Chapter 14 - Review

US:  A Narrative History Volume 1 – Chapter 14 Review

Western Expansion and the Rise of the Slavery Issue [1820-1850]

Strangers on the Great Plains

At first the Crows, Arapahos, and other Indians of the Great Plains paid little attention to the new people moving out from the forests far to the east. After all, for as long as they could remember, nations such as the Crow had called the plains their own. But the new arrivals were not to be taken lightly. Armed with superior weapons and bringing a great many women and children, they seemed to have an unlimited appetite for land. They attacked the villages of the Plains Indians, massacred women and children, and forced defeated enemies to live on reservations. In little more than a century and a half—from the first days when only a handful of their hunters had come into the land—they had become the masters of the northern plains. The invaders who established this political and military dominance were not the strange “white men,” who also came from the forest. During the 1830s and early 1840s whites were still few in number. The more dangerous people—the ones who truly worried the Plains tribes—were the Sioux. Westward expansion is usually told as a one-dimensional tale, centering on the wagon trains pressing toward the Pacific. But frontiers are the transition lines between different cultures or environments, and during the nineteenth century those in the West were constantly shifting. Frontiers moved not only east to west, as with the white and the Sioux migrations, but also south to north, as Spanish culture diffused, and west to east, as Asian immigrants came to California. Furthermore, frontiers marked not only human but also animal boundaries. Horses, cattle, and pigs; all species imported from Europe, moved across the continent; usually in advance of European settlers. Often they transformed the way Indian peoples lived. Frontiers could also be technological, as in the case of trade goods like firearms. Moreover, disease moved across the continent with disastrous consequences for natives who had not acquired immunity to European microorganisms. Three frontiers revolutionized the lives of the Sioux: those of the horse, the gun, and disease. The horse frontier spread ahead of white settlement from the southwest, where horses had first been imported by the Spanish. The Spanish, however—unlike English and French traders—generally refused to sell firearms to Indians, so the gun frontier moved in the opposite direction, from northeast to southwest. The two waves met and crossed along the upper Missouri during the first half of the eighteenth century. For the people that possessed them, horses provided greater mobility, both for hunting bison and for fighting. Guns, too, conferred obvious advantages, and the arrival of these new elements inaugurated an extremely unsettled era for Plains Indian cultures. The Sioux were first lured from the forest onto the Minnesota prairie during the early 1700s to hunt beaver, whose pelts could be exchanged with white traders for manufactured goods. Having obtained guns in exchange for furs, the Sioux drove the Omahas, Otos, Cheyennes, and Missouris (who had not yet acquired guns) south and west. But by the 1770s their advantage in guns had disappeared, and any farther advance was blocked by powerful tribes such as the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras. These peoples were primarily horticultural, raising corn, beans, and squash and living in well-fortified towns. They also owned more horses than the Sioux; thus it was easier for them to resist attacks. But the third frontier, disease, threw the balance of power toward the Sioux after 1779. That year, a continental smallpox pandemic struck the plains via Louisiana. Those who raised crops were hit especially hard because they lived in densely populated villages, where the epidemic spread more easily. The Sioux embarked on a second wave of westward expansion in the late eighteenth century, so that by the time Lewis and Clark came through in 1804, they firmly controlled the upper Missouri as far as the Yellowstone River. The Sioux's nomadic life, centered on the buffalo hunt, enabled them to avoid the worst ravages of disease, especially the smallpox epidemic of 1837, which reduced the plains population by as much as half. Indeed, the Sioux became the most populous people on the plains and were the only group whose high birthrate approximated that of whites. From an estimated 5,000 in 1804, they grew to 25,000 in the 1850s. Their numbers increased Sioux military power as well as the need for new hunting grounds, and during the first half of the nineteenth century, they pushed even farther up the Missouri, conquered the plains west of the Black Hills, and won control of the hunting grounds on the Platte River. These shifting frontiers of animals, disease, firearms, and trade goods disrupted the political and cultural life of the Great Plains. And as white Americans moved westward, their own frontier lines produced similar disruptions, not only between white settlers and Indians but also between Anglo-American and Hispanic cultures. The relations between Indian peoples and Mexico were also in flux, as many tribes across the Plains began attacking Mexicans during the 1830s. There would even be a frontier moving west to east, as thousands of Chinese were drawn, as were other immigrants from North and South America, Australia, and Hawaii, to gold fields discovered after 1849. Ironically, perhaps the greatest instability created by the moving frontiers occurred in established American society. As the political system of the United States struggled to incorporate territories, the North and South engaged in a fierce debate over whether the new lands should become slave or free. Just as the Sioux's cultural identity was brought into question by moving frontiers, so too was the identity of the American Republic.

Manifest (and Not so Manifest) Destiny

“Make way … for the young American Buffalo—he has not yet got land enough,” roared one American politician in 1844. In the space of a few years, the United States acquired Texas, New Mexico, California, the lower half of the Oregon Territory, and the lands between the Rockies and California: nearly 1.5 million square miles in all. John L. O'Sullivan, a prominent Democratic editor in New York, struck a responsive chord when he declared that it had become the United States '“manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” The cry of Manifest Destiny soon echoed in other editorial pages and in the halls of Congress.

The Roots of the Doctrine

Many Americans had long believed that their country had a special, even divine, mission, which could be traced back to the Puritans' attempt to build a “city on a hill.” Manifest Destiny also contained a political component, inherited from the ideology of the Revolution. In the mid–nineteenth century, Americans spoke of extending democracy, with widespread suffrage among white males, no king or aristocracy, and no established church, “over the whole North American continent.” Americans believed that their social and economic system, too, should spread around the globe. They pointed to its broad ownership of land, individualism, and free play of economic opportunity as superior features of American life. More importantly, Manifest Destiny was about power, especially economic power. American business interests recognized the value of the fine harbors along the Pacific Coast, which promised a lucrative trade with Asia, and they hoped to make those harbors American. Finally, underlying the doctrine of Manifest Destiny was a widespread racism. The same belief in racial superiority that was used to justify Indian removal under Jackson, to uphold slavery in the South, and to excuse segregation in the North also proved handy to defend expansion westward. The United States had a duty to regenerate the backward peoples of America, declared politicians and propagandists. Their reference was not so much to Indians: the forced expulsion of assimilated Cherokees during Indian removal made clear what most American policy makers thought about Indian “regeneration.” By the 1840s it was rather the Mexicans who had caught the attention of Manifest Destiny's prophets of progress.The Mexican race “must amalgamate and be lost, in the superior vigor of the Anglo-Saxon race,” proclaimed O'Sullivan's Democratic Review, “or they must utterly perish.”Before 1845 most Americans assumed that expansion would be achieved without international war.  American settlement would expand westward, and when the time was right, neighboring provinces, like ripe fruit, would fall naturally into American hands. Texas, New Mexico, Oregon, and California—areas that were sparsely populated and weakly defended—dominated the American expansionist imagination. With time, Americans became less willing to wait patiently for the fruit to fall.

The Mexican Borderlands

In addition to baptism and an education in certain crafts and skills, Christian missions in California and elsewhere offered native people food, clothing, and sanctuary in a rapidly changing world. Often missions were also places of harsh discipline, physical coercion, and rampant disease. The Ohlone or Costanoan people pictured here are native to northern California and were drawn or coerced into missions starting in the 1760s. The heart of Spain's American empire was Mexico City, where spacious boulevards spread out through the center of the city and the University of Mexico, the oldest university in North America, had been accepting students since 1553, a full 85 years earlier than Harvard. From the Mexican point of view, the frontier was 1,000 miles to the north, a four-week journey to Texas, another two weeks to New Mexico, and three months by land and sea to the missions of California. Being so isolated, these Mexican provinces developed largely free from royal supervision. California's settlements were anchored by four coastal presidios, or forts, at San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Francisco. Between them lay 21 Catholic missions run by a handful of Franciscans (there were only 36 in 1821). The missions controlled enormous tracts of land on which grazed gigantic herds of cattle, sheep, and horses. The animals and irrigated fields were tended by about 20,000 Indians, who in certain regards lived and worked like slaves. When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, California at first was little affected. But in 1833 the Mexican Congress stripped the Catholic church of its vast landholdings. These lands were turned over to Mexican cattle ranchers, usually in massive grants of 50,000 acres or more. The new rancheros ruled their estates much like great planters of the Old South. Labor was provided by Indians, who once again were forced to work for little more than room and board. Indeed, the mortality rate of Indian workers was twice that of southern slaves and four times that of the Mexican Californians. At this time the Mexican population of California was approximately 4,000. During the 1820s and 1830s Yankee traders set up shop in California in order to buy cattle hides for the growing shoe industry at Lynn and elsewhere. Still, in 1845 the American population in California amounted to only 700. Throughout the Spanish and Mexican periods, town life in California, New Mexico, and Texas revolved around central plazas and their churches. One of the first structures built in Santa Fe, the Mission Church of San Miguel (est. c. 1610), is today the oldest church building in the present-day United States. Spanish settlement of New Mexico was denser than that of California: the province had about 44,000 Spanish-speaking inhabitants in 1827. But as in California, its society was dominated by ranchero families that grazed large herds of sheep along the upper Rio Grande valley between El Paso and Taos. A few individuals controlled most of the wealth, while their workers eked out a meager living. Mining of copper and gold was a side industry, and here too the profits enriched a small upper class. Spain had long outlawed any commerce with Americans, but after Mexico declared its independence in 1821, yearly caravans from the United States began making the long journey along the Santa Fe Trail. Although this trade flourished over the next two decades, developments in the third Mexican borderland, neighboring Texas, worsened relations between Mexico and the United States.

The Texas Revolution

At first, the new government in Mexico encouraged American immigration to Texas, where only about 3,000 Mexicans, mostly ranchers, lived. In 1821 Moses Austin, an American, received a grant from the Spanish government to establish a colony. After his death, his son Stephen took over the project, laying out the little town of San Felipe de Austin along the Brazos River and offering large grants of land at almost no cost. By 1824 the colony's population exceeded 2,000. Stephen Austin was only the first of a new wave of American land agents, or empresarios, that obtained permission from Mexican authorities to settle families in Texas. Ninety percent of the new arrivals came from the South. Many, intending to grow cotton, brought slaves. Tensions between Mexicans and American immigrants grew with the Texas economy. Most settlers from the States were Protestant. Although the Mexican government did not insist that all new citizens become Catholic, it did officially bar Protestant churches. In 1829 Mexico abolished slavery, then looked the other way when Texas slaveholders evaded the law. In the early 1830s the Mexican government began to have second thoughts about American settlement and passed laws prohibiting any new immigration. Austin likened the new anti-immigration laws to “trying to stop the Mississippi with a dam of straw.” It was an apt metaphor: between 1830 and 1833 illegal American immigrants and their slaves flooded into Mexican Texas, nearly doubling its colonial population. Admitting that the new regulations had served only to inflame Texans, Mexico repealed them in 1833. But by then colonial ill-will had ballooned along with the population. By mid-decade the American white population of 40,000 was nearly 10 times the number of Mexicans in the territory. Once again Mexico's government talked of abolishing slavery in Texas. Even more disturbing to the American newcomers, in 1834 President Antonio López de Santa Anna and his allies in the Mexican Congress began passing legislation that took power away from the states and concentrated it in Mexico City. Texans had been struggling for more autonomy, not less. When Santa Anna brutally suppressed an uprising against the central government in the state of Zacatecas, Texans grew all the more nervous. Finally, when conflicts over taxes led Santa Anna to march an army north and enforce his new regime, a ragtag Texas army drove back the advance party and then captured Mexican troops in nearby San Antonio. A full-scale rebellion was under way.

The Texas Republic

As Santa Anna massed his forces, a provisional government on March 2, 1836, proclaimed Texan independence. The document was signed by a number of prominent Tejanos, Mexican residents of Texas. The constitution of the new Republic of Texas borrowed heavily from the U.S. Constitution, except that it explicitly prohibited the new Texas Congress from interfering with slavery. Meanwhile, Santa Anna's troops overran a Texan garrison at an old mission in San Antonio, known as the Alamo, and killed all its 187 defenders—including the famous backwoodsman and U.S. congressman, Davy Crockett. The Mexicans, however, paid dearly for the victory, losing more than 1,500 men. The massacre of another force at Goliad after it surrendered further inflamed American resistance.But anger was one thing; organized resistance was another. The commander of the Texas forces was Sam Houston, a former governor of Tennessee. Physically gifted and something of an eccentric, Houston had a flair for wearing colorful clothing to attract attention. His political career in Tennessee might have continued, except that the failure of his marriage led him to resign abruptly as governor and go live with the Cherokees. Eventually he made his way to Texas, where his intellectual ability and unexcelled talent as a stump speaker propelled him to the forefront of the independence movement. Steadily retreating eastward, Houston tried to discipline his fighting force and wait for an opportunity to counterattack. That opportunity came in late April. Reinforced by eager volunteers from the United States, Houston's army surprised Santa Anna's force when spies revealed that they were resting unaware near the San Jacinto River. Admonished to “remember the Alamo,” Houston's men burst upon the stunned Mexican force, killing dozens in a brief battle.Driven by revenge, the Texans then pursued the fleeing Mexican soldiers and massacred hundreds. By day's end 630 Mexicans lay dead on the field (compared to only nine Texans), and a humiliated Santa Anna had been taken into custody. Threatened with execution, the Mexican commander signed treaties recognizing Texan independence and ordering his remaining troops south of the Rio Grande. Texans would later claim that Santa Anna thereby acknowledged the Rio Grande to be Texas's southern boundary. The Mexican Congress repudiated the agreement, especially the claim to the Rio Grande. Over the next decade both sides engaged in low-level border conflict, but neither had the power to mount a successful invasion. In the meantime, Houston assumed office in October 1836 as president of the new republic, determined to bring Texas into the American Union as quickly as possible. As an old Tennessee protégé of Andrew Jackson, Houston assumed that the United States would quickly annex such a vast and inviting territory. But Jackson worried that any such move would revive sectional tensions and hurt Martin Van Buren's chances in the 1836 presidential election. Only on his last day in office did he extend formal diplomatic recognition to the Texas Republic. Van Buren, distracted by the economic panic that broke out shortly after he entered office, took no action during his term.

Rebuffed, Texans decided to go their own way. In the 10 years following independence, the Lone Star Republic attracted more than 100,000 immigrants by offering free land to settlers. Mexico refused to recognize Texan independence, and the vast majority of its citizens still wished to join the United States, where most of them, after all, had been born. There matters stood when the Whigs and William Henry Harrison won the presidency in 1840.

The Trek West

As thousands of white Americans were moving into Texas, and increasingly bringing slaves with them, a much smaller trickle headed toward the Oregon country. Since 1818 the United States and Great Britain had occupied that territory jointly, as far north as latitude 54°40'. Although white settlement remained sparse, by 1836 American settlers outnumbered the British in the Willamette valley. Pushed by the Panic of 1837 and six years of depression and pulled by tales of Oregon's lush, fertile valleys and the healthy, frost-free climate along California's Sacramento River, many American farmers struck out for the West Coast. Missouri was “cleaned” out of money, worried farmer Daniel Waldo, and his wife was even more adamant about heading west: “If you want to stay here another summer and shake your liver out with the fever and ague, you can do it,” she announced to her husband, “but in the spring I am going to take the children and go to Oregon, Indians or no Indians.” The wagon trains began rolling west.

The Overland Trail

Only a few hundred emigrants reached the West in 1841 and 1842, but in 1843 more than 800 followed the Overland Trail across the mountains to Oregon. From then on, they came by the thousands. Every spring brought a new rush of families to Independence or later to St. Joseph, Missouri, or to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where they waited for the spring rains to end and the trails to become passable. The migration was primarily a family enterprise, and many couples had only recently married. Most adults were between 20 and 50 years old; the hard journey discouraged the elderly. Furthermore, a family of four needed about $600 to outfit its journey, an amount that excluded the poor. Caravans of 20 to 30 wagons were not uncommon the first few years, but after 1845 parties traveled in smaller trains of 8 to 10 wagons. The livestock of large companies ate up the prairie grass quickly, disagreements were more likely, and breakdowns (and hence halts) were more frequent. The trip itself lasted about 6 months, since the wagons normally covered only 15 miles a day, and the weather, repairs, deaths, and other eventualities necessitated occasional halts.

Women on the Overland Trail

The journey west often placed a special strain on women. Few wives were as eager as Daniel Waldo's to undertake the journey. “Poor Ma said only this morning, ‘Oh I wish we never had started,’” one daughter reported, “and she looks so sorrowful and dejected.” In one study of Oregon-bound parties, three-fourths of the women did not want to make the move. At first, parties divided work by gender, as had been done back home. Women cooked, washed, sewed, and took care of the children, while men drove the wagons, cared for the stock, stood guard, and did the heavy labor. Necessity placed new demands on women, however, and eventually altered their roles. Within a few weeks, they found themselves helping to repair wagons and construct bridges. When men became exhausted, sick, or injured, women stood guard and drove the oxen. The change in work assignments proceeded only in one direction, however, for few men undertook “women's work.” As women strove to maintain a semblance of home on the trail, they often experienced a profound sense of loss. Trains often worked or traveled on the Sabbath, which had been ladies' day back home and an emblem of women's moral authority. Women also felt the lack of close companions to whom they could turn for comfort. One woman, whose husband separated their wagon from the train after a dispute, sadly watched the other wagons pull away: “I felt that indeed I had left all my friends to journey over the dreaded plains without one female acquaintance even for a companion—of course I wept and grieved about it but to no purpose.”

Indians and the Trail Experience

The nations whose lands were crossed by white wagon trains reacted in a number of ways to the westward tide. The Sioux, who had long been trading with whites, were among the peoples who regularly visited overlanders to trade for blankets, clothes, cows, rifles, and knives. But the white migrants took a heavy toll on the Plains Indians' way of life: emigrant parties scared off game and reduced buffalo herds, over-grazed the grass, and depleted the supply of wood. Having petitioned unsuccessfully in 1846 for government compensation, some Sioux decided to demand payment from the wagon trains crossing their lands. Whether parties paid or not depended on the relative strength of the two groups, but whites complained bitterly of what seemed to them, outright robbery.  Their fears aroused by sensational stories, overland parties were wary of Indians, but this menace was greatly exaggerated, especially on the plains. Few wagon trains were attacked by Indians, and less than 4 percent of deaths on the trail were caused by Indians. In truth, emigrants killed more Indians than Indians killed emigrants. For overlanders the most aggravating problem posed by native peoples was theft of stock. Many companies received valuable assistance from Indians, who acted as guides, directed them to grass and water, and transported stock and wagons across rivers.

The Political Origins of Expansion

President William Henry Harrison made the gravest mistake of his brief presidential career when he ventured out one raw spring day, bareheaded and without an overcoat, to buy groceries at the Washington markets. He developed pneumonia and died only one month after his inauguration. For the first time in the nation's history, a vice president succeeded to the nation's highest office on the death of the president. John Tyler of Virginia had been a Democrat who supported states' rights so strongly that, during the nullification crisis, he was the only senator to vote against the Force Bill (page •••). After that, Jackson and the Democrats would have nothing to do with him, so Tyler joined the Whigs despite his strict constructionist principles. In 1840 the Whigs put him on the ticket with Harrison in order to balance the ticket sectionally.

In the rollicking 1840 campaign, the Whigs sang all too accurately: “And we'll vote for Tyler, therefore, / Without a why or wherefore.”

Tyler's Texas Ploy

Tyler's courteous manner and personal warmth masked a rigid mind. Repeatedly, when Henry Clay and the Whigs in Congress passed a major bill, Tyler opposed it. After Tyler twice vetoed bills to charter a new national bank, disgusted congressional Whigs formally expelled their president from the party. Most Democrats, too, avoided him as an untrustworthy “renegade.” Tyler, in short, was a man without a party. Surrounded by a group of flatterers, the president could claim almost no support except among federal officeholders, who could be fired if they did not endorse him. Still, Tyler's ambition led him to believe that he might win another four years in the White House if only he latched onto the right popular issue. Nursing their own personal and political dreams, his advisers began to whisper in his ear that that issue was the annexation of Texas. That advice came mostly from Democrats disgruntled with Martin Van Buren. Jackson's successor was, in their eyes, an ineffective leader who had stumbled through a depression and in 1840 gone down in ignominious defeat. “They mean to throw Van overboard,” reported one delighted Whig, who caught wind of the plans. Meanwhile, Tyler's allies launched rumors designed to frighten southerners into pushing for annexation. Britain was ready to offer economic aid if Texas would abolish slavery, they claimed. (The rumor was false.) In April 1844 Tyler sent to the Senate for ratification a treaty he had secretly negotiated to bring Texas into the Union. The front runners for the Whig and Democratic presidential nominations were Clay and Van Buren. Although rivals, they were both moderates who feared the slavery issue. Apparently by prearrangement, both men issued letters opposing annexation on the grounds that it threatened the Union and would provoke war with Mexico. As expected, the Whigs unanimously nominated Clay on a platform that ignored the expansion issue entirely. The Democrats, however, had a more difficult time. Those who opposed Van Buren persuaded the Democratic convention to adopt a rule requiring a two-thirds vote to nominate a candidate. That blocked Van Buren's nomination. On the ninth ballot the delegates finally turned to James K. Polk of Tennessee, who was pro-Texas. The 1844 Democratic platform called for the “reannexation” of Texas (under the dubious claim it had been part of the Louisiana Purchase) and the “reoccupation” of Oregon, all the way to its northernmost boundary at 54°40'. Angered by the convention's outcome, Van Buren's supporters in the Senate joined the Whigs in decisively defeating Tyler's treaty of annexation. Tyler eventually withdrew from the race as an independent candidate, but the Texas issue would not go away. Henry Clay found many southerners slipping out of his camp because he opposed annexation; backtracking, he announced that he would be glad to see Texas annexed if it could be done without war or dishonor and without threatening the Union. And in the North, a few antislavery Whigs turned to James G. Birney, running on the Liberty party ticket. In the end, Polk squeaked through by 38,000 votes out of nearly 3 million cast. If just half of Birney's 15,000 ballots in New York had gone to Clay, he would have carried the state and been narrowly elected president. Indignant Whigs charged that by refusing to support Clay, political abolitionists had made the annexation of Texas, and hence the addition of slave territory to the Union, inevitable. And indeed, Tyler again asked Congress to annex Texas—this time by a joint resolution, which required only a majority in both houses rather than a two-thirds vote for a treaty in the Senate. In the new atmosphere following Polk's victory, the resolution narrowly passed, and on March 3, 1845, his last day in office, Tyler invited Texas to enter the Union.

To the Pacific

Polk pursued his objectives as president with a dogged determination. Humorless, calculating, and often deceitful, he was not particularly brilliant in his maneuvering. But the life of politics consumed him, he knew his mind, and he could take the political pounding by his opponents. Embracing a continental vision of the United States, Polk not only endorsed Tyler's offer of annexation but also looked beyond, hoping to gain the three best harbors on the Pacific: San Diego, San Francisco, and Puget Sound. That meant wresting Oregon from Britain and California from Mexico.

Claiming that the American title was “clear and unquestionable,” the new president brushed aside any notion of continuing joint occupation of Oregon with Britain. To pressure the British, he induced Congress to give the required one-year notice terminating the joint occupation of Oregon. His blustering was reinforced by the knowledge that American settlers in Oregon outnumbered the British 5,000 to 750. On the other hand, Polk hardly wanted war with a nation as powerful as Great Britain. So when the British offered, in June 1846, to divide the Oregon Territory along the 49th parallel, he readily agreed (see map, page 379). Britain retained Vancouver Island, where the Hudson's Bay Company's headquarters was located. But the arrangement gave the United States Puget Sound, which had been the president's objective all along.

Provoking a War

The Oregon settlement left Polk free to deal with Mexico. In 1845 Congress admitted Texas to the Union as a slave state, but Mexico had never formally recognized Texas's independence. Mexico insisted, moreover, that Texas's southern boundary was the Nueces River, not the Rio Grande, 130 miles to the south, as claimed by Texas. In reality, Texas had never controlled the disputed region; the Nueces had always been Texas's boundary when it was a Mexican province; and if taken literally, the Rio Grande border incorporated most of New Mexico, including Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Taos, and other major towns. Few Texans had ever even been to these places. Indeed, the one-time Texas tried to exert authority in the region, New Mexicans had to ride out onto the Plains to save the lost and starving expedition, and ultimately sent the men to Mexico City in chains. Nonetheless, Polk was already looking toward the Pacific and thus supported the Rio Grande boundary. As soon as the Texans entered the union, Mexico broke off diplomatic relations with the United States, and Polk sent American troops under General Zachary Taylor into the newly acquired state. At the same time, knowing that the unstable Mexican government desperately needed money, he attempted to buy territory to the Pacific. Sending John Slidell of Louisiana to Mexico as his special minister, Polk was prepared to offer $2 million in return for clear title to the Rio Grande boundary, $5 million for the remaining part of New Mexico, and up to $25 million for California. But the Mexican public overwhelmingly opposed ceding any more territory to the land-hungry “Yankees” from the United States, and the government refused to receive Slidell. “Depend upon it,” reported Slidell, as he departed from Mexico in March 1846, “we can never get along well with them, until we have given them a good drubbing.” When American troops invaded northern Mexico they were literally marching in the footsteps of Comanches and Apaches, traversing territory that had already endured more than a decade of war. Blocked on the diplomatic front, Polk ordered Taylor, who had already crossed the Nueces with 4,000 troops, to proceed south to the Rio Grande. From the Mexican standpoint, the Americans had invaded their country and occupied their territory. For his part, Polk wanted to be in position to defend the disputed region if the two countries went to war. More importantly, once he realized that Mexico would not cave in to bullying diplomacy, Polk hoped that Taylor's position on the Rio Grande would provoke the Mexican army into starting a war. By May 9 Polk and his cabinet had lost patience with the plan and decided to submit a war message to Congress without Mexican action. But on that day word arrived that two weeks earlier Mexican forces had crossed the Rio Grande and attacked some of Taylor's troops, killing 11 Americans. The president quickly rewrote his war message, placing the entire blame for the war on Mexico. “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory, and shed American blood upon American soil,” he told Congress on May 11. “War exists, and notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself.” The administration sent a bill to Congress calling for volunteers and requesting money to supply American troops.

Indians and Mexicans

Mexican forces would often outnumber their American enemies in battle, but Mexico nonetheless suffered from critical disadvantages in the war. Chronic instability in its central government left the nation divided against itself in its moment of crisis. An empty national treasury fueled this instability and made it difficult to mobilize an effective response to the U.S. invasion. Mexico was also at a disadvantage in terms of military technology. While Mexican forces had to rely on bulky, fixed cannon, the U.S. army employed new light artillery that could be repositioned quickly as battles progressed. Light artillery would tip the balance in several crucial engagements. Finally, much of Mexico had to fight two wars at once. While Mexico enjoyed formal diplomatic title to most of the present-day American West, Indians still controlled the vast majority of that territory, and Mexico had seen its relations with these Indians collapse in the 15 years before the U.S. invasion. During the late eighteenth century, Comanches, Navajos, Utes, and several different tribes of Apaches had made peace with Spanish authorities, ending decades of destructive war. Spaniards provided Indian leaders with gifts, guaranteed fair trade, and even handed out rations to minimize the animal thefts that could spark conflict. This expensive and delicate system began to falter once Mexico achieved independence in 1821. Lacking the finances, the political unity, the stability, and the diplomatic resources of their Spanish predecessors, Mexican authorities watched the peace with northern Indians slip away. By the early 1830s, Native men were traveling hundreds of miles to raid Mexican ranches, haciendas, and towns, killing or capturing the people they found there, and stealing or destroying animals and other property. Whenever they were able, Mexicans did the same things to their Indian enemies. American markets helped drive the increasing violence, as Indian or white traders from the United States eagerly purchased horses and mules stolen from Mexico and supplied the raiders' arms and ammunition in return. By the eve of the U.S. invasion of Mexico the violence encompassed all or parts of nine Mexican states and had claimed thousands of Mexican and Indian lives. Thus, when American troops invaded northern Mexico they were literally marching in the footsteps of Comanches and Apaches, traversing territory that had already endured more than a decade of war. As Indian peoples pursued their own political, strategic, and economic goals, they made it far easier for the United States to achieve its goals. Impoverished, exhausted, and divided, and facing ongoing Indian raids, few northern Mexicans were willing or able to resist the U.S. conquest and occupation.

Opposition to the War

The war with Mexico posed a dilemma for Whigs. They were convinced (correctly) that Polk had provoked the conflict in order to acquire more territory from Mexico, and many northern Whigs accused the president of seeking to extend slavery. But they remembered, too, that the Federalist party had doomed itself to extinction by opposing the War of 1812. Throughout the conflict, they strenuously attacked the conduct of “Mr. Polk's War.” But they could not bring themselves to cut off funding for the war. Pro-war sentiment was strongest in the Old Southwest and most of the Old Northwest. It was much weaker in the East, where antislavery “Conscience Whigs” were prominent. “If I were a Mexican,” Senator Thomas Corwin of Ohio affirmed in the Senate, “I would tell you, … ‘we will greet you with bloody hands and welcome you to hospitable graves.’” With their party deeply divided over the issue of the expansion of slavery, Whigs opposed the acquisition of any territory from Mexico.

The Price of Victory

Even before any word of hostilities arrived in California, a group of impetuous American settlers around Sacramento launched the “Bear Flag Revolt.” In June 1846 they proclaimed California an independent republic. American forces in the area soon put down any Mexican resistance, and by the following January California was safely in American hands. Meanwhile, Taylor moved south from the Rio Grande and won several battles.At each town conquered or surrendered he read statements provided in advance by President Polk and the War Department, promising to respect private property and protect the long-suffering residents from Indian attack. Taylor's campaign culminated in a narrow victory over General Antonio López de Santa Anna at Buena Vista in southern Coahuila. Polk had gained the territory he sought to reach the Pacific and wanted an end to the war. But Mexico refused to surrender, so Polk ordered an invasion into the heart of the country. After an American army commanded by General Winfield Scott captured Mexico City on September 14, 1847, Mexico agreed to come to terms. The two nations ratified a peace treaty in 1848. Including Texas, which Mexico had continued to lay claim to, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred half of Mexico's territory—more than half a million square miles—to the United States. In return the United States recalled its army and ended its aggressive war. It also assumed all the outstanding claims that U.S. citizens had against Mexico and gave the Mexicans 15 million dollars. The war had cost the United States $97 million and 13,000 American lives, mostly as a result of disease. Yet the real cost was even higher. By bringing vast new territories into the Union, the war forced the explosive slavery issue to the center of national politics and threatened to upset the balance of power between North and South. Ralph Waldo Emerson had been prophetic: “The United States will conquer Mexico,” he wrote when the U.S.–Mexican War began, “but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”

The Rise of the Slavery Issue

When the second party system emerged during the 1820s, Martin Van Buren had championed political parties as one way to forge links between North and South that would strengthen the Union. But the Texas movement increased sectional suspicions, and President Polk did nothing to ease this problem. Polk was a politician to his bones: constantly maneuvering, promising one thing, doing another, making a pledge, taking it back—using any means to accomplish his ends. Discontent over his double-dealing finally erupted in August 1846, when Polk requested $2 million from Congress, as he vaguely explained, to “facilitate negotiations” with Mexico. It was widely understood that the money was to be used to bribe the Mexican government to cede territory to the United States. On August 8 David Wilmot, an obscure Pennsylvania congressman, startled Democratic leaders by introducing an amendment to the bill that barred slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso, as the amendment became known, passed the northern-controlled House of Representatives several times, only to be rejected in the Senate, where the South had more power. As such, it revealed mounting sectional tensions. Wilmot himself was hardly an abolitionist. Indeed, he hoped to keep not only slaves but all black people out of the territories. Denying any “morbid sympathy for the slave,” he declared, “I would preserve for white free labor a fair country … where the sons of toil, of my own race and color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.” The Wilmot Proviso aimed not to destroy slavery in the South but to confine the institution to those states where it already existed. Still, abolitionists had long contended that southern slaveholders—the “Slave Power”—were plotting to extend their sway over the rest of the country. The political maneuverings of slaveholders such as Tyler, and especially Polk, convinced growing numbers of northerners that the Slave Power did indeed exist and that it was aggressively looking to expand its influence. The status of slavery in the territories became more than an abstract question once the peace with Mexico had been finalized. The United States gained title to an immense territory, including all of what would become the states of California, Nevada, and Utah, nearly all of New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. With the United States in control of the Pacific Coast from San Diego to Puget Sound, Polk's continental vision had become a reality. But slavery would once again dominate national politics.

New Societies in the West

As Hispanic, Indian, Asian, and Anglo-American cultures interacted, the patterns of development along the frontier varied widely. Some newcomers recreated the farm economies and small towns of the Anglo-American East; others continued the cattle-ranching life of the Hispanic West. In California the new settlements were overwhelmingly shaped by the rush for gold after 1848. And in the Great Basin around Salt Lake the Mormons established a society whose sense of religious mission was as strong as that of the Puritans.

Farming in the West

The overlanders expected to replicate the societies they had left behind. When a wagon train arrived at its destination, members had usually exhausted their resources and thus quickly scattered in search of employment or a good farm site. “Friday, October 27.—Arrived at Oregon City at the falls of the Willamette,” read one pioneer diary. “Saturday, October 28.—Went to work.” In a process repeated over and over, settlers in a new area set up the machinery of government. Although violence was common on the frontier, farming communities tended to resolve problems by traditional means. Churches took longer to establish, for ministers were hard to recruit and congregations were often not large enough to support a church. As the population grew, however, a more conventional society evolved. Towns and a middle class developed, the proportion of women increased, schools were established, and the residents became less mobile. Although opportunity was greater on the frontier and early arrivals had a special advantage, more and more the agricultural frontier of the West resembled the older society of the East. With the development of markets and transportation, wealth became concentrated, some families fell to the lower rungs of society, and those who were less successful left, seeking yet another fresh start.

The Gold Rush

In January 1848, while constructing a sawmill along the American River, James Marshall noticed gold flecks in the millrace. More discoveries followed, and when the news reached the East, it spread like wildfire. The following spring the Overland Trail was jammed with eager “forty-niners.” Some 80,000 emigrants journeyed to California that year, about 55,000 of whom took the overland route. In only two years, from 1848 to the end of 1849, California's population jumped from 14,000 to 100,000. By 1860 it stood at 380,000. Among those who went to California was William Swain, a 27-year-old farmer in western New York. Deciding that he had had enough of the hard work of farming, he bid good-bye to his wife and daughter in 1849 and set off for the gold fields to make his fortune. On his arrival in November he entered a partnership and staked a claim along the Feather River, but after several months of back-breaking work in icy waters, he and his partners discovered that their claim was “worth nothing.” He sold out and joined another company, but early rains soon forced them to stop work. In October 1850, after less than a year in the diggings, Swain decided to return home. With only a few hundred dollars to show for his labor, he counted himself one of the vast majority of miners who had seen “their bright daydreams of golden wealth vanish like the dreams of night.” He arrived home the following February and resumed farming. With their distinctive clothing and bamboo hats, Chinese miners could be seen throughout the diggings. Chinese immigration reached a peak in 1852, when 20,000 arrived in California. In the heyday of the mining camps, perhaps 20 percent of the miners were Chinese. Confronted with intense hostility from other miners, they worked abandoned claims and unpromising sites with primitive and less expensive equipment. Predictably, mining the miners offered a more reliable road to prosperity.

Perhaps half the inhabitants of a mining town were shopkeepers, businesspeople, and professionals who provided services for prospectors. Also conspicuous were gamblers, card sharks, and other outcasts, all bent on separating the miner from his riches. More than 80 percent of the prospectors who poured into the gold country were Americans, including free blacks. Mexicans, Australians, Argentinians, Hawaiians, Chinese, French, English, and Irish also came. Observers praised the diggings' democratic spirit. Yet such assertions overlooked strongly held nativist prejudices: when frustrated by a lack of success, American miners directed their hostility toward foreigners. The miners ruthlessly exterminated the Indians in the area, sometimes hunting them for sport. Mob violence drove Mexicans out of nearly every camp, and the Chinese were confined to claims abandoned by Americans as unprofitable. The state eventually enacted a foreign miners' tax that fell largely on the Chinese. Free African Americans felt the sting of discrimination as well, both in the camps and in state law. White American miners proclaimed that “colored men were not privileged to work in a country intended only for American citizens.” Only about 5 percent of gold rush emigrants were women or children; given this relative scarcity, men were willing to pay top dollar for women's domestic skills. Women supported themselves by cooking, sewing, and washing, as well as by running hotels and boardinghouses. “A smart woman can do very well in this country,” one woman informed a friend in the East. “It is the only country I ever was in where a woman received anything like a just compensation for work.” Women went to the mining frontier to be with their husbands, to make money, or to find adventure. But the class most frequently seen in the diggings was prostitutes, who numbered perhaps 20 percent of female Californians in 1850. Before long, the most easily worked claims had been played out and large corporations moved in heavy equipment to get at hidden ore. Shafts were dug deep into the ground, high-pressure water jets tore away ore-bearing gravel, and veins of quartz rock were blasted out and crushed in large stamping mills. This type of mining left a lasting environmental legacy. Abandoned prospect holes and diggings pockmarked the gold fields and created piles of debris that heavy rains would wash down the valley, choking streams and ruining lands below. Excavation of hillsides, construction of dams to divert rivers, and the destruction of the forest cover to meet the heavy demand for lumber and firewood caused serious erosion of the soil and severe flooding in the spring.

Instant City: San Francisco

When the United States assumed control of California, San Francisco had a population of perhaps 200. But thousands of emigrants took the water route west, passing through San Francisco's harbor on their way to the diggings. By 1856 the city's population had jumped to an astonishing 50,000. In a mere 8 years the city had attained the size New York had taken 190 years to reach. The product of economic self-interest, San Francisco developed in helter-skelter fashion. Land prices soared, speculation was rampant, and commercial forces became paramount. Residents lived in tents or poorly constructed, half-finished buildings. To enlarge the commercial district, hills began to be leveled, with the dirt used to fill in the bay (thereby creating more usable land). Since the city government took virtually no role in directing development, almost no land was reserved for public use. Property owners defeated a proposal to widen the streets, prompting the city's leading newspaper to complain, “To sell a few more feet of lots, the streets were compressed like a cheese, into half their width.”

The Migration from China

The gold rush that swelled San Francisco's streets was a global phenomenon. Americans predominated in the mining population, but Latin Americans, Europeans, Australians, and Chinese swarmed into California. An amazing assortment of languages could be heard on the city's streets: indeed, in 1860 San Francisco's inhabitants were 50 percent foreign-born. The most distinctive ethnic group was the Chinese. They had come to Gum San, the land of the golden mountain. Those who arrived in California overwhelmingly hailed from the area of southern China around Canton—and not by accident. Although other provinces of China also suffered from economic distress, population pressures, social unrest, and political upheaval, Canton had a large European presence, since it was the only port open to outsiders. That situation changed after the first Opium War (1839–1842), when Britain forced China to open other ports to trade. For Cantonese, the sudden loss of their trade monopoly produced widespread economic hardship. At the same time a series of religious and political revolts in the region led to severe fighting that devastated the countryside. A growing number of residents concluded that emigration was the only way to survive, and the presence of western ships in the harbors of Canton and nearby Hong Kong (a British possession since 1842) made it easier to migrate to California rather than to southeast Asia. Between 1849 and 1854, some 45,000 Chinese flocked to California. Among those who went was 16-year-old Lee Chew, who left for California after a man from his village returned with great wealth from the “country of the American wizards.” Like the other gold seekers, these Chinese immigrants were overwhelmingly young and male, and they wanted only to accumulate savings and return home to their families. (Indeed, only 16 Chinese women arrived before 1854.) Generally poor, Chinese immigrants arrived already in debt, having borrowed the price of their steamship ticket; they fell further into debt to Chinese merchants in San Francisco, who loaned them money to purchase needed supplies. When the Chinese were harassed in the mines, many opened laundries in San Francisco and elsewhere, since little capital was required—soap, scrub board, iron, and ironing board. The going rate at the time for washing, ironing, and starching shirts was an exorbitant $8 per dozen. Many early San Franciscans actually found it cheaper to send their dirty laundry to Canton or Honolulu, to be returned several months later. Other Chinese around San Francisco set up restaurants or worked in the fishing industry. In these early years they found Americans less hostile, as long as they stayed away from the gold fields. As immigration and the competition for jobs increased, however, anti-Chinese sentiment intensified. Gradually, San Francisco took on the trappings of a more orderly community. The city government established a public school system, erected streetlights, created a municipal water system, and halted further filling in of the bay. Industry was confined to the area south of the city; several new working-class neighborhoods grew up near the downtown section. Fashionable neighborhoods sprouted on several hills, as high rents drove many residents from the developing commercial center, and churches and families became more common. By 1856, the city of the gold rush had been replaced by a new city whose stone and brick buildings gave it a new sense of permanence.

The Mormons in Utah

The makeshift, often chaotic society spawned by the gold rush was a product of largely uncontrolled economic forces. In contrast, the society evolving in the Great Basin of Utah exhibited an entirely different but equally remarkable growth. Salt Lake City became the center of a religious kingdom established by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. After Joseph Smith's death in 1844, the Mormon church was led by Brigham Young, who lacked Smith's religious mysticism but was a brilliant organizer. Young decided to move his followers to the Great Basin, an isolated area a thousand miles from the settled parts of the United States. In 1847 the first thousand settlers arrived, the vanguard of thousands more who extended Mormon settlement throughout the valley of the Great Salt Lake and the West. Church officials also held the government positions, and Young had supreme power in legislative, executive, and judicial matters as well as religious affairs. In 1849 the state of Deseret was officially established, with Brigham Young as governor. It applied for admission to the Union. The most controversial church teaching was the doctrine of polygamy, or plural marriage, which Young finally sanctioned publicly in 1852. Visitors reported with surprise that few Mormon wives seemed to rebel against the practice. Some plural wives developed close friendships; indeed, in one sample almost a third of plural marriages included at least two sisters. Moreover, because polygamy distinguished Mormonism from other religions, plural wives saw it as an expression of their religious faith. “I want to be assured of position in God's estimation,” one such wife explained. “If polygamy is the Lord's order, we must carry it out.” The Mormons connected control of water to their sense of mission and respect for hierarchy. The Salt Lake valley, where the Mormons established their holy community, lacked significant rivers or abundant sources of water. Thus success depended on irrigating the region, something never before attempted. When the first Mormons arrived from the East, they began constructing a coordinated series of dams, aqueducts, and ditches, bringing life-giving water to the valleys of the region. Fanning out from their original settlement, they founded a series of colonies throughout the West, all tied to Salt Lake City and joined by ribbons of water. Mormon farmers grew corn, wheat, hay, and an assortment of fruits and vegetables. By 1850 there were more than 16,000 irrigated acres in what would eventually become the state of Utah. The Mormons were the first Anglos to extensively use irrigation in North America. Manipulation of water reinforced the Mormons' sense of hierarchy and group discipline. Centralization of authority in the hands of church officials made possible an overall plan of development, allowed for maximum exploitation of resources, and freed communities from the disputes over water rights that plagued many settlements in the arid West. In a radical departure from American ideals, church leaders insisted that water belonged to the community, not individuals, and vested this authority in the hands of the local bishop. Control of water resources, which were vital for survival in the desert, reinforced the power of the church hierarchy over not just the faithful but dissidents as well. Community needs, as interpreted by church leaders, took precedence over individual rights. Thus irrigation did more than make the desert bloom. By checking the Jeffersonian ideal of an independent, self-sufficient farmer, it also made possible a centralized, well-regulated society under the firm control of the church.

Shadows on the Moving Frontier

Transformations such as Salt Lake City and San Francisco were truly remarkable. But Americans were not coming into a trackless, unsettled wilderness. As frontier lines crossed, 75,000 Mexicans had to adapt to American rule. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed Mexicans in the ceded territory “the free enjoyment of their liberty and property.” As long as Mexicans continued to be a sizable majority in a given area, their influence remained strong. But wherever Anglos became more numerous, they demanded conformity to American customs. When Mexicans remained faithful to their heritage, language, and religion, these cultural differences worked to reinforce Hispanic powerlessness, social isolation, and economic exploitation. New Mexico had the largest Hispanic population as well as the fewest Anglos in the Mexican cession. As a result, the upper-class Mexicans who owned the land and employed large numbers of mixed-blood workers on their ranches managed to maintain their position. This class had cultivated American allies during the Santa Fe trade, and their connections grew stronger as American businesspeople slowly entered the territory in the 1850s. Neither group had many qualms about exploiting poorer Hispanics. The rush of American emigrants quickly overwhelmed Hispanic settlers in California. Even in 1848, before the discovery of gold, Americans in California outnumbered Mexicans two to one, and by 1860 Hispanics amounted to only 2 percent of the population. At the time of the American conquest, the 200 or so ranchero families owned about 14 million acres, but changes in California land law required verification of their original land grants by a federal commission. Since the average claim took 17 years to complete and imposed complex procedures and hefty legal fees, many rancheros lost large tracts of land to Americans. Less affluent Mexicans scratched out a bare existence on ranches and farms or in the growing cities and towns. Scorned by the dominant Anglo majority and without marketable skills and resources, they were often reduced to extreme poverty. As the Hispanic population in California became primarily urban, women assumed a larger role in the family. Many men became seasonal workers who were absent part of the year, and thus women played a greater role in sustaining the family economically. Mexicans in Texas were also greatly outnumbered: they totaled only 6 percent of the population in 1860. Stigmatized and despised by whites as racial inferiors, they were the poorest group in free society. One response to this dislocation, an option commonly taken by persecuted minorities, was social banditry. An example was the folk hero Juan Cortina. A member of a displaced landed family in southern Texas, Cortina was driven into resistance in the 1850s by American harassment. He began stealing from wealthy Anglos to aid poor Mexicans, proclaiming, “To me is entrusted the breaking of the chains of your slavery.” Cortina continued to raid Texas border settlements until finally he was imprisoned by Mexican authorities. While failing to produce any lasting change, Cortina demonstrated the depth of frustration and resentment among Hispanics over their abuse at the hands of the new Anglo majority.

Escape from Crisis

With the return of peace, Congress confronted the problem of whether to allow slavery in the newly acquired territories. David Wilmot, in his controversial proviso, had already proposed to outlaw slavery throughout the Mexican cession. John C. Calhoun, representing the extreme southern position, countered that slavery was legal in all territories.The federal government had acted as the agent of all the states in acquiring the land, he argued, and southerners had a right to take their property there, including slaves. Only when the residents of a territory drafted a state constitution could they decide the question of slavery. Between these extremes were two moderate positions. One proposed extending the Missouri Compromise line of 36°30' to the Pacific, which would have continued the earlier policy of dividing the national domain between the North and the South. The other proposal, championed by Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan and Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, was to allow the people of the territory rather than Congress to decide the status of slavery. This solution, which became known as popular sovereignty, was deliberately ambiguous, since its supporters refused to specify whether the residents could make this decision at any time or only when drafting a state constitution, as Calhoun insisted. When Congress organized the Oregon Territory in 1848, it prohibited slavery there, since even southerners admitted that the region was too far north to grow the South's staple crops. But this seemingly straightforward decision made it impossible to apply the Missouri Compromise line to the other territories. Without Oregon as a part of the package, the bulk of the remaining land would be open to slavery, something at which the North balked. Almost inadvertently, one of the two moderate solutions had been discarded by the summer of 1848.

A Two-Faced Campaign

In the election of 1848 both major parties tried to avoid the slavery issue. The Democrats nominated Lewis Cass, a supporter of popular sovereignty, while the Whigs bypassed all their prominent leaders and selected General Zachary Taylor, who had taken no position on any public issue and who remained silent throughout the campaign. The Whigs adopted no platform and planned instead to emphasize the general's war record. But the slavery issue would not be ignored. A new antislavery coalition, the Free Soil Party helped force the issue. Alienated by Polk's policies and still angry over the 1844 convention, northern Democrats loyal to Van Buren spearheaded its creation. They were joined by “Conscience Whigs,” who disavowed Taylor's nomination because he was a slaveholder. Furthermore, political abolitionists like Salmon P. Chase left the Liberty party in favor of this broader coalition. To widen its appeal the Free Soil platform focused on the dangers of extending slavery rather than on the evil of slavery itself. Ironically, the party's convention named as its candidate Martin Van Buren—the man who for years had struggled to keep the slavery issue out of politics. With the Free Soilers strongly supporting the Wilmot Proviso, the Whigs and Democrats could not ignore the slavery question. The two major parties responded by running different campaigns in the North and the South.To southern audiences, each party promised that it would protect slavery in the territories; to northern voters, each claimed that it would keep the territories free. In this two-faced, sectional campaign, the Whigs won their second national victory. Taylor held on to the core of Whig voters in both sections (Van Buren and Cass, after all, had long been Democrats). But in the South, where the contest pitted a southern slaveholder against two northerners, Taylor won many more votes than Clay had in 1844. As one southern Democrat complained, “We have lost hundreds of votes, solely on the ground that General Cass was a Northerner and General Taylor a Southern man.” Furthermore, Van Buren polled five times as many votes as the Liberty party had four years earlier. It seemed that the national system of political parties was being gradually pulled apart.

The Compromise of 1850

Once he became president, Taylor could no longer remain silent. The territories gained from Mexico had to be organized; furthermore, by 1849 California had gained enough residents to be admitted as a state. In the Senate the balance of power between North and South stood at 15 states each. California's admission would break the sectional balance. Called “Old Rough and Ready” by his troops, Taylor was a forthright man of action, but he was politically inexperienced and he oversimplified complex problems. Since even Calhoun conceded that entering states had the right to ban slavery, Taylor proposed that the way to end the sectional crisis was to skip the territorial stage by combining all the Mexican cession into two very large states, New Mexico and California. So the president sent agents to California and New Mexico with instructions to set the machinery in motion for both territories to draft constitutions and apply for statehood directly. Even more shocking to southern Whigs, he proposed to apply the Wilmot Proviso to the entire area, since he was convinced that slavery would never flourish there. By the time Congress convened in December 1849, California had drafted a constitution and applied for admission as a free state. Taylor reported that New Mexico (which included most of Arizona, Utah, and Colorado) would soon do the same and recommended that both be admitted as free states. The president's plan touched off the most serious sectional crisis the Union had yet confronted. Clay loved politics: the bargaining, the wheeling and dealing, the late-night trade-offs eased along by a bottle of bourbon. Thirty years earlier he had engineered the Missouri Compromise, and in 1833 he had helped defuse the nullification crisis. Clay decided that a grand compromise was needed to save the Union. Into this turmoil stepped Henry Clay, now 73 years old and nearing the end of his career. A savvy card player all his life, Clay loved politics: the bargaining, the wheeling and dealing, the late-night trade-offs eased along by a bottle of bourbon. Thirty years earlier he had engineered the Missouri Compromise, and in 1833 he had helped defuse the nullification crisis. Clay decided that a grand compromise was needed to save the Union. Already, Mississippi had summoned other southern states to meet in a convention at Nashville to discuss the crisis, and southern extremists were pushing for secession. The points of disagreement went beyond the question of the western territories. Many northerners considered it disgraceful that slaves were bought and sold in the nation's capital, where slavery was still permitted. Southerners complained bitterly that northern states ignored the 1793 fugitive slave law and prevented them from reclaiming runaway slaves.Clay's compromise, submitted in January 1850, addressed all these concerns. California, he proposed, should be admitted as a free state, which represented the clear wishes of most settlers there. The rest of the Mexican cession would be organized as two territories, New Mexico and Utah, under the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Thus slavery would not be prohibited from these regions. Clay also proposed that Congress abolish the slave trade but not slavery itself in the District of Columbia and that a new, more rigorous fugitive slave law be passed to enable southerners to reclaim runaway slaves. To reinforce the idea that both North and South were yielding ground, Clay combined those provisions that dealt with the former Mexican territory and several others adjusting the Texas–New Mexico boundary into a larger package known as the Omnibus Bill. With the stakes so high, the Senate debated the bill for six months. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, always deep-voiced, seemed more somber than usual when he delivered a pro-Compromise speech on the seventh of March. “I wish to speak today not as a Massachusetts man, not as a Northern man, but as an American…. I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.” Calhoun, whose aged, crevassed face mirrored the lines that had been drawn so deeply between the two sections, was near death and too ill to deliver his final speech to the Senate, which a colleague read for him as he listened silently. The “cords of Union,” he warned—those ties of interest and affection that held the nation together—were snapping one by one. Only equal rights for the South and an end to the agitation against slavery could preserve the Union. Clay, wracked by a hacking cough, spent long hours trying to line up the needed votes. But for once, the great card enthusiast had misplayed his hand. The Omnibus Bill required that the components of the compromise be approved as a package. Extremists in Congress from both regions, however, combined against the moderates and rejected the bill. With Clay exhausted and his strategy in shambles, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas assumed leadership of the pro-Compromise forces. The sudden death in July of President Taylor, who had threatened to veto Clay's plan, aided the compromise movement. One by one, Douglas submitted the individual measures for a vote. Northern representatives provided the necessary votes to admit California and abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia, while southern representatives supplied the edge needed to organize the Utah and New Mexico territories and pass the new fugitive slave law. On the face of it, everyone had compromised. But in truth, only 61 members of Congress, or 21 percent of the membership, had not voted against some part of the Compromise. By September 17 all the separate parts of the Compromise of 1850 had passed and been signed into law by the new president, Millard Fillmore. The Union, it seemed, was safe.

Away from the Brink

The general public, both North and South, rallied to the Compromise. At the convention of southern states in Nashville, the fire-eaters—the radical proponents of states' rights and secession—found themselves voted down by more moderate voices. Even in the Deep South, coalitions of pro-Compromise Whigs and Democrats soundly defeated secessionists in the state elections that followed. Still, most southerners felt that a firm line had been drawn. With California's admission, they were now outnumbered in the Senate, so it was critical that slaveholders be granted equal legal access to the territories. They announced that any breach of the Compromise of 1850 would justify secession. The North, for its part, found the new fugitive slave law the hardest measure of the Compromise of 1850 to swallow. The controversial law denied an accused runaway a trial by jury, and it required that all citizens assist federal marshals in its enforcement. Harriet Beecher Stowe's popular novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) presented a powerful moral indictment of the law—and of slavery as an institution. Despite sentimental characters, a contrived plot, and clumsy dialect, the book profoundly moved its readers. Emphasizing the duty of Christians toward the downtrodden, it reached a greater audience than any previous abolitionist work and heightened moral opposition to the institution. In reality, however, fewer than 1,000 slaves a year ran away to the North, many of whom did not succeed. Despite some cases of well-publicized resistance, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was generally enforced in the free states. Many northerners did not like the law, but they were unwilling to tamper with the Compromise. Stephen Douglas spoke accurately enough when he boasted in 1851, “The whole country is acquiescing in the compromise measures—everywhere, North and South. Nobody proposes to repeal or disturb them.” And so calm returned. In the lackluster 1852 presidential campaign, both the Whigs and the Democrats endorsed the Compromise. Franklin Pierce, a little-known New Hampshire Democrat, soundly defeated the Whig candidate, Winfield Scott. Even more significant, the antislavery Free Soil candidate received only about half as many votes as Van Buren had four years before. With the slavery issue seemingly losing political force, it appeared that the Republic had weathered the storm unleashed by the Wilmot Proviso. The moving frontier had worked many changes during the 1830s and 1840s; and many more upheavals awaited the decade ahead. From a continental point of view, political relations among the United States, Mexico, and the Indian peoples had shifted significantly. Indian attacks on Mexico in the 1820s and 1830s had weakened Mexico's ability to repel an invasion by the United States. And with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States gained over half a million square miles. Its frontier had leaped from the Mississippi valley to the Pacific, but in between remained territory still unorganized and still controlled by formidable Indian peoples. And as the North became increasingly industrialized and the South more firmly committed to an economy based on cotton and slavery, the movement of Americans into those territories would revive growing conflict between the two sections over slavery. The disputes would shatter the Jacksonian party system, reignite the slavery issue, and shake the Union to its foundation.

Chapter Overview

This chapter examines the Republic's expansion to the Pacific Ocean, its transformation into a continental nation, and the process by which these developments injected the slavery issue into national politics. It begins with the expansion of the Sioux onto the Plains, as a reminder that westward expansion in American history involved more than Anglo-Saxon whites. Moreover, the case of the Sioux illustrates the importance of different kinds of frontiers in the process of expansion. The Sioux's conquest of the Plains ultimately depended on the acquisition of guns and horses, and the outbreak of disease epidemics that weakened enemy tribes and shifted the balance of power to the Sioux. Along with the cultures of Indians, whites, and slaves, those of the Hispanics of the Southwest and the Chinese immigrants of the 1850s combined to create diverse and often conflict-filled societies in the nation's newest territories.

Destinies: Manifest and Otherwise

In the 1840s, Americans promoters proclaimed the United States' "Manifest Destiny" to expand across the North American continent. This doctrine combined idealistic motives with attitudes of racial superiority and a hunger for good farmland. Simultaneously, it also brought Americans into contact--and conflict--with Mexicans in Texas, New Mexico, and California, all territories that had existed under loose Mexican control since the Mexican Revolution of 1821.

Mexico initially welcomed American settlers into Texas. Attracted by the promise of free land, Americans poured in, largely from the southern states, and soon became a clear majority of the population. Tensions with the Mexican authorities steadily mounted, and this friction eventually led to a revolution. In 1836 Texas forces defeated the Mexican army sent to quell the rebellion, and Texas became an independent republic. Americans in Texas hoped to annex themselves to the United States, but the Jackson and Van Buren administrations held back, fearful of stoking the fires of sectionalism.

The Trek West
Lured by the promise of good land and a fresh start, other Americans headed for Oregon and California on the Overland Trail. Most migrants traveled in wagons as part of a family group. The journey, which took six months or more, put heavy pressures on families. Women, who during this journey often had to perform tasks normally reserved for men especially complained about the breakdown of traditional gender roles on the trail, as they saw any semblance of a home, their traditional domain, disappear.

Migration on the Overland Trail also took a heavy toll on the Plains Indians' way of life. Wagon trains scared off game and used up the grass and wood, which prompted the Sioux to demand payment for crossing their lands. Nevertheless, despite subsequent legends to the contrary, Indians actually attacked few trains along this route.

The Political Origins of Expansion
Politicians initially blocked the desire of the people of Texas to become part of the United States out of fears of raising the slavery issue, since Texas had legalized slavery. The death of the Whigs' first president, William Henry Harrison, only a month after he assumed office, however, brought John Tyler to the presidency. A proponent of states' rights, Tyler soon broke with the Whigs over economic policy. As a result, he took up the Texas issue in the hope of winning another term as president in 1844. This caused the Democratic Party to counter by dropping Martin Van Buren (who opposed the annexation of Texas) in favor of James K. Polk (who supported it) as the party's presidential candidate. Polk narrowly won the election over Henry Clay. Polk entered the White House determined to expand American boundaries across the continent and to acquire the best harbors on the Pacific. He agreed to divide the Oregon territory with Britain, gaining the lower half for the U.S., including Puget Sound. Upholding Tyler's annexation of Texas, he tried to buy New Mexico and California from Mexico, but when his diplomatic efforts failed he provoked a war with Mexico. Polk's willingness to use military means to achieve his goals provoked considerable opposition in American politics. The United States quickly conquered New Mexico and California, and when Mexico stubbornly refused to make peace, American forces occupied Mexico City and forced Mexico to surrender. By the treaty of peace, the U.S. acquired California and New Mexico, but northern Democrats, angry over Polk's pro-southern policies, injected the slavery issue into the controversy by introducing the Wilmot Proviso. The proviso sought to ban slavery from any territory gained from Mexico.

New Societies in the West
Overlanders sought to recreate in the West the societies they had left behind. With time, these communities became more stable and their economies more diversified. At the same time, wealth became more concentrated and opportunity more constricted. The discovery of gold in California set off a frantic rush to the diggings in 1848. The gold rush created a unique society in the mining camps--one that was overwhelmingly male, strongly nativist, and without any sense of permanence. By 1852 miners had largely depleted the claims, and the remaining efforts became increasingly dominated by heavily capitalized corporations. Cities also developed in the West. The product of economic self-interest, San Francisco experienced rapid, chaotic growth. It was also an amazingly diverse community ethnically, with large numbers of Europeans, South Americans, Chinese, and other groups.  Salt Lake City offered a striking contrast. In order to escape persecution for their unusual beliefs, including polygamy, the Mormons, led by Brigham Young, moved to the Salt Lake basin and established their own society, free to worship as they chose. A planned community, Salt Lake City had an orderly appearance since church officials carefully regulated its development. The peace treaty with Mexico had incorporated a large number of Hispanics were incorporated into the United States, but increasingly they came into conflict with the Anglo population, especially in Texas and California. Treated as inferiors, harassed, and often reduced to poverty, some expressed their frustration through social banditry.

Escape from Crisis
Solution of the territorial question became increasingly urgent in the wake of the 1848 California Gold Rush. As miners flocked to the region, California quickly garnered sufficient population to gain admission as a state. In addition, Mormons in the Salt Lake basin also asked for admission. Since neither state allowed slavery, the balance between slave and free states in Congress became threatened. When both major parties tried to avoid the issue of slavery's expansion in 1848, northern antislavery forces founded a new party, the Free Soil party, which urged adoption of the Wilmot Proviso. In a three-way race for president, Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate and a hero of the Mexican War, won the election. When Congress assembled in December 1849, the two sections remained locked in conflict, with many northerners calling for the prohibition of slavery in the Mexican cession and southerners demanding that the federal government open the area to slavery. Congress momentarily settled this question through the Compromise of 1850, a piece of legislation devised by Henry Clay and pushed through Congress by Stephen A. Douglas. The compromise settled the boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico, included a new fugitive slave law, and adopted the principle of popular sovereignty (the people of the territory should decide) to deal with slavery in the Utah and New Mexico territories. Yet the Compromise was more an armistice than a compromise, since only one-fifth of the members had supported the entire Compromise. Public opinion in both sections, however, rallied to the Compromise measures, and both the Whigs and the Democrats endorsed the Compromise in their 1852 platforms. Sectional harmony returned, and it seemed the Union had weathered the storm.

Review Questions

1. The chapter introduction tells the story of the Sioux migration to the Great Plains to make the point that:

A.    the American ideology of Manifest Destiny meant manifest destruction for tribal cultures.

B.     Mexican advancement northward, as well as Anglo-American advancement westward, put pressure on the Plains tribes.

C.     frontiers were multidimensional, mobile, involved a variety of peoples and cultures, and ultimately proved as disruptive to the settled East as to the contested West.

D.    the United States not only had to resort to war and diplomacy to expand its borders, it also had to cope within its borders with native peoples who attacked the emigrants on the Overland Trail.

2. Territorial acquisitions in the 1840s included all EXCEPT:

A.    Texas.

B.     Oregon south of the 49th parallel.

C.     the area between the Rockies and California.

D.    the area between the Rockies and the Missouri River.

3. Manifest Destiny was based on all of the following ideas EXCEPT:

a.       Anglo-Saxon racial superiority justified American absorption of inferior peoples and their lands.

b.      new lands would extend the domain of free government and free enterprise.

c.       conquest of new territory would prove American military superiority.

d.      America had a specially ordained mission in the world.

4. After Mexico won independence, Mexican borderland society was dominated by:

A.    rancheros.

B.     Catholic padres.

C.     mining barons.

D.    bureaucrats appointed by the central government in Mexico City.

5. After successfully defeating the Mexican army, Texas:

A.    became a self-governing province within the Mexican federation.

B.     forced the Mexican government to recognize its independence.

C.     became an independent nation, unrecognized by Mexico.

D.    was admitted to the United States.

6. Most women on the Overland Trail:

A.    had been eager to start the journey west.

B.     did traditional women's work during the journey.

C.     gained a new sense of moral authority.

D.    were forced to take on "men's work," such as handling the oxen and fixing the wagons.

7. On the Overland Trail, "Have you seen the elephant?" meant:

A.    Have you ever been to the circus?

B.     Have you seen the Indians?

C.     Have you overcome adversity yet on your journey?

D.    Have you seen the wolves?

8. The Mexican War began when:

A.    the U. S. annexed Texas.

B.     Mexico expelled an American diplomat.

C.     Taylor's force of Texans crossed the Rio Grande River into Mexico.

D.    American and Mexican forces clashed in disputed border territory.

9. The Whigs:

A.    strongly supported the Mexican War.

B.     completely condemned "Mr. Polk's War."

C.     vocally attacked Polk's war policy but voted in favor of bills supplying American troops.

D.    believed the war would assist the manufacturing industries in the United States.

10. As Emerson predicted, the Mexican War "poisoned" the United States because:

A.    it cost the country $97 million.

B.     it cost the country 13,000 American lives.

C.     it brought vast new territories into the country, which were expensive to control.

D.    it placed the issue of slavery at the center of national politics and threatened to destroy the balance of power between North and South.

11. Had it passed, the Wilmot Proviso would have:

A.    divided Texas into five slave states.

B.     prohibited slavery in any territory won from Mexico.

C.     extended the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific.

D.    given legal sanction to the doctrine of popular sovereignty.

12. During the Gold Rush, all of the following occurred EXCEPT:

A.    the creation of mining towns that grew into permanent settlements.

B.     the emergence of San Francisco as an "instant city."

C.     the emergence of significant financial opportunities for women.

D.    the development of a virulent nativism among the miners.

 

13. Which of the following can be described as an important moderate or mediating position on slavery in the early 1850s?

A.    Slavery should be abolished in the District of Columbia.

B.     Slaves should be gradually emancipated (with compensation).

C.     Territorial voters should determine whether they will become slave or free states.

D.    Whichever position is most popular in a national vote should prevail.

14. The final Compromise of 1850, originally introduced by Henry Clay as a single "Omnibus Bill," passed as five separate pieces of legislation, including all EXCEPT:

A.    California was admitted as a free state.

B.     New Mexico was organized as a territory that could choose for itself whether to be slave or free.

C.     slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia.

D.    provisions for capturing runaway slaves were strengthened.

15. What is the proper sequence?

            1)  Mexican War

            2) Acquisition of Texas

            3) Acquisition of California

            4) Acquisition of full title to Oregon

            5)  Election of James K. Polk

A.    2, 5, 1, 3, 4

B.     5, 2, 4, 1, 3

C.     1, 2, 3, 4, 5

D.    3, 1, 2,5, 4

Practice Test

1. Travelers on the Overland Trail:

A.    experienced significantly higher death rates than the general population.

B.     experienced constant and deadly attacks by Indian tribes along the trail.

C.     had a highly individualized experience.

D.    often migrated as families that practiced traditional gender divisions of labor.

E.     were often loners who preferred a vagabond lifestyle.

2. The idea that God and history had selected America to expand its boundaries over the continent of North America was known as:

A.    Manifest Destiny.

B.     divine right.

C.     white supremacy.

D.    nativism.

E.     imperialism.

  

3. The Compromise of 1850 included all of the following EXCEPT:

A.    California would come in as a free state.

B.     in the rest of the lands acquired from Mexico, territorial governments would be formed without restrictions on slavery.

C.     the national government would not pay the Texas debt.

D.    the slave trade, but not slavery, would be abolished in the District of Columbia.

E.     Kansas would come in as a slave state

4. The admission of California into the United States was a divisive national issue because:

A.    westerners in other territories believed they deserved statehood before California.

B.     California's entry would upset the nation's numerical balance of free and slave states.

C.     most Californians opposed entry into the United States.

D.    California adopted a constitution that allowed slavery.

E.     lawmakers believed California gold would upset the currency and cause inflation.

5. In 1849, President Zachary Taylor favored admitting California:

A.    as a free state.

B.     as a slave state.

C.     with no determination on the issue of slavery.

D.    as a territory.

E.     as two separate states, one slave and one free.

6. When the new republic of Texas requested annexation by the United States,

A.    the American government quickly agreed.

B.     Americans in the North opposed acquiring a large new slave territory.

C.     southerners, led by President Jackson, pushed for annexation.

D.    Mexico gave up all claims to Texas.

E.     Mexico declared war on the U.S.

7. In the 1820s, most of the settlers from the United States who migrated to Texas were:

A.    white southerners and their slaves.

B.     white northerners.

C.     free blacks.

D.    Far West whites.

E.     recently-arrived European immigrants.

8. In 1845, the immediate cause of war with Mexico was:

A.    a border dispute.

B.     tariffs.

C.     Mexico's debt to the United States.

D.    the issue of slavery.

E.     the Alamo.

9. In 1836, Texas did not immediately join the United States because:

    Congress feared that giving statehood to Texas might lead to war with Mexico.

    the American leadership in Texas delayed in applying for statehood.

    President Andrew Jackson thought that action would add to sectional tensions.

    England had forged its own political ties to Texas.

    Texas settlers overwhelmingly did not want to be part of the United States.

 

10. As a result of the gold rush, by 1850,

A.    Californian Indians saw their social conditions improve.

B.     California had a large surplus of labor.

C.     California had a very diverse population.

D.    California had a population larger than any state in the Union.

E.     California became virulently antislavery.

11. The Wilmot Proviso prohibited slavery in the territory taken from Mexico.

A.    True

B.     False

12. The Compromise of 1850 essentially restored the Missouri Compromise.

A.    True

B.     False

13. Only a tiny fraction of the so-called Forty-niners ever discovered gold in California.

A.    True

B.     False

14. The immediate cause of war between the United States and Mexico was a border dispute.

A.    True

B.     False

15. In the Mexican War, American troops seized Mexico City.

A.    True

B.     False

16. Mexican residents of Texas were known as ________.

Tejanos

17. The Compromise of 1850 was made for the entry of ________ into the Union.

California

18. The idea that America was predetermined by providence or fate to expand its boundaries over most of the North American continent is generally known as ________.

Manifest Destiny

19. The notion that people should be able to vote on the matter of slavery in the territories was called ________.

popular sovereignty

20. The government of the newly independent nation of Mexico invited U.S. settlers to immigrate to its frontier border province of ________.

Texas

21. The United States and Great Britain agreed on the "joint occupation" of ________.

Oregon

22. The one component of the Compromise of 1850 that was a clear concession to southern interests was a stronger federal law providing for seizure of ________.

Runaway slaves

23. The ________ was a proposal, introduced in Congress but never passed, that would have banned slavery in any territories acquired from Mexico.

Wilmot Proviso

24. ________ from Missouri established the first legal American settlement in Texas in 1822.

Stephen Austin

25. Mexico City was captured in 1847 by General ________.

Winfield Scott

Chapter Test

1. According to the textbook authors the real cost of the war was:

    it turned America into a colonial power

    forced the explosive slavery issue to the center of national politics

    13,000 American lives

    $97 million dollars

2. When Congress prohibited slavery in 1848 in the newly organized Oregon Territory southerners agreed, recognizing that the region was too far north to grow the South's staple crops.

A.    True

B.     False

3. All of the following are terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, EXCEPT:

A.    officially set the Nueces River as the official US Mexican border

B.     agreed to pay 15 million dollars to Mexico.

C.     transferred half of Mexico's territory, including Texas to the US

D.    assumed all of the outstanding claims that US citizens had filed against Mexico.

4. Some advocates of Manifest Destiny believed the United States should control the Western Hemisphere.

A.    True

B.     False

5. Indian attack was the greatest danger westward immigrants faced.

A.    True

B.     False

6. California's population was very homogeneous.

A.    True

B.     False

7.  The Compromise of 1850 allowed for the admission of California:

A.    as a slave state.

B.     along with a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act.

C.     along with an agreement to construct a transcontinental railroad.

D.    with the agreement that there would be no additional states added for ten years.

E.     as a free state, along with Utah and New Mexico as slave states.

8. By the end of the 1840s, the territory of the United States included:

A.    all of the nation's current territory.

B.     the entire territory of the current continental United States.

C.     nearly the entire territory of the current continental United States.

D.    the entire continental United States east of the Rockies.

E.     the Gadsden Purchase.

9. The Wilmot Proviso:

A.    went into law without the president's signature.

B.     was supported by southern militants.

C.     was a compromise acceptable to the South and the North but not the West.

D.    drew very little attention outside of Congress.

E.     passed the House but not the Senate.

10. Which part of the Compromise of 1850 was the most upsetting to Northerners?

A.    admission of California as a free state

B.     opening of New Mexico and Utah territories to slavery under popular sovereignty

C.     reduction of Texas to its present boundaries

D.    enactment of the new Fugitive Slave Law

E.     prohibition of slavery in the District of Columbia

 11. Which statement about Mormonism is FALSE?

A.    Its founder was murdered.

B.     It advocated sexual equality.

C.     Early Mormons practiced polygamy.

D.    They successfully set up a territory in the west they called Deseret.

E.     Early Mormons met with much persecution from their neighbors.

12. In the 1820s, the United States and Britain jointly occupied Oregon.

A.    True

B.     False

13. Before the early 1850s, Americans who traveled west on the overland trails were generally:

A.    relatively young people who traveled in family groups.

B.     over the age of thirty.

C.     from the eastern seaboard states.

D.    wealthy.

E.     domestic servants and prostitutes.

14. In 1836, the Battle of the Alamo:

A.    saw the American garrison executed after it had surrendered.

B.     saw the death of Davy Crockett.

C.     began the Mexican War.

D.    led Americans in Texas to proclaim their independence from Mexico.

E.     was a surprising victory for American forces in Texas.

15. In 1844, President James K. Polk supported the acquisition of:

A.    Oregon.

B.     Texas.

C.     Cuba.

D.    Oregon and Texas.

E.     Cuba and Texas.