US Hist 5.pdf

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 5

Lecture Five

Expansion Beyond Mississippi and the Growth of Sectional Tension

(1789-1850)

Scope: This lecture will examine the territorial expansion of the US in the first part of the 19 th

century. Competing philosophies of government will be seen as giving rise to the emergence of the

first political parties—Democratic Republicans and the Federalists—and their visions of the future

America will be demonstrated as resolved in an agreement over the colonization of the west. The

colonization of the territories first between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, and then west

of the Mississippi will be examined, also in the context of Indian resistance. The discussion will

conclude with stages and consequences of the westward expansion of the US in the Louisiana

Purchase, in the war with England, and finally in the war with Mexico: all of them will be seen as

engendering the rise of sectional tension between the North and the South.

Outline

I. George Washington was President of the US between 1789 and 1796. During his two terms of

office competing philosophies of government gave rise to the emergence of two political parties,

and the federal Indian policy—one that would guide the US annexation of Indian land throughout

the 19 th century—took shape.

B. Coalesced around James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, Democratic Republicans sought to

defend republican interests of ordinary people against controlling ambitions of a central

government. Like most free, hard-working Americans, they believed that the success of the

republic depended on the political virtue of its republican citizens: those who were not too

wealthy and not too poor, and whose lives balanced personal ambition and an abiding interest

in the common good. Democratic Republicans were motivated by the love of liberty.

C. Centered around Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, Federalists believed that a

strong central government is necessary and unavoidable. Supported by large landowners and

merchants, Federalists believed that the success of the republic depended on how effective its

central government will be in dealing with economy and politics on the national and

international scale. Federalists were motivated by the love of order.

D. Despite their differences, Federalists and Democratic Republicans shared the assumption that

the area west of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River and south to the Gulf of Mexico,

transferred to the US by the Treaty of Paris, was American “by right of conquest.” Since the

Treaty had contained no acknowledgement of Indian claims, by the time Washington took

office the backcountries were in an uproar, with settlers and Indians fighting each other

everywhere.

E. Washington’s Indian policy was twofold.

1. On the one hand, it sought to bring consistency and a greater degree of fairness to Indian

policy, advocating that the US meet its moral and legal obligation by purchasing Indian

claims to the disputed lands.

2. On the other hand, it did not recognize an ultimate right of Native Americans to refuse to

negotiate or sell their lands.

A. The election of 1792 saw the emergence of first two political parties. The supporters of a weak

central government and strong local democracy adopted the name of Democratic Republicans.

The supporters of a strong central government became known as Federalists.

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 5

II. In 1803, a Democratic Republican President Thomas Jefferson doubled the territory of the US

with the Louisiana Purchase, thus anticipating the trans-Mississippi expansion of the nation.

A. Louisiana, acquired by Napoleon from Spain in 1800, was to be the foundation of the new

French empire in North America. However, after the debacle at Saint Domingue, later Haiti,

Bonaparte grew weary of the American enterprise.

B. In 1803 the US obtained the Territory of Louisiana from France for $15 million. The French

refused to provide a statement of the exact boundaries of the purchase, suggesting that the

Americans should make the most of it.

C. In 1804 the president sent out an exploring expedition, appointed to Captain Meriwether Lewis

and a skilled surveyor and mapmaker William Clark. Their mission was to explore the

Missouri River and water communication across the continent for the purposes of commerce

with the Indians living along the northern Missouri and its tributaries.

1. The expedition set out from St. Louis in May 1804 and reached the Pacific Ocean in

November 1805. Throughout their journey, Lewis and Clark had represented themselves as

the envoys of a great nation to whom the Native Americans should now direct their

commerce. But they also kept an eye out for the prospects of future settlement. After their

return in 1806 parts of their journals and letters, including detailed maps and drawings,

slowly found their way into print, advertising the future colonization of these areas.

D. The Louisiana Purchase was a momentous transaction. In the South it supplied new territories

for slavery’s march west. In both the North and the South, it ensured that the American assault

on Native American lands, communities and freedom would be projected across the

Mississippi.

III. The colonization of the area east of the Mississippi met severe Native American resistance in the

Eastern Woodlands of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana Territory. Organized Indian resistance was

only broken in 1813.

A. America’s political economy of aggressive expansion collided violently with Native American

practices and autonomy. Most communities refused to abandon their community holdings,

their gender division of labor, or their matrilineal households. Resistance to Euro-American

culture also took the form of a broad movement for spiritual revitalization, either through a

synthesis of traditional beliefs and Christianity, or through cleansing themselves of Euro-

American practices.

B. By 1805 the diffuse anger of Native Americans was coalesced into effective organized

resistance by two Shawnee leaders, the warrior chief Tecumseh and his half-brother,

Tenskwatawa, known as The Prophet.

1. About 1808, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa founded a village in present-day Indiana on the

banks of the Tippecanoe River. The Prophet remained there, while Tecumseh traveled,

building a pan-Indian alliance.

2. By 1811, Tecumseh’s widespread success alarmed the Americans. That fall, as Tecumseh

made his way to the villages of the Cherokees and the Creeks, an army marched toward

3. This double bind wrote into American policy one of the enduring paradoxes of federal

relations with Indians: the linkage of a rhetoric of negotiation with a reality of coercion.

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 5

Tecumseh’s village in Indiana. Although cautioned by Tecumseh not to be drawn into

battle in his absence, The Prophet engaged American troops and was thoroughly defeated.

3. In 1812, when war broke out between Britain and the US, Tecumseh amassed a huge force

on the side of the British. His death in battle on Canadian soil in 1813 marked the end of

organized Indian resistance east of the Mississippi.

IV. The Second War with England (1812-14) broke as a result of British blockade of Europe, in the

course of which—since 1805—the British, and then the French, began seizing American ships

traveling to and from Europe.

A. The war was declared in 1812, after Napoleon had revoked French policy against American

shipping. Ironically, two days before the war was declared, unaware of events in the US,

England had announced that it was revoking its maritime policy against American ships.

B. The war vote in Congress suggested that the young nation was torn.

1. New England shippers remained firmly opposed to war, protesting that American

prosperity was deeply dependent upon Britain.

2. Farmers and planters in the West and South were ready to fight to open up the seas. They

hoped to use to war to break Creek and Shawnee resistance—supposedly incited by the

British—invade British Canada and Spanish Florida.

C. The course of was mixed and costly.

1. Three overland advances to invade Canada in the summer of 1812 failed.

2. In 1813 American honor in the North was saved by Commodore Perry’s victory on Lake

Erie, in which he forced the surrender of the entire British Great Lakes squadron.

3. By 1813 the British Navy had succeeded in blockading the American coast from the

Chesapeake south through the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans.

4. The British fleet pummeled the American cities and villages along the coast, first

bombarding them from sea and then sending parties on shore to fire the ruins and attack the

fleeing refugees. In 1814 the British troops invaded and laid waste to Washington and then

Baltimore.

5. In the South, Andrew Jackson used the war to suppress Indian resistance to US settlement.

In 1814 Jackson caught and defeated the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, forcing them to cede

two-thirds of their remaining lands to the US. After Horseshoe Bend, Jackson’s troops had

made their way to New Orleans.

6. Unaware that in December 1814 Britain and the US had signed a peace treaty, in January

1815, a force of 7,500 British regulars stormed Jackson’s position, and was defeated. The

Battle of New Orleans brought Jackson into the national limelight and established him as a

national hero.

D. The War of 1812 ended through the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, Belgium. The treaty was

silent on the issues of free trade and impressment that had triggered the war but the British

agreed to remove troops from the Northwest and stop protecting neutral Indians.

V. Within a decade following the end of the War of 1812 the strains in America became apparent in

the form of growing sectional conflict between the North and the South. The first three milestones

in the growth of sectional tension were the Missouri Compromise, the Nullification Crisis, and the

growth of tension with Mexico.

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 5

A. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was a political decision in response to a new danger in the

settlement of the West: its power to tear the nation apart. In 1819, when Missouri applied for

permission to organize as a state, there were 22 states in the union, 11 free and 11 slave.

1. The question of Missouri was one of political power on the federal level: admission of

Missouri would give the slave states domination in any purely sectional disputes.

2. The firestorm was resolved when Maine applied for statehood as a free state. The two bills

were linked in the Missouri Compromise, preserving the balance in the Senate.

B. The Nullification Crisis was the first attempt at secession by a southern state. The nullification

was a decision, made in 1832 by South Carolina Radicals in a statewide convention, that

federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832 are null and void in the state and will not be collected.

1. The act of nullification transformed the crisis from a question of regional economic

interests to a question of national union.

2. President Jackson issued a proclamation that denied South Carolina the right to exclude

itself from federal taxation and asked Congress for a law to affirm that.

3. A compromise was found in a tariff that reduced duties, but the law Jackson had requested

was passed too. Known as the Force Bill, the act was a pointed reminder to South Carolina

that nullification and secession would not be tolerated.

4. Since South Carolina stood alone even among southern states, the supporters of

nullification withdrew their ordinance.

C. The growth of tension with Mexico was the result of influx of Anglo settles to the territories of

northern Mexico and resulted in an uprising that separated Texas from Mexico as an

independent country in 1836.

1. In 1820s individual Americans began to enter the northeastern province of Mexico,

adjacent to the state of Louisiana in growing numbers. Many of these immigrants were

specifically invited by the new Mexican government. In return for the promise to bring

setters, it granted individual US citizens large tracts of land.

2. Soon a conflict developed between immigrant Americans and resident Mexicans called

Tejanos. Beneath the Anglos’ objections to Tejanos were more fundamental issues: slavery

and the immigrants’ disdain for Mexican culture.

(1) Although Mexico banned slavery, the Anglo immigrants had developed a cotton

economy dependent on slave labor and were determined to preserve the institution.

(2) Anti-Mexican feeling in the immigrant community also focused on religion: Mexicans

were Catholic, while the US immigrants were predominantly Protestant.

D. In 1832 the Anglos demanded the right to organize their own separate state within Mexico, and

in 1836 they declared Texas a free and sovereign republic.

1. Armed conflict broke out in 1836, when a huge Mexican Army, led by General Santa

Anna, wiped out 187 Texas patriots barricaded in a mission called the Alamo.

2. A few weeks later the Texans scored a huge victory against the Mexicans. Bargaining to

save his life, Santa Anna signed a declaration that Texas was a free nation.

3. Ecstatic Texans drew up a constitution, made Army commander in chief Sam Houston

their first president, and called for annexation to the US as soon as possible.

VI. The decades between 1830s and 1850s saw several waves of Pacific-bound migration and the

colonization of areas west of the Mississippi.

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 5

A. Manifest Destiny—the phrase coined in 1845 by journalist John O’Sullivan, but as a concept

dating back to late 18 th century—was the belief that white Americans have a providential right

to as much of the land of North America as they care to claim. Manifest Destiny informed the

vast migration of Americans across the Mississippi River, into Texas and the Southwest,

across the Great Plains into Oregon, and by ship and overland to California.

B. The migration began modestly in the 1830s, but in the late 1840s, it became a mass exodus

with long lines of wagon trains moving west. The journey was arduous, but land in Oregon and

in the west was worth it.

C. The problem was that the territories through which the migrants traveled, and the lands to

which they eventually laid claim, were neither uninhabited nor unclaimed. Between Missouri,

and the Rocky Mountains lay the Indian nations of the American prairies and Great Plains.

Along the Pacific were many other groups. Crossing to Utopia meant transgressing the

boundaries of all of these nations and the homes of the people who lived there.

D. For the Indians of the plains and prairies, the effects of the migration of the 1840s were social,

cultural, and economic.

1. The migration created a false stereotype of bloodthirsty Indians. In fact, of the more than

250,000 settlers who crossed the plains between 1840 and 1860, fewer than 400 were

killed by Native Americans protecting their homes. More often white migrants and Indians

merely passed each other silently on the trail or relied upon one another for food.

2. The migration caused a shift in official US policy toward the Indians. Prior to the massive

migration, it had been one of removal west to new tribal lands. After 1840s it was

resettlement with individual ownership of reservation lands. The goal was to make Indians

live like white farmers.

3. The migration forced many tribes to shift from semiagricultural to more nomadic ways of

life. By 1840, the great northern grasslands and southern plains of central North America

supported a complex economy of hunting and foraging, at the center of which stood the

buffalo. The way of life that had evolved on the plains by 1840s could survive unchanged

only as long as the buffalo survived.

4. The migration brought about the end of the buffalo. By 1848 recreational hunting parties,

as well as bands of hunters wiped out the buffalo specifically to deprive Indian

communities of their support. This soon threw the Indians at the mercy of the government.

VII. Between 1836 and 1845 Texas was doing everything in its power to be annexed by the US.

The annexation was problematic not only because a strict adherence to the letter and spirit of the

Constitution did not permit it, but also because Texas had come to embody the highly charged

issue of slavery. The annexation of Texas in 1845 was resented by Northerners and provoked a

war with Mexico in which even more land was transferred to the US.

A. In President Polk’s eyes, the annexation of Texas was a piece of a larger acquisition, to include

not only Oregon, but also present-day New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

B. To achieve these aims, Polk played a double game of negotiation and coercion.

1. Appealing for a peaceful resolution of the Texas matter, Polk dispatched former Louisiana

Congressman John Slidell to Mexico to offer to purchase New Mexico and Texas for $30

million. The Mexican government refused even to receive Slidell.

2. Meanwhile, Polk sent troops under General Zachary Taylor, ordering them to approach the

Rio Grande as closely as they dared to provoke a Mexican reaction.

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