Chapter 13 - The Impending Crisis
Manifest Destiny reflected both the burgeoning pride that characterized American nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century and the idealistic vision of social perfection that fueled so much of the reform energy of the time.
It rested on the idea that America was destined—by God and by history—to expand its boundaries over a vast area, an area that included, but was not necessarily restricted to, the continent of North America
Throughout the 1840s, many Americans defended the idea of westward expansion by citing the superiority of the “American race”—white people of northern European origins.
The “nonwhite” peoples of the territories could not be absorbed into the republican system.
The Indians, the Mexicans, and others in the western regions were racially unfit to be part of an “American” community, Manifest Destiny advocates insisted
The idea of Manifest Destiny had spread throughout the nation, publicized by the new “penny press” (inexpensive newspapers aimed at a mass audience) and fanned by the rhetoric of nationalist politicians.
Not everyone embraced the idea of Manifest Destiny. Henry Clay and other prominent politicians feared, correctly as it turned out, that territorial expansion would reopen the painful controversy over slavery and threaten the stability of the Union.
The United States had once claimed Texas—which until the 1830s was part of the Republic of Mexico—as a part of the Louisiana Purchase, but it had renounced the claim in 1819.
Twice thereafter the United States had offered to buy Texas, only to meet with indignant Mexican refusals.
Friction between the American settlers and the Mexican government continued to grow.
It arose from the continuing ties of the immigrants to the United States, and it arose, too, from their desire to legalize slavery, which the Mexican government had made illegal in Texas in 1830.
But the Americans were divided over how to address their unhappiness with Mexican rule.
In the mid-1830s, instability in Mexico drove General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna to seize power as a dictator and impose a new, more autocratic regime on the nation and its territories.
A new law increased the powers of the national government of Mexico at the expense of the state governments, a measure that Texans from the United States assumed Santa Anna was aiming specifically at them.
The Mexicans even imprisoned Stephen Austin in Mexico City for a time, claiming that he was encouraging revolts among his fellow Americans in Texas.
Sporadic fighting between Americans and Mexicans in Texas began in 1835 and escalated as the Mexican government sent more troops into the territory.
In 1836, the American settlers defiantly proclaimed their independence from Mexico
April 23, 1836, at the Battle of San Jacinto (near the present-day city of Houston), he defeated the Mexican army and took Santa Anna prisoner.
A number of Mexican residents of Texas (known as “Tejanos” ) had fought with the Americans in the revolution. But soon after Texas won its independence, their positions grew difficult.
The Americans did not trust the Mexicans, fearing that they were agents of the Mexican government, and in effect drove many of them out of the new republic.
Most of those who stayed had to settle for a politically and economically subordinate status within the fledgling nation.
Above all, American Texans hoped for annexation by the United States.
One of the first acts of the new president of Texas, Sam Houston, was to send a delegation to Washington with an offer to join the Union.
Spurned by the United States, Texas was cast out on its own.
Its leaders sought money and support from Europe
England and France quickly recognized and concluded trade treaties with Texas.
In response, President Tyler persuaded Texas to apply for statehood again in 1844.
But when Secretary of State Calhoun presented an annexation treaty to Congress as if its only purpose were to extend slavery, northern senators rebelled and defeated it.
Rejection of the treaty only spurred advocates of Manifest Destiny to greater efforts toward their goal.
The Texas question quickly became the central issue in the election of 1844.
Both Britain and the United States claimed sovereignty in the region
The British claimed the basis of explorations in the 1790s by George Vancouver, a naval officer
The Americans on the basis of simultaneous claims by Robert Gray, a fur trader.
Unable to resolve their conflicting claims diplomatically, they agreed in an 1818 treaty to allow citizens of each country equal access to the territory.
This arrangement, known as “joint occupation,” continued for twenty years
Significant numbers of white Americans began emigrating to Oregon in the early 1840s, and they soon substantially outnumbered the British settlers there.
They also devastated much of the Indian population, in part through a measles epidemic that spread through the Cayuse.
By the mid-1840s, American settlements had spread up and down the Pacific coast; and the new settlers (along with advocates of Manifest Destiny in the East) were urging the U.S. government to take possession of the disputed Oregon Country.
The migrations into Texas and Oregon were part of a larger movement that took hundreds of thousands of white and black Americans into the far western regions of the continent between 1840 and 1860. Southerners flocked mainly to Texas.
But the largest number of migrants came from the Old Northwest—white men and women, and a few African Americans, who undertook arduous journeys in search of new opportunities.
Most traveled in family groups, until the early 1850s when the great California gold rush attracted many single men. Most were relatively prosperous young people.
Poor people could not afford the expensive trip, and those who wished to migrate usually had to do so by joining established families or groups as laborers— men as farm or ranch hands, women as domestic servants, teachers, or, in some cases, prostitute
All the migrants were in search of a new life, but they harbored many different visions of what a new life would bring.
Some—particularly after the discovery of gold in California in 1848—hoped for quick riches.
Some (among them the Mormons) were on religious missions or were attempting to escape the epidemic diseases plaguing many cities in the East.
But the vast majority of migrants were looking for economic opportunities.
They formed a vanguard for the expanding capitalist economy of the United States.
Most migrants—about 300,000 between 1840 and 1860— traveled west along the great overland trail
The major route west was the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail, which stretched from Independence across the Great Plains and through the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains.
From there, migrants moved north into Oregon or south (along the California Trail) to the northern California coast
However, they traveled, overland migrants faced considerable hardships—although the death rate for travelers was only slightly higher than the rate for the American population as a whole.
The mountain and desert terrain in the later portions of the trip were particularly difficult.
Most journeys lasted five or six months (from May to November), and there was always pressure to get through the Rockies before the snows began, not always an easy task given the very slow pace of most wagon trains (about fifteen miles a day).
And although some migrants were moving west at least in part to escape the epidemic diseases of eastern cities, they were not immune from plagues.
Thousands of people died on the trail of cholera during the great epidemic of the early 1850s.
In the years before the Civil War, fewer than 400 migrants (about one-tenth of 1 percent) died in conflicts with the tribes.
In fact, Indians were usually more helpful than dangerous to the white migrants.
They often served as guides through difficult terrain or aided travelers
In preparing for the presidential election of 1844, the two leading candidates—Henry Clay and former president Martin Van Buren—both tried to avoid taking a stand on the controversial issue of the annexation of Texas.
Polk entered office with a clear set of goals and with plans for attaining them. John Tyler accomplished the first of Polk’s goals for him.
Interpreting the election returns as a mandate for the annexation of Texas, the outgoing president won congressional approval for it in February 1845.
That December, Texas became a state. Polk himself resolved the Oregon question.
The British minister in Washington brusquely rejected a compromise Polk offered that would establish the United States–Canadian border at the 49th parallel; he did not even refer the proposal to London.
Incensed, Polk again asserted the American claim to all of Oregon
One of the reasons the Senate and the president had agreed so readily to the British offer to settle the Oregon question was that new tensions were emerging in the Southwest—tensions that ultimately led to a war with Mexico.
As soon as the United States admitted Texas to statehood in 1845, the Mexican government broke diplomatic relations with Washington.
Mexican–American relations grew still worse when a dispute developed over the boundary between Texas and Mexico.
Texans claimed the Rio Grande as their western and southern border, a claim that would have added much of what is now New Mexico to Texas.
Mexico, although still not conceding the loss of Texas, argued nevertheless that the border had always been the Nueces River, to the north of the Rio Grande.
Polk accepted the Texas claim, and in the summer of 1845 he sent a small army under General Zachary Taylor to Texas to protect it against a possible Mexican invasion
Americans were also increasing their interest in an even more distant province of Mexico: California.
In this vast region lived members of several western Indian tribes and perhaps 7,000 Mexicans, mostly descendants of Spanish colonists.
Gradually, however, white Americans began to arrive: first maritime traders and captains of Pacific whaling ships, who stopped to barter goods or buy supplies; then merchants, who established stores, imported merchandise, and developed a profitable trade with the Mexicans and Indians; and finally pioneering farmers, who entered California from the east, by land, and settled in the Sacramento Valley.
Some of these new settlers began to dream of bringing California into the United States
President Polk soon came to share their dream and committed himself to acquire both New Mexico and California for the United States.
At the same time that he dispatched troops to Texas, he sent secret instructions to the commander of the Pacific naval squadron to seize the California ports if Mexico declared war.
Representatives of the president quietly informed Americans in California that the United States would respond sympathetically to a revolt against Mexican authority there.
Having appeared to prepare for war, Polk turned to diplomacy and dispatched a special minister, John Slidell, to try to buy off the Mexicans.
But Mexican leaders rejected Slidell’s offer to purchase the disputed territories.
On January 13, 1846, as soon as he heard the news, Polk ordered Taylor’s army in Texas to move across the Nueces River, where it had been stationed, to the Rio Grande. For months, the Mexicans refused to fight
Opposition intensified as the war continued and as the public became aware of the casualties and expenses.
To others, the war was a moral crime.
Ulysses Grant, then an officer in the Mexican War, called it “one of the most unjust ever waged.”
Abraham Lincoln criticized the war on the grounds that it gave the president too much power.
“Allow the President to invade a neighboring country whenever he shall deem it necessary . . . ,” he said, “and you allow him to make war at pleasure.”
Pacifists were particularly dismayed.
Henry David Thoreau was so horrified by the war that he refused to pay taxes (which he said financed the conflict) and spent time in jail.
American forces did well against the Mexicans, but the victory did not come as quickly as Polk had hoped
The United States now controlled the two territories for which it had gone to war. But Mexico still refused to concede defeat.
At this point, Polk and General Winfi eld Scott, the commanding general of the army and its finest soldier, launched a bold new campaign
President Polk was now unclear about his objectives.
He continued to encourage those who demanded that the United States annex much of Mexico itself.
At the same time, concerned about the approaching presidential election, he was growing anxious to finish the war quickly
Polk had sent a special presidential envoy, Nicholas Trist, to negotiate a settlement.
On February 2, 1848, Trist reached an agreement with the new Mexican government on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by which Mexico agreed to cede California and New Mexico to the United States and acknowledge the Rio Grande as the boundary of Texas.
In return, the United States promised to assume any financial claims its new citizens had against Mexico and to pay the Mexicans $15 million.
The president submitted the Trist treaty to the Senate, which approved it by a vote of 38 to 14.
The war was over, and America had gained a vast new territory.
But it had also acquired a new set of troubling and divisive issues
In August 1846, while the Mexican War was still in progress, Polk asked Congress to appropriate $2 million for purchasing peace with Mexico
As the sectional debate intensified, President Polk supported a proposal to extend the Missouri Compromise line through the new territories to the Pacific coast, banning slavery north of the line and permitting it south of the line.
Other politicians supported a plan, originally known as “squatter sovereignty” and later by the more dignified phrase “popular sovereignty,” which would allow the people of each territory (acting through their legislature) to decide the status of slavery there.
The debate over these various proposals dragged on for many months, and the issue remained unresolved when Polk left office in 1849.
The presidential campaign of 1848 dampened the controversy for a time as both Democrats and Whigs tried to avoid the slavery question.
The Whigs nominated General Zachary Taylor of Louisiana, hero of the Mexican War but a man with no political experience.
Opponents of slavery found the choice of candidates unsatisfying, and out of their discontent emerged the new Free-Soil Party, which drew from the existing Liberty Party and the antislavery wings of the Whig and Democratic Parties and which endorsed the Wilmot Proviso.
Its candidate was former President Martin Van Buren.
Manifest Destiny reflected both the burgeoning pride that characterized American nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century and the idealistic vision of social perfection that fueled so much of the reform energy of the time.
It rested on the idea that America was destined—by God and by history—to expand its boundaries over a vast area, an area that included, but was not necessarily restricted to, the continent of North America
Throughout the 1840s, many Americans defended the idea of westward expansion by citing the superiority of the “American race”—white people of northern European origins.
The “nonwhite” peoples of the territories could not be absorbed into the republican system.
The Indians, the Mexicans, and others in the western regions were racially unfit to be part of an “American” community, Manifest Destiny advocates insisted
The idea of Manifest Destiny had spread throughout the nation, publicized by the new “penny press” (inexpensive newspapers aimed at a mass audience) and fanned by the rhetoric of nationalist politicians.
Not everyone embraced the idea of Manifest Destiny. Henry Clay and other prominent politicians feared, correctly as it turned out, that territorial expansion would reopen the painful controversy over slavery and threaten the stability of the Union.
The United States had once claimed Texas—which until the 1830s was part of the Republic of Mexico—as a part of the Louisiana Purchase, but it had renounced the claim in 1819.
Twice thereafter the United States had offered to buy Texas, only to meet with indignant Mexican refusals.
Friction between the American settlers and the Mexican government continued to grow.
It arose from the continuing ties of the immigrants to the United States, and it arose, too, from their desire to legalize slavery, which the Mexican government had made illegal in Texas in 1830.
But the Americans were divided over how to address their unhappiness with Mexican rule.
In the mid-1830s, instability in Mexico drove General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna to seize power as a dictator and impose a new, more autocratic regime on the nation and its territories.
A new law increased the powers of the national government of Mexico at the expense of the state governments, a measure that Texans from the United States assumed Santa Anna was aiming specifically at them.
The Mexicans even imprisoned Stephen Austin in Mexico City for a time, claiming that he was encouraging revolts among his fellow Americans in Texas.
Sporadic fighting between Americans and Mexicans in Texas began in 1835 and escalated as the Mexican government sent more troops into the territory.
In 1836, the American settlers defiantly proclaimed their independence from Mexico
April 23, 1836, at the Battle of San Jacinto (near the present-day city of Houston), he defeated the Mexican army and took Santa Anna prisoner.
A number of Mexican residents of Texas (known as “Tejanos” ) had fought with the Americans in the revolution. But soon after Texas won its independence, their positions grew difficult.
The Americans did not trust the Mexicans, fearing that they were agents of the Mexican government, and in effect drove many of them out of the new republic.
Most of those who stayed had to settle for a politically and economically subordinate status within the fledgling nation.
Above all, American Texans hoped for annexation by the United States.
One of the first acts of the new president of Texas, Sam Houston, was to send a delegation to Washington with an offer to join the Union.
Spurned by the United States, Texas was cast out on its own.
Its leaders sought money and support from Europe
England and France quickly recognized and concluded trade treaties with Texas.
In response, President Tyler persuaded Texas to apply for statehood again in 1844.
But when Secretary of State Calhoun presented an annexation treaty to Congress as if its only purpose were to extend slavery, northern senators rebelled and defeated it.
Rejection of the treaty only spurred advocates of Manifest Destiny to greater efforts toward their goal.
The Texas question quickly became the central issue in the election of 1844.
Both Britain and the United States claimed sovereignty in the region
The British claimed the basis of explorations in the 1790s by George Vancouver, a naval officer
The Americans on the basis of simultaneous claims by Robert Gray, a fur trader.
Unable to resolve their conflicting claims diplomatically, they agreed in an 1818 treaty to allow citizens of each country equal access to the territory.
This arrangement, known as “joint occupation,” continued for twenty years
Significant numbers of white Americans began emigrating to Oregon in the early 1840s, and they soon substantially outnumbered the British settlers there.
They also devastated much of the Indian population, in part through a measles epidemic that spread through the Cayuse.
By the mid-1840s, American settlements had spread up and down the Pacific coast; and the new settlers (along with advocates of Manifest Destiny in the East) were urging the U.S. government to take possession of the disputed Oregon Country.
The migrations into Texas and Oregon were part of a larger movement that took hundreds of thousands of white and black Americans into the far western regions of the continent between 1840 and 1860. Southerners flocked mainly to Texas.
But the largest number of migrants came from the Old Northwest—white men and women, and a few African Americans, who undertook arduous journeys in search of new opportunities.
Most traveled in family groups, until the early 1850s when the great California gold rush attracted many single men. Most were relatively prosperous young people.
Poor people could not afford the expensive trip, and those who wished to migrate usually had to do so by joining established families or groups as laborers— men as farm or ranch hands, women as domestic servants, teachers, or, in some cases, prostitute
All the migrants were in search of a new life, but they harbored many different visions of what a new life would bring.
Some—particularly after the discovery of gold in California in 1848—hoped for quick riches.
Some (among them the Mormons) were on religious missions or were attempting to escape the epidemic diseases plaguing many cities in the East.
But the vast majority of migrants were looking for economic opportunities.
They formed a vanguard for the expanding capitalist economy of the United States.
Most migrants—about 300,000 between 1840 and 1860— traveled west along the great overland trail
The major route west was the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail, which stretched from Independence across the Great Plains and through the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains.
From there, migrants moved north into Oregon or south (along the California Trail) to the northern California coast
However, they traveled, overland migrants faced considerable hardships—although the death rate for travelers was only slightly higher than the rate for the American population as a whole.
The mountain and desert terrain in the later portions of the trip were particularly difficult.
Most journeys lasted five or six months (from May to November), and there was always pressure to get through the Rockies before the snows began, not always an easy task given the very slow pace of most wagon trains (about fifteen miles a day).
And although some migrants were moving west at least in part to escape the epidemic diseases of eastern cities, they were not immune from plagues.
Thousands of people died on the trail of cholera during the great epidemic of the early 1850s.
In the years before the Civil War, fewer than 400 migrants (about one-tenth of 1 percent) died in conflicts with the tribes.
In fact, Indians were usually more helpful than dangerous to the white migrants.
They often served as guides through difficult terrain or aided travelers
In preparing for the presidential election of 1844, the two leading candidates—Henry Clay and former president Martin Van Buren—both tried to avoid taking a stand on the controversial issue of the annexation of Texas.
Polk entered office with a clear set of goals and with plans for attaining them. John Tyler accomplished the first of Polk’s goals for him.
Interpreting the election returns as a mandate for the annexation of Texas, the outgoing president won congressional approval for it in February 1845.
That December, Texas became a state. Polk himself resolved the Oregon question.
The British minister in Washington brusquely rejected a compromise Polk offered that would establish the United States–Canadian border at the 49th parallel; he did not even refer the proposal to London.
Incensed, Polk again asserted the American claim to all of Oregon
One of the reasons the Senate and the president had agreed so readily to the British offer to settle the Oregon question was that new tensions were emerging in the Southwest—tensions that ultimately led to a war with Mexico.
As soon as the United States admitted Texas to statehood in 1845, the Mexican government broke diplomatic relations with Washington.
Mexican–American relations grew still worse when a dispute developed over the boundary between Texas and Mexico.
Texans claimed the Rio Grande as their western and southern border, a claim that would have added much of what is now New Mexico to Texas.
Mexico, although still not conceding the loss of Texas, argued nevertheless that the border had always been the Nueces River, to the north of the Rio Grande.
Polk accepted the Texas claim, and in the summer of 1845 he sent a small army under General Zachary Taylor to Texas to protect it against a possible Mexican invasion
Americans were also increasing their interest in an even more distant province of Mexico: California.
In this vast region lived members of several western Indian tribes and perhaps 7,000 Mexicans, mostly descendants of Spanish colonists.
Gradually, however, white Americans began to arrive: first maritime traders and captains of Pacific whaling ships, who stopped to barter goods or buy supplies; then merchants, who established stores, imported merchandise, and developed a profitable trade with the Mexicans and Indians; and finally pioneering farmers, who entered California from the east, by land, and settled in the Sacramento Valley.
Some of these new settlers began to dream of bringing California into the United States
President Polk soon came to share their dream and committed himself to acquire both New Mexico and California for the United States.
At the same time that he dispatched troops to Texas, he sent secret instructions to the commander of the Pacific naval squadron to seize the California ports if Mexico declared war.
Representatives of the president quietly informed Americans in California that the United States would respond sympathetically to a revolt against Mexican authority there.
Having appeared to prepare for war, Polk turned to diplomacy and dispatched a special minister, John Slidell, to try to buy off the Mexicans.
But Mexican leaders rejected Slidell’s offer to purchase the disputed territories.
On January 13, 1846, as soon as he heard the news, Polk ordered Taylor’s army in Texas to move across the Nueces River, where it had been stationed, to the Rio Grande. For months, the Mexicans refused to fight
Opposition intensified as the war continued and as the public became aware of the casualties and expenses.
To others, the war was a moral crime.
Ulysses Grant, then an officer in the Mexican War, called it “one of the most unjust ever waged.”
Abraham Lincoln criticized the war on the grounds that it gave the president too much power.
“Allow the President to invade a neighboring country whenever he shall deem it necessary . . . ,” he said, “and you allow him to make war at pleasure.”
Pacifists were particularly dismayed.
Henry David Thoreau was so horrified by the war that he refused to pay taxes (which he said financed the conflict) and spent time in jail.
American forces did well against the Mexicans, but the victory did not come as quickly as Polk had hoped
The United States now controlled the two territories for which it had gone to war. But Mexico still refused to concede defeat.
At this point, Polk and General Winfi eld Scott, the commanding general of the army and its finest soldier, launched a bold new campaign
President Polk was now unclear about his objectives.
He continued to encourage those who demanded that the United States annex much of Mexico itself.
At the same time, concerned about the approaching presidential election, he was growing anxious to finish the war quickly
Polk had sent a special presidential envoy, Nicholas Trist, to negotiate a settlement.
On February 2, 1848, Trist reached an agreement with the new Mexican government on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by which Mexico agreed to cede California and New Mexico to the United States and acknowledge the Rio Grande as the boundary of Texas.
In return, the United States promised to assume any financial claims its new citizens had against Mexico and to pay the Mexicans $15 million.
The president submitted the Trist treaty to the Senate, which approved it by a vote of 38 to 14.
The war was over, and America had gained a vast new territory.
But it had also acquired a new set of troubling and divisive issues
In August 1846, while the Mexican War was still in progress, Polk asked Congress to appropriate $2 million for purchasing peace with Mexico
As the sectional debate intensified, President Polk supported a proposal to extend the Missouri Compromise line through the new territories to the Pacific coast, banning slavery north of the line and permitting it south of the line.
Other politicians supported a plan, originally known as “squatter sovereignty” and later by the more dignified phrase “popular sovereignty,” which would allow the people of each territory (acting through their legislature) to decide the status of slavery there.
The debate over these various proposals dragged on for many months, and the issue remained unresolved when Polk left office in 1849.
The presidential campaign of 1848 dampened the controversy for a time as both Democrats and Whigs tried to avoid the slavery question.
The Whigs nominated General Zachary Taylor of Louisiana, hero of the Mexican War but a man with no political experience.
Opponents of slavery found the choice of candidates unsatisfying, and out of their discontent emerged the new Free-Soil Party, which drew from the existing Liberty Party and the antislavery wings of the Whig and Democratic Parties and which endorsed the Wilmot Proviso.
Its candidate was former President Martin Van Buren.
