling tilled fields), they put their animals in pens. They also planted huge fields of grain and put up fences.

In 1820 the Northwest Territory sent only 12 percent of its farm produce to markets outside the region—a sign that nearly all Northwestern farmers limited their economic lives to their families and neighbors. By 1840 exports accounted for 27 percent of what Northwestern farmers produced, and by 1860—with railroad connections to the east completed—the figure stood at 70 percent. The figures were even higher in the northern, grain–growing areas. Increasingly, the market for Northwestern farm products was not in Europe but in the towns and cities of the east as well as such local centers as Cincinnati, Ohio, and Chicago, Illinois. In turn, these cities provided farmers with manufactured goods. Land that only a generation earlier had been occupied by independent Native American peoples was now the center of a great internal commercial revolution.

C

Expansion: The Southwest

Equally dramatic was the rapid settlement of the trans-Appalachian South. At the conclusion of the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson forced the Creeks to cede huge territories in the Southwest. Settlers, often with the help of state governments, began pressuring the Cherokee, Choctaw, and other tribes to give up their lands. The land was eagerly sought by Southeastern whites who had small, worn–out farms, and who faced lives of tenancy and rural poverty.

The best lands, however, were taken by planters who since the 1790s had been reaping huge profits from the cotton boom. Fertile land beside navigable rivers in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri became slave plantations devoted to cotton. These cotton farms were among the largest, the most intensely commercialized, and the most profitable business operations in the Western Hemisphere.

Farmers who owned few or no slaves took higher, more isolated, and less fertile land in the same states. Like their cousins who settled north of the Ohio River, they practiced a mixed agriculture that included animals and plants (primarily hogs and corn), provided for themselves and their neighbors, and sold the surplus to outside markets. Some of those markets were reached by floating produce downriver to the seaports, while other markets were on plantations that grew only cotton and that bought food from farmers in their region.

The big cotton farms relied on slave labor, and slaves performed the immense task of turning a huge trans–Appalachian wilderness into cotton farms. Much of the slave population that was moved west came from the slave centers of South Carolina and coastal Georgia. But the cotton boom also provided a market for Virginia and Maryland slaves who were not as economically useful as they had been in the 18th century. In the 1790s, as the cotton boom began, about 1 in 12 Chesapeake slaves was moved south and west. Chesapeake slave exports rose to 1 in 10 in the first decade of the 19th century and 1 in 5 between 1810 and 1820. The movement of slaves from the Chesapeake to the new cotton states was immense. The Cotton Belt of the Deep South had become the center of American slavery. See also Slavery in the United States: Growth of Slavery.

D

The Indian Removal Act

With the expansion of the white agricultural frontier came the final blows to Native American independence east of the Mississippi. In New York, the once mighty Iroquois were limited to reservations near the new towns of Buffalo and Syracuse; many of the Iroquois moved to Canada. The Shawnee, who had led Native American resistance in the Northwest Territory until 1815, were scattered. Many of the most defiant members moved to Canada. Others relocated to Missouri, then to Mexican territory in east Texas or to eastern Kansas.

In the South the 60,000 remaining Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole were pressured by the national government to sell away most of their land at pennies per acre. Legislation passed in 1819 provided small amounts of government money to train southern Native Americans in plow agriculture and Christianity on their reduced lands. The plan took hold among many of them, and whites began calling them the Five Civilized Tribes. But even as these efforts continued, settlers moved onto lands that Native Americans had not ceded while the federal government looked the other way. In his final annual message to Congress in 1824, President James Monroe recommended that the indigenous peoples who remained in the east be removed to new lands west of the Mississippi.

The Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw nations rejected the idea of removal and insisted that the national government live up to the treaties that guaranteed them what was left of their territory. At the same time, Southern state governments insisted that they and not the federal government had jurisdiction over Native American lands within their borders. The claim reinforced southern notions of states’ rights; it also held the promise of more Native American land for settlers.

The situation reached a crisis in Georgia, where Governor George Troup extended state jurisdiction to Native American lands and began giving the lands to poor whites by means of a lottery in 1825. Troup also sent state surveyors onto Creek lands and warned President John Quincy Adams not to interfere with this exercise of state authority. Faced with this threatening situation the Creek and the Cherokee reorganized themselves as political nations, stripping local chiefs of power and giving it to national councils. In 1827 the Cherokee nation declared itself a republic with its own government, courts, police, and constitution.

By 1830 the situation had become a crisis. New president Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee plantation owner and a famous fighter of Native Americans, refused to exercise federal jurisdiction over Native American affairs, allowing southern states to find their own solutions. The Cherokee took the state of Georgia to court, and in 1832, in the case of Worcester v. Georgia, John Marshall, chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, ruled that Georgia’s extension of its authority over Cherokee land was unconstitutional. President Jackson simply refused to enforce the decision, allowing southern states to continue to encroach on Native American lands.

In the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Congress—with Jackson’s blessing—offered Native American peoples east of the Mississippi federal land to the west, where the United States government had the authority to protect them. Many of them accepted. Then in 1838, Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren, sent the U.S. Army to evict 18,000 to 20,000 Cherokee remaining in the South and move them to what is today Oklahoma. In all, 4,000 Native Americans died on the march that became known as the Trail of Tears. Jackson, who more than any other person was responsible for this removal policy, argued, “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?” Again, the white empire of land and liberty came at the expense of other races. See also Indian Wars: Native American Removal Policy.

E

The Trans-Mississippi West, 1803–1840s

In 1804, a year after the Louisiana Purchase, President Jefferson sent an expedition under Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the purchase and to continue on to the Pacific Ocean. The Lewis and Clark Expedition traveled up the Missouri River, spent the winter of 1804 to 1805 with the Mandan people, and with the help of a Shoshone woman named Sacagawea traveled west along the Snake River to the Columbia River and on to the Pacific.

Even as they traveled, mounted bands of Sioux were conquering the northern Great Plains. The Sioux had already cut off the Pawnee, Otoe, and other peoples of the lower Missouri from the western buffalo herds and were threatening the Mandan and other agricultural peoples on the upper reaches of the river. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, epidemics of European diseases traveled up the Missouri River. The worst of them came in the 1830s, when smallpox killed half the Native Americans along the river. The Sioux, who lived in small bands and moved constantly, were not as badly hurt as others were. They used that advantage to complete their conquest of the northern sections of Jefferson’s great “Empire of Liberty.”

Farther south, white settlers were crossing the Mississippi onto the new lands. Louisiana, already the site of New Orleans and of Spanish and French plantations, became the first state west of the Mississippi in 1812. Southerners were also moving into the Arkansas and Missouri territories. Missouri entered the Union in 1821, Arkansas in 1836. Settlers also began moving into Texas, in the northeastern reaches of the Republic of Mexico, which won its independence from Spain in 1821. Mexico at first encouraged them but demanded that new settlers become Catholics and Mexican citizens. Mexico also demanded that they respect the Mexican government’s abolition of slavery within its territory. Settlers tended to ignore these demands, and they continued to stream into Texas even when the Mexican government tried to stop the migration.

By 1835 the 30,000 Americans in Texas outnumbered Mexicans six to one. When the Mexican government tried to strengthen its authority in Texas, the American settlers (with the help of many of the Mexicans living in that province) went into an armed revolt known as the Texas Revolution. Volunteers from the southern United States crossed the border to help, and in 1836 the Americans won. They declared their land the independent Republic of Texas and asked that it be annexed to the United States. The question of Texas annexation would stir national politics for the next ten years.

Americans considered the plains that formed most of the Louisiana Purchase (the lands over which the Sioux had established control) to be a desert unsuitable for farming. Congress designated the area west of Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa and north of Texas as Indian Territory in the 1840s. But Americans were already crossing that ground to reach more fertile territory on the Pacific, in California and Oregon (which included present-day Washington and much of present–day British Columbia). See also American Westward Movement: Beyond the Mississippi.

These lands were formally owned by other countries and occupied by independent indigenous peoples. California was part of Mexico. The Oregon country was jointly occupied (and hotly contested) by Britain and the United States. American settlers, most of them from the Ohio Valley, crossed the plains and poured into Oregon and the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys in California after 1841. As populations in those areas grew, members of the new Mormon Church, after violent troubles with their neighbors in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, trekked across the plains and the Rocky Mountains in 1847 and settled on Mexican territory in the Salt Lake Valley.

F

The Monroe Doctrine

The American government in these years was expansionist. With the end of the second war between Britain and the United States, the heated foreign policy debate that had divided Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans since the 1790s quieted down. In the years after 1815 most American politicians agreed on an aggressively nationalist and expansionist foreign policy. John Quincy Adams, who served as secretary of state under James Monroe, did the most to articulate that policy. In the Rush-Bagot Convention of 1817 he worked out agreements with Britain to reduce naval forces on the Great Lakes and establish the U.S.-Canadian border from Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains along the 49th parallel. For the first time in their history, Americans did not have to worry about an unfriendly Canada.

Americans turned their attention south and west, and to Spain’s crumbling empire in the New World. In the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819, Spain ceded Florida to the United States. The treaty also established the border between Louisiana and Spanish Texas, a border that ran west along the Arkansas River, over the Rocky Mountains, and to the Pacific along the present southern borders of Idaho and Oregon. Thus the treaty gave the United States its first claim to land bordering the Pacific Ocean, although it shared that claim with Britain.

In part, the Spanish were willing to give up territory because they had bigger things to worry about: Their South American colonies were in revolt, establishing themselves as independent republics. Spain asked the European powers that had stopped Napoleon’s France to help it stop revolutionary republicanism in Spanish America. Britain, however, did not agree and instead proposed a joint British–United States statement, in which both nations would oppose European intervention in Latin America and would agree not to annex any of the former Spanish territories.

Secretary Adams answered with what became known as the Monroe Doctrine. In it, the United States independently declared that further European colonization in the Americas would be considered an unfriendly act (which agreed with the British proposal). The Monroe Doctrine did not, however, include the British clause that would have prevented annexation of former Spanish territory. Although he had no immediate plans to annex them, Adams believed that at least Texas and Cuba would eventually become American possessions. At the same time, the United States extended diplomatic recognition to the new Latin American republics. In short, the Monroe Doctrine declared the western hemisphere closed to European colonization while leaving open the possibility of United States expansion.

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