Manifest Destiny

During the 1840’s the quest for a better chance and more living room, continued to excite the American imagination. By 1860 some 4.3 million people had settled in the trans-Mississippi West.

Most of these settlers and adventures sought out to exploit the many economic opportunities afforded by the new lands.

Local Trappers and farmers, miners and merchants, hunters, ranchers, teachers, domestics, and prostitutes, among others headed westward seeking their fortunes. Others sought religious freedom of new converts to Christianity.

Whatever the reason, they formed an increasing migratory stream flowing across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains.

The Indian and Mexican inhabitants of the region soon found themselves swept aside by successive waves of American settlement.

In 1858 President James Buchanan could report that the nation was bound east and west “by a chain of Americans which can never be broken”.

William Henry Harrison took office in 1841, elected like Jackson on the strength of his military record and his lack of public stand on key issues. Harrison served the shortest term of any president, after the longest inaugural address.

On April 4, 1841, exactly one month after the inauguration he died of pneumonia at age sixty-eight. Thus, John Tyler of Virginia, the first vice-president to succeed on the death of a president, served practically all of Harrison’s term.

When congress met in a special session in 1841, Clay introduced a series of resolutions designed to supply the platform that the party had evaded in the previous election. The chief points were; repeal of the Independent Treasury Act, establishment of a Third Bank of the United States, distribution to the states of proceeds from public land sales, and a higher tariff. Clay then set out to push his program through congress. “Tyler dares not resist me, I will drive him before me” said Clay.

Tyler it turned out was not easily driven. Although he agreed to allow the repeal of the Independent Treasury Act and signed a higher tariff bill in 1842, Tyler vetoed Clay’s bill for a new national bank.

This provoked Tyler’s entire cabinet, with the exception of Webster to resign, in an unprecedented action. Tyler replaced the defectors with anti-Jackson Democrats like himself who had become Whigs.

In foreign relations, on the other hand, developments of immense significance were taking place. Several unsettled issues had arisen to trouble relations between Britain and the United States.

In the 1830’s Canadian nationalists rebelled against British rule, and many of them took refuge across the border in the US. They viewed their American bases as safe havens, and used the American ship called the Caroline to bring them supplies.

In 1837 Canadian militia loyal to England seized the Caroline and set it on fire.

Another issue between the two nations involved the suppression of the African Slave Trade, which both the US and Britain had outlawed in 1808.

In 1841 Prime Minister Palmerston asserted the right of British patrol off the coast of Africa to board and search vessels flying the American flag to see if they carried slaves. But the American government, mindful of the impressments and seizures during the Napoleonic Wars, refused accept it.

IN 1842 The Webster-Ashburton Treaty provided for joint patrols off Africa to suppress the slave trade.

The Western Frontier

In the early 1840s, the American people were no more stirred by the quarrels of Tyler and Clay over such issues as banking, tariffs, and distribution, important as they were; what stirred the blood was the mounting evidence that the “empire of freedom” was hurdling the barriers of the Great American Desert and the Rocky Mountains, reaching outward toward the pacific coast.

The Western frontier across the Mississippi River differed radically from previous western frontiers encountered by settlers from the East. Here was a new environment as well as a new culture.

Indians and Mexicans, peoples who had lived in the region for centuries and had established their own distinctive customs and ways of life, already occupied the Great Plains and the Far West.

Historians estimate that over 325,000 Indians inhabited the southwest, The Great Plains, and the Pacific Northwest in 1840, when the great migration of white settlers began to pour into the region.

These Native Americans were divided into more than 200 different tribes, each with its own language, religion, economic base, kinship practices, and systems of governance. Some were primarily farmers; others were nomadic hunters who preyed upon game animals as well as other Indians.

Some twenty-three tribes resided in the Great Plains, vast grassland stretching from the Mississippi River west to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to Mexico. Typically they used buffalo meat for food and transformed the skins into clothing, bedding, and teepee coverings. The bones and horns served as tools and utensils. Even buffalo manure could be dried and used for fuel.

Plains Indians such as the Arapaho, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Sioux were horse-borne nomads; they moved across the grasslands with the buffalo herds, caring their tepees with them.

Disputes over buffalo and hunting grounds provoked clashes between rival tribes, which helps explain the cult of the warrior among the Plains Indians. Scalping or killing an enemy would earn praise from elders and feathers for their ceremonial headdress.

West of the Plains Indians in an arid region including what is today Arizona, New Mexico, and southern Utah were the peaceful Pueblo tribes, Acoma, Hopi, Laguna, Taos, Zia, Zuni.

They were sophisticated farmers who lived in adobe villages along rivers that they used to irrigate their crops of corn, beans, and squash.

The word Pueblo comes from the Spanish term fro “village”.

Their rivals were the Apache and Navajo, warlike hunters who roamed the countryside in small bands and preyed upon the Pueblos. The Comanche’s, their powerful enemies, in turn, periodically harassed them.

To the North, in the Great Basin between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada range, Indians such as the Paiutes and Gosiutes struggled to survive in the harsh, arid region of what is today Nevada, Utah, and eastern California.

They traveled in family groups and subsisted on berries, pine nuts, insects, and rodents. West of the mountains, along the California coast, the Indians lived in small villages.

They gathered wild plants and acorns and were quite adept at fishing in the rivers and bays. More than 100,000 Indians lived in coastal California in the 1840s.

The Indian tribes living along the northwest Pacific coast, Nisqually, Spokane, Yakima, Chinook, and Nez Perce` (pierced noses), enjoyed the most abundant natural resources and the most temperate climate.

The ocean and rivers provided bountiful supplies of seafood (whales, salmon, seals and crabs). The lush forests just east of the coast harbored game, berries, and nuts. And the majestic stands of fir, redwood, and cedar offered wood for cooking and sheltering.

All of these Indian tribes eventually felt the unrelenting pressure of white expansion. Because Indian life on the Plains depended on the buffalo, the influx of white settlers posed a direct threat to their cultural survival.

In 1851 US officials invited the Indian tribes from the Northern Plains to a conference held in the grassy valley along the North Platte River, near Ft. Laramie in what is now southwestern Wyoming.

Almost 10,000 Indians attended the treaty council. What made this huge gathering even more remarkable is that so many of these tribes were at war with each other.

After nearly three weeks of heated discussions and after bestowing on the chiefs a mountain of gifts, federal negotiators and tribal leaders agreed to what became known as the Ft. Laramie Treaty.

The American Government promised to provide annual cash payments to the Indians as compensation for the damages caused by wagon trains traversing their hunting grounds.

In exchange the Indians agreed to stop harassing white caravans, to allow federal forts to be built, and to confine themselves to a specified area “of limited extent and well-defined boundaries”.

Specifically the Indians were restricted to lands north and south of the corridor through which passed the Overland Trail.

As American settlers moved westward, they also encountered Spanish-speaking peoples. Many whites were as contemptuous of these people as they were of the Indians.

The vast majority of the Spanish-speaking people in what is today the American southwest

Resided in New Mexico. Most of these were of mixed Indian and Spanish blood and were poor ranch hands or small farmers and herders.

In 1807 French forces occupied Spain and imprisoned the king. This created both consternation and confusion throughout Spain’s colonial possessions, including Mexico.

Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a Creole (Europeans born in the new world) Mexican Priest, took advantage of the fluid situation to organize a revolt of Indians and mestizos (people of mixed Indian and white ancestry) against the Spanish rule in Mexico.

In 1811 Spanish troops captured Hidalgo and executed him, Mexicans however continued to yearn for independence. In 1820, Mexican Creoles again tried to liberate themselves from Spanish authority.

By then, the Spanish forces in Mexico had lost much of their cohesion and dedication. Facing a growing revolt, the last Spanish officials withdrew from Mexico in 1821, and it became an independent nation.

In the Northwest, the western frontier consisted of Nebraska, Washington and Oregon Territories. Fur traders were especially drawn to the Missouri River with its many tributaries.

The heyday of the mountain fur trade began in 1822 when a Missouri businessman sent his first trading party to the upper Missouri River, but by 1840 the great days of the western fur trade were over.

Spain and Russia had given up their rights to the Oregon Country, leaving Great Britain and the US as the only claimants. Under the Convention of 1818, the two countries had agreed to “joint occupation”.

Until the 1830s, however joint occupation had been a legal technicality, because the only American presence was the occasional mountain man who wandered into the Pacific slope or the infrequent trading vessel from Boston, Salem, or New York.

Word of Oregon’s fertile soil, temperate climate, and magnificent forests gradually spread eastward. By the late 1830s, in the midst of economic hard times after the Panic of 1837, a trickle of emigrants was flowing along the Oregon Trail.

In 1841 and 1842 the first sizable wagon trains made the trip, and in 1843 the movement became a mass migration. By 1845 there were about 5,000 settlers in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.

California was also an alluring attraction for new settlers and entrepreneurs. It first felt the influence of European culture in 1769, when Spain grew concerned about Russian fur and seal traders moving south along the Pacific coast from their base in Alaska.

The Spanish discovered San Francisco Bay and constructed presidios (military garrisons) at San Diego and Monterey. Even more important, Franciscan friars led by Junipero Serra established a mission at San Diego.

Over the next fifty years Franciscans built twenty more missions spaced a days journey apart along the coast from San Diego to San Francisco.

By 1803, 40% of California’s Native Americans population had embraced Catholicism, and within three decades infectious diseases transmitted by Europeans settlers ravaged the Indian population, leaving only a third as many by 1833 as in 1803.

By the start of 1846 there were perhaps 800 Americans in California, along with some 8,000-12,000 Californios of Spanish decent.

Between 1841-1867 some 350,000 made the arduous trek to California or Oregon, while hundreds of thousands of others settled along the way in Colorado, Texas, Arkansas, and other areas.

After gaining its independence in 1821, the new government of Mexico was much more interested in trade with the Americas than Spain had been. In Spanish-controlled Santa Fe, all commerce with the US had been banned. However after 1821 trade flourished.

By the 1830s there was so much commercial activity between Mexico and St. Louis that the Mexican silver peso became the primary medium of exchange in Missouri.

The trades along the Santa Fe Trail pioneered more than a new trail. They showed that heavy wagons could cross the plains and the mountains, and they developed the technique of organized caravans for common protection.

On the Overland Trail (also known as the Oregon Trail) people bound for Oregon and California traveled in caravans of wagons. Most of the people were settlers rather than traders, and traveled in family groups from all over the US.

By 1845 some 5,000 people were making the arduous journey annually. The discovery of Gold in California in 1848 brought some 30,000 pioneers along the Oregon Trail in 1849. The number had risen up to 55,000 by 1850, the peak year of travel along the Trail.

The journey west was incredibly difficult and few who embarked on their western quest were adequately prepared for the ordeals they were going to face.

The carcasses of mules, oxen, and wagons from previous groups signaled the difficulties they would confront. On average there was one grave every eight yards along the trail between the Missouri River and the Willamette Valley. Some 20,000 pioneers died in all.

Initially the pioneers along the Oregon Trail adopted the same divisions of labor used back east. Women cooked, washed, sewed, and monitored the children while the men drove the wagons, tended the horses and cattle, and handled the heavy labor.

However the unique demands of the trail soon dissolved such neat distinctions and posed new tasks. Women found themselves gathering buffalo dung for fuel, pitching in to help dislodge a wagon mired in mud, helping to construct a makeshift bridge, or participating in a variety of other unladylike activities.

Yet only rarely did the men assume conventional female roles. Most of the older women strove to keep distinct traditional boundaries between men and women’s work, and quarrels frequently erupted.

Despite the hardships and dangers of the overland crossing, the Far West proved an irresistible attraction. In 1842 John Charles Fremont, “the pathfinder” mapped the Oregon Trail, after he had mainly found the paths that the mountain men had shown him.

American presidents, beginning with Jackson tried to acquire at least northern California, down to San Francisco Bay, by purchase from Mexico. Political conditions in Mexico left the remote territory in near anarchy much of the time, as governors came and went in rapid succession. By the time Americans were ready to fire the spark of rebellion in California, there was little will in Mexico to resist.

The Mexican War

On March 6, 18445 two days after Polk took office, the Mexican ambassador broke off relations and left for home to protest the annexation of Texas. When an effort at negotiations failed, Polk focused his efforts on unilateral initiatives.

The last hope for peace died when John Slidell, sent to Mexico City to negotiate a settlement, finally gave up on his mission in March 1846. Polk decided that he could only achieve his purpose by force. And he signed the declaration of war on May 13, 1846.

Both the US and Mexico were not prepared for the war. American policy had been incredibly reckless, risking war with both Britain and Mexico while doing nothing to strengthen armed forces until the war came.

Nevertheless, being used to a rough-and-tumble life, the motley American troops outmatched larger Mexican forces, which had their own problems with training, discipline, and munitions. Many of the Mexicans were pressed into service or requited from prisons, and they made less than enthusiastic fighters.

Along the Pacific coast, conquest was well underway before definite news of the Mexican War arrived. When the Mexican commandant at Monterey ordered John C Fremont out of the Salinas Valley, at first Fremont refused to go, but he soon changed his mind and headed for Oregon.

In 1846 he and his men moved south again, this time into the Sacramento Valley. American sin the area fell upon Sonoma on June 14, proclaimed the “Republic of California”, and hoisted a hastily designed Bear Flag, a grizzly bear and star painted on white cloth (a version which later became the state flag).

After nearly two year of battles and the fall of the capital, Santa Anna resigned and a month later left the country. Meanwhile Polk had appointed Nicholas P. Trist as chief negotiator.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed on February 2, 1848; Mexico gave up all claims to Texas above the Rio Grande and ceded California and New Mexico to the US. In return the US agreed to pay Mexico 415 million and assume the claims of American citizens against Mexico up to a total of $3.25 million.

The War’s Legacies:

The 17 month long war cost the US 1,721 killed, 4,102 wounded and far more than 11,155 were dead from disease.

It remains the deadliest war in American military history in terms of percentage of combats killed. Out of every 1,000 soldiers in Mexico some 110 died.

The next highest death rate would be that in the Civil War, with 65 out of every 1,000 participants.

The military and naval expenditures totaled $98 million.

Several important firsts are associated with the Mexican War:

Ø The first successful offensive American War

Ø The first major amphibious operation

Ø The first occupation of an enemy capital

Ø The first in which martial law was declared on foreign soil

Ø The first in which West point graduates played a major role

Ø The first reported by modern war correspondents.

It was also the first significant combat experience for a group of junior officers who later serve as leading generals during the Civil War:

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David Wilmot, a young democratic congressman from Pennsylvania introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill. This amendment, which became known as the Wilmot Proviso, stipulated that slavery be prohibited in any territory acquired by the negotiations with Mexico.

The Proviso raised unsettling constitutional questions. Calhoun and other southerners contended that because slaves were property, the Constitution protected slaveholder’s rights to carry their slaves wherever they chose.

On the other side, many northerners cited the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compromise, and the Constitution itself, which gave Congress the power to “make rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the US”, as justification for congressional legislation over slavery in the territories.

The Wilmot Proviso gave the Whigs a political windfall; originating in the Democratic Party, it allowed the Whigs to portray themselves as the South’s only true friends.

As a Louisiana slaveholder, Zachary Taylor had obvious appeal to the south. As a political Newcomer, he had no loyalty to a discredited American System. In the campaign both parties tried to avoid the issue of slavery in the territories, but neither succeeded.

Zachary Taylor benefited from the opposition’s alienation of key northern states over the tariff issue, from Democratic disunity over the Wilmot Proviso, and from his war-hero stature.

He captured a majority of the electoral votes in both North and South. Although it failed to carry any state, the Free-Soil party ran well enough in the north to demonstrate the grassroots popularity of opposition to the extension of slavery.

An American carpenter discovered gold while building a sawmill in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada only nine days before the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was signed.

By December 1848 pamphlets with such title as The Emigrants Guide to the Gold Mines had hot the streets of New York City, and the Gold rush was on. Overland emigrants to California rose from 400 in 1848 to 44,000 in 1850.

The Gold rush made the issue of slavery an immediate, practical concern. The Newcomers to California included Mexicans, free blacks, and slaves brought by southern planters.

White prospectors loathed the idea of competing with these groups and wanted to drive them from the goldfields. Violence mounted, and demands grew for a strong civilian government to replace the ineffective military government left over from the war.

The gold rush guaranteed that the question of slavery in the Mexican cession would be the first item on the agenda for Polk’s successor

The Compromise of 1850

When the Mexican War ended in 1848, the US contained an equal number of free and slave states (15 each) but the vast territory gained by the war threatened to upset this balance.

As the rhetoric escalated, events plunged the nation into crisis. Utah and then California, both acquired from Mexico, sought admission to the Union as free states.

President Taylor believed that the South must not kindle the issues of slavery, because neither New Mexico nor California was suited for slavery. Taylor proposed a plan, which in contrast left the decision to the states.

He promoted California to apply for admission as a free state, bypassing the territorial stage, and hinted that he expected New Mexico to do the same. Southerners rejected Taylor’s plan.

Not only would it yield the Wilmot Proviso’s goal, but also it rested on the shaky assumption that slavery could never take place in California or New Mexico. Southerners also protested the addition of two new free states.

In early 1850 Kentucky senator Henry Clay challenged Taylor’s leadership by forging a compromise bill to resolve the whole range of contentious issues. Clay proposed:

The admission of California as a free state
The division of the remainder of the Mexican cession into two territories, New Mexico and Utah, without federal restrictions on slavery
The settlement of the Texas-New Mexico boundary dispute on terms favorable to New Mexico
As a pot sweetener for Texas, an agreement that the federal government would assume the state’s large public debt
Continuation of slavery in the district of Columbia but abolition of the slave trade
And a more effective fugitive slave law.

By the end of summer in 1850 Congress had passed each component of Clay’s plan and the “Compromise of 1850” had become a reality.

Northern and Southern Democrats alike rallied behind the Compromise of 1850 and the idea of popular sovereignty, and Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire won a smashing victory in the election of 1852.

Pierce became the last president of the nineteenth century to hold office under the second party system. The Whig party would soon disintegrate, to be replaced by two newcomers, the Republican Party and the short-lived American Party.

Signed in Late May 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act shattered the already weakened second party system and triggered renewed sectional strife. In January 1854 Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois proposed a bill to organize Nebraska as a territory.

There were sources of potential conflict:

First, some southerners advocated a southern-based Pacific route rather than a Midwestern one
Second, Nebraska lay north of the Missouri Compromise line in the Louisiana Purchase, a region closed to slavery.

Under Douglas’s bill, the south would lose the Pacific rail route and face the possibility of more free territory in the Union. To placate southerners, Douglas made two concessions.

First, he proclaimed the Missouri Compromise now void, supercede by the compromise of 1850 and its doctrine of popular sovereignty
Second, he agreed to divide the territory into northern and southern parts, Nebraska and Kansas.

The idea was that Nebraska would be free soil and Kansas would be open to slavery. Despite the modifications to the original bill and the outraged antislavery northerners Douglas guide the bill easily through the senate. The bill passed by a narrow margin in the house.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act, in free-soilers’ opinion was “a part of a continuous movement of slaveholders to advance slavery over the entire North”. It also embarrassed the Pierce administration and it doomed the Manifest Destiny, the one issue that held the Democrats together in the 1840s.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act broken down the Whig party. Born in the chaotic aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Republican Party became the main opposition to the Democratic Party by 1856 and won each presidential election from 1860 until 1884.

The forces driving the nation apart and spinning were out of control by 1856, and Buchanan could not stop them. On March 6, 1857, two days after Buchanan’s inauguration, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, a case that promised to resolve the vexatious issue of slavery’s extension.

In the 1830s Dred Scott’s master had taken him from Missouri into Illinois and the Wisconsin territory, both closed to slavery. After his master’s death, Scott sued for his freedom on the grounds of his residence in free territory.

The court faced two questions:

Did Scott’s residence in free territory during the 1830s make him free?
Did Scott, again enslaved in Missouri, have the right to sue in the federal courts?

The Supreme Court could have sidestepped the controversy by ruling that Scott had no right to sue, but chose not to. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney handed down a decision that created another firestorm.

First, he wrote that Scott could not sue for his freedom, further no black whether a slave or a free descendant of slaves, could become a US citizen. Taney ruled that even had Scott been entitled to sue, his residence in free territory did not make him free because the Missouri Compromise, whose provisions prohibited slavery in the Wisconsin Territory, was itself unconstitutional.

The Dred Scott decision, instead of settling the issue of expansion of slavery, touched off another blast of controversy. The antislavery press flayed it as “willful perversion” filled with “gross historical falsehoods”. Republicans saw it as further evidence that the fiendish Slave Power gripped the nation.

Stephen A. Douglas, his presidential hopes still strong, faced a stiff challenge in the 1858 Illinois senatorial election. Of his Republican opponent, Abraham Lincoln, Douglas remarked. “I shall have my hands full. He is the strong man of his party, full of wit, facts, and dates, and the best stump speaker with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West”.

Indeed, the campaign pitted the Republican Party’s rising star against the Senate’s leading Democrat. Thanks to the railroad and the telegraph, it received unprecedented national attention.