Homework #25

WEST INTO THE PACIFIC

11.3

Watch on MyHistoryLab

Video The Gold Rush

Describe the causes and outcomes of U.S. expansion in California and into the Pacific

region, including establishing new relationships with Hawaii, China, and Japan.

Early in his term of offi ce, President Polk had told Congress that he was interested in

acquiring California’s harbors from Mexico because, he said, these ports would shelter

American ships and allow the Pacifi c Ocean to provide the basis for “an extensive and

profi table commerce with China, and other countries of the East.” He had no idea how

quickly his dream would come true. Even before the negotiations with Mexico were

complete, gold was discovered in California, and the resulting Gold Rush made into

thriving commercial centers not only the gold camps but also the cities around harbors

that Polk wanted. Th ese same Pacifi c coast harbors quickly became home to American

ships that had been dominating much of the Pacifi c Ocean for a decade before Polk

spoke. In the 1840s, American whaling ships led all other nations in the whale trade in

the Pacifi c, and the U.S. Navy led the way to American negotiations for a role in trade

with Hawaii and China. Aft er the acquisition of California, the Navy also established

a trading relationship with Japan. Aft er 1848, the profi ts of the Pacifi c trade poured

into the United States through the newly acquired Pacifi c ports. Th e acquisition of

Oregon and California not only expanded the United States to the Pacifi c coast but

also allowed the nation to become a dominant player all across the Pacifi c Ocean.

The Gold Rush to California

Another 1848 development was perhaps even more important to California’s history

than the shift in political authority from Mexico to the United States. On January 24,

1848, while American and Mexican negotiators were still meeting in the Mexican town

of Guadalupe Hidalgo, James Marshall, a carpenter at the fort and mill owned by Swiss

native Johann Sutter on the American River in northern California, was deepening the

channel going into the mill’s water wheel when he noticed some odd material in the

water. He reported, “Boys, I believe I have found a gold mine.” His was the fi rst discov-

ery of gold that would quickly lead to the California Gold Rush .

Sutter and Marshall tried to keep the discovery a secret, but word spread all too

quickly. By May 1848, everyone in San Francisco seemed to know that gold had been

discovered. And while communications were still slow, prospective miners from all

over California—Indians, long time Mexican residents, and American settlers—as

well as immigrants from Oregon, Hawaii, Mexico, and as far away as Chile, Peru,

Australia, France, and parts of China moved into the gold fi elds of the Sierra Nevada

mountains. The rush was on. Two-thirds of the white men in Oregon came south

to California. Recently discharged soldiers from the Mexican and American armies

joined them there. In the earliest days, California Indians who knew the land best

made excellent gold prospectors. Newcomers expressed surprise that in the fi rst year

of the gold rush Miwok Indian women panned for gold alongside of Milwok men and

the newcomers from around the globe. Th e diversity in the fi elds did not last.

In August 1848, an article in the New York Herald included a brief mention that

“gold, worth in value $30, was picked up in the bed of a stream of the Sacramento.”

President Polk, determined to show the value of the newly acquired territory,

Chapter 11 Manifest Destiny: Expanding the Nation 343

California Gold Rush

The rush to find gold that brought thousands

of new residents to California and produced

millions of dollars in new wealth for the

region and the United States.11.1

11.2

11.3

344 Part IV included a mention in his Annual Message to Congress. Ten million dollars in gold

was produced in California in 1848, and within 3 years, the revenue had grown to

$220 million. So much gold changed the economic calculations of the United States

and much of the world from China to South America to Europe. Suddenly, there was

a great deal of gold in circulation everywhere.

Th ousands of people wanted to get rich quickly by coming to California to fi nd

the gold. California’s non-Indian population was around 7,000 in 1845. It had grown

to almost 93,000 in the fi rst U.S. census of 1850. While the fi rst prospectors had come

from the south—Mexico and South America—and the east—from Pacifi c whaling

ships, Hawaii, and China—by 1849, the largest numbers were coming from the east-

ern United States and Europe. Getting to California from other parts of the United

States or Europe could mean a long, slow, and expensive trip by ocean around the

southern tip of South America. It could also involve a shorter sea voyage to Nicaragua,

then an overland trek by pack mule across the isthmus, and another voyage from

there up to San Francisco. Still for others, it could mean traveling overland by walking

and on ox-drawn wagons across the continent. Sea travel around South America was

certainly the most comfortable and perhaps safest, but it cost a lot, from $300 to $700,

and it was slow, taking 4 to 8 months. Th e trip via Nicaragua or Panama was almost

as expensive, perhaps $600, and dangerous, but it was certainly the fastest, taking 5 to

8 weeks. Coming by land across the continent was by far the cheapest, costing not

more than $200, but it also took at least 3 months and had to be timed just right to

avoid winter on the Rocky Mountains. The majority opted for the cheapest way.

Small numbers of people had been coming west for decades, but in 1849–50, many

thousands of prospective Californians traveled along the Platte and Humboldt Rivers

and then the Oregon and California Trails into the gold fi elds (see Map 11-3 ).

Th e gold camps themselves were harsh places. Fortunes were made and lost not

only in the fields but also at gambling tables and through theft and intimidation.

White Americans, some of them very recent Americans, resented the competition of

miners from South America and elsewhere, especially those who came from China or

who were Indians or Californios. Within a short time, most Chinese and Indians min-

ers had been driven from the gold fi elds through violence and intimidation, though

some Indians were retained to work for subsistence wages mining gold for others

while the Chinese found other kinds of work, eventually building the western rail-

roads and developing service industries for miners and others.

Th e incredible jump in California’s immigrant population came at a terrible cost

for the California Indians. Th eir population, already declining in the face of the mis-

sions, declined much more rapidly aft er the beginnings of the Gold Rush because of

disease and outright murder, decreasing by almost 85 percent between 1848 and 1880

to 23,000. African slaves were rare both because slave owners knew it was all too easy

for a slave to escape in California and because other miners hated all competition.

Few women were able to succeed as miners; indeed, far fewer women than men

even came to California in the gold rush. Mining camps were overwhelmingly male

communities. Some women who did come to California were forced or tricked into

prostitution to pay for their passage from Europe, China, and Latin America.

Th e most freewheeling era of the gold camps was very short lived. By 1851, the

chances of fi nding gold by simply looking in a stream bed, as Marshall and Sutter

had done in 1848, or even fi nding gold with a pan had pretty much ended except in

the more southerly Tuolumne and Merced gold regions. Some miners began using a

“rocker” or “cradle” that washed dirt out more quickly. Soon enough, gold mining

was transformed into large-scale hydraulic mining, which required large corpo-

rate investments and reduced most miners to hired labor. Even for hired laborers,

though mining paid much better than most East Coast jobs, the possibility of making

a fortune evaporated. Gold mining continued and fortunes were still made in the gold

fi elds, but the Gold Rush was over.

Crafting a Nation, People, Land, and a National Identity, 1800–1848Whaling in the Pacifi c Ocean

In February 1849, the owners of the whaling ship Minerva from New Bedford,

Massachusetts, received a letter from its captain. Th e communication reported that,

aft er hunting whales in the Pacifi c, he had stopped in San Francisco for supplies and to

recruit more sailors, “but the excitement there in relation to the discovery of gold made

it impossible to prevent the crew from running away. Th ree of the crew in attempt-

ing to swim ashore were drowned, and the ship’s company soon became too much

reduced to continue the whaling voyage.” Th e Minerva thus joined dozens of other

whaling ships abandoned in San Francisco harbor while their crews sought wealth in

the California gold fi elds.

Some sailors no doubt found fortunes in the gold fi elds that had eluded them at

sea, and some ship owners lost substantial sums when their ships were abandoned,

but in general, the whaling industry was a source of wealth to some Americans while

supporting many others and contributing to the growth of the American economy.

Th e golden age of the American whaling industry began aft er the War of 1812 and

continued until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. During these years, hundreds

of American ships moved from their earlier and safer whale hunts in the Atlantic to

2-, 3-, and 4-year voyages to the Pacifi c Ocean. Whale oil, which burned brighter than

any other fuel available at the time, was used for lamps across the globe. Whale prod-

ucts provided oil for the industrial revolution as well as the bone for the hoop dresses

and corsets that were the height of women’s fashion. Despite British eff orts to launch

their own whaling fl eets, by the 1830s four-fi ft hs of all the whaling ships in the world

were American.

Th e owners and captains of most American whaling ships were mostly men of old

New England English stock, many of them Quakers, but there were exceptions. A few

African-Americans, including Paul Cuff ee and Absalom F. Boston, became captains,

11.1

11.2

11.3

Clipper ships like the famous Flying Cloud made the trip from New York to San Francisco in record speed—

89 days in one case—while slower whaling ships traveling from New Bedford and other Atlantic ports into

the Pacifi c often took 2 or 3 years. During the 1830s and 1840s, American sailing ships projected American

infl uence into the Pacifi c Ocean region as never before.

Chapter 11 Manifest Destiny: Expanding the Nation 34511.1

11.2

11.3

346 Part IV and Cuff ee became a ship owner. Th e crews, white and black, came from almost every

corner of the globe—Pacifi c Islanders, West Indians, South Americans, or Portuguese.

Whaling was one of the few occupations in which blacks were paid the same as whites.

Even a runaway slave could admit, as John Th ompson did in 1840, “I am a fugitive

slave from Maryland….I thought I would go on a whaling voyage, as being a place

where I stood least chance of being arrested by slave hunters.” By some estimates,

10 percent of those who worked on whaling ships were black. Nevertheless, most sail-

ors in the whaling business were white men, like Ishmael, the fi ctional narrator of

Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, though like the fi ctional Ishmael, the real-

world whites served as part of racially diverse crews.

Few women served on whaling ships. There were occasional stories of women

who hid their gender and embarked with the crew, not easy in the close quarters of a

small ship on a long voyage. Some captains also took along their wives and children,

and some crew members said they appreciated having a woman on board who might

know more medicine than the men and who could sooth an angry captain.

Whaling ships also explored parts of the world unknown to previous genera-

tions of Americans. Th e fi rst Americans to enter Japan were whaling sailors. Almost

a decade before Commodore Perry’s famous voyage to “open up” Japan in 1853–54,

the Manhattan entered Tokyo harbor in 1845 to return shipwrecked Japanese sail-

ors. Th e Superior was the fi rst whaling ship to enter the Arctic Ocean off the coast of

Alaska in 1848. U.S. whaling ships explored much of the South Pacifi c, sailed off the

coast of Australia, and explored Antarctica. As a result of the many whaling ships that

anchored there, Honolulu and San Francisco became major American ports, rivaling

New Bedford, Boston, and Nantucket.

The Navy and Diplomacy Across the Pacifi c

While many American whaling ships had been sailing the Pacifi c since 1815, the 1848

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo added a string of Pacifi c ports, especially San Francisco,

to the United States. Indeed, the push for Pacifi c Ocean ports had been part of the

driving force behind President Polk’s push for war. The acquisition of those ports

expanded U.S. interest in the Pacifi c and beyond. By 1851, Daniel Webster, who had

become secretary of state again under President Fillmore, proclaimed that the United

States should “command the oceans, both oceans, all the oceans.”

Central to the “command” of the Pacific Ocean was securing U.S. influence in

Hawaii. In 1778, the British explorer Captain James Cook was the fi rst European to

reach the Hawaiian Islands, but by the mid-19th century, the United States had a much

larger presence in Hawaii. Many Protestant missionaries and merchants began arriving

in Hawaii in the 1820s where they built churches, schools, and businesses. Missionaries,

merchants, and whalers boosted the Hawaiian economy, but they also brought alco-

hol, gambling, prostitution, and disease, including venereal diseases that killed many

Hawaiians and reduced the islanders’ ability to maintain their independence.

On occasion, the United States did protect the native Hawaiians. An American

missionary, William Richards, advised King Kamehameha II (r. 1819–1824) on ways

to maneuver among the great powers and play the United States, Britain, and France

against each other. In 1842, Secretary of State Daniel Webster added Hawaii to the

protections of the Monroe Doctrine and made it clear that the United States would

not tolerate a British or French takeover. In 1851, Webster negotiated a secret treaty

with King Kamehameha III that, in the event of war, Hawaii would become a U.S.

protectorate. Webster’s priority was securing trading rights and the use of Honolulu

as a coaling station for U.S. steamships—merchant vessels and warships—on their

way to trade with China and Japan.

Just as the United States gained San Francisco and infl uence in Hawaii, Britain

was forcing China to open to the West. China saw itself as the center of the world.

Foreigners were barbarians who might be allowed to trade in a limited way through

Crafting a Nation, People, Land, and a National Identity, 1800–184811.1

11.2

11.3

A Japanese artist captured a U.S. Navy commanded by Commodore Mathew Perry landing in Tokyo and

demanding that Japan open itself to trade with the United States.

the port of Guangzhou but would never be treated as equals. Despite the restrictions,

American merchants wanted access to more trade with China, and American

missionaries wanted access to its people. Regardless, both were mostly shut out.

Losing patience with the Chinese, the British turned to violence. In the so-called

Opium War (1839–1842), the British forced China to open its ports to British prod-

ucts, including opium from British India, and cede Hong Kong Island as a British

colony. Following in the footsteps of the British, U.S. Ambassador Caleb Cushing

negotiated the Treaty of Wang-hsia in 1844, which gained the United States the

same trade rights as the British.

While Britain took the lead in China, the United States forced the even more

isolated Empire of Japan to open to the West. The United States wanted Japan as

another coaling station beyond Hawaii on the route to China and wanted to trade

with Japan for its own sake. President Fillmore sent Commodore Mathew Perry to

“open up” Japan and force a “weak and semi-barbarous people” to deal with the

United States. In July 1853, Perry led four large warships with nearly 1,000 sailors into

Tokyo Bay and began negotiations. He returned in March 1854 with an even larger

fl eet. Perry did everything he could to impress the Japanese, providing Japanese offi -

cials with champagne, Kentucky bourbon, and a history of the war with Mexico to let

them know what happened to those who opposed United States might. In return, the

Japanese grudgingly agreed to the Kanagawa Treaty that opened two relatively iso-

lated ports to the United States. Only in 1858 did Japan open more ports and estab-

lish formal diplomatic relations with other countries. Britain quickly became a larger

economic and military force in Japan than the United States. Nevertheless, the United

States had established a solid presence in Japan and China by the late 1850s.

As a result of expansion in the 1840s, the nation’s border was extended to the

Pacifi c, and U.S. ships sailed everywhere on that ocean. Th e Pacifi c and every nation

on its shores including China, Japan, and Russian Siberia were in much closer contact

with the United States than they had been a short time before. Aft er 1848, the United

States was an emerging force in the world.

11.3 Kanagawa Treaty

An 1854 agreement–the first between the

United States and Japan–it opened two

Japanese ports to American commerce,

protected shipwrecked American sailors, and

ended Japan's 200 years of isolation.

Quick Review Was expansion to other nations (Hawaii, China, Japan) a logical extension

of Manifest Destiny? How were U.S. intentions across the Pacifi c different than U.S. goals in

North America?

Chapter 11 Manifest Destiny: Expanding the Nation 347CONCLUSION

From the late 1830s through the 1840s, the United States became a continental power

whose territory spanned from the Atlantic to the Pacifi c oceans. A strong belief in

the Manifest Destiny of the United States justified the Louisiana Purchase of 1803

(though the term was not yet in use) and supported hoped-for territory acquisitions

from Oregon to Texas to California. Manifest Destiny refl ected the larger belief that

the United States was specially chosen by divine will to bring liberty and democracy—

usually in its Jacksonian form—to the planet.

While Americans discussed Manifest Destiny, the nation experienced hard times

in the 1830s. Th e fi nancial Panic of 1837, brought on by a worldwide glut in trade, cre-

ated economic uncertainty in the cotton-growing South and the industrial North. It

took several years for the nation’s economy to recover.

Many Americans supported versions of Manifest Destiny for varied political or

economic reasons, while others had grave reservations. Whether one supported or

opposed slavery played directly into views about expansion, which new territories one

wanted, and how new territories would be used. Military actions that leaders took in

the name of Manifest Destiny led to territorial expansion that spanned the continent

to the Pacifi c coast.

During the presidency of James Polk, Texas entered the Union as a slave state,

and aft er a bloody war from 1846 to 1848, Mexico ceded much of what became the

American West to the United States, including New Mexico and—aided by the

local Bear Flag Revolt—California. While many Americans, from politicians like

John Quincy Adams to philosophers like Henry David Th oreau, opposed the War

with Mexico, many other Americans celebrated the victory and the acquisition of so

much new territory. Th e United States also ended the joint ownership of the Oregon

Territory with Britain, and both countries resolved borders that allowed each country

to have full control of its share. Th e Gold Rush accelerated the settlement of California

with diverse people, and it produced enormous amounts of gold but decimated the

American Indian population in the far west.

Winning California from Mexico dramatically changed the U.S. economy not only

in terms of gold but also in terms of increased ventures throughout the Pacifi c involv-

ing whaling and trade. Th e United States now projected Manifest Destiny across an

ocean where it had few rivals. Th e United States became the world leader in the pro-

duction of whale oil, established a relationship with Hawaii, increased its trade with

China, and forced Japan to open itself up to the West. Th e intensifi cation of American

interest in Asia in the 1840s and 1850s refl ected the desire of American policy makers

to successfully compete with Europe for new markets and coincided with the real-

ization of the long-standing desire among many Americans to create a continental

nation that could become a world power.