United States History

G

Manifest Destiny

Few American migrants questioned their right to move into Texas, Oregon, and California. By the mid–1840s expansion was supported by a well-developed popular ideology that it was inevitable and good that the United States occupy the continent “from sea to shining sea.” Some talked of expanding freedom to new areas. Others talked of spreading the American ethic of hard work and economic progress. Still others imagined a United States with Pacific ports that could open Asian markets. Before long, some were imagining a North America without what they considered the savagery of Native Americans, the laziness and political instability of Mexicans, or the corrupt and dying monarchism of the British. God, they said, clearly wanted hard–working American republicans to occupy North America. In 1845 a New York City journalist named John L. O’Sullivan gave these ideas a name: Manifest Destiny. It is, he wrote, “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

H

Annexation: Oregon and Texas

The new Republic of Texas asked to be annexed to the United States as early as 1837. The governments of Presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren took no action for two reasons. First, the question of Texas annexation divided the North and South. Up to the 1840s, trans–Mississippi expansion had extended Southern society: Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri were all slave states. Texas would be another, and Northerners who disliked slavery and Southern political power imagined that the Texas territory could become as many as 11 new slave states with 22 new proslavery senators. Annexation of Texas was certain to arouse Northern and antislavery opposition. President John Tyler, who supported the South, tried to annex Texas in 1844 but was defeated by congressional Northerners and by some Southern members of the anti-Jacksonian Whig Party. The second reason for avoiding annexation was that Mexico still considered Texas its own territory. Annexation would create a diplomatic crisis, and perhaps lead to war.

In the presidential election of 1844 the Whig Party nominated Henry Clay of Kentucky. Clay refused to take a stand on the annexation of Texas. The Democrats rejected former president Martin Van Buren, who opposed annexation, and nominated James K. Polk of Tennessee. Polk ran on a pro-annexation platform: He would annex Texas, and he would assert American ownership of all of Oregon’s territory disputed with Britain. Polk’s position on Oregon was intended to reassure Northerners that expansion would benefit them as well as the South.

This position on Oregon was, however, a radical change from earlier policies. Previously, Americans had not claimed land north of the 49th parallel, the present-day United States–Canada border on the Pacific. Polk claimed all the land up to latitude 54°40’ north, the present southern boundary of Alaska, which at the time was owned by Russia. The British, on the other hand, claimed territory as far south as the Columbia River. After Polk won the election, both sides sought to avoid a serious dispute; they backed down and accepted the boundary that exists today between Washington State and British Columbia. The compromise avoided war, but it convinced Northern expansionists that Polk (and behind him, the Democratic Party) cared more about Southern expansion than about Northern expansion.

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I

War with Mexico

There was ample reason for that suspicion. While Polk compromised with Britain on the Oregon boundary, he stood adamant against Mexico on the question of Texas. Mexico warned that it would consider the annexation of Texas by the United States a declaration of war. A Texas convention voted to join the Union on July 4, 1845. Polk and a Congress strongly favoring annexation not only offered to take Texas into the Union, they also set the southern boundary of the new state at the Rio Grande—150 miles south of what most people had agreed was the Texas–Mexico border. The new boundary gave Texas far more Mexican land (including much of present-day New Mexico and Colorado) than the Texas Revolution had given it. Polk knew that the additional territory would provide a gateway to New Mexico and California, territories of northern Mexico that he and other expansionists coveted along with Texas. While annexing Texas, Polk offered to buy New Mexico and California from Mexico for $30 million in late 1845—an offer that the Mexicans angrily refused. Polk then provoked a war with Mexico in which he would win all that he had offered to buy.

As Mexico prepared for war, Polk sent troops into the disputed area north of the Rio Grande. Mexico sent troops north of the Rio Grande and in spring 1846 fought a skirmish in which the Americans suffered more than a dozen casualties. Congress declared war on Mexico that May. Near–unanimous congressional support for the declaration hid the fact that most Whigs and many Northern Democrats were deeply suspicious of a Southern war to annex new territory for slavery.

In the war the Americans launched a three–pronged offensive. General Zachary Taylor invaded northern Mexico from Texas, capturing the city of Monterrey in September 1846. A second American army under General Stephen Kearny occupied Santa Fe in August of that year. Kearny then sent part of his force to join Taylor at Monterrey and marched the rest of his army west to California, where American settlers had already established an independent “Bear Flag Republic.” At the same time, the U.S. Navy seized California ports.

Having lost Texas, California, New Mexico, and large portions of Chihuahua and Sonora in northern Mexico, the Mexicans marched toward Taylor’s army near Monterrey. Taylor held off determined attacks by a Mexican army about three times as large as his own and won the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847. The next month the third prong of the U.S. offensive was launched when General Winfield Scott landed at Veracruz. Five months later he had fought his way to Mexico City.

As happened in much of the war, the Mexican army was larger and fought bravely, but the Mexican government and high command were divided and often incompetent, and the Americans were better armed and better led. In particular, the Mexicans had no answer to American artillery. After a series of bloody battles in September 1847, Scott’s army occupied Mexico City, and the war was over.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 ceded Texas (with the Rio Grande boundary), California, and New Mexico to the United States, which agreed to pay Mexico $15 million. The Mexican Cession gave the United States present–day west Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, most of Colorado, and part of Wyoming. The northern third of Mexico had become the southwestern quarter of the United States.

The Mexican War was a straightforward land–grab. The ease with which the United States won and the arrogance with which it behaved created a distrustful and sometimes violent southern border area for the country. More immediately, the lands ceded by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo became the object of contest and resentment between the slave and free states—a conflict that would widen into the American Civil War 13 years later.

IX

Social Development: North and South

The regions of the United States that argued about the Mexican War and its aftermath had grown in divergent ways since agreeing to be a nation in 1788. The North had experienced a market revolution based on commercial agriculture and the growth of cities and industry. The South, on the other hand, remained tied to a plantation system that depended on slave labor and international markets. The plantation system enslaved the one-third of all Southerners who were black and excluded more and more poor whites.

A

The Market Revolution in the North

By the 1820s, farmers no longer produced mainly for themselves and their neighbors, selling any excess production on international markets. Most Northern farms had become business operations. They specialized in a small range of marketable crops (grain, meat, dairy products) and sold the food they produced to an internal market made up of Americans who had moved to towns, cities, and industrial villages.

In turn, these urbanized and industrialized Northerners provided farmers with finished goods (hats, shoes, cotton cloth, furniture, tools) that had previously been made in rural households and neighborhoods or imported from Europe. With this self–sustaining internal market, the North stepped out of the old colonial relationship in which America produced food and raw materials for Europe (primarily Britain) in exchange for foreign finished goods. The northern United States was no longer on the colonial periphery of the world market economy. It was taking its place as part of the financial and industrial center. See also Industrial Revolution: The Industrial Revolution in the United States.

This internal market revolution would have been impossible without dramatic improvements in transportation. After 1815 Congress repeatedly considered nationally planned and funded internal improvements. But these plans were voted down by congressmen who favored states’ rights and a strict construction of the Constitution—the notion that Congress could legislate only in areas explicitly granted to it by the Constitution. State governments took up the slack by building roads and canals themselves and by subsidizing private corporations that built them. The result was a system of roads, canals, and—by the 1840s and 1850s—railroads that reflected no single vision of a national system. Instead, the transportation map reflected the ambitions of the most prosperous and active states.

The first and most spectacular example was the Erie Canal, completed by the state of New York in 1825. It connected the Hudson River at Albany with Lake Erie at Buffalo. The canal provided farmers in western New York and in the sections of the Northwest that drained into the Great Lakes with a continuous water route east to New York City—and from there to national and international markets. Steamboats provided a similar service for farms in areas that drained into the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The upriver trip from New Orleans to Louisville, Kentucky, had taken three to four months via keelboat before 1815. Steamboats cut that time to one month. In the 1850s railroads, although more expensive than water routes, brought the manufacturing towns and the food–producing farmers even closer together. These improvements quickly reduced the cost of transportation. The cost of moving farm produce and manufactured goods over long distances fell 95 percent between 1815 and 1860. With that drop, farmers could grow wheat in Indiana and sell it at a profit in New York City, while New England manufacturers could make work shoes and sell them to the farmers of Indiana. Transportation had transformed the old Northeast and the new Northwest into an integrated market society.

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